DIFFICULT WOMEN

A HISTORY OF FEMINISM IN 11 FIGHTS

HELEN LEWIS

Cape, 368pp, £16.99

Difficult women can change the world. Helen Lewis’s book is divided into 11 chapters with mostly oneword titles – ‘Divorce’ ‘Work’, ‘Safety’, ‘Play’, ‘Sex’ – with each concentrating on the contribution of one particular character to the history of feminism. Players include well-known figures – Marie Stopes and Erin Pizzey, for instance – and forgotten ones such as Jayaben Desai, who led the 1976 Grunwick strike in north-west London of largely South Asian women against the inhumane work practices of the photo-processing factory in which they worked. Lewis’s argument is that worthwhile fights were fought by women who might then attach themselves to causes or lead lives which we find impossible to admire. The point is neither to airbrush the biographies of these women, nor junk them as subjects for study. Joan Smith in the Literary

Review noticed the effects of social media in the footnotes which read like ‘the knowingly clever one-liners people post on Twitter’. She also credited the author’s experience of being trashed online for opinions expressed as a journalist for her sensitivity to the ‘barbs aimed at well-known women in the past’. Nell Frizzell in the Telegraph enjoyed ‘Lewis’s short, sharp political observations’. As an example: ‘Every feminist action provokes an equal, opposite reaction.’ Melanie Mcdonagh in the Evening Standard promised that you didn’t have to be on side with Lewis to enjoy her arguments: ‘I disagree with her about abortion. But it’s written in a feistily accessible style ... so it’s easy to engage with the actual substance.’