Difficult Women

The book's spine is a set of concrete battles rather than abstract waves of theory. Lewis organizes it around victories that changed material life: the vote, the right to leave a marriage, refuges for women fleeing violence, control over reproduction, paid work, equal pay, the law, education, and so on. Each chapter takes a fight and hangs it on a person or a moment, and the effect is to make feminism feel less like a philosophy and more like a series of stubborn, specific arguments won in courts, factories, and living rooms.

The divorce chapter is characteristic. Lewis tells the story of Caroline Norton, a nineteenth-century woman whose abusive husband had, under the law of the time, the right to her earnings, her property, and their children. Norton was no radical; she explicitly disclaimed any belief in women's equality and lobbied largely to fix her own catastrophe. Her campaigning helped produce reforms that benefited every woman in the country. Lewis relishes the paradox: a woman who did not think she was a feminist advanced the cause more than many who did.

If the first half of the book is about people, the argument sharpening underneath is about how progress actually moves. Lewis is impatient with the purist strain in modern feminism, the one that treats compromise as betrayal and any imperfect ally as an enemy. Her reading of history says the opposite: nearly every gain women won was a compromise, brokered by people who took half a loaf because half a loaf fed someone. The 1918 franchise gave the vote only to women over thirty who met a property qualification. It was partial, class-bound, and unfair to the younger, poorer women who had done much of the fighting. It was also a foot in the door, and ten years later the door opened all the way.

Step back from the eleven fights and Lewis's title turns out to be doing double work. Difficult is what these women were called by the men who wanted them quiet — and it is also, she argues, the quality that let them win. Agreeable women do not tend to overturn the law of the land. It takes a certain amount of being impossible, of not caring whether you are liked, of pushing past the point where reasonable people would stop, to move something that has not moved in centuries. Difficulty, in this reading, is not the embarrassing footnote to the achievement. It is the mechanism.

This has a wider resonance beyond feminism, and Lewis knows it. Any movement that succeeds eventually has to decide how to remember the people who got it there, and the temptation is always to smooth them into icons fit for a stamp or a school assembly. The smoothing feels respectful. It is actually a kind of forgetting. It erases the arguments, the ugly compromises, the personal spite, and the wrongheadedness that were part of the actual work — and in doing so it makes the achievement look easier and cleaner than it was, which leaves the next generation unprepared for how hard and how messy their own fights will be.

Emily Davison's plaque at Epsom does not mention that her colleagues found her hard going, and that is exactly the omission Lewis spent a book resisting. The suffragettes, the divorce reformers, the refuge founders, the campaigners for equal pay and reproductive rights — they were prickly, partial, sometimes prejudiced, frequently at each other's throats. They also, between them, remade the legal and material conditions of half the population. Difficult Women asks us to keep both facts in view at once rather than choosing the flattering half.