Early French Feminisms, 1830-1940 is a source book of personal and political writings by Flora Tristan, Pauline Roland, Jeanne Deroin, Helene Brion and Madeleine Pelletier, five key individuals in the development of women's rights in France. Though their writings and political activity ranged over more than a century, these women were linked by their commitment to feminism and to socialism and can be considered as seminal figures in French political thought. Their journals, letters and diaries have not been available in print or in English translation and the same is true of many of their published works. As well as extensive extracts from the original source material, Early French Feminisms, 1830-1940 contains biographical and contextual historical material which sets the writers in their period and links them to contemporary feminist and socialist debates. Tristan, Deroin, Roland, Pelletier and Brion were active in the growth of trade union organization, Saint-Simonian utopian socialism, the birth of the parliamentary Socialist Parties, pacifism during the First World War and the neo-Malthusian or birth control movement. Ranging across personal and public genres of writings, the texts reproduced for this volume, placed in historical context, demonstrate the difficulty which these largely self-educated women faced in entering the public sphere and the political persecution which they faced courageously. Early French Feminisms, 1830-1940 clarifies an important chapter in feminist and socialist militancy which will be of interest to students and scholars of women's studies and modern French history.

The life story of Marie-Madeleine Jodin opens an exciting new perspective on the world of 18th-century women, European court theatres, and, most strikingly, entails the remarkable discovery of a previously unknown French feminist. In 1790, Jodin, a protegee of Denis Diderot and a former actress, published a treatise entitled Vues legislatives pour les femmes (Legislative Views for Women), which can lay claim to being the first signed, female-authored feminist manifesto of the French Revolutionary period, and which reveals Jodin's wide reading in women's history and feminist writing since ancient times. This new critical and contextual biography traces the turbulent life of an extraordinary woman, focusing particularly on her transformation from artisan's daughter, to tragic actress, to Enlightenment intellectual and feminist. The authors analyze the confrontations and scandals that beset her career, and read her feminist treatise-here reproduced, for the first time in English, in its entirety-as the summation of a chaotic but passionate existence. Also presented for the first time in English, fully set in their biographical and historical context, are the twenty-one letters that constitute Diderot's correspondence with Jodin. The varied and fascinating documentation concerning Jodin, which has only recently been discovered, provides a window on the world of 18th-century women. While memoirs and biographies of aristocratic women and upwardly mobile salonieres such as Mme. Geoffrin and Mme. Roland are legion, chronicles of the lives of individual women lower down the social ladder are far fewer in number. A contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges, Jodin argued for the social reform of working-class women, particularly prostitutes, to render them worthy to exercise the rights of citizenship.

This anthology of primarily non-fiction works by British women (1702-1870) introduces readers to a range of lesser-known texts and examines thei authors'? scholarly ambitions and often groundbreaking achievements.

Despite their lack of civil and political rights and in the absence of formal academic training, each of the writers profiled in this unique collection was anxious to establish herself as a serious contributor to what were regarded as male intellectual traditions. Students of women's history will be reacquainted with Harriet Martineau and Mary Hays' political writings while being introduced to Priscilla Wakefield, Jane Marcet, Ada Byron, and Mary Somerville's contributions to science and mathematics. Among others, Mary Shelley and Anna Jameson will intrigue readers with their innovative offerings to the expanding print culture.

A historical introduction and chronology provide the context for the primary sources which are arranged thematically. Biographical profiles and short commentaries are provided for each author.