While welcoming the celebration of the bravery of the Kurdish women guerrilla who defended the Syrian city of Kobani from the Islamic State, activist Zîlan Diyar challenged the accompanying erasure of “the women who carried the struggle to today.” It’s like “one half of us is missing,” she wrote during the summer of 2014, puzzled by the lack of feminist curiosity in the revolutionary heritage of Rojava’s Women’s Defense Units. Even though Kurdish women have been involved in armed struggle in the Middle East since the 1980s when they joined the Kurdistan Organization of the Communist Party of Iran (Komala) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK), they are absent in both its feminist and leftist histories. For feminist scholars, Kurdish women’s intertwined struggle for national liberation and female emancipation was “out of time”―elided by the narrative of male “betrayal” of revolutionary women. For scholars of the left, their eras did “not match”―Islam replacing Marxism as the language of revolution in the Middle East after 1979. This paper takes up Diyar’s challenge to reconstruct the history of “the women who carried the struggle to today” by “holding together” the present imagination of women’s liberation in Kurdistan with the remembrance of its past hopes and disappointments. Utilizing a variety of sources (memoirs, film, music and funeral practices) to explore the “memorial resistance” (Fritsch) of the women of two significant yet understudied revolutionary movements, Komala and the PKK, the paper offers a new understanding of revolutionary struggle in the Middle East—one that neither ends its leftist histories in the 1970s nor confines its feminist possibilities to the present. Departing from the literature that dismisses present longings for revolutionary pasts as post-colonial melancholy, romantic nostalgia, or (to paraphrase Marx) parody, as well as scholars who view the commemoration of its violence as silencing, forgetting or the “first lie” (Houston), this paper reclaims the “retroactive force” (Benjamin) of the long history of women’s resistance in Kurdistan.