For centuries, patriarchal culture has imposed on women ideals of meekness, sacrificial service, and humility, the role of domestic angel, and the need to be "nice." Helen Lewis's heroines are hardly sweet. Their names were linked to scandals. Complex, intolerant, awkward, sometimes aggressive, sometimes funny—eccentrics, eccentrics, upstarts—they voiced problems with utter candor and exposed the abnormality of the familiar, shattering stereotypes and forcing society to reconsider gender attitudes, changing social structures, legal norms, and state institutions—for the benefit of everyone else. Thanks to them, women gained the rights they sometimes exercise without even thinking: 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, bitter, funny, and fearless history of feminism, its victories and failures, and a manifesto for all those women who are not ready to be “convenient.”