Patriarchal culture has imposed on women for centuries the ideals of meekness, self-sacrificial service, and humility, the role of the domestic angel and the necessity of being "nice." The heroines of Helen Lewis cannot be called nice. Their names were associated with scandals. Complex, intolerable, uncomfortable, sometimes aggressive, sometimes funny — originals, oddballs, upstarts, they voiced problems with utmost directness and showed the abnormality of the familiar, broke stereotypes, and made society reconsider gender norms, changing lifestyle, legal norms, and state institutions — in the interest of everyone else. Thanks to them, women gained the rights they often use today without even thinking about it: the right to manage their bodies and voices, their time and income, the right to make mistakes and correct them. Full of vibrant and precise political observations, simultaneously amusing and informative, this book is a sober, bitter, joyful, and fearless history of feminism, its victories and failures, and a manifesto of all those women who are not ready to be "comfortable."
