Women in Dark Times

Women in Dark Times begins with three remarkable women: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German–Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon; and film icon Marilyn Monroe. The story of these women, bound together by their struggles against iniquity, blazes a trail across some of the defining features of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism and the American dream – and compels us to reckon with the unspeakable. Bringing to the surface the subterranean depths of history and the human mind that dominant political vocabularies cannot bear to face, pioneering critic and psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose forges a new language for feminism. Extending her argument into the present, Rose grapples with ‘honour’ killings and celebrates contemporary artists whose work grows out of an unflinching engagement with all that is darkest in the modern world. Women in Dark Times, reissued a decade after its original publication, offers a template for a scandalous feminism, one which refuses to sanitize itself and confronts all that is most recalcitrant and unsettling in the struggle to create a better world.