This book teems with accounts of women’s philosophical ideas, intellectual cross-currents, radical and reformist causes, and ‘experiments in living’, that were pioneered in Britain, Europe, north America, western Europe and elsewhere during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – themes that have long been familiar to historians of that period interested in movements for social, economic and political reform. What distinguishes this new account, however, is that, whereas in many earlier studies the ideas and achievements of women have been portrayed as playing an important, but nonetheless largely subaltern, role in the wider evolution of the period, Ann Oakley’s gripping narrative centres upon reform movements, scientific innovations and philosophical systems in which many of the major protagonists of change were themselves members of the female sex. She suggests, moreover, that the sheer range and impact of their activities in the late-Victorian/early-twentieth century period meant that many such movements were in no sense minor or supplementary factors in the evolution of the ‘modern’ epoch, but were often no less influential (and in some spheres even more so) in generating new norms, social practices, and moral and spiritual values than those being generated by men. They affected not merely areas of human life that were central to the lives of women (such as child-rearing, family life, medicine and social welfare) but much wider and more public issues such as town-planning, economic policy, and questions of war and peace. Such trends, moreover, were by no means confined to Britain, but were part of a much wider movement of cultural exchange and social interaction that stretched via feminist networks from London to Los Angeles, from Norway to New Zealand, and across much of the British Empire.

At the start of the period covered by this study, women generically – not just in Britain but in all ‘advanced’ countries – were almost wholly excluded from the formal structures of political, economic and intellectual power. They had only recently (and even then very marginally) been admitted to institutions of further and higher education; they conventionally occupied only the most menial and subordinate roles within the wider economic system; their access to professions which involved technical and theoretical expertise was negligible or non-existent; and (perhaps most paradoxical of all) in all social classes they had far more limited legal powers over the welfare and destinies of their children than those enjoyed by their male counterparts (despite the fact that far greater expectations of responsibility for day–to-day child nurture and welfare were placed on women rather than men). Even more limited was the influence of women over economic production and terms of employment, even in the most ‘female’ of occupations (including the professional teaching of small children, where women employees in Britain in the 1880s and 90s outnumbered men by a factor of ten to one, but whose formal control, over syllabuses, work processes, security of employment and laws relating to the needs of children, was virtually nil). By the end of the period, however, women had (albeit on a very limited level) been admitted to Parliament; pioneers among them had became senior civil servants, doctors, diplomats, police officers, and practitioners of sanitary science. And likewise at a more humble and humdrum level, the social and economic imperatives of the first world war had forced (or attracted) women into many work-roles that were traditionally seen as the generic functions of men. Thereafter, the pace of change decelerated for a generation; but Professor Oakley amply makes her point that the years 1880-1920 were to prove an irreversible launching-pad for the emergence of a new kind of society.

I have only one cavil with this book, which is a human and personal rather than intellectual one. Professor Oakley, surely rightly, draws attention to the long-drawn-out neglect by historians, social theorists, and intellectuals more generally of the experiences of women, both in the pre-1914 period and in face of the intensely tragic experiences of widowhood and bereavement suffered by so many during and after the first world war itself. (My own grandmothers both suffered such bereavements, which left scars upon their lives for nearly half a century thereafter). My cavil relates to the experiences of the men themselves, of whom nearly half a million male Britons not merely experienced hardship but actually died during the course of the First World War, as did a still larger number of conscripted male Europeans. Many more in all countries were left with physical disabilities, psychological trauma, and with several decades of prolonged mass unemployment (during which the traditional definitive role of men – that of being the ‘provider’ or ‘male breadwinner’ – was to be in many contexts progressively undermined or degraded). In the face of such experiences, the historical problem ceases to be part of a distinctively ‘women’s’ history, and becomes part of the wider cross-gender experience of humanity itself. It would be good to have a further, complementary, study, with Ann Oakley’s impressive imaginative and analytical skills trained on this dualistic aspect of the problem.