Sexed: A History of British Feminism

Susanna Rustin's Sexed is a radical retelling of the story of British feminism. Starting in the revolutionary 1790s and ending in the present day, she introduces the 1830s radicals who demanded “LIBERTY FOR EVER!”, Victorian petitioners who expected to be dead before women won the vote, and rival camps of suffragists who embraced and rejected violence. She considers the contributions of the first female MPs, as well as activists including the Greenham peace protesters and the black and Asian women’s groups of the 1970s and 1980s. Her goal? To show how successive generations have fiercely contested what it means to be a woman, and why this matters. Biology on its own is not destiny. But this book argues that differences between male and female bodies have always been feminist issues. While gender is a useful concept, women cannot be supported by a politics that forgets that they, like men, are sexed.