Do you find her wartime collaboration with the Nazis “empowering”? I don’t, although admittedly she does sound like a woman who “didn’t need rescuing”. In the name of inspiring little girls living in a male-dominated world, the book doesn’t so much airbrush Chanel’s story as sandblast it. In the 1930s, she tried to remove that “wealthy friend” from the company under racist laws that forbade Jews to own businesses. It does not mention that Chanel was the lover of a Nazi officer and very probably a spy for Hitler’s Germany. Its entry for the fashion designer Coco Chanel mentions that she wanted to start a business, and a “wealthy friend of hers lent her enough money to make her dream come true”. It tells 100 “empowering, moving and inspirational” stories, promising that “these are true fairytales for heroines who definitely don’t need rescuing”. Take the wildly successful children’s book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, which has sold more than a million copies. Holding up a few exceptions is no substitute for questioning the rules themselves, and in our rush to champion historical women, we are distorting the past. The idea of role models is not necessarily a bad one, but the way they are used in feminism can dilute a radical political movement into feelgood inspiration porn. In the name of inspiring little girls living in a male-dominated world, Rebel Girls doesn't so much airbrush Coco Chanel's story as sandblast it We don’t have to be perfect to deserve equal rights. Women are people, and people are more interesting than cliches. It must allow them to be just as flawed – just as human – as men.
“Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (Or, as I always catch myself adding, the unreasonable woman.) A history of feminism should not try to sand off the sharp corners of the movement’s pioneers – or write them out of the story entirely, if their sins are deemed too great. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1903. They were awkward and wrong-headed and obstinate and sometimes downright odd – and that helped them to defy the expectations placed on them. You will find women with views that were unpalatable to their contemporaries. Look back at early feminists and you will find women with views that are unpalatable to their modern sisters. Most of us are more than one thing no one is pure everyone is “problematic”. A thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach to historical figures is boring and reductive. First of all, difficult means complicated. So what does it mean to be a difficult woman? I’m not talking about being rude, thoughtless, obnoxious or a diva. “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.” “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is,” wrote Rebecca West in 1913. The title of her 1998 feminist manifesto was ‘Bitch’ Photograph: Neville Elder/Corbis via Getty ImagesĪll this is edging towards the same idea, an idea that is imprinted on us from birth: that women are called unreasonable, selfish and unfeminine when they stand up for themselves. “Yeah,” chipped in fellow actor Emma Stone: “You were ‘difficult’.”Įlizabeth Wurtzel. The reaction to the incident left her worried that she would be punished by the industry. No one wants to be difficult.” The actor Jennifer Lawrence told the Hollywood Reporter that she had once stood up to a rude director. She did not complain, she said, because “that’s just the culture that television breeds.
HUN THUMBSUP TV
The TV presenter Helen Skelton once described being groped on air by an interviewee while pregnant. The word is particularly pointed since it recurs so often when women talk about the consequences of challenging sexism. The book’s main title was, simply, Bitch. The late Elizabeth Wurtzel took “in praise of difficult women” as the strapline for her feminist manifesto in 1998.
A year later, it gave the US author Roxane Gay the title for her short story collection. In 2016, it was used of Theresa May (she was “a bloody difficult woman,” Ken Clarke said, when she ran for Tory leader). It’s a word that rests on a knife-edge: when applied to a woman, it can be admiring, fearful, insulting and dismissive, all at once.
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