The Rights and Wrongs of Women

Are the rights of women any more recognised today than they ever were, and are their wrongs any less?

The authors of this book – historians, sociologists, educationalists and literary critics – have from many different political positions, set out to answer the question.

Their contributions show that the world has changed but that the relative position of women in it has not. They show that from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft’s struggles, through to the work of Harriet Martineau and Simone de Beauvoir, little or nothing has happened. In education, work, even in the clearly female province of childbearing, male attitudes, male controls and male structures still rule the roost.

Liberal democracy has clearly made life easier; oppression and the responses to it have both become more subtle and that demand for subtlety is reflected in the differing responses from the authors. But throughout this carefully researched and excitingly written book, one message comes through clearly: whatever ‘sisterhood’ may come to mean, the women’s movement still has its greatest battle before it.