SOURCE: “Nothing Alarming,” in New Statesman, October 19, 1984, pp. 31–32.

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

Half the women who appear in Margaret Forster's book Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism, as she herself points out, denied they were feminists. Florence Nightingale had no patience with women who wanted to do men's work: she sneered that Elizabeth Blackwell, the world's first qualified female doctor, had ‘only tried to be a man.’ Elizabeth Blackwell herself refused to speak at a Woman's Rights convention because ‘I believe that the chief source of the false position of women is the inefficiency of women themselves—the deplorable fact that they are so often careless mothers, weak wives, poor housekeepers, ignorant nurses and frivolous human beings.’

Herein lies a conundrum. The very women who brought about significant changes in the status of women denied they were feminists. Margaret...