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

Collective biographies of women written in the 19th and early 20th century had common weaknesses: biographical information with little or no analysis, weak threads of connection among the subjects and sanitized views of the subjects. Margaret Forster's Significant Sisters suffers from none of those weaknesses. Indeed it illustrates how satisfying a work can be both for the author and the reader.

No romantic narratives, the lives of the eight English and American women chosen are lives of ambition, risk, concern and accomplishment. Forster, also a novelist, has used her narrative skill to tell the stories of these women who were “born to start things off, to fight for all women” (234). Cautioning the reader that she defines feminism not as one steadily progressing movement but as a philosophy, a way of looking at and thinking of life for all women, Forster presents the women, their individual cause and their individual approach as they acted in eight different spheres. These spheres, spheres in a woman's life where dramatic changes were made from 1839–1939, are the law, the professions, employment, education, sexual morality, politics, birth control and ideology. The domestic sphere is not included, and rightly so, because the changes occurring there were not as clearly defined and there was not a woman who was as clearly identified as an instigator of change.

Interweaving change, the changing life of the woman, the change she caused and the changing thought, provides the connecting structure for each. In addition each woman struggles with first her relationship with men and, as a result, secondly, her own nature. And the conclusions are as unique as the work.

And so each woman's story is told—Caroline Norton, Elizabeth Blackwell, Florence Nightingale, Emily Davies, Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman. These courageous women acted alone, balancing what was expected of them by family and society, femininity, with what they were compelled to do because of their convictions, feminism. In doing so, they successfully laid the foundation for modern feminism. A good chronicle.