When the former chancellor Ken Clarke described Theresa May as a “bloody difficult woman” in 2016, the subtext was that life would be easier were she more acquiescent, more feminine. But what was delivered as an insult, May decided to take as a compliment; the Fawcett Society liked it so much they put it on a T-shirt. As feminism has moved into the mainstream, and cases of misogyny have made headlines, the world is gradually getting used to women who resist, obstruct or are badly behaved in order to get things done.

There’s a lot of obstruction and bad behaviour in Helen Lewis’s Difficult Women, which looks at the victories secured by 19th and 20th-century feminists that many of us take for granted, among them the right to divorce, vote, study, work, enjoy consensual sex, compete in team sports, abort a foetus or escape violent partners. The women who made these things happen often used unorthodox, underhand, illegal and sometimes violent tactics. Few were thanked or rewarded for their efforts; many were punished.

Publishing is currently awash with books that seek to elevate the bold, brilliant and often neglected women of the past. Kira Cochrane’s Modern Women: 52 Pioneers, Zing Tsjeng’s Forgotten Women series, Hannah Jewell’s 100 Nasty Women of History and Cathy Newman’s Bloody Brilliant Women have each endeavoured to right the wrongs of social and political histories written for and about men. Meanwhile, illustrated compendiums such as Kate Pankhurst’s Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World and the mega-selling Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls have done the same for younger readers. That these books exist is clearly A Good Thing and, taken individually, many are to be recommended. But we are surely at saturation point.

Theresa May at the Global Women’s Forum in Dubai, February 2020. Photograph: Christopher Pike/Reuters

In Lewis’s book, the chapters are divided by causes rather than individuals, with each one highlighting a handful of figures, some dead and some living, instrumental in bringing about change. Difficult Women is smart, thoughtful and rich in detail. It isn’t a straightforward celebration, either. Lewis isn’t trying to repackage her subjects as heroines or rebels or badass babes. Her point is that pioneering or high-achieving women are multidimensional and are apt to be a pain in the arse. They can be mean-spirited, defensive, contradictory, downright reprehensible, but this doesn’t cancel out their achievements.

In her introduction, Lewis sets this idea of “difficult” female pioneers against contemporary feminism that, seen through the reductive lens of social media and call-out culture, often demands that feminists, past and present, be morally upright, consistent and sisterly. She makes clear her irritation at today’s feminists blithely writing off their first and second-wave forebears for being blinkered, privileged or otherwise “problematic”. While I would take issue with her blanket assertion that “modern feminism feels toothless” – tell that to the estimated 4 million women who marched in America in 2017 after Trump’s election, the largest single-day demonstration recorded in US history – she is right in observing a reluctance to deal with the complexities of individuals and past eras. “In this book,” she warns, “you will meet women with views which were unpalatable to modern feminists.” Some have views that “were unpalatable to their contemporaries. A history of feminism should not try to sand off the sharp corners of the movement’s pioneers – or write them out of the story entirely, if their sins are deemed too great.”

Among the feminist sinners examined here are Caroline Norton, whose long and unpleasant battle to separate from a violent husband and retain access to her children led to the creation of the 1839 Custody of Infants Act; and Marie Stopes, who tutored the nation on pleasure and the female body with Married Love (1918), and founded the first birth control clinic. Both would seem like poster girls for feminist progress were it not for the fact that Norton wrote “the natural position of woman is inferiority to man”, and Stopes was anti-abortion and, like many early 20th-century intellectuals, a supporter of eugenics. (She also sent Hitler a book of her poetry in 1939 with a note saying “love is the greatest thing in the world”.)

Annie Kenney (second left) with fellow suffragists. Photograph: Alamy

Elsewhere, Lewis digs in to the stories of Annie Kenney, a working-class suffragette who fell out with her middle and upper-class feminist peers; Sophia Jex-Blake, who fought hard to train as a doctor but who, it turns out, was a dreadful snob; and Jayaben Desai, who was the opposite of the stereotype of the quiet, docile migrant worker in her fight for employees’ rights at Grunwick in the 70s. Lewis proves an excellent storyteller who seamlessly blends scholarly inquiry and journalistic investigation with autobiographical titbits and flashes of caustic wit (her footnotes are a hoot).

Similarly illuminating are the tales of living women, many of whom she tracks down to interview. There’s a tough conversation with the octogenarian Erin Pizzey, who opened the first refuge for domestic abuse victims in London in 1971, but who has come to view feminism as “a lie” and become an advocate for the men’s rights movement. Pizzey maintains there are two types of domestic violence victims: those who are “innocent” and those who keep returning to their abuser because they are addicted to violence. She is fascinating and infuriating, and Lewis tries to engage with her thinking without letting her off the hook. “The idea that good, responsible, strong women leave – and those that don’t only have themselves to blame – is a shocking one,” Lewis writes.

We fail to take into account that people are flawed, and these flaws often contribute to their achievements

Her reflections on Pizzey are intertwined with interviews with Luke Hart, whose father, Lance, killed his sister and mother: they had just left him, following a lifetime of emotional abuse and psychological control. And with David Challen, whose mother, Sally, killed his father, Richard, after suffering years of abuse at his hands (she was originally convicted of murder, which was reduced to manslaughter on appeal). Given what we now understand about the psychology of abuse, Pizzey’s standpoint is bewildering. Still, in the 70s she cast sufficient light on the issue for it to be debated in parliament, and her shelter led to the creation of Refuge, the biggest charity of its kind in England, with an annual income of £13.3m. So does the “good” erase the “bad”? It’s complicated.

This, really, is the thrust of Lewis’s book – that people are complicated and so is feminist achievement. And yet, she notes, our expectations of feminism, often self-imposed, are unfair – “Perfection. Niceness. Selflessness. We worry whether women can ‘have it all’.” We fail to take into account that people are flawed, and these flaws often contribute to their achievements. “History is always more interesting when it is difficult,” Lewis writes. “The battles are difficult, and we must be difficult too.”

• Difficult Women is published by Jonathan Cape (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.