Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- What is Feminism? -- What is Patriarchy? -- Biology is Destiny -- Logic or Emotion? -- Early Modern Feminist Activity -- Reinterpreting the Bible -- First Political Action -- "To the Ladies" -- Early Perspectives -- The Age of Reason -- Social Planners -- Competing Perspectives -- The Rise of Individualism -- First Wave Feminism -- Remembering the Ladies -- Mary Wollstonecraft -- An Unconventional Life -- Against Rousseau -- Sense and Sensibility -- The Divine Right of Husbands -- The Grimké Sisters -- The "Cult of Domesticity", 1820-80 -- Rules of Conduct for Men and Women -- Harriet Taylor Mill -- Theory and Practice -- A Panoply of Servants -- "Man" or "Person"? -- Caroline Norton -- Coverture -- The Infant Custody Act -- The Matrimonial Causes Act -- Catherine Helen Spence -- Seneca Falls Convention, New York 1848 -- A Declaration of Independence -- The Advent of the Bloomers -- The 1850s in the USA -- The International Council of Women -- The 1850s in Britain -- Barbara Bodichon -- Langham Place -- Emmeline Pankhurst -- The Woman's Social and Political Union -- Militant Suffragettes -- Women's Suffrage in Australia -- Suffrage Gains Momentum -- Against Suffrage -- The First Backlash -- Feminism = Lesbianism? -- Educated but Under-employed -- The Lost Sex -- Virginia Woolf -- A Room of One's Own -- Guineas and Locks -- "I have no country …" -- Simone de Beauvoir -- Existence Precedes Essence -- Second Wave Feminism -- The Women's Liberation Movement -- The Personal is Political -- The Seven Demands of the WLM -- Betty Friedan -- The Feminine Mystique -- Motherhood Before Career? -- The Feminist Mystique -- C-R and Rap -- Varieties of Feminisms -- Socialist Feminism -- Traditional Marxist Feminism -- Radical Feminism -- Ecofeminism -- Psychoanalytic Feminism -- Postfeminism -- Protest and Revolt

A Black Miss America -- Germaine Greer -- Shulamith Firestone -- Reproduction, not Production -- Consuming for Capitalism -- Kate Millet -- The Sex/Gender Hierarchy -- Misogyny in Literature -- Ann Oakley -- Subject Women -- Gynocriticism -- Psychoanalysis and Feminist Thought -- "The Reproduction of Mothering" -- Mermaids and Minotaurs -- Separation from the Mother -- Adrienne Rich -- Gyn/Ecology -- The 1980s -- Black Women's Experience of Feminism -- Early Expressions of Black Feminism -- A'n't I a Woman? -- Frances Harper -- The Combahee River Collective -- Gynocentricism and Black Feminism -- bell hooks -- Alice Walker -- Popular Fiction in the 1980s -- The Power of Romance -- Feminism and Pornography -- Feminism and the Body -- The Beauty Myth -- The Grotesque -- Feminism and the Question of Gender -- Deconstructive Feminism -- Men Back at Centre Stage? -- Girl Power -- Feminism and the Developing World -- The Subaltern -- Challenging Rituals -- What is Feminism? -- Milestones -- Further Reading -- About the author and artist -- Acknowledgements -- Index

The term 'feminism' came into English usage around the 1890s, but women's conscious struggle to resist discrimination and sexist oppression goes much further back. This work surveys the major developments that have affected women's lives from the 17th century to the present day