When we think of the struggle for women's rights we often think of it as being a recent development - dating from the 1960s or, if we are up on women's history, from the 1848 women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. This fascinating new anthology of women's resistance writing worldwide makes clear that women have resisted oppression for over 25 centuries and in all corners of the earth.

Edited by Jean O'Barr, director of Women's Studies at Duke University, as well as by University of Arizona English professor Eugenia Delamotte and Duke graduate student Natania Meeker, this ambitious and unique work,Women Imagine Change, uses first-person autobiographical narratives so readers get an inside view of what women long ago, and from different parts of the world, were thinking. Women have "resisted" - "reflected on, reacted to, and initiated social change" in terms of gender - in a broad variety of arenas: religion, sexuality, work, education, and politics.

Some ways of resisting might seem alien to us today: often women had to choose a life of religious commitment and/or celibacy to avoid arranged marriage, to be able to receive an education, and to live relatively independently. Writings by Buddhist nuns during the last millennium and the early part of this millennium, and by Chinese women in the early 20th century who were able to live independently by taking a vow of spinsterhood, underscore this point.

Some women, despite enormous cultural barriers, managed to escape the strictures of women's lives successfully. Nzinga was Queen of Angola in the 17th Century, although women did not normally rule in her ethnic group. She dressed as a man and successfully negotiated treaties with the Portuguese invaders to protect her people. In the early 1800s in England, Anne Lister was able to get away with lesbian relationships because of her upper-class standing and/or because no one believed women could have sexual relationships. Lister wrote a coded diary which, when deciphered, revealed her relationships with women.

One of the modern U.S. women's movements biggest concerns is women's equality in politics and society, and Women Imagine Change shows that this has been a concern for women throughout the ages. In ancient Rome Hortensia gave a famous speech on behalf of women who refused to be taxed in a time of war, because they did not have a political voice. Iranian feminist Taj al-Saltana helped start the Society for the Emancipation of Women in 1910, at the beginning of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. The excerpt from her autobiography urges women's unveiling as a path towards women's equality.

This eye-opening anthology brings home the reality that women have always, in every part of the world, worked for freedom in all the ways they were able. Far from being a twentieth-century Western anomaly, the struggle for women's rights and autonomy is global and timeless. This anthology is a must for every feminist library. -- Eleanor Smeal