The first comprehensive guide to women activists from every part of the world, illuminating the broad range of women's struggles to reform society from the 18th century to the present.

Despite being marginalized, disenfranchised, impoverished, and oppressed, women have always stepped forward in disproportionate numbers to lead movements for social change. This two-volume encyclopedia documents the visions, struggles, and lives of women who have changed the world.



This encyclopedia celebrates the lives and achievements of nearly 300 women from around the globe—women who have bravely insisted that the way things are is not the way they have to be. Nadeshda Krupskaya, the wife of Lenin, spearheaded the drive against illiteracy in post-revolutionary Russia. American Dorothy Day founded the Catholic worker movement. Begum Rokeya Hossain organized a girls' school in Calcutta in 1911. Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement with her book Silent Spring. The stories of these women and the hundreds of others collected here will restore missing pages to our history and inspire a new generation of women to change the world.









Over 400 A–Z biographical entries, including the childhood, education, achievements, and challenges of each woman



A timeline that spans the history of women reformers from the French Revolution, to the second wave of feminism in the late 1970s, to the disenfranchised status of women in many countries in the contemporary Middle East



Numerous drawings and photographs of women reformers



Two special indexes listing reformers by country and by cause