This study seeks to discern the contrasts and common patterns in the feminist movements across the industrialized world. It draws the conclusion that feminism has been far more successful in the sphere of institutional reform than it has been in the personal areas of women's lives.

But the emergence of a distinctly 'second-class' female workforce, plagued by low pay and bereft of employment protection and benefits, shows up the limits of women's ability to rely on market forces to consolidate their position. Coupled with governmental moves to roll back the boundaries of public responsibility, such developments reveal the extent to which the women's movement needs instead to ally itself with political forces tat value the role of the public realm, and develop a strategy for operating in the current business-oriented policy environment. An authoritative survey by some of the most important contemporary writers on the subject, Mapping the Women's Movement provides key pointers to the political and ideological forces which shape women's lives today.