For centuries, patriarchal culture has imposed on women the ideals of meekness, sacrificial service and humility, the role of domestic angel and the need to be “nice”. You can’t call Helen Lewis’s heroines nice. Their names were associated with scandals. Complex, intolerant, inconvenient, sometimes aggressive, sometimes funny – originals, eccentrics, upstarts, they voiced problems with utmost directness and showed the abnormality of the usual, broke stereotypes and forced society to reconsider gender attitudes, changed the way of life, legal norms and state institutions – in the interests of everyone else. Thanks to them, women gained the rights that, sometimes without even thinking, they enjoy today: the right to control their bodies and voices, their time and income, the right to make mistakes and correct them. Full of vivid and accurate political observations that are both funny and informative, this book is a sober, bittersweet, funny and fearless history of feminism, its victories and its failures, and a manifesto for all those women who refuse to be 'convenient'.

'Of all the unfinished feminist revolutions, the right to good sex has proven one of the most elusive.'

'You don't have to be perfect to deserve equal rights.'

'One of the problems is that in sport, women don't demand to be treated exactly the same as men. There isn't a single woman in the world who could be selected for a Premier League team, or a woman who could outrun a male champion in the 100m sprint. We need our own gender-specific leagues and competitions because testosterone gives men a huge physical advantage.'