Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism, 1839-1939

Description

Significant Sisters traces the lives of eight women, each of whom pioneered vital changes in the spheres of law, education, the professions, morals or politics: the first woman doctor, the pioneer of birth control, a radical journalist, and suffragists. Each forced her own particular brand of feminism, yet all fought bravely to make real, lasting difference to women's lives, and make us redefine our own notions of feminism today.

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster was the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? , Keeping the World Away, Over and The Unknown Bridesmaid. She also wrote bestselling memoirs - Hidden Lives, Precious Lives and, most recently, My Life in Houses - and biographies. She was married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lived in London and the Lake District. She died in February 2016, just before her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, was published.

Margaret Forster is alive to the debt we owe to such champions, who made our world so much more hospitable to women -- Marina Warner * Sunday Times * Margaret Forster writes history with a novelist's eye for details and is interested in the contradictions and conflicts in her heroines' attitudes to their own femininity -- A. S. Byatt * The Times * Humane, humorous and perceptive * Evening Standard * Inspiring * Times Literary Supplement *