Arguing feminist who achieved progress

This is the story of feminism’s success down to complicated contradictory imperfect women, who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights,  who have been forgotten in our modern search for feel-good inspirational heroines.

You will meet the working-class suffragettes who advocated bombings and arson, the princes who discovered why so many women were having bad sex, the striker in a sari who terrified Margaret Thatcher and the Lesbian politician who outraged the country.

Helen Lewis former editor of the New Statesmen and describes the fight for gender quality the antidote to you-go-girl which is a must-read.

11 Feminist battlegrounds throughout history: divorce, the vote, sex, play, work, safety, love education, time, abortion and the fight to just be, well, difficult. There are several WhatsApp groups pinging away, as women slag one another off – women who truly love each other over something that has been said or done or even worn.

The social campaigners who make things happen, who effect change, can be brilliant and inspiring but contradictory.

Marie Stope was a famous advocate of birth control and believer in the past fashionable doctrine of eugenics – discouraging the reproduction of less than perfect human beings and a strong antiabortionist.

Then there was Caroline Norton, who in the 1830s bravely fought court cases that led to divorced mothers’ rights of access to their children- yet all the time believing that women are essentially not the equals of men.

Sophia Jex-Blake, the battle to become one of Britain’s first female doctors and went on to do fine work in the field of women’s health, was, in fact, capable of making now-unthinkable comments about fellow medical students, “boys of a low social class” who were “unfit” for such education.

Erin Prizzey, became a household name in the 1970s after she opened the first refuge for battered women, refugees in the UK now shelter some  4000 women and children a year.

Annie Kenney, the working-class women who campaigned and alongside Christabel Pankhurst, but who was largely written out of the record for class snobbery reasons.

 Difficult Women: A History of  Feminism in 11 Fights by Helen Lewis, Jonathan Cape £16.99, 368 pages.