1 H-France Review Vol. 5 (March 2005), No. 31 Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, Eds., Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. ix + 448 pp. Acknowledgements, contributors, notes, supplementary bibliography, and index of names. $60.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0804747644. Review by Sara L. Kimble, University of Northern Iowa. The impetus for this collection of essays was an international conference held in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1995, which was organized to discuss the origins and development of European women’s rights movements during the long nineteenth century. Scholars from eleven countries contributed studies on the early years of women’s emancipation within national contexts organized geographically. The national studies begin with Britain, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, then look north to Norway and Sweden, then east to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and finally south to Spain and Greece. The authors carefully situate the movements in historical context thus illustrating the prevalence of feminist ideas concurrent with the growth of liberalism, nationalism, and republicanism. Comparative views are provided by Karen Offen, who focuses on challenges to “male hegemony” from the French Revolution to 1860, and Christine Bolt, who connects the British and American feminist movements during the second half of the nineteenth century. The editors, Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow- Ennker, introduce the goals and concepts of this anthology and conclude with a concise synthesis of the broad historical trends. This book is a valuable contribution to a field that has benefited recently from the publication of Karen Offen’s European Feminisms, 1700-1950 (2000) and the Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women (2003) edited by Christine Fauré.[1] Although the development of women’s emancipation movements is partly unique to each nation’s history, the editors propose that a four-phased chronology is generally applicable Europe-wide. The first phase began in the Enlightenment and continued to the end of the French Revolution as networks of publications and small circles of friends endeavored to improve women’s education and legal status under civil law. With the implementation of the Napoleonic Civil Code in 1804, gains made during the Revolution were overturned and new codifications constrained women with vehemence. With these formal obstacles in place, the second phase of the movement was primarily literary and frequently aligned with nationalism in central, eastern, and southern Europe from the 1810s to the 1860s. In France, the early socialist movements of the 1830s and 1840s, especially among the followers of Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon, incorporated gender equality into their platforms for change. The reactionary phase which followed the 1848 revolutions detrimentally affected these early efforts. The period of the 1850s