When Zsuzsanna Budapest founded her coven in Los Angeles in 1971, she named it after Susan B. Anthony, the nineteenth century suffragist who never lived to see women win the vote she spent her life demanding. The choice signals what the coven, and the book that grew out of it, was actually for: not a new costume for an old religion, but a religious structure built specifically around women's own authority.
The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries opens with the coven's own manifesto, stated in Budapest's words as a belief that feminist witches are women who search within themselves for the female principle of the universe and relate to it as daughters of a Creatrix, not as subjects of a male god borrowed from an older tradition. That is a specific theological claim, not a rhetorical flourish: it recasts the divine itself as female first, and everything the book sets out afterward, its ritual calendar, its coven structure, its spellcraft, follows from that starting premise.
Budapest is widely credited as one of the founding figures of the broader women's spirituality movement and is often cited as the person who coined the term feminist spirituality itself. The book is where that movement first put its founding claim in writing, under a name borrowed from a woman who fought a different battle a century earlier.