The women continue to ignore him, chatting. “Thank you, no really, it’s nothing, really.” Smiling modestly to himself. In the final frame, back in reality, he walks out of the kitchen with the bin bag. In the third frame he is suddenly centre stage in a theatre along with his bag of rubbish, in front of a crazily applauding audience – he stretches out his arms to his fans. He is still tying the bag, ostentatiously, in the second frame. They glance at him, but go back to their conversation. “I’m just taking the rubbish out,” he says in the first frame. She has published six books of cartoons, The Trouble with Women is her seventh.T here is a lovely cartoon by Jacky Fleming, not in this book, where in four consecutive frames a man ties up rubbish in a black bin liner and takes it outside, while two women sit talking over mugs of coffee at a table behind. Since then her work has featured in many publications including the Guardian, the Independent, New Statesman, New Internationalist, Red Pepper, Observer, Diva, You magazine and the Big Issue. Her first published work, which appeared in Spare Rib, was a university essay for feminist art historian Griselda Pollock which Fleming handed in as a cartoon strip. Following a foundation year at the Chelsea School of Art, she went on to study Fine Art at Leeds University, where her contemporaries formed bands like the Mekons, and the Gang of Four. Jacky Fleming is a feminist cartoonist whose work first became known through her series of pre-internet postcards which reached women around the world by snail mail. You will never look at history in the same way again.

Get ready to laugh, wince and rescue forgotten women from the 'dustbin of history', whilst keeping a close eye out for tell-tale 'genius hair'. We learn that even Charles Darwin, long celebrated for his open, objective scientific mind, believed that women would never achieve anything important, because of their smaller brains.

A brilliantly witty book of cartoons, it reveals some of our greatest thinkers' baffling theories about women. CAN WOMEN BE GENIUSES? OR ARE THEIR ARMS TOO SHORT? WHY DID WE ONLY LEARN ABOUT THREE WOMEN AT SCHOOL? WHAT WERE ALL THE OTHERS DOING? The Trouble With Women does for girls what 1066 and All That did for boys: it reminds us of what we were taught about women in history lessons at school, which is to say, not a lot.

The Trouble With Women by Jacky Fleming