[In the following review, Smith offers a positive assessment of Significant Sisters.]

Half the women who appear in Margaret Forster's book Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism, as she herself points out, denied they were feminists. Florence Nightingale had no patience with women who wanted to do men's work: she sneered that Elizabeth Blackwell, the world's first qualified female doctor, had ‘only tried to be a man.’ Elizabeth Blackwell herself refused to speak at a Woman's Rights convention because ‘I believe that the chief source of the false position of women is the inefficiency of women themselves—the deplorable fact that they are so often careless mothers, weak wives, poor housekeepers, ignorant nurses and frivolous human beings.’

Herein lies a conundrum. The very women who brought about significant changes in the status of women denied they were feminists. Margaret Forster has the answer. If some women seem to detest feminism, it is because feminists have scared them off by too openly expressing their resentments. She goes on to offer a definition of feminism as ‘a force for the good of both men and women,’ a soothing and all-encompassing phrase.

In fact, she says reassuringly, feminism is ‘nothing to be frightened of.’ Her book is a powerful illustration of this acceptable face of feminism—not a political belief, like socialism, not ‘a shrieking harridan obsessed with destruction,’ but ‘the most attractive and peaceful of doctrines.’ So harmless and well-bred a creature is Margaret Forster's feminist that you could safely invite her to tea at the vicarage (or write flattering articles about her in The Mail on Sunday).

This is not to say that Significant Sisters is a bad book. It sets out with the admirable object of showing how women gained improvements in the choices open to them in the 100 years between 1839 and 1939. It is a timely reminder of the enormous obstacles faced by women who had the courage to embark on difficult campaigns at a time when feminism was in its infancy. Josephine Butler, one of the eight women whose life stories are told in the book, faced physical assault during her crusade against the iniquitous Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed any woman suspected of being a prostitute to be seized and examined for venereal disease. Margaret Sanger was imprisoned for opening a family planning clinic in Brooklyn in 1916.

In this sense, the book fills a gap. It even comes close to facing the reality which Forster finally ducks. By the 1920s, she says, all was not well with feminism. Social restrictions had loosened, more women went out to work. But ‘a wider, deeper ideology was needed and needed quickly before feminism floundered in a sea of complacency.’ It was Emma Goldman who spotted the problem, she believes. Goldman realised women were prisoners of their own notions—even though they went out to work, they still felt obliged to do the housework.

‘True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts,’ she wrote. ‘It begins in a woman's soul.’ But the crucial difference between Emma Goldman's feminism and Margaret Forster's is that the former recognised how challenging the emancipation of women would be to men.

Goldman's attempts to combine her work with her relationships with men pitched her into a series of battles with lovers who resented the changes they were expected to make in their own lives as a result of her feminism. One of them accused her of having ‘no thought for anything else—your love has no thought of me or my needs … you are simply incapable of deep feeling … you will have to choose.’

Is this a response to Margaret Forster's force which is ‘for the good of both men and women’? On the contrary, it is the strongest possible evidence that feminism is radical, challenging, difficult and dangerous. If feminism is disguised as a series of loosely-related campaigns to improve various aspects of women's lives, it comes with an unwritten guarantee that feminists won't rock the boat too much. Fortunately, the fact that they do and they will has been out of the closet for too long for Margaret Forster's genteel attempt at redefinition to force it back there.