SOURCE: A review of Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism, 1839–1939, in Historian, Vol. 49, November, 1986, pp. 109–10.

In the following review, Suellentrop offers a positive assessment of Significant Sisters.

Collective biographies of women written in the 19th and early 20th century had common weaknesses: biographical information with little or no analysis, weak threads of connection among the subjects and sanitized views of the subjects. Margaret Forster's Significant Sisters suffers from none of those weaknesses. Indeed it illustrates how satisfying a work can be both for the author and the reader.

No romantic narratives, the lives of the eight English and American women chosen are lives of ambition, risk, concern and accomplishment. Forster, also a novelist, has used her narrative skill to tell the stories of these women who were “born to start things off, to fight for all women” (234). Cautioning the reader that she defines feminism not as one...