Women’s Involvement in Terrorism

Women have had a long history of participating in terrorist activity. This history extends from the earliest modern terrorist group, from the nineteenth century Russian People’s Will to the current wave of suicide bombings carried out by the Chechen Black Widows and the Tamil Tiger’s Birds of Paradise. This article traces the history of female involvement in modern terrorism and then goes on to make a number of generalizations about this experience. Among other things, the writers point out that women have played strong leadership roles in left-wing, revolutionary bands, while these roles have been far fewer with right-wing and racist aggregations. Women have tended to be late-comers to contemporary, religiously-inspired terrorism: Muslim religious authorities first had to endorse their participation.