Rebel Women: The renegades, viragos and heroines who changed the world – from the French Revolution to today by Rosalind Miles is published by Virago.
Rosalind Miles is probably best known for The Women’s History of the World, and once again she is celebrating women who have played their part in liberating half the human race from the traditional roles of wife and motherhood. Obviously, it isn’t a definitive history – her choices are idiosyncratic and, as she admits, slanted towards the West.
Miles starts off with the French Revolution, where women managed to make their voices and deeds noticed, though with little ultimate change to their position. Then she gallops through the Enlightenment – the Age of Reason – which, she points out, was enlightened and reasonable for men.
The telling is not entirely chronological: Miles cruises back and forth, and while for the most part the book is entertaining, she is on occasion cavalier with the facts. Another problem is that in certain places she tries to cram in too much, leading to catalogues of women, some familiar and some not, who made their mark but in her efforts to give them their due, it turns into something of a laundry list of names as she hops from Mary Robinson to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, then on to Kay Graham - and on and on.
Where the book is much better is where Miles allows herself to focus in some detail on a character, like the fascinating Eleanor Roosevelt, or Betty Friedan. And her chapter on Hollywood is terrific. The film industry started so well, but as Miles says: “How did film turn in the 20th Century from an art form of wit, humour and invention to a drip-drip-drip message to women that women were for men, and should be happy and grateful?”
We get the baddies as well as the goodies – what are women to make of the pronouncements and actions of a Margaret Thatcher, an Imelda Marcos or a Joice Mujuru?
Another criticism of the book is the style. Miles is distancing herself from academia here, and the writing is racy, not always in tune with the content as she tackles issues like women getting the vote or their rights with regard to their bodies. All in all, Rebel Women, though always readable, is something of a curate’s egg. At least the curate might nowadays be a woman, which is something to celebrate. - Margaret von Klemperer
Rebel Women by Rosalind Miles is published by Virago ISBN-13: 9780349006055
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