Women make up roughly 50% of the population but only feature in about 0.5% of recorded history. In Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, Kate Mosse, the bestselling author of Labyrinth, celebrates can-do women and gives history’s trailblazers their due. Aimed at teenage readers but just as enjoyable for adults, this anthology comprises bite-sized stories of female achievement and the centuries-old fight for equality. As Mosse notes in the introduction, it is about women “who refused to accept the limitations put on them, who campaigned and marched, battled and challenged the status quo to change the world for the better”.
The book features a mixture of famous and lesser-known figures: artists, writers, scientists, academics, sportswomen, educators and politicians. There’s primatologist Dian Fossey; avant garde painter Amrita Sher-Gil; Britain’s first black headteacher Beryl Gilroy; Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai; Ethiopian politician and humanitarian Senedu Gebru; racehorse trainer Florence Nagle; computer programmers Ada Lovelace and Dorothy Vaughan; and actor and music hall star Josephine Baker, who was also a pilot and agent in the French resistance during the second world war. Not all the assembled achievers are straightforwardly heroic – Marie Stopes may have founded Britain’s first ever birth control clinic in 1921, but she also believed in eugenics.
