Flora Tristan was an exceptional woman of the XIX century. She is better known as the grandmother of Paul Gauguin but she deserves recognition for her own life and achievements. She was born in Paris as the illegitimate child of a wealthy peruvian who died when she was three years old. She suffered poverty throughout her childhood and early adulthood but her indomitable spirit made her work towards the improvement of conditions for women and workers in the XIX century. She visited London four times and wrote this book as an observation of what she saw in the social and political scene of the time. After the publication of this book she saw the need for organizing labor into an international union and decided to tour France to promote the idea. She died of a stroke in Bordeaux in 1844 at the age of forty one. Her grandson, Paul Gauguin, introduced her to the twentieth century with the publication of his memoirs in 1918.