Few women to emerge from Victorian Britain aroused as much hatred, outrage, and public disapproval as Annie Besant. In a career spanning more than 60 years, she used her role as an influential journalist, political activist, and social reformer to challenge and reform existing attitudes about birth control, religion, the plight of industrial laborers and the growth of Indian nationalism. Her many controversial and contradictory campaigns, which alienated friend and foe alike, had a dramatic and lasting impact on British and Indian political and social development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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