“Rebellious women have not been much celebrated in our society,” the editors correctly argue in the introduction to this inspiring collection from Honno, a co-operative press set up to support Welsh women’s writing.

The interviews and short essays from 17 British women activists it contains go some way to countering our male-centred history and contemporary political culture.

The editors have taken care to choose a diverse set of largely little-known campaigners in terms of their social class, ethnicity, age, politics and issue of concern. It’s difficult to choose favourites from all the extraordinary testimonies, though Emma Must’s very personal account of her involvement in the pivotal anti-road protest at Twyford Down in the early 1990s is particularly affecting.

Elsewhere, Angharad Tomos’s contribution about her direct action in support of the Welsh language led me to reassess my own thoughts on the subject. Helen Steel’s interview is another highlight, her successful “McLibel” campaign against McDonald’s as remarkable as her being deceived into having a relationship with a police spy is angering.

Some common themes emerge, including Greenham Common’s widespread influence to the eye-opening experience of imprisonment for those jailed for their resistance.

An interview with Age of Stupid’s director Franny Armstrong fittingly closes this hugely important and motivating book. Armstrong shocks with her brutal honesty about the seriousness of climate change. “It’s too late for civilisation as we’ve known it to continue,” she explains and the moral and political ramifications of her argument that the people alive today “are the most powerful people who will ever live — because the generation before us didn’t know about climate change and those that follow will be powerless to stop it,” is disconcerting.

With corporate-generated climate change the biggest threat facing humanity, we need more people like the exceptional women found here.

As the freed slave Frederick Douglass said over 150 years ago: “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” Activism, then, is the key to combatting climate change, just as it has been the fundamental driver of all progressive change throughout history.

Ian Sinclair