Nancy Fraser's powerful new book documents the "movements of feminism" and the shifts in the feminist imaginary since the 1970s. Fraser follows the history of feminism from the ferment of the New Left, during which "Second Wave" feminism emerged as a struggle for women's liberation alongside other social movements, to its emersion in identity politics following the decline of its initial utopian energies. Alongside this detailed history, Fraser recognizes the need for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism to respond to the crisis in neoliberalism. She argues for a feminism that could join other egalitarian movements in struggles aimed at subjecting capitalism to democratic control, while retrieving the core utopian insights of feminism's earlier phases.

This is an historical account of feminism, looking at the roots of feminism, voting rights, the liberation of the sixties, and analysing the current situation of women, across Europe and the United States, and elsewhere in the world (in particular in Third World countries). Walters examines the difficulties and inequities that women still face, more than forty years after the 'new wave' of 1960s feminism -- difficulties, particularly, in combining domesticity, motherhood and work outside the house. How much have women's lives really changed? In the West women still come up against the 'glass ceiling' at work, most earning considerably less than their male counterparts. What are we to make of the now commonplace insistence that feminism deprives men of their rights and dignities? And how does one tackle the issue of female emancipation in different cultural and economic environments - in, for example, Islam, Hinduism, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian sub-continent?