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.

The problem with good ideas is that you never know quite where they will end. The Arts and Crafts movement, conceived in hand-thrown innocence by William Morris, was partly responsible for the rows of standardised bungalows put up in the interwar period, not to mention all that classroom raffia work. The bright idea of uncoupling romantic relationships from the mechanics of church and state in favour of "free love" resulted by the late 1960s in some rather anguished women and some very smug men. The clever wheeze of outsourcing routine domestic duties drove directly into the current high-cholesterol cul de sac of home-delivered pizzas. These are just some of the Big Ideas of the early 20th century that Sheila Rowbotham deals with in this exhilarating, if sometimes rueful, book.

Rowbotham, a pioneering historian in the field, takes as her subject the three generations of women on either side of the Atlantic who tried to imagine a new kind of world for the 20th century. By 1880 it was clear that the vote was coming. What was needed next was something far more thorough-going  a complete rethinking of the social and economic relations which would knit women to the world in progressive ways. Everything mattered, from who did the washing-up to whether "rational" clothing made you look a bit of a frump. From the earnest if slightly titillating discussions of the Men and Women Club of 1890s London to black self-help initiatives in the Southern States to the cross-dressing lesbians of Greenwich Village, these women  and some men  set out on a series of adventures in the everyday armed with only the sketchiest of maps.

What immediately becomes clear from Rowbotham's admirably lucid book is that each woman had a slightly different view of what she was aiming for  which, if pursued tenaciously (and it usually was), would result in some crazy contradictions. For a parliamentarian such as Eleanor Rathbone, for instance, it was all about getting government to recognise that women's work should be properly funded by a system of family allowances. Marx's daughter Eleanor, meanwhile, saw the way forward in getting women into the big new trades unions where they could flex their industrial muscle. Meanwhile, for an anarchist such as Emma Goldman, liberation came from loving wherever and whomever you chose.

Goldman was not alone in her emphasis on the revolutionary potential of intimate relationships. Until the habits of love were transformed there was little point in moving on to the business of who cooked the dinner or chaired the local council. Still, that didn't stop everyone getting a bit confused, including the men. One young swain who turned up at a Tolstoyan commune in the Cotswolds announcing that he was looking for "varietism" in his relationships with women was quickly shown the door. A rather serious young woman called Elmina Slenker, the daughter of a radical Shaker, suggested that instead of men having orgasms, the act of love should be completed by means of "animal magnetism". Unsurprisingly, she was left having to advertise for a husband in a publication called The Water-Cure Journal. It was up to the educational reformer Margaret McMillan to introduce some brisk common sense into the debate when she declared that "Marriage is Bad and Free Love is worse".

Rowbotham covers a huge amount of ground in her book. Her method for constructing a viable narrative out of 40 years' worth of social and political data is to weave snatches of individual case history into a big fat plait. The downside to this procedure, which borders on what historians call "prosopography", is that the reader fails to follow up on the drama of individual stories. Beatrice Webb declaring to her Sidney that she loved her work more than him or Vera Brittain explaining to her husband that the success of their marriage was key to the survival of the feminist movement are such tantalising scraps that one longs to know what happened next. Or what about the intriguing revelation that Herbert Morrison, grandfather to our own Lord Mandelson, once proposed a system whereby housewives could send a postcard overnight to their local council ordering freshly cooked food to be delivered the next day? Still, most of these big names already have full-length biographies written about them, and the advantage of Rowbotham's approach is to allow us to see them as part of the general texture of their age, rather than as isolated colossi.

Reading about the wild hopes of these early 20th-century pioneers, you cannot fail to be moved by the sheer exuberance of their imaginations. As well as Morrison's idea about turning the local town hall into a vast meals-on-wheels service for the harried able-bodied, there were wonderful initiatives such as men abandoning trousers in favour of Arabic-style robes and everyone eating off paper plates. Many of the suggestions  especially the one about city-centre service flats for working women  sound sheer bliss. There is, though, one feature of life as an early feminist that has happily not survived. For some reason  not always due to the American custom of women tacking their husband's name on to their own  many of these women went about their business hefting the most extraordinary tripartite labels. In the US leading pioneers included Elsie Clews Parsons, Ethel Puffer Howes and Harriot Stanton Blatch. In the UK, meanwhile, women activists thrilled to the leadership of Laura Ormiston Chant and Ada Nield Chew. It must have made taking the minutes at all those interminable committee meetings a whole lot harder than it need have been.

Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.