In 1405 a French woman named Christine published a book called The City of Ladies, in which she recounted the achievements of women from legend and history. With de Pizan's work as her starting point, Thatcher Ulrich explores the nearly forgotten history of women who refused to stay in their place. Her exploration is framed by the stories of de Pizan, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and writer Virginia Woolf. In the final chapters she examines the women's movement of the 1970s and the evolution of women's history as a scholarly discipline.