The recourse to violence for political reasons combines political engagement, political action, and penal transgression. In the case of women, these elements are accompanied by the transgression of gender norms during revolutionary outbreaks, whether or not they enjoy the same political rights as men. Bringing into tension penal and gendered norms, political violence enables the women who exercise it to assert themselves as political subjects. Revolutionaries, socialists, anarchists, communists or patriots, these women came up against the permanence of gender norms—regardless of the period or the causes that guided their political engagement—as well as the impact of the collective imagination which made the political violence of women into a genuine social enigma.
