Published in 2021
429 pages
12 hours and 3 minutes
Rosalind Miles is a well-known and critically acclaimed English novelist, essayist, lecturer, and BBC broadcaster. Educated at Oxford and the Universities of Leicester and Birmingham, she is the founder of the Center for Womens Studies at Coventry Polytechnic in England. Her novels, including Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country and The Knight of the Sacred Lake, have been international bestsellers. She divides her time between homes in England and California.
What is this book about?
The internationally best-selling author of Who Cooked the Last Supper? presents a wickedly witty and very current history of the extraordinary female rebels, reactionaries, and trailblazers who left their mark on history from the French Revolution up to the present day.
Now is the time for a new women’s history – for the famous, infamous, and unsung women to get their due – from the Enlightenment to the #MeToo movement.
Recording the important milestones in the birth of the modern feminist movement and the rise of women into greater social, economic, and political power, Miles takes us through through a colorful pageant of astonishing women, from heads of state like Empress Cixi, Eugenia Charles, Indira Gandhi, Jacinda Ardern, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to political rainmakers Kate Sheppard, Carrie Chapman Catt, Anna Stout, Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm, Winnie Mandela, STEM powerhouses Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, Sophia Kovalevskaya, Marie Curie, and Ada Lovelace, revolutionaries Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Patyegarang, and writer/intellectuals Mary Wollstonecraft, Simon de Beauvoir, Elaine Morgan, and Germaine Greer. Women in the arts, women in sports, women in business, women in religion, women in politics – this is a one-stop roundup of the tremendous progress women have made in the modern era.
A testimony to how women have persisted – and excelled – this is a smart and stylish popular history for all listeners.
