Patriarchal culture for centuries has imposed on women the ideals of meekness, sacrificial service and humility, the role of a domestic angel, and the sweetness of submission. Helen Lewis's heroines are anything but. Their names were surrounded by scandals. They were imprisoned, stoned, and in modern times - because morals have softened - they are simply ridiculed. Complex, intolerant, inconvenient and self-centered, sometimes aggressive, sometimes funny - originals, eccentrics, upstarts, they articulated implicit problems and showed the abnormality of the usual. They broke stereotypes, forced society to reconsider gender conventions, changed the way of life, legal norms and state institutions - in the interests of everyone else. The dispassionate pedantry of a historian-archivist and the honesty of an investigative journalist, analytical mind, passionate empathy and willingness to see the unpleasant truth about her heroines allowed Helen Lewis to write a sober, insightful, bitter, funny and fearless history of feminism, its victories and failures. Without pathos or ressentiment, talk about how half of humanity sought the right to control their body and voice, their time and income, the right to make mistakes and correct mistakes, the right to be imperfect - to be human.