You Can't Kill the Spirit

Publisher:  New Society Publishers
Year Published:  1988
Pages:  237pp   Price:  $13.95   ISBN:  ISBN 0-86571-131-3
Resource Type:  Book
Cx Number:  CX4134

This book tells the inspiring stories of women using nonviolent action in their struggles for social change. These vivid accounts drawn from around the world testify to women's courage and inventiveness in struggles for women's rights, economic self- sufficiency, liberation, human dignity, and self-determination.

Abstract: 
You Can't Kill the Spirit is a collection of stories that testify to "women's courage, inventiveness and effectiveness in using nonviolent strategies to struggle for women's rights, economic self-sufficiency, liberation, human dignity and self-determination."
McAllister preaches a complex path to truth. The greatest appeal of non-violence, she believes, is a recognition of the complexity of issues, a denial of the dualistic, polarizing approach to thinking that characterizes violent tactics: "I mean the complexity which requires us to name an underpaid working man who beats his wife both as someone who is oppressed and as an oppressor."
The author has gathered together dozens of stories of women's nonviolent resistance, and grouped them in chapters to illustrate different tactics. Divided roughly into three, these chapters explore nonviolent protest and persuasion, which includes such tactics as lobbying, demonstrating, picketing, and petitioning; nonviolent noncooperation, including boycotts, strikes and tax resistance; and nonviolent intervention, including such tactics as physical obstruction, blockades, civil disobedience and sit-ins.
McAllister hopes her research will stimulate the imaginations of activists and spur them on to new action, "in the great tradition of the women whose stories fill this book." She invites readers to mail in any details about women's nonviolent action, and has convinced her publishers to make this book the first in a series.
Appendices list non-violent events by chronology and nation as well as activists mentioned throughout the book.