Divided lives

The lives of American women have changed dramatically in the nine decades since the turn of the century. Women have made extraordinary strides in winning personal autonomy, sexual freedom, economic independence, and legal rights. They won the right to vote, the legal right to equal pay for equal work, and the right to control their reproductive lives. Nonetheless, the vast majority of women still assume the domestic burdens that leave men free to play their traditional role outside the home; paradoxically, the bedrock of liberal individualism that has made women's great gains possible clashes with the powerful tradition of gender inequality. Moreover, it has impeded the growth of social services--health care, maternal aid, and child care--that could further promote equality for women. Equality in practice remains elusive. Rosalind Rosenberg writes a lively history. She includes vignettes of many of the great leaders who during a turbulent century-long struggle have achieved so much for their sex: reformers Jane Addams and Frances Peck; labor leaders Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Ruth Young; birth-control advocates Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger; civil-rights leaders Ida Wells-Barnett and Pauli Murray; feminists Alice Paul and Betty Friedan; and many lesser-known women. Enjoyable, colorful, informed, Ms. Rosenberg's book maintains a clear focus as it deals with the leaders, the goals (some contradictory), and triumphs (and occasional setbacks) of the women's movement in the twentieth century.