Rosalind Miles

Twenty-five years ago The Women’s History of the World, by the brilliant historian, journalist and academic, Rosalind Miles, burst upon the world. It was instantly lauded and applauded by everyone from A.S. Byatt (‘Witty, balanced, inexorable ….and splendid’) to the Washington Post (‘an inspiration’). The book went on to be a longstanding Sunday Times bestseller, was translated into almost 40 foreign languages and became a New York Times US bestseller under the sporting title of Who Cooked The Last Supper? In all these years it has never been echoed or imitated, let alone surpassed. Dr. Miles book has continued to substantially add to the feminist argument for the last twenty-five years. But in that time, the argument itself has changed.

If The Women’s History of the World was a myth-busting ice-breaker of history at the time, for women now there are many new myths to combat and arctic oceans of new ice to break in their voyage through this old/new world of today. It is time for a new appraisal - Rebel Women. This entirely new book looks again at the central question - why women’s history? From there, it conducts a critical examination of how women have fared in what history calls the modern age. The last two hundred years have witnessed the worst and greatest social upheavals in the history of the world, war, revolution, and genocide, mass murder on an industrial scale. At the same time, women have made greater advances than in all the previous ages of the human record.

Rebel Women examines the progress of events and the roles of women as they emerged from millennia of silence and suppression to play their part in every modern movement as it unfurled. Brave, brilliant, unrivalled in its wit and erudition, Rebel Women is not only a hugely readable book, but also a very important one - a book which everyone concerned with a woman’s place in the world will want to read.