der a comprehensive understanding of both the true role of women in the revolution, and the failure of most earlier research to provide such an understanding.
The differences between the two books are matters more of form than of content. Clearly, the Melzer-Rabine collection of fifteen articles (including the Introduction) give the reader a less focused portrait of women in the revolution than does Yalom's book. With respect to methodology, we have in Melzer-Rabine a number of approaches, while Yalom primarily depends on the accounts of the women themselves. Both authors want us to relate both historically and personally to the women of the revolution, but Yalom's work focuses more on the personal aspects: "What makes these memoirists worthy of our attention---in addition to their value as witnesses to the making of history---is the narrator's character that shines through her words."
Both works are thoroughly feminist in perspective, but the Melzer-Rabine collection leans more toward a theoretical focus, in part simply because of the wide range of the interests of the various authors of the essays. Letting the revolutionary women speak more for themselves, rather than seeing them as subjects of a scientific, "multidisciplinary" study (as in the case of Melzer-Rabine), Yalom inevitably focuses more than Melzer-Rabine on the non-scientific, personal and emotional aspects of women's participation in the revolution. For this reason, Yalom's book is the more involving and convincing for this reader
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