Harriet Harman

This is a compelling account of the women's movement, of life in parliament over the last 40 years, and of Harriet Harman's struggle to use her role as MP to change the lives of women and families: in many ways successfully while her party was in power, but frustratingly and impotently slowly when they were not.

Her supportive husband and her three children appear little in this book, and yet her struggle to combine her combative professional life with her relationship with them is clearly central to her story, and to her understanding of the lives of women from all levels of society. It's clear that many women recognised her constant battles on our behalf, even when the Parliamentary Labour Party did not necessarily do so.

Harriet Harman kept no diaries, so this book is free of obsessive day-to-day minutiae. But it's a lively and compelling account of a woman struggling to prosper professionally, and to change the lives of women in that most macho of environments, the House of Commons.

Even if you don't share her political views, read this book for an overview of social reform campaigning over the last half century. You may even find yourself grateful to her, and to women like her, for taking on the battles she has fought and often won.

'If you are not having arguments, you are not making a difference.'
… (mere)