Introduction: Writing Women’s Rights – from Enlightenment to Ecofeminism

This chapter focuses on the role of women in transatlantic antislavery networks in the 1840s and 1850s, bringing to the fore the relationship between campaigns for the abolition of American slavery and movements for women's rights on both sides of the Atlantic. It preserves a history of feminist performance practice and explores the power of the spoken and embodied word as a vehicle of feminist activism. The writers, speakers, and performers who are the subject of this chapter are likewise sustaining careers across the theatre and entertainment industries, literature, and journalism, often in concert with networks forged by personal friendships and working partnerships. Examining women's writing from the 1970s to the present, the chapter explores poetry, short stories, and novels, including work published in Welsh platforms by the Scottish and Irish nature writers Kathleen Jamie and Paula Meehan.