Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking

Abstract

Two anarchist women from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Alexandra David-Néel and Lily Gair Wilkinson, combined their politics with radical engagement in walking. In both the literal sense, moving their bodies along the earth, and the figurative sense of calling on peripatetic tropes to express their ideas, they found walking to be a constitutive element of freedom. This paper brings the ideas of Whitehead and other process philosophers into conversation with material and semiotic dimensions of walking and with anarchist politics. In the political lives of Wilkinson and David-Néel, I see struggles to live anarchist lives, lives into which one could walk.