A few years ago, when in the span of about four years I got a Ph.D., got a real job as an assistant professor, moved across the country to a part of the world I’d never inhabited with a man I’d known and loved for about a year, then married that man and shortly after that had a tiny perfect daughter who was more beautiful than anything I could ever have imagined, and then left my wonderful and fulfilling job to move our young family closer to our other family and subsequently add to that family by the addition of a perfect young son (WHEW!), I was as a stay-at-home/work-from-home mother more lost, lonely, unmoored, and unmentored than I ever had been in my life. My inner circle was seven hours away by car; my social life consisted of my MOPS group, which met once a month. I had no one to talk to, complain to, or just sigh with exasperation and weariness and outrage to, and when I did try to edge toward Real Feelings with my inner circle, I just upset them, resulting in the insistence that I had to put the kids in the car and drive straight north that minute so they could rescue me.
So one of those lost summers, when I picked up The Bitch in the House from the public library, and read it as swiftly and greedily as I could, I laughed and cried and shouted with tears of joy, “YES! FINALLY someone has said what I have been thinking! I’m not so terribly, awfully, desperately alone!” Well, physically I was, but I wasn’t alone, or awful, and no longer quite so desperate in what I was feeling. Every thread of that book—all the rage, hope, humor, love, effort, passion, and bewilderment—hit me right where I felt it. (And also made me think, what can’t I/didn’t I write something like that? I started to fall in love with the personal essay.)
When I saw The Bitch is Back at my new public library, I fell upon it with the delight of welcoming a wise old friend and mentor to my coffee table. And was not disappointed. The critics are right: there’s not quite so much rage in this one. Have we all mellowed because we’re older and wiser and have more coping skills? I don’t think that’s the case. Some of the contributors are from the original volume, but some are new, and add to the varied perspectives. Very few (in fact, I can think of only one) verge on the self-congratulatory look-at-me-and-my-great-life sweep aside of the curtain; most of them are frank, honest, funny, poignant verging on heart-breaking, and just simply, beautifully, wise.
Because anger and helplessness and aloneness and abandonment are not the focus anymore; the focus of these women is by and large on themselves, what they’ve learned about themselves in and out of relationship, and how they’ve come to their own philosophies about feminism, love, sex, art, work, life, and domesticity. They are the voices of women who have looked at themselves and examined their choices, learned to laugh at themselves and remedy their mistakes. They are the voices of women who have struggled through difficult times and learned to find balance. They are the voices (again, I can think of only that one exception) who are reaching out a hand across the coffee table to say, sister, I’ve been there, I feel you; here’s my take on that.
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, the first book to identify me to myself as a bitch, and inform me that it was okay to be one.
I want to sit down in this room full of women and listen to them talk for hours. But more than that, their honesty and clarity and forthrightness and sheer grit has encouraged me to look at myself a little more sternly and figure out where my pressure points are. And rather than falling into the rage/bewilderment/hopeless loneliness/self-pity cycle, I ask myself: what can I do?
Besides which, it’s summer, and therefore my writing time. Yes, I am sending my kids to daycare in the summer (summer!) so that I have a few hours a day to write. As my supervisor at the Writing Center said (she’s a published author, too), writing is your job. You need to set aside time to do it. And I am, with full friendly-bitch-face, protecting that time to the utmost. Yes, I still struggle to find the balance—to give my spiritual growth, paying work, fulfilling relationships, community service, children and husband and housework and family all the proper time and attention those segments of my life need to thrive. But I learned a valuable lesson from those days of blasted loneliness: if I let the creative part of me wither, every single other slice of the pie gets poisoned by the blight. So, in this house also, the bitch is back, and doggone am I happy to see her.
Camille Paglia captures all her best provocations, smoke bombs, and sturdy anti-establishmentarianism in this collection of essays, opening with excerpts from her hefty and admittedly groundbreaking 
The relentless self-satisfaction and feelings of superiority aside, Paglia’s intellectual endeavors of the past 27 years are full of striking common sense. Abortion, she declares, should be legal on the sheer fact of constitutional rights. She’ll concede pro-lifers the moral high ground, given their feelings about the sanctity of life, but she comes down staunchly libertarian on this political spectrum. Madonna, she noticed early on, is a “real” feminist: “She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funny—all at the same time” (50).
Paglia gets less pleasure out of celebrating the things she does like, however, than she does out of bashing the things she hates. Paglia’s praise is warm but mild, but her glee when she holds the sledgehammer is glorious to behold. Most of the book is a strident and, by the end, well-rehearsed tirade against the same set of targets: mainstream Western feminism (“Infirmary Feminism”) and feminists, with their “moldy neuroses,” women’s studies centers, poststructuralist theory (oh, how Paglia loathes poststructuralism! she trots out her best insults on this rampage), and the Victorian coddling of college students over date rape.
Libertarian as she is, as noted, Paglia fails to see how a good dose of bucking up, showing some backbone, slinging insults, and—in the case of real women leaders, like female presidential candidates—maybe have a little military training can not immediately solve the problems women have created for themselves by being born into a world where men have invented technology, culture, government, sports, and fashion. Paglia might be more persuasive if she were more inclined to negotiate, consider all sides, explore, rethink, and potentially compromise—best seen in her lecture at MIT, when she howls with outrage over a presentation she had to sit through with a feminist scholar critiquing fashion photography. Beauty is all! Paglia says, not ever considering how a young and impressionable girl might be led to decades of hating and disfiguring her own body because she doesn’t live up to these highly managed and curated images. But Paglia is having too much fun to put down the sledgehammer, and besides, she hates sissies.
For another, Paglia’s critique of women’s studies programs and the way academic feminists train other academic feminists deserves some serious consideration. Her plea to inject some self-possession and some real common sense—and some basic knowledge of science, including biology—into mainstream feminism should be taken seriously, too. Last but not least, her prose, even when she’s at her most insulting, has a spare, lithe, powerful beauty. The book is simply fun to read, occasional howlers aside.
Depending on how you look at it, feminism has either become more acceptable and mainstream, or it continues to be perceived by most young women as a radical dogma that requires one to forego personal grooming and to revile men. Feminism is either strong, better, more pervasive than ever before, or it’s been hijacked into a marketing ploy that “liberates” young women by insisting they express themselves by the clothes, make-up, and accessories they buy and wear. Second-wave feminism is dead but third- and fourth-wave feminism are thriving. Wave feminism is archaic and waveless feminism is the thing. Feminism is a global cause or Western feminists have to be very careful about how they try to foist their imperialistic views on others. Feminists are still mainly white and ignorant of the battles of their less privileged sisters. Intersectionality is where it’s at. The future face of feminism is young, multi-colored, and somewhere outside the restrictive gender binary. Feminism is everywhere. Feminism is you.
Okay, that last one is easy. I think a rebuke is definitely called for in the last instance. Better yet, I will direct the privileged sister to read Dina Leygerman’s great blog post, 
This is a dense book aimed at fellow feminist historians, but it’s a huge contribution to the history of second-wave feminism in the United States, and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in how the wave got halted and the different camps, feminist vs. anti-feminist, so divisively bitter. Spruill begins with the dramatic assessment that the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977 was a dramatic watershed moment in the advance of women’s rights in the United States, and she spends the bulk of the book in a detailed inquiry of what led up to the conference, and what happened there, with the last segments devoted to a summation of what has happened for women’s rights in this country between then and now.
It takes some persuading to the see the NWC as a fundamental accomplishment, especially since Spruill, both times she talks about it–in the introductory chapter, and then in the middle chapters exploring the Houston event–spends at least as much time discussing the anti-feminist, anti-ERA rally taking place alongside, an event that seems to have been louder, better-attended, and even more self-congratulatory. For those curious about what the recent Women’s Marches following Trump’s inauguration have accomplished, this book is a good reminder that protests galvanize, provide solidarity, and develop loyalty among a group. It is also testament to the fact that, when you have two equally heated opinions that are dead-set against one another, nothing gets done beyond a lot of screaming, insult-launching, and exaggerated hyperbole.
This is best seen in the chapters devoted to the state conferences preceding the NWC, whose job it was to elect delegates to the national convention and determine a platform to submit. Here there is a tragic arc to the narrative as well. While legislative and popular support for the ERA in particular and the idea of women’s rights in particular was high in the initial stages, the conventions did what they were supposed to do: elect a diverse set of delegates and develop a platform that reflected a progressive agenda of full civil rights, including reproductive rights and non-discrimination, for the national platform that would eventually be submitted to the president. Once the anti-ERA forces got into action—the forces who passionately believed that the traditional family structure, with the woman at home dependent on the husband, were the only right model for everyone—the book becomes a wearying account of how, state by state, busloads of smug white evangelical women and their husbands descended on conventions, disrupted any fruitful discussion, congratulated themselves for being family champions, and then went back home to their safe, white houses.
Spruill doesn’t shy away from how the anti-forces deployed all sorts of others groups, including the KKK, to bulk out their protest numbers (an association Schafly always denied). In short, these chapters pound home the point learned from watching the U.S. Congress in action for the last six years: those who can make every effort available to obstruct an agenda that might mean more social justice for the broader population can usually manage to succeed. But the book also doesn’t shy away from showing the divisions within the feminist ranks—the arguments over how far to embrace LGBT rights, for example, and how to handle the abortion question—that led to factions and fissures there that generally left the middle-of-the-road feminists and the pro-life feminists with no place to go. As the more progressive voices won out, some of the middle who weren’t prepared to go that far get left behind—which is why the popular opinion still prevails among my students that feminists are strident, bra-burning, man-hating radicals, which means productive conversations about how to promote equal rights and just treatment for all genders get derailed quickly.
The major women on the scene emerge as courageous, charismatic, dedicated, impressive people, among them Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan (all pro-ERA), and Phyllis Schafly (anti). The story of how Schafly nearly single-handedly organized the resistance and halted such an enormously important piece of legislation as equal rights for all genders is awesome and—if you happen to be on the side of equal rights for women—a completely demoralizing example of how the shrill misuse of information and incitement of fear can stop any real dialogue and any positive change from happening (something we continue to see happening in the discussion on women’s rights up to this day). In this way, Spruill’s history is a revealing and explanatory account of just how the divisions between the progressives and the conservatives got so deep and the rhetoric got so heated to the point that there seems no middle ground remaining.
This Christmas I gave myself the best book I’ve ever or quite possibly will ever read.
Teresa LaBella
I started with 
What I like most about these Regencies (at least the ones I’ve read so far) is that each heroine has her own individual quirk. Aurelia Sinclair of
In
And, because it’s Christmas and because I have reached the age where I like to celebrate the season by reading holiday-themed books, I also read 
Now that I’m older, my fantasies are more about fulfilling quests, achieving career aspirations, and establishing myself in the world on my own terms, not in relation to someone else. Maybe that’s why I loved Disney’s latest animated feature 
I’ve read two books by this author. My motivation and interest in reading both extended beyond entertainment to assistance in researching a story I plan to write. 
This is a romance novel of the highest quality, the love story of Fiona and Alexander Maxwell and the tenuous circumstances that bring and keep them together despite a six-year time span and an ocean between them. But the author ventures far beyond the boundaries of romance and the star-crossed history of the present-day lovers’ descendants to career and livelihood destruction perpetrated by the rogues of international free trade. The families of Fiona and Alex, and the people their respective U.S. furniture manufacturer and Scottish textile mill plants employ, are threatened by deceitful businessmen who steal ideas and profit by paying workers in Far East sweatshops next to nothing.
Teresa LaBella
