This book focuses on how there was more to women's history than just the suffrage campaign and women's war work by looking at the broader context of women's achievements.

The book is divided into themes looking at education, work, marriage, relationships, health and maternity, poverty and housing, and the involvement of women in political parties and campaigns for social and legal reforms, including the right to vote.

It explores these themes through the lives of both the well-known and women who rarely, if ever, make the history books. The stories of Norwich women such as Mabel Clarkson, the first female sheriff in England, and one of the first women councillors and Lady Lord Mayor; and Dorothy Jewson, the first female MP in Norwich and East Anglia, provide the backdrop to the history of campaigns against poverty and women's right to vote.

Drawing on published and unpublished material held in the record office and heritage centre, the National Archives, museums and private collections, this book explores the lives of individual women to chart transformational changes in society at large, and Norwich in particular. These social, political and legal changes can be traced through the lives of divorcee Elizabeth Gurney; suffragette Miriam Pratt; nurse Philippa Flowerday, blacksmith Elizabeth Sabberton; economist and writer Harriet Martineau and abolitionist and writer Amelia Opie, and numerous schoolteachers, clerks, tradeswomen, weavers, WWI munitionettes and more.