'Difficult Women' by Helen Lewis

Searching for a way to define feminism, in 1913 Rebecca West wrote ‘I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute’ other feminists have summed it up in a single word: ‘no’.

To make change someone must be difficult, and not be afraid to be so.

In her own words, Lewis ‘takes feminism apart…and examines it as a series of fights’ she focuses on the protagonists of these fights in their glory, flaws, wins, and losses: Marie Stopes who wrote the deeply honest and trailblazing book Married Love about sex as a gendered space, porn actor and director Stoya who posts her videos alongside essays, Caroline Norton who’s hideous marriage and fight was instrumental in legislation that gave women’s the rights to divorce or to see their children, Lilly Parr, a force from the first serious women’s football team. She links the women of the past and their small wins that had catalytic effects on change and opened doors: football as a force that created women that ‘belonged to themselves and each other, rather than slotting into the near, man adjacent boxes of daughter, wife, mother,’ the Rational Dress Society of 1881 that argued for the freeing of women from heavy and restrictive clothing that was designed to be looked at rather than lived in, the fight for free time ‘between lunch and dinner’ to even think of or practice feminism.

Just as feminism fights for women to be seen as complex, multilayered, important, powerful, sexy, clever, and strong, it also fights for women to be able to be flawed, problematic, and difficult at the same time. Helen Lewis does not pedestal the women whose stories she narrates. She is aware of the factors of class, race, and misogyny even in the fights in the name of feminism, and doesn’t fail to point out flaws of logic, prejudice, and privilege.

Lewis’ storytelling and its intertwined debate and discourse are completely human, deeply informed, and dynamic. Her extensive reading of literature past and present, immersive cultural knowledge, personal experience, and passion for feminism combined with witty footnotes and blunt honesty, mean that the text reads as a passionately warm and firm voice for feminism across the decades. She tells the stories of the women in the tone that they would want to be spoken about. Taking us through pillars of inequality such as Divorce, Abortion, Love, Sex, and Time she lays them out as the battlegrounds of fights past, present, and future. It is a book suitable as an introduction to feminist literature or as a text that will surprise and engage even an avid reader.

Lewis concludes her writing with a manifesto for the difficult woman. She re-frames 'difficult' into a positive, an asset to character; someone outspoken, unafraid, unapologetically supportive. Combining this book with Authority Gap'  by Mary Anne Seighart, I am determined to make myself a more difficult women, and admire those who dare to be.