When it comes to gender, the 2010 election failed to change the established order. There are four female ministers sitting in Cameron's cabinet. In 1997, Blair chose five women for his ministerial team. This will not surprise Sheila Rowbotham, eminent historian and lifelong feminist activist. She is an old hand at recording fluctuations in women's fortunes. Her latest book is a compelling study of the adventurous visionaries who challenged sex and gender assumptions from the 1880s up to the first world war. It is a celebration of what women have won but also a warning of what could still be lost.

Rowbotham is sceptical of history as defined by centres of power. She is more concerned with the wider technical and cultural advances that have revolutionised daily experience. In 1895, the reformer Clementina Black noted: "The bicycle is doing more for the independence of women than anything expressly designed to that end." Effective contraception and safer childbirth gradually released women from the drudgery and danger of repeated pregnancies. Feminists seized the resulting opportunities to transform women's expectations of their private and public roles.

The alliances that arose between women from different backgrounds led to an awareness of class divisions – a tentative sense of solidarity took shape. Many campaigners saw their efforts as an extension of moral or religious idealism: they were "missionaries" who had to save the ignorant and dispossessed.

But models of devotion seemed irrelevant to the anarchists, bohemians and free thinkers bent on rejecting the notion that it is a woman's nature to be self-sacrificing. Edith Ellis, the British writer and activist, remembers how she and her friends were "restive and impetuous and almost savage in our arguments. This was either the end of the world or the beginning of a new world for women."

Rowbotham is at her most persuasive when she insists on the variety of outlook among the women dreaming of better lives. Her book is crammed with detail and resonant quotation, grouped in chapters on motherhood, employment, domesticity and sexuality. The disadvantage is that themes overlap – it's often difficult to trace an overarching narrative. The thicket of accumulating evidence is overwhelming in its density.

But individual voices do emerge, and the reader comes to recognise them with pleasure. Ada Nield Chew, a working-class suffragist (the "Crewe Factory Girl"), lost her job after revealing injustices in a series of articles for the Crewe Chronicle in 1894. Her lively arguments about women's conditions are repeatedly revisited, but in a fragmented form that obscures the trajectory of her remarkable life. These frustrations may be necessary to Rowbotham's project, as she reflects on exuberantly mixed values articulated over decades. Enterprising arguments were not always coherent or predictable in their legacy: who knew the Arts and Crafts enthusiasts would give rise to generations of primary-school children doing raffia work?

But our lives would be poorer if such women had not taken the risks of intellectual experiment. Rowbotham has given us a powerful reminder of how much we owe to their courage and imagination.

Dinah Birch is professor of English at Liverpool University.