Delap, upholding this commitment, often returns to the vibrant and diverse forms of women’s activism across the African continent (and elsewhere) – not all or even much of it explicitly ‘feminist’, given the term’s Western baggage, but nonetheless essential to any global history of feminisms worthy of the name. Some readers may already be aware of some of the people profiled, such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900–78), the charismatic women’s rights activist from Nigeria, while others, such as Senegalese-born, French-educated writer Awa Thiam, an enthusiastic but sometimes naïve advocate for African feminism, are given necessarily nuanced treatment. One of the ways Delap’s history is especially useful – and the ‘usability’ of feminist history for contemporary feminism is an animating concern, as it has been for generations of feminist historians – is in refreshing well-known examples and showcasing new ones through a thematic approach that simultaneously honours specificity, connection, and context.

Without entirely eschewing chronology – in her thoughtful introduction, she commits to a span of 250 years – Delap organises her history into eight thematic chapters: ‘Dreams’, ‘Ideas’, ‘Spaces’, ‘Objects’, ‘Looks’, ‘Feelings’, ‘Actions’, and ‘Songs’. It is an approach explicitly and respectfully indebted to recent developments in feminist historiography, though Delap never lets the scholarship overwhelm the stories being told. A few of them are even her own, and these charming yet fleeting glimpses into her own feminist history enhance rather than detract from the wider themes. As a teenager, Delap read My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and felt that her ‘refusal of the path of heterosexual romance spoke powerfully to my own emotions across the many oceans and decades that separated us’. Elsewhere, she recalls a feminist history seminar in the 1990s in which a colleague’s colourful rainbow socks, ‘with a space for all of her toes’, caught her eye. Her new friend shared her dream of a world ‘where male and female were simply irrelevant categories’. Such encounters can be as transformative, Delap suggests, as reading a canonical text. Crucially, Delap also recognises that one woman’s dream (say of a ‘common language’, for Adrienne Rich) could clash with another’s (like Audre Lorde’s for a ‘house of difference’). Hers is a capacious history, with plenty of room for competing visions and politics. Delap can comprehend and convey the appeal of feminisms and feminists past – Mary Daly, for instance – without insisting on their contemporary relevance.

Each chapter enlightens and entertains, with some of the best material reflecting Delap’s expertise on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘Woman Question’, as covered in her book The Feminist Avant-Garde (2007). In ‘Dreams’, we learn that the early twentieth century was a particularly ripe time for imagining what a feminist world might look like. The steady beat of women’s suffrage and communist revolution variously inspired Bengali woman Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain to publish Sultana’s Dream (1905), a fictional account of a feminist utopia named ‘Ladyland’ in which men were banished into harems and women ruled the world in an ecologically sustainable fashion; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), her ‘paean to a female-centred lifestyle’; and Alexandra Kollontai’s extensive fictional and non-fictional writings advocating the merging of sexual and socialist revolution. In ‘Ideas’, Delap dutifully traces the history of feminist theorising around patriarchy and double-or-triple jeopardy (also known as ‘intersectionality’). The stand-out comes from the dawn of the twentieth century, in the writing and activism of Chinese anarchist-influenced feminist He-Yin Zhen (c.1884–1920).

The themes of ‘Spaces’, ‘Looks’, and ‘Action’ cohere around enduring faultlines in feminism – for instance, about the pleasures and problems of separate or dedicated spaces; the politics of clothes and the gaze, and different ideas about how best to achieve social change. But Delap’s case studies are, pleasingly, not always predictable – in ‘Spaces’, there is far more about the mobilisation of women workers, including in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States (on the basis that formal equality eroded hard-won gains for ‘protection’) than there is about the separatism of ‘cultural feminists’ in the 1970s, though there is some of that, too. In ‘Looks’, Delap offers fresh analysis of the politics of the veil, including by placing in context Egyptian feminist Huda Sha’arawi’s deliberate unveiling of her face at the meeting of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Rome in 1923.

At the risk of sounding parochial, I was pleased to see Australia referenced multiple times, in both positive and negative terms. The chain protests of Merle Thornton, Rosalie Bogner, and Zelda D’Aprano in the 1960s, and the anti-sexist graffiti activism of BUGA-UP throughout the 1970s and 1980s, feature positively in ‘Actions’, while the racism of early feminist refuges is not glossed over in an account that also acknowledges the importance of these spaces. Australian examples of feminist material culture are littered throughout ‘Objects’, a testimony to the important work of Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson in their edited collection Things That Liberate: A feminist Wunderkammer (2013). In contrast, Australian feminists such as Jessie Street who have featured in histories of feminist internationalism do not appear here, but Feminisms: A global history is not that kind of history.

Delap wants her readers to comprehend feminism as emotion, experience, and embodiment, rather than only or primarily as a movement aggregated into national, regional, and international organisations. Against the Western-centric narrative of ‘waves’ or peaks of feminist activity, where nothing much happens in between, Delap offers ‘“mosaic feminism”, built up from inherited fragments but offering distinctive patterns and pictures’. In ‘Songs’, the final, rousing chapter, Delap draws on historian Nancy Hewitt to suggest that ‘rather than seeing successive “ocean waves” of feminism, we might imagine competing, simultaneous broadcasts, some loud and clear, others disrupted by static’. Delap does not labour these metaphors, but her intermittent discussion of them is a reminder of the interpretative and political challenges facing those who dare to write the history of something as widely dispersed, multi-faceted, contested, and ongoing as feminism. Delap rises to the occasion in the best feminist spirit – building on and acknowledging the work of those who came before, while bringing new ideas and energy to the task.