This book tells the stories of some of the many thousands of women who in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took the reform of society as a serious intellectual and political goal. They were active and practical reformers, and they thought deeply about the forms of social organization and values that give rise to the problems calling for reformers’ attention. They were also among the first to develop the tools of social science that brought such problems firmly within the remit of public policy. Women’s exclusion at the time from many areas of public life, their development of international networks and their convictions about peace also called into question dominant ideas about the supremacy of nation-states and about the place of nationality in identity and citizenship. Most of these women were seen as ‘difficult’ in one way or another by the communities within which they lived and worked. They broke or challenged an uncomfortable number of laws and customs; they dug out facts politicians and policy makers would rather not have had to confront; they created new groupings, platforms and forms of organization; they queried long-accepted notions of heterosexual family living; and they placed exceptional demands on government agendas at local, national and international levels. But most of all they wove a rich tapestry of ideas about how human beings might live more harmoniously and altruistically together. Conceptions of social welfare and gender equality were yoked inexorably to the idea of a society in which warfare, militarism and aggression could no longer play any part. Masculinity could be stripped of its damaging apparel, and so, too, could and should the nation-state. The citizenship women claimed – and which they had been denied for so long – was a new form of human citizenship, embedded in a transnational solidarity and community in which everyone would share.

Almost as extraordinary as these radical blueprints for a better society is the fact that they are virtually unknown today. Remnants may survive in our reminiscences of individual women, for instance the visionary American writer and reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who appears in Chapter Two, or the British Emily Hobhouse, whose government-affronting protests against war at home and abroad are charted in Chapter Seven.