Anyone who wants to study or write about the first international women's movement should read Joyous Greetings. This book serves as an important foundation and addresses the sociological constraints existing in the 1800s to explain how the feminist movement developed. Anderson's account is based on real stories from the 1830s to the 1860s. The book analyzes different issues within the women's movement, such as the emancipation of women, the use of technology as a network of information, and the antislavery movement and women's rights. The author focuses on a cohort of twenty different women and examines their lives.

In her study, Anderson foregrounds several prominent activists and other women who played a role in the movement, including: Mathilde Franziska von Tabouiller, a German feminist focused on women's issues; Fredrika Bremer, a novelist who founded the American Swedish Historical Foundation; Jeanne Deroin, a French feminist who spent time in jail; and Pauline Roland who wrote to the French women's movement, activities, and unions proclaiming social equality and declaring equality for women and no distinction of sex and color at various conferences.

Anderson devotes considerable energy to describing western society in the 18th and 19th centuries and women's economic contributions to the income of their households. She demonstrates that women's economic contributions were not recognized and that this situation continued even after the occurrence of a fundamental shift introducing industrialization, division of work, slavery, bad work conditions, sexual abuse, lower salaries, and discrimination. Moreover, the division of classes began to be more distinguished and a new labor market of domestic workers arose. For these reasons, in 1848 Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and three other women emphasized the equality of women and men and encouraged the mobilization of many groups to support a new vision and declaration of women's emancipation. Anderson does not, however, acknowledge that immigrants and indigenous peoples are also affected by industrialization. In fact, Anderson does not address the expropriation of lands and construction of the society and its impact on immigrants and indigenous people.

Regarding women in eighteenth-century politics, Anderson discusses individuals such as Maria Theresa who ruled Austria during the years 1740 to 1780; Marie Antoninette, queen of France during the years 1774 to 1793; and Catherine the Great who governed Russia from 1762 to 1796. Anderson criticizes the male tendency to exaggerate the power these women had. Yet even in this section, Anderson does not seem to consider that all of the women discussed are women with privileged socio-economic and political positions. These women are exceptions.

The author discusses a series of socialist ideas in a framework of social stratification in a structural system in which the feminist movement was inspired by Saint-Simonians, a movement that supported women's rights and anti-slavery. Under this framework the women's movement developed a social network of communication between countries. This network helped women to democratize ideas in conferences and speeches using a variety of communication media such as newspapers. Anderson discusses media of mass communication reaching women in different sectors of society. In 1849 four feminist newspapers, Louise Dittmar's Social Reform, Amelian Bloomer's The Lily, American journalist Jeanne Deroin's Women's Opinion, and Louis Otto's Women's Newspaper became the tools of communication that women used to talk about women's issues and anti-slavery topics. They also provided a forum for women to debate internationally. Newspapers, conferences, and debates helped to shape the women's movement and systematically to introduce new concepts into increasingly nuclear families.

Anderson argues that the communication network, conferences, and letters published by women promoted women's issues and pushed feminist groups, unions, and individuals to identify beyond geographic frontiers in France, the United States, and Germany. Thus these activities also foreshadowed the later international women's movement created in 1952.

Finally, the author analyzes how slavery and abolitionism influenced feminism. The women's movement refocused issues related to slavery, and in the 1840s an organization called the World Anti-Slavery Organization was established in London and later in the U.S. Anderson mentions that Lucretia Mott, a female Quaker feminist, reported about the atrocity of slavery at conferences and in newspapers. This is one example of how white feminists communicated through the media -- an important point because even though it was white women reporting on these issues, they had a significant impact on both slaves and slave-owners.

While the book is broad in scope, spanning Europe and the U.S., in many ways it is limited. All of the twenty women studied by the author are Euro-American or white Europeans, which may leave many readers wondering about the lives of African American women and indigenous women. In addition, most of the women studied by Anderson enjoyed privileged social positions. Considering that the author emphasizes how industrialization divided women into different classes, it would seem to be an important factor to include women from the middle class and lower class in this study. Overall, Anderson's book is useful for understanding white women's leadership in the mid-nineteenth century. To understand the role of African American women or women from other social classes, readers will need to consider other resources.