Difficult Women

A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

English language

Published Jan. 1, 2020 by Penguin Random House.

ISBN:
978-1-4735-6225-7
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4 stars (1 review)

Well-behaved women don’t make history: difficult women do.

Feminism’s success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperfect women, who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights. Helen Lewis argues that too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in our modern search for feel-good, inspirational heroines. It’s time to reclaim the history of feminism as a history of difficult women.

In this book, you’ll meet the working-class suffragettes who advocated bombings and arson; the princess who discovered why so many women were having bad sex; the ‘striker in a sari’ who terrified Margaret Thatcher; and the lesbian politician who outraged the country. Taking the story up to the present with the twenty-first-century campaign for abortion services, Helen Lewis reveals the unvarnished – and unfinished – history of women’s rights.

Drawing on archival research and interviews, Difficult Women is a funny, fearless and sometimes shocking narrative history, …

3 editions

Review of 'Difficult Women' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

when a man marries his housekeeper, the GDP falls.

fascinating, infinitely readable, and chockful of shocking laws, some that have only been recently overturned! Lewis argues that we need to divorce admiration from love because all these feminist pioneers had plenty of warts to go around. being 'problematic' is no reason to be written out of history. air-brushing flaws through collective forgetfulness is not doing these women any favors (as role models). instead, she asks us to embrace these difficult women who were instrumental in the women's right movement. in the age of twitter and baying mobs, it's a welcome message