It’s nice to have fun at a reunion of old pals, but definitely an extra blessing to come away with a fine idea for a book. Maggie Siggins, whose credits include A Canadian Tragedy: The Colin Thatcher Story and Riel: A Life of Revolution, went to the 50th birthday party of one of her classmates from a Toronto high school, and five years later has emerged with this fat and fascinating account of women’s lives, from the remote past to the present.

In Her Own Time’s hook is Siggins’ brief recounting of the lives of 23 women from her class of 1961 at R. H. King Collegiate, an unremarkable suburban school. These are women at a particular hinge of history: they grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, but have been adults through the century’s second wave of feminism. Their lives, from thwarted and fulfilled ambitions to family and physical struggles to political upheavals and spiritual journeys, are probably pretty typical of the times – or at least they seem so in Siggins’ fairly flat telling of them. But they do provide a series of structural jumping-off points for a contrastingly dramatic, fast-paced, and very useful exploration of the state of Western womanhood, from Greek and Roman times to the present. (Note that this is strictly Western culture – a massive research feat in itself, but nevertheless one that omits entirely all other histories.)

Siggins has broken her analysis into six sections: relationships, the married state, the body, the mind, the soul, and the imagination. Into each segment fall the relevant life stories of selected R. H. King grads. Often enough Siggins’ historical research illustrates that while circumstances may have changed, fundamentals have not. For instance, attitudes toward love and sex in the 1850s – with their lavish sentimentality, brutal pornography, and thriving prostitution market – turn out to be horrifyingly similar to the year 2000.

The book’s gripping historical documentation, coated against indigestion by the life stories of the R. H. King women, is wholly compelling, and not just for women in that neither-here-nor-there class of ’61. Just about everybody’s likely to be startled and instructed – not least men, or younger women who imagine the current state of affairs is the beginning and the end of the story.