A remarkable, if flawed, Marxist-feminist look at the role of female warrior societies (Amazons) in resisting the rise of patriarchy and class oppression by Emanuel Kanter.

‘It was the Amazon who resisted the enslavement of woman by the male. She was none other than the primitive communist woman—the equal, if not the superior, of the male, struggling against his usurpation of rights over her, rights that gentile society did not grant him. She was vanquished; she became man’s slave, chattel, play-thing…The proletarian woman, the modern “Amazon,” must take her place in the great conflict alongside of her male comrade in the struggle for the dictatorship of the Proletariat, aiming to establish a new society in which there is a conscious and rational equality of the sexes….The Amazons, then, symbolize woman’s desire for freedom. They signify that there is, latent in womanhood, the primitive spirit of equality; that the warrior in woman is not yet dead; that if she (the working woman) is to attain freedom, she must rally with her class around the standard of the Proletarian Revolution.’

The Amazons: A Marxian Study by Emanuel Kanter. Charles H. Kerr Company, Chicago. 1926.

Contents: Foreword, Introduction, I) The Scythian Amazons, Appendix, II) The African Amazons, Conclusion. 121 pages.

The Charles H Kerr publishing house was responsible for some of the earliest translations and editions of Marx, Engels, and other leaders of the socialist movement in the United States. Publisher of the Socialist Party aligned International Socialist Review, the Charles H Kerr Co. was an exponent of the Party’s left wing and the most important left publisher of the pre-Communist US workers movement. It remains a left wing publisher today.

PDF of full book: https://books.google.com/books/download/The_Amazons.pdf?id=6D0YAAAAIAAJ&output=pdf