FIGHTING LIKE A WOMAN – The Women Who Strike Back

  • This book tells the forgotten story of fighting women: about muscles, breath, and voice – and the strength to claim your space.
  • Challenging the myth of female weakness: a story of empowerment.

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

Contact Foreign Rights
  • Publisher: Rowohlt Hardcover
  • Release: 27.01.2026
  • ISBN: 978-3-498-00397-5
  • 272 Pages
  • Author: Andrea Böhm

Awards

  • 2026: empfohlen - Sachbuch-Bestenliste

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Buchcover von FIGHTING LIKE A WOMAN – The Women Who Strike Back: Die Geschichte der Frauen, die zurückschlagen
Andrea Böhm FIGHTING LIKE A WOMAN – The Women Who Strike Back
Portrait von Andrea Böhm
© Gordon Welters/DIE ZEIT
Andrea Böhm

Andrea Böhm , born in 1961, lived for over ten years as a freelance journalist in the USA, writing for publications such as tageszeitung , Die Zeit , and GEO . Since 2006, she has been part of the politics section at Die Zeit , serving as the Middle East correspondent from 2013 to 2018, based in Beirut. Her book Gott und die Krokodile. Eine Reise durch den Kongo was published in 2011 and nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Non-Fiction Prize. In 2017, she published Das Ende der westlichen Weltordnung . For her journalistic work, she has received several awards, including the Theodor-Wolff Prize, the Hansel-Mieth Prize, and the Werner-Holzer Prize.