Re‐scripting women's collective action: Nationalist writing and the politics of gendered memory

Abstract

This article considers the events of a three day protest against Italian rule on the Greek island of Kalymnos in 1935 for what they can tell us about the way women's agency is conceptualized in narratives of national history. Depictions of these events by male and female writers are contrasted, but also compared for their shared assumptions that limit women's roles to that of self‐sacrificing mothers or to heroic fighters in a masculine mode. I counterpose these to my own reading of the events, based on recent reformulations of the public and domestic domains in feminist ethnography of Greece. I suggest that such a reading provides “better scripts” by which Kalymnian women can reclaim tradition as models for action in the present.