As a novelist and historian, I craft stories in intimate ways that allow readers to feel events of the past: from the experience of the enslaved woman who hid in an attic for seven years to save her children, to the Indigenous woman who braved twenty years in prison for killing a child predator, to Susan B. Anthony’s boisterous campaign to stay out of jail for casting a vote. In Fearless Women, each generation is revealed through the biographies of two people: one who worked explicitly for reform and one who barely survived the hazards of her time. Together, each pair helped nail a new rung on the ladder that lifted us to where we are today.As a Stanford Ph.D., I did not start out as a historian of women, but a scholar of United States foreign relations. Like many people, I considered the fight for legal rights mostly behind us. It was not until I recognized the concerted efforts of traditionalists and authoritarians around the globe to reverse women’s rights that I thought it might be useful to better understand how one innovation built upon the next, and how such efforts facilitated the economic and political development of the United States generally. For example, few historians recognize that female high school teachers laid the basis for industrialization by educating the workforce, or that feminists got the Thirteenth Amendment eliminating slavery on the floor of Congress, or that former suffragists established America’s social safety net.When we see efforts to ban women from school in Afghanistan, or force them out of public spaces in Iran, or weaken laws against domestic violence in Russia, or limit access to the workplace in China, or criminalize abortion and birth control in the United States, it is useful to understand the historical evolution of such laws and the wide consequences that may result from reversing them.