Feminists

by Richard J. Evans

Originally published in 1977, this book brings together what is known about liberal feminist and socialist movements for the emancipation of women all over the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It deals not only with Britain and the United States but also with Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Scandinavian countries. The chapters trace the origins, development, and eventual collapse of these movements in relation to the changing social formations and political structures of Europe, America and Australasia in the era of bourgeois liberalism.The first part of the book discusses the origins of feminist movements and advances a model or 'ideal type' description of their development. The second part then takes a number of case studies of individual feminist movements to illustrate the main varieties of organised feminism and the differences from country to country. The third part looks at socialist women's movements and includes a study of the Socialist Women's International. A final part touches on the reason for the eclipse of women's emancipation movements in the half-century following the end of the First World War, before a general conclusion pulls together some of the arguments advanced in earlier chapters and attempts a comparison between these feminist movements of 1840-1920 and the Women's Liberation Movement.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 to 2017 President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He served as Provost of Gresham College in the City of London from 2014 to 2020. In 1994 he was awarded the Hamburg Medal for Art and Science for cultural services to the city, and in 2015 received the British Academy Leverhulme Medal, awarded every three years for a significant contribution to the Humanities or Social Sciences. In 2000 he was the principal expert witness in the David Irving Holocaust Denial libel trial at the High Court in London, subsequently the subject of the film Denial. His books include Death in Hamburg (winner of the Wolfson History Prize), In Defence of History, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. His book The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, volume 7 of the Penguin History of Europe, was published in 2016. His most recent books are Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019) and The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In 2012 he was knighted for services to scholarship.