Book Review – THE WOMEN’S HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD by Rosalind Miles

Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the Modern World: How Radicals, Rebels, and Everywomen Revolutionized the Last 200 Years. William Morrow, 2021. 415 pp. 24 Black and white illustrations. ISBN: 978-0-06-244403-5.

Reviewed by Emily Sohmer Tai, Professor of History, Queensborough Community College, City University of New York

A medieval and Renaissance literature specialist, Rosalind Miles has enjoyed a brisk career as a journalist, novelist, and pundit. Accordingly, this book is less a formal work of scholarship than a sequel to Miles’s popular history of women and gender, Who Cooked the Last Supper?, which appeared in 1988 to positive reviews and has been re-issued in several editions. While Miles offers an occasional reprise of material covered in that first survey, the twelve chapters of The Woman’s History take up, for the most part, where Who Cooked the Last Supper? left off, opening with an evocative consideration of the career and execution of Olympe de Gouges and concluding with such recent events as the Women’s March of January 21, 2017.

Alternately celebratory and indignant, Miles is most interested in individuals she terms “heroines:” women who transgressed against traditional gender roles and the legal incapacities that might work to enforce them, and more focused–as she herself concedes–on “the Western world” (x). There is a denunciation of the “despotic” power men exercised over women through the Napoleonic code (50-54) and quotations from various prominent male intellectuals who argued for female inferiority. Miles also includes brief, lively biographical sketches of dozens of women who proved these men wrong, from the astronomer Catherine Hershel to the historian and diplomat Gertrude Bell, among many others. The Anglo-American suffrage and birth-control movements (with a nod to the French Vésuviennes), as well as the progress of second-stage feminism in Britain and America, are also treated in detail.

It is to Miles’s credit that she endeavors to widen her coverage to accommodate issues of race and class, considering, for example, Indigenous fisherwomen and female convicts corralled into transportation to Australia and the conditions nineteenth-century women faced in mines, factories, and on slave plantations. In a section on women in armed conflicts, Miles considers the women of China’s Taiping Rebellion, the battalions of Russian women who fought in World War I and II, and American nurses who served and died in the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Miles’s focus on Anglo-American female political figures occasionally shifts to profile non-Western “heroines” such as Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar or Lakshmi Bai. 

Miles’s celebration of the various women who could—or can–fight, fly, spy, and lead makes for a lively girl-power narrative, if one that occasionally reads like an annotated list. Making “no pretense to the traditional historical fiction of impartiality” (x), Miles’s anecdotal portraits of these women are introduced as evidence to justify a concluding “Manifesto for Equality” (362-363) with which most readers of this publication will be in sympathy. If there is any flaw in this approach, it may be that Miles seldom moves beyond an implied assertion that the only real power is public power and that the only worthy tasks are those associated with traditional male gender roles. “Equality,” in Miles’s definition, is about doing what men do, and so her book is a history of women who successfully jettisoned what Elizabeth Cady Stanton termed a “dependent and abject life” (195) to encroach upon male preserves. The women who come off badly in this narrative, such as Queen Victoria or Phyllis Schlafly, are those who opposed this project. Miles has less to say about complicating elements of the empowerment campaigns she traces, such as the possible involvement of Margaret Sanger or Marie Stopes in the eugenics movement. Nevertheless, the rapid pace and jaunty, readable style Miles brings to this book may stimulate an interest that leads students to more nuanced, scholarly treatments.