difficult women: a history of feminism in 11 fights by Helen Lewis

Forty-seventh book of 2020

Reading period: Jun 03rd 2020 – June 11th 2020

Summary

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 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.

Rating

Review

I like the point of view of this book as you have different fights, some are obvious and some less but as much important than the other.

It shows that in the past, women who fought for their rights weren’t as fragile and without opinion things that the society (and history, which tends to forget or change them) want them to be.

Moreover, the word “difficult” doesn’t have the negative meaning that it usually has as it designates empowered women who fought for what they think was best and allow us to have rights.

I discover a lot in this book especially a lot of difficult women, and I want to learn more about them, it’s a good thing that there is the title of their biographies in the book.

Liz.