Modern feminism has deep roots. Over the past 2500 years, female writers and thinkers across the world have expressed their feelings about gender roles, their frustrations and successes, their struggles for equality. This four-volume anthology brings together the richest collection of feminist texts available with over 120 entries, most of them complete essays or chapters, arranged broadly chronologically. Readers can juxtapose seventeenth-century ‘New World' feminist writing with European counterparts, historical with poststructuralist feminist writing, Asian with Anglophone voices and ‘difference feminism' with universalist statements. Each text features an editorial headnote and annotation, while the general introduction sets feminism in its historical and global contexts. The anthology's inclusion of multiple genres – letters and poems as well as philosophical or polemical prose – offers new possibilities for the study of genre and feminist discourse.