The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Peoplepleasing gets you nowhere
A sparkling history of feminism in 11 fights revels in the bolshiness of its female pioneers, finds Nell Frizzell
WDIFFICULT WOMEN by Helen Lewis 368pp, Jonathan Cape, £16.99, ebook £9.99
hat links an 18th-century aristocrat, a chainsmoking Lancashire footballer, a breastfeeding politician, a South Asian factory worker, the hunger-striking daughter of an earl, a lesbian Labour MP, a Jewish housewife in New York and a Scottish medical student? Being difficult, of course.
As climate change, pandemics and the fracturing of politics drive us into ever-tightening circles of despair, there has never been a more important time to hear Helen Lewis’s message: you don’t have to be nice to be great. You don’t have to be a people pleaser to achieve something that will benefit millions of people. More fundamentally: “You aren’t entitled to human rights based on how blameless your behaviour has been.”
In Difficult Women, her first book, Lewis charts her own history of feminism through “11 fights”, celebrating the challenging, sometimes militant, sometimes hypocritical, often unpopular women who fought for change. The book, which is divided into chapters on divorce, the vote, sex, play, work, safety, love, education, time and abortion, doesn’t airbrush these women into paragons of sisterly righteousness, soft-focus saints or cosy maternal puddings. Did Marie Stopes disapprove of her daughter-in-law simply because she wore glasses? Perhaps. Did she change the state of reproductive rights for women? Yes.
As Lewis states early on, shadowboxing her imagined critics: “I’m not a historian, and this is not a conventional history.” If this is a partial, imperfect, personal history of feminism, then those gaps, writes Lewis, will hopefully be seen as invitations rather than deficiencies. It opens up the narrative of what a pioneering political figure looks like; it takes us off the hook of expecting all public figures to conform to an arbitrary template of perfection; it hopefully galvanises us to see the change that we can make. As Lewis writes: “Feminism is not a shorthand for ‘what women think’ but a political movement dedicated to the equality of the sexes.” If that means taking up the baton from someone with whom you share little else but a common cause, then so be it.
Of course, there are plenty of women in the book that you will love. Annie Kenney, the highestranking working-class woman in the suffragettes, who had herself delivered to a meeting in a hamper to avoid the police; 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; Tess Gill and Anna Coote, who in 1982 led a wine bar caper pointing out the petty idiocy of El Vino’s policy of not allowing women to queue at the bar but instead making them wait at a table for men to buy them drinks.
Does it matter that Annie Kenney went on to change her name, and live the domestic life of a wife and mother? Does it matter that Desai’s strike ultimately failed, where eight years earlier the women at Dagenham had succeeded? Does it matter that Gill and Coote were campaigning in a walk of life occupied almost entirely by middle-class, educated, white people? Does it matter that Lady Caroline Norton, who campaigned for the maternal and financial rights of married women, was a member of the aristocracy? Does it matter that Stopes sent a volume of her poetry to Hitler with an adoring note? Does it matter that Erin Pizzey, who opened and ran the country’s only women’s refuge in 1971, is now a men’s rights activist? Not to Lewis:
“Each one has something to teach us, without us needing to airbrush out the difficult bits of their biographies.”
The book is full of Lewis’ short, sharp political observations: “Every feminist action provokes an equal, opposite reaction”; “campaigners have to be disruptive”; “The same force which radicalises so many women – the burden of unpaid caring labour – also hampers them from doing anything about it”; “Work is not what creates value for an employer. It’s what creates a society. It’s what takes up your time.”
Her footnotes are almost always as funny as they are informative. When writing about the historical resistance to women’s football, she quotes a newspaper letter: “Sir, if she can push an eightpound baby through her pelvis, it can probably handle bumping into the opposing winger.”
And, within these stories of other difficult women, Lewis confronts her own apparently controversial status – she has been called “problematic” for arguing that the confirmation hearing of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had turned into a media circus and that ‘“even those accused of sexual assault deserve better” – and refuses to back away from the issues that still vex her. She writes about the “strange country” of motherhood without making any claim to direct personal experience; she writes about how race, wealth, immigration status and disability affect sexual discrimination, even though she is a white, educated, middleclass woman.
That should not weaken her right to be heard. Rather, 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. After all, as Lewis writes in her epilogue: “Difficult Women can change the world.”
Marie Stopes took against her daughterin-law simply because she wore glasses