[In the following negative review, Selvin derides the lack of interpretation found in Significant Sisters.]

We who cut our political teeth on feminism during the 1960s and 1970s may find it hard to remember that there was a “movement” before us. To those of us who so self-consciously went braless, to those of us who own treasured first editions of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the women's movement now seems almost middle-aged.

But the history of feminism is, in fact, quite old and rich. Margaret Forster's book, Significant Sisters, explores the careers of eight extraordinary British and American women whose lives spanned a century and a half. Many of their names are familiar but their accomplishments, courage and personal determination may not be.

Caroline Norton fought for passage of the Reform of Marriage and Divorce Laws Act, which, for the first time, legally recognized British wives as individuals apart from their husbands. Elizabeth Blackwell, an American, was the first registered and trained female physician. Florence Nightingale, who professionalized the field of nursing, asserted that woman must have the option to choose to work. Emily Davies founded Girton College for women at Cambridge. Josephine Butler lobbied for repeal of the British Contagious Diseases Act, which punished prostitutes and subjected them to degrading and often dangerous medical examinations without punishing their male customers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped organize the Woman's Suffrage Movement in the United States. Margaret Sanger, another American, advocated the widespread dissemination of birth control technology among women to give them control over their reproductive lives. And Emma Goldman, an American, laid the framework for the feminist ideology of the 1970s by asserting that “true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts [but] … in a woman's soul.”

Forster chose these women to demonstrate that their remarkable individual achievements were not isolated occurences. Rather, these women were part of an extraordinary flowering of feminism in law, employment, education, sexual morality, politics and ideology between the early 19th and early 20th centuries. “[T]hey had all been born,” Forster writes, “to start things off.”

But contemporary women may be hard pressed to identify them as feminists, for these women felt constrained to choose between marriage and children on the one hand and political or professional involvement on the other. Elizabeth Blackwell and Florence Nightingale rejected outright the notion of marriage. Margaret Sanger and Elizabeth Cady Stanton found that their marriages could not survive their activism. Only Josephine Butler managed to maintain both a loving marriage and her commitment to her work with prostitutes.

More important, however, Forster's feminists sound strikingly anti-feminist at times. Blackwell, Nightingale and Norton often blamed women themselves for their own plight. “I believe that the chief source of the false position of women,” Blackwell wrote, “is the inefficiency of the women themselves.” Nightingale was more sarcastic: “[T]he whole occupation of [upper-class British women] was to lie on … sofas and tell each other not to get tired by putting flowers into water.”

Forster is somewhat sympathetic to this view: “True emancipation may have begun in my childhood soul, but it did not flower as it should have done. … I have been a feeble feminist. I have gradually come round to understanding that there is … something in women which prevents them striking out as men do.”

Yet Forster argues persuasively that we cannot judge these women by contemporary standards of feminism. She shows them to be courageous women who for the most part had to battle their own families as well as the larger world for acceptance. “Without them, feminism would have been nothing.” They were the “stepping stones.” Moreover, through the use of well-selected quotations and a bit of dramatic prose, Forster casts the concerns of her subjects in a strikingly contemporary light.

To the extent these women failed, it was because they were naive about the power of legislative reform to effect social change and because they viewed themselves as anomalies. They could not envision that many women would emulate them. As a result, ultimately they did not change how most women viewed themselves and their opportunities.

Despite its several virtues, however, Significant Sisters is disappointing. Forster writes that feminism has a “long and worthy history” but fails to acknowledge that the study of women's history does also. Forster has relied on the writings of her subjects—their correspondence, autobiographies and their political tracts. She all but ignores the excellent interpretive biographies that have appeared in recent decades.

Not surprisingly then, the book is thin on interpretation. Forster asserts that each of her subjects “had her own particular brand of feminism.” In effect, however, she simply views her subjects uncritically. She largely dismisses, for example, the darker, eugenic motivations for Margaret Sanger's advocacy of birth control that other historians have seen in her writings.

She also imbues her subjects with an inappropriate sense of predestination. Of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Forster writes, “Whether she was having breakfast with Josephine Butler or tea with Elizabeth Blackwell, she would feel excited, too, by an additional sense of common destiny: They had all been born … to fight for all women.”

Significant Sisters is a tidy set of biographies about eight remarkable women. It breaks no new ground as history but does remind us that the concerted effort to improve women's lives did not begin with publication of The Feminine Mystique and that postwar attitudes on sex, marriage and careers are anything but novel.