This is a history of feminism which starts with the premise that most women in the various battles associated with it were tricky, problematic, sometimes completely frightful.
Which is, if you’re talking about a movement that aspires to represent half the human race, about right. If we were discussing the people who sought straightforward human rights, universal suffrage et al, you’d say just the same about them.
The problem is that contemporary accounts of feminism tend to gloss over the unappealing aspects of the combatants. Helen Lewis quotes the hilarious description of Coco Chanel in Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls which observed that when Coco wanted to start a business, a wealthy friend lent her money.
“It does not mention,” observes Lewis, “that Chanel was the lover of a Nazi officer and very probably a spy for Hitler’s Germany. In the Thirties she tried to remove that wealthy friend from the company under racist laws which forbade Jews to own businesses.” Tricky, huh?
But that’s the point. Women who make a difference are often tricky. In this book we get umpteen awkward customers, which is a polite term for Marie Stopes’s views on eugenics, the Pankhursts’ approach to violence or Erin Pizzey, the pioneer of domestic violence refuges who spectacularly fell out with feminism. Fine. They did what they did and made a difference.
‘It does not mention,’ observes Lewis, ‘that Chanel was the lover of a Nazi officer and very probably a spy for Hitler’s Germany. In the Thirties she tried to remove that wealthy friend from the company under racist laws which forbade Jews to own businesses’ Tricky, huh?
As Lewis observes, some feminists had views that were not only problematic to future feminists but to their contemporaries too. The book is described as A History of Feminism in 11 Fights and they range from the vote and divorce to football and higher education. But it also includes the interesting question of time – who is entitled to leisure time and how do you get it when there are children? More than once Lewis quotes Hannah Mitchell’s observation that “no cause can be won between dinner and tea”. And she raises the question of whether the ever-longer working day for professionals may be one more way of excluding women from advancement.
Obviously, there are aspects of the book that not everyone will agree with; I disagree with her about abortion. But it’s written in a feistily accessible style – if you like Caitlin Moran this is one for you – so it’s easy to engage with the actual substance.
She talks, for instance, about the basic mechanics of sex. One of the difficult women Lewis rescues from obscurity is Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of Napoleon and friend of Freud, who conducted research to prove that in a significant number of women, the clitoris and vagina are too far apart for Freud’s theory – that adult women should aim for sexual satisfaction through vaginal sex alone – to work. God knows how many lives the old fool messed up.
One of the dispiriting realities she discusses is how social media has made it pretty much impossible for feminists like her to attempt to say anything, but she tries anyway. She’s probably a difficult woman herself – and that’s a compliment.