The Bitch Is Back

Soul-Searching Women

About fifteen years ago, Cathi Hanauer has edited a best-selling book of essays titled The Bitch In The House, in which 26 women told “the truth about Se Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage.”  What that book talked out was post-feminism women, who had careers and husbands they chose, but found themselves exhausted with the effort to live up to their own high expectations and trying to do it all.

Some of them write again in The Bitch Is Back, about the experiences gained in the intervening years, and some new writers enter the list of 26 women with their own perspectives on what it like to be a woman in the 21^st century with all the choices they have been able to make.

There is, of course, the problem of ageing in a youth-obsessed world, and though the tone of the writing is upbeat and often witty, there is still an underlying whine about men, sex and the insecurities of growing older (there has to be one essay on nips, tucks and hormone therapy to look young). When you’d expect that that many of them have reached the age when they ought not to give a damn about anyone or anything, they are still caught up in the conventions of coupledom (including a “non-radical” lesbian couple) or the lack of it.

This is by no means a representation of the experiences of all women, but going by this book, if youthful anger is simply replaced by middle-aged angst in some and resignation in others, when are women ever truly happy or fulfilled?

The Bitch Is Back: Older, Wiser, And (Getting) Happier

Edited by Cathi Hanauer

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 338