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.Keywords People's Will Á German terrorism Á Black Widows Á Birds of Paradise Á Weather Underground Á Women as leaders In thinking about the role of women in terrorism what comes to mind at first is their status as victims, as individuals to be humiliated for political or religious reasons [4]. Over the last two decades, for instance, Serbian-nationalist groups in Bosnia waged a systematic campaign of rape as part of their more general effort at ethnically cleansing the region's Muslim population. Likewise in the Kivu province of the Congo and the Darfur region of the Sudan women have become the targets of rape as part of insurgencies or counter-insurgencies of one kind or another. Beyond shame and humiliation, the political purpose behind these campaigns of sexual
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