Rose Summerfield: Australian Radical

Book excerpt: Rose Summerfield: Australian Radical outlines the largely forgotten achievements of this overlooked labor union activist and socialist sympathetic to anarchist, feminist, and secularist ideas: a dynamic speaker, who eventually emigrated to Paraguay to live on a utopian commune called Cosme. In this first book-length study of Summerfield, Shone supplements existing scholarship with new information, revealing to a much fuller extent Summerfield’s contributions to radical thought, documenting the substantial scope of her contributions to women’s rights activism in New South Wales in the 1890s, a topic that has previously been almost completely ignored.