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Over one hundred fifty years ago, champions of women's rights–including Ernestine Rose– in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany formed the world's earliest international feminist movement. Joyous Greetings is the first book to tell their story. 

From Seneca Falls in upstate New York to the barricades of revolutionary Paris, from the Crystal Palace in London to small towns in the German Rhineland, early feminists united to fight for the cause of women. At the height of the Victorian period, they insisted their sex deserved full political equality, called for a new kind of marriage based on companionship, claimed the right to divorce and to get custody of their children, and argued that an unjust economic system forced women into poorly paid jobs. They rejected the traditional view that women's subordination was preordained, natural, and universal. In restoring these daring activists' achievements to history, Joyous Greetings passes on their inspiring and empowering message to today's new generation of feminists.

Oxford University Press, 2000
Reviews:

• "The Other Revolution" by David Brion Davis, The New York Review of Books
• "Joyous Greetings" by Paula Friedman, The New York Times, April 30, 2000
• PublishersWeekly.com Starred Reviews Nonfiction: Joyous Greetings

Co-Author Judith P. Zinsser

This classic two-volume history is an exciting and revolutionary look at women's history from prehistoric times to the present. Its unique organization focuses on the developments, achievements, and changes in women's roles in society. Rather than examining women's history as an inevitable progression of events along a strict timeline, this text is organized within a loose chronology, with chapters focusing on women's place and function in society. 

Volume One covers women's history from the prehistoric period to the seventeenth century. It includes topics such as the treatment of and attitudes about women during earliest recorded history; the alternating forces of empowerment and subordination imposed on women by ancient religions and the emergence of Christianity; peasant women's daily experiences of childbirth, family life, and field labor; women's religious lives; and the contrast between the lives of noblewomen and the lives of townswomen in early modern Europe.

Volume Two covers the fifteenth century to the present. Topics include the roles of female monarchs and women of the court; the application of the new tools of the Scientific Revolution to prove traditional views of women; the salons and parlors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and wealthy women's contributions to the arts and social services; the impact of city-living and the Industrial Revolution on women's roles and family life; and the emergence, evolution, and impact of the modern feminist movement.

Ofxord University Press, 2000

Reviews:

• "Never Underestimate a Misogynist" by Lynn Hunt, The New York Times, December 18, 1988

Translations of A History of Their Own:

Published in Great Britain by Penguin, in German by Fischer, in Italian by Laterza, and in Spanish by Crítica.  All these editions, including a 2007 one-volume Spanish edition are available for purchase at the links below.