FIGHTING LIKE A WOMAN – The Women Who Strike Back

Female strength is not an exceptional state, but a historically documented part of social reality.

In a time of global anti-feminist backlash, journalist Andrea Böhm uncovers the forgotten stories of women who physically resist their oppression – fighting with every weapon at their disposal. From 18th-century female boxers and Jiu-Jitsu suffragettes to Berlin schoolgirls learning self-defense, women have long questioned the belief in their physical inferiority to men.

Andrea Böhm asks: Is the female body truly as vulnerable, available, and exposed as we have been taught from childhood? Is the male monopoly on violence a myth? On her travels, she encounters Mexican wrestlers defying the female victim role, Kurdish female fighters dreaming of a feminist utopia, Kenyan and German girls asserting themselves in violent environments, and the men who support them. They all reveal the active female body as the core of emancipation and self-assertion. An essential and personal plea for a physical feminism.

"Nothing stays the same. To perceive and understand this, it takes insightful observers, like travelers such as Andrea Böhm." Der Spiegel

"Its greatest asset is a truly global view, built on superb field reporting." taz