Difficult Women Quotes

“Women's history should not be a shallow hunt for heroines.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“Your vagina is not a democracy. No one else gets a vote on what you do with it.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“Feminism has to fight 'the tyranny of niceness'. It is, and has always been, one of the most potent forces holding women back.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“I want to restore the complexity to feminist pioneers. Their legacies might be contested, they might have made terrible strategic choices and they might not have lived up to the ideals they preached. But they mattered. Their difficulty is part of the story.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“If feminism doesn't frighten people with power, it is toothless.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“Changing the world won't make people like you. It will cause you pain. It will be difficult. It will feel like a struggle. You must accept the size of the mountain ahead of you, and start climbing it anyway.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“Being exceptional requires a thousand small selfishnesses, and the world was not ready for women to be that difficult. It is still not ready.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“There is no perfect way to make a demand on power. There is no way to do feminism which will protect you from being attacked. You have to be honest with yourself: am I really being unreasonable? Or is the problem with the rest of the world? If it is the latter, then don't be derailed.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“It is deeply conservative to suggest that any sufficiently difficult woman from history -- say, one who rebelled against the constraints of femininity by dressing and acting in a masculine way -- must have been a man.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“If modern feminism feels toothless, it is because it has retreated into two modes: empty celebration or shadow-boxing with outright bastards. Neither deals with difficulty, and so neither can make a difference.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“The average workplace is like fucking Bromancing the Stone.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“The suffragettes were easy to condemn, but hard to ignore. Their actions also boosted donations to peaceful, law-abiding suffragist societies. Many of those who claimed to be repelled by the militants were what we would now call "concern trolls" pretending to care about the success of a movement they never supported anyway.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“gender”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“attention”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“My grandmother didn’t have the vote, my mother didn’t have the pill, and I don’t have the time.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“Perhaps you are thinking: I don't care about sport. Well, neither did I. But now I realise that's partly because sport did not seem to have a place for me.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“Women need time and space to play - particularly when we work so hard”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights

“Perhaps you are thinking: I don't care about sport. Well, neither did I. But now I realise that's partly because sport did not seem to have a place for me.”
― Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights