Difficult Women

Difficult Women

A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (The Sunday Times Bestseller)

Summary

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

'This is the antidote to saccharine you-go-girl fluff. Effortlessly erudite and funny'
Caroline Criado-Perez

Strikers in saris. Bomb-throwing suffragettes. The pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men's rights activist.

Forget feel-good heroines: meet the feminist trailblazers who have been airbrushed from history for being 'difficult' - and discover how they made a difference.

Here are their stories in all their shocking, funny and unvarnished glory.

** Shortlisted in the 2020 Parliamentary Book Awards **


'All the history you need to understand why you're so furious, angry and still hopeful about being a woman now. A book that is part intellectual weapon in your handbag, part cocktail with a friend' Caitlin Moran
'Compulsive, rigorous, unforgettable, hilarious and devastating' Hadley Freeman

'A great manifesto for all those women who have never been very good at being well-behaved
.' Mary Beard

'Difficult Women is full of vivid detail, jam-packed with research and fizzing with provocation' Sunday Times


Reviews

  • 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 read Difficult 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 Times

About the author

Helen Lewis

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic, and a former deputy editor of the New Statesman. She has written for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New York Times and Vogue. She is a regular host of BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster, a regular panellist on the News Quiz and Saturday Review, and a paper reviewer on The Andrew Marr Show. She was the 2018/19 Women in the Humanities Honorary Writing Fellow at Oxford University. She tweets at @helenlewis
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