Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on womens bodies and womens lives. Peopleof any and no genderhave protested and theorised, penned manifestos and written poetry and songs, testified and lobbied, gone on strike and fomented revolution, quietly demanded that there is an I and loudly proclaimed that there is a we. The Verso Book of Feminism chronicles this history of defiance and tracks it around the world as it develops into a multivocal and unabashed force.
Global in scope, The Verso Book of Feminism shows the breadth of feminist protest and of feminist thinking, moving through the female poets of Chinas Tang Dynasty to accounts of indigenous women in the Caribbean resisting Columbuss expedition, British suffragists militating for the vote to the revolutionary pétroleuses of the 1848 Paris Commune, the first-century Trung sisters who fought for the independence of Nam Viet to women in 1980s Botswana fighting for equal protection under the law, from the erotica of the sixth century and the ninteenth century to radical queer politics in the twentieth and twenty-first.
The Verso Book of Feminism is a weapon, a force, a lyrical cry, and an ongoing threat to misogyny everywhere.
