'Thinking Against the Current'

This collection brings together essays written between 1970 and 2010 that examine a wide range of political questions. Subjects include the persecution of Quakers in the seventeenth century, the social consequences of Thomas Malthus's ideas, the way English women won their own emancipation, Eleanor Rathbone's campaign for the rights of girls, and the resistance of German women to Hitler.

The volume also turns to literature. Its literary pieces consider how the English Romantic poets thought about society, how Dickens's Great Expectations engages with its world, and how Simone Weil and Virginia Woolf challenged militarism and the authority of the state. Contemporary American women poets writing about war are discussed as well.

Despite its variety, the essays are linked by a single argument: that resistance is necessary. Woolf's wartime essay Thoughts on Peace in an Air-raid supplies the book's central image of pushing against prevailing opinion. The author traces how opposition to oppression and militarism has been passed from one generation to the next, from the seventeenth century to the present, by men and women willing to accept personal cost.