This sweeping, impassioned work traces women's struggle from humanity's harsh beginnings to the demand for full freedom in modern civilization. It opens with a vivid evolutionary vision of early life, where survival against beasts, climate, and conflict shaped the first shelters and the rise of human intelligence. From cliff houses and caves to tents, snow huts, and global forms of aboriginal dwelling, it shows how architecture and social life grew out of danger and adaptation. The book then argues that women, not men alone, were the true builders of civilization: gathering and cultivating plants, inventing agriculture, shaping pottery, weaving, basketry, tanning, dressmaking, and tools, and preserving fire, food, and family life. Yet this achievement is set against a history of exploitation—marriage as property, bride-price, polygamy, kidnapping, slavery, and religious cruelty—from tribal custom to ancient empires. Urgent and polemical, it culminates in a call for solidarity among working women and for the recognition of women's rights as essential to human progress. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.