Difficult Women (Lead Title): A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (The Sunday Times Bestseller)

Well-behaved women don’t make history: difficult women do. Helen Lewis argues that feminism’s success is down to complicated contradictory imperfect women who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights. 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 pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men’s rights activist; the ‘striker in a sari’ who terrified Margaret Thatcher; the wronged Victorian wife who definitely wasn’t sleeping with the prime minister; 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 which shows why the feminist movement has succeeded - and what it should do next. The battle is difficult and we must be difficult too. Review Whoever said feminists lack a sense of humour has not read enough Lewis... A funny sparky wide-ranging account... Her book isn’t at all a conventional history. It’s a collection of powerful personal essays on the gnarly issues that women continue to face... I readDifficult Women with gratitude. It’s an authoritative benchmark of modern feminism written by someone on top of her game... Hooray for a great book by a clever clear-sighted straight-talking difficult young woman. -- Melanie Reid ―The TimesDifficult Women was a joy to read... I learned so many delicious facts about women whom I thought I knew. In fact readingDifficult Women felt like sitting down with a friend and gossiping about other women in our circle... It has some howl-out-loud funny moments... Helen Lewis does more than just tell their stories - she allows them to be complicated something that women are so rarely permitted to be. -- Jess Phillips ―New StatesmanDifficult Women is smart thoughtful and rich in detail... Lewis proves an excellent storyteller who seamlessly blends scholarly inquiry and journalistic investigation with autobiographical titbits and flashes of caustic wit (her footnotes are a hoot). -- Fiona Sturges ―GuardianA sparkling history of feminism in 11 fights… The book is full of Lewis’ short sharp political observations…almost always as funny as they are informative… It proves her point; that we all have something to learn from each other if we can open our minds to the true complicated nature of humanity. -- Nell Frizzell ―Daily TelegraphDifficult Women is full of vivid detail jam-packed with research and fizzing with provocation. -- Christina Patterson ―Sunday Times About the Author Helen Lewis is a staff writer at theAtlantic and a former deputy editor of theNew Statesman. She has written for theGuardianSunday TimesNew York Times andVogue. She is a regular host of BBC Radio 4’sWeek in Westminster a regular panellist on theNews Quiz andSaturday Review and a paper reviewer onThe Andrew Marr Show. She was the 2018/19 Women in the Humanities Honorary Writing Fellow at Oxford University. She tweets at @helenlewis