The basic bitch: a lifelong struggle with relating to Generic Womanhood

I

In 1999, I smugly recorded in my diary that on non-uniform day at school, I'd been one of only two girls in my form not to wear head to toe sports brands. Aged 14, my favourite outfit consisted of cord flares (Gap; too big as I'd misread the label and looked at the US sizing), a bottle green velvet jacket (Camden Market) and cherry red Dr Marten boots (£30 in the sale. £30). The girls who tended to wear head to toe sports brands and mock my cord flares, were 'trendies': the basics of the late 90s. In 1999, trendies wore Kickers or Fila sweatshirts with bootcut jeans and listened to boy bands and UK garage. I inked Kula Shaker lyrics onto my homework diary in metallic gel pen; they did the same with the lyrics to Sweet Like Chocolate. 

In 2004, I was a student. The trendy, transported into the campus environment, had evolved, and my best friend and I, angsty and awkward, were by now referring to them as 'generics'. Generics wore Miss Sixty jeans and sometimes their boyfriend's sports stash. They had super-straight hair and made a lot of noise in the dining hall. They were your rag reps and your Christmas ball committee and they sniggered behind their hands whenever the Christian Union rep made an announcement about something. They didn't write angry letters to the student magazine when the Union bar ran a Playboy-themed night. They chatted loudly in the corridor about how they were definitely cutting back on carbs. I only had two small potatoes with dinner this evening. Do you think that's ok?

It's 2014 and the trendy who became the generic has now evolved into the 'basic', or the 'basic bitch'. Despite the origins of the term, it's come to to define a particular sort of young white woman. The basic likes Uggs and seasonal beverages and posting dubiously-attributed Marilyn Monroe quotes on Facebook, while watching Sex and the City and scrolling through her 'wedding inspiration' board on Pinterest. Should you wish to find out, Buzzfeed et al can give you examples of what a basic posts on Instagram, the sort of texts she sends, how she treats her boyfriend and what she gets up to on a girls' night out.

The US-centric stereotype doesn't always translate, but the idea of the basic is universal. And as Noreen Malone wrote in this piece for The Cut last month, it's taken off because it 'feels restrained, somehow'.

'You don’t quite have to stoop to calling someone a slut or a halfwit or anything truly cruel. It’s not as implicating as calling someone tacky — the basic woman is so evidently nonthreatening she doesn’t even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-tagging is coolly lazy. It conveys a graduate seminar’s worth of semiotics in five letters. “So basic,” you think, scrolling through your Facebook feed. “She’s basic,” you offer to a friend, commenting on her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It was a word we’d been looking for.'

Malone sums it up perfectly when she describes the basic as 'the woman who fails to surprise us'. She buys into what society and capitalism tells us it means to be a woman today. She's unoriginal, and she doesn't care. What's noticeable about the current usage of 'basic' is that it doesn't simply describe unoriginal patterns of consumption; it also describes patterns of thought and modes of expression. Feminists can be 'basic'. Mothers can be 'basic' (witness the rivalry between Mumsnet and Netmums and the stereotypes the former has of the latter). Fashion and lifestyle bloggers who don't necessarily buy in to generic consumerism but actually see themselves as pretty 'alternative' can also be 'basic'.

II

As if you couldn't have guessed it, from my tales of 1999 and 2004, I have to confess to a lifelong struggle with all that is basic. At the age of 14, major aspects of my personality and behaviour were little more than a construction to throw other girls off the scent and give them something to talk about. If they're mocking my clothes and my taste in music, at least they're not mocking the way I look or the fact I don't have a boyfriend. It was only in recent years that it became clear to me exactly what I'd been up to, diverting their mockery at the same time as inwardly marking myself out as better than them. If you grew up being given funny looks by all your popular, incredibly generic peers, if you ever felt like a tortured soul or called yourself 'indie' or wrote in your journal that you were pretty misunderstood, really, you've probably had a lifelong struggle with relating to all that is basic. Sooner than you know it you're 30 years old, and you're still avoiding basics and rolling your eyes when they pop up in your Facebook feed.

Those of us who can't deal with 'basicity' have a tendency to (inwardly) mark ourselves out as 'not like Those Women'; those generic ones over there. In a hangover from our school years, we categorise and separate out. We're more unique, more interesting, more special. Today the tables have turned, and the basic is no longer queen. She may subscribe to all that is on-trend and acceptable for women, but she's no longer cool. What I believe is an uncomfortable truth for many of us as feminists, however, is that decrying basic culture is kind of problematic. We know it, and we do it anyway. Noreen Malone started to explore this and hit the nail on the head when she concluded her piece saying:

'And so the woman who calls another woman basic ends up implicitly endorsing two things she probably wouldn’t sign up for if they were spelled out for her: a male hierarchy of culture, and the belief that the self is an essentially surface-level formation.'

When you're calling another woman basic, you probably haven't got to know her very well. And it's fairly reliant on your perception of what society sees as 'things for women' as inferior. Ouch. I'm not going to pretend I'm the first person to feel conflicted about the popularity of the word. In fact, the thinkpieces about it have been numerous. Anne Helen Petersen, for Buzzfeed, described women being dismissive of all things basic as little more than class anxiety, citing the term's origins as having class connotations and explaining its current usage in the same way:

'Unique taste — and the capacity to avoid the basic — is a privilege. A privilege of location (usually urban), of education (exposure to other cultures and locales), and of parentage (who would introduce and exalt other tastes). To summarize the groundbreaking work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We don’t choose our tastes so much as the micro-specifics of our class determine them. To consume and perform online in a basic way is thus to reflect a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should.'

Petersen ends her piece by telling us that mockery of the basic woman is 'troubling' and 'regressive':

'To call someone “basic” is to look into the abyss of continually flattening capitalist dystopia and, instead of articulating and interrogating the fear, transform it into casual misogyny.'

Responding on Thought Catalog, Anna Dorn vehemently disagrees. Calling out basicity, as she sees it, is 'rooted in female empowerment'. She gets the argument that deriding other women as 'basic' for choices they have made in the vacuum of patriarchal society is misogyny, but she doesn't ascribe to it.

'...basic-bashing is not about punishment. It’s about women rising up. It’s about women saying – We can be real people with real thoughts and opinions. We can wear our natural hair. We can be loud and curse and be offensive. We can say fuck heels because they hurt. Basicity is about giving power to the fringes, because basics – the walking embodiment of male subordination – ultimately have all the power.'

She concludes that '...basic-bashers can’t be misogynistic because we don’t stand to benefit from patriarchy.'

III

Both Petersen and Dorn are partially correct. As women, defining ourselves as superior to basics is somewhat rooted in anxieties surrounding consumption and class - even when we write off feminists as 'basic' because their commitment to the cause goes about as far as reading Lena Dunham's autobiography and thinking that a women's magazine running a feature on feminism 'is everything'. But it's not the full story. It's about buying in to expectations that we'll always define ourselves in opposition to some other group of women. Not like those women, thinking this, supporting that and wearing those clothes. Writing off women as friends and sisters because our opinions are superior or because they haven't reached a certain level of consciousness yet, sealing ourselves off and sneering at the Other. Radfems vs libfems vs funfems vs whitefems.

When we differentiate ourselves from all that is basic, we're representing all that is real and diverse and exciting about being a woman on the fringe when it is, indeed, what is generic and safe that has the power. Every woman who's ever felt free to be the person she really is knows that. Generic and safe is the ideal, and when you don't fit the mold you're often made to feel bad about it. Being able to say 'That's not me and I don't care' is liberating. But defining 'basic-bashing' as feminist praxis? 21st century empowerment as declaring that we're not like other girls and effectively writing off those generic specimens of womanhood as people who matter? It's indisputably problematic.

It's here that disagreements over the nature of sisterhood are bound to come in. Feminism doesn't mean liking all other women, or even being able to relate to them, but sneering at other women and calling it empowered shouldn't even come into it. Call it what it is: an extension of the way women have always been socialised to relate to other women, judging them and eyeing them up as competition and fuelling our anxieties about being interesting and clever and real.

Having always written off that which we now call basic, I've felt challenged in recent weeks not to buy into that any longer. Don't like particular women for particular reasons? Fine. Name them. But basic-bashing isn't about women rising up. It's upholding the status quo and shutting women out of potential opportunities to learn, grow, and identify with one another,

What you should have read this week

I'm reviving my weekly-ish round-up of things worth reading!

 

Black Women and The 41st Anniversary of Roe v. Wade: Thoughts About Reproductive Justice - Gradient Lair

"While some women are fighting not to conceive children—which matters—others are fighting to able to, to not be sterilized, to not be shamed and abused during pregnancy, to not live in poverty with that child and to not worry about State interference and oppression no matter what the choice may be. Whether Black women need abortion or need support for entering motherhood, both choices are valid and both need deliverance from the impact of White supremacist capitalist patriarchy on Black womanhood and Black motherhood."

I didn't fully understand what it means to be pro-choice ... until I decided not to have an abortion - Sarah Ditum

"I thought about the decision that was mine to make. And surprisingly, solidly, I realised what I would do: I would have this baby. At the time, I didn't know that there is a critical difference between unplanned and unwanted. At the time, I would barely have described myself as “wanting” children. I had never felt that cooing hunger which teenage girls called "broodiness", the longing to put their arms around a baby – even when small, I preferred reading to playing with dolls. And I will never feel the ravenous grief that older women call broodiness, either, the anguish of love with no object. But I did want a child, and specifically I wanted a child with the man I was with. It was ten years premature, but this was that child."

Not caring isn’t caring more: Lord Rennard, Michael White and feminist priorities - Glosswatch

"In the meantime, though, we feminists are stuck with this endless list of reminders from those far cleverer than us. Just in case you’ve forgotten, you shouldn’t worry about banknotes because you should be worrying about Page Three. You shouldn’t worry about Page Three because you should be worrying about every other page of the Sun. You shouldn’t be worrying about the Sun because you should be worrying about the representation of women across the whole of the media. You shouldn’t be worrying about women in the media because you should be worrying about violence against women. You shouldn’t be worrying about violence against women because you should be worrying about FGM."

The glitter and gloss of the faith of my youth - Nish Weiseth

"After I got married and we left Boulder, a deep-seeded cynicism set in, and every little thing about that former church were all things I despised about Christianity. I mean, really, WHO NEEDS A FOG MACHINE AND LASER LIGHTS? But now, working through that cynicism and suspicion, I've come to have a tender place for churches like that. The glossy evangelical megachurch is a part of my story, just as much as the more gritty, hipster, urban church we're in now.

But, more than missing the worship service and the big-church feel, I miss having an answer for everything and having a checklist to live by. I miss the Christianity of my younger years. I miss that chapter of my story, and in some ways, I truly long for it. Being naive was so much easier."

She's All That : 15 years and 5,000 words - Bim Adewunmi

"I first watched She’s All That back in 1999, at the Stratford Picturehouse some weekend after school. I remember loving it, because it hit all the spots it was supposed to: boy and girl got to have each other at the end, and bad guy kind of got his comeuppance, which is as it should be in real life. The 90s – especially in the mid-to-late period – was a significant time for teen movies. It was a golden period, during which the industry enjoyed a purple patch starting around 1995 with Clueless, continuing into 1996 with The Craft, and exploding in a high point of acne, prom and hormone-fug in 1999, which saw the release of 10 Things I Hate About You, Cruel Intentions, Never Been Kissed, Election, American Pie and of course, She’s All That."

Inside Nigeria's ruthless human trafficking mafia - Tobore Ovuorie

"It is on the windy Sunday evening of October 6 that I make my first contact with the outer ring of this mafia. A big party with VIPs is on the cards; the kind of party an ordinary girl, or rather ‘product’, as we are called by traffickers, is not usually invited to. But I am currently on a fortune ride: Oghogho’s favourite. Additionally, I have been classified as ‘Special Forces’, or ‘Forza Speciale’ as my new contacts say, borrowing the Italian term.  It’s a rule of thumb, I understand, that a syndicate subjects girls to classification through a check on their nude bodies and I, too – in the company of some male and female judges, headed by a trafficker called Auntie Precious – had been checked. I had received the highest classification. “This means that you don’t have to walk the streets. You can be an escort for important clients,” Auntie Precious had told me in a soft, congratulatory tone. The ones of ‘lesser’ classification were referred to as Forza Strada, the Road Force."

And finally...

- This week I finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. Get on it, if you haven't already.

- C. Jane Kendrick is back on the blogging wagon. Hurrah!

- Sunday 26 January is World Leprosy Day (work-related plug alert). If you don't know much about leprosy now's your chance to find out how it's very much a 21st century disease. Watch the video!

- At the Christian Feminist Network we're organising a day conference that's being held on Saturday 1 March in Manchester. The conference will include presentations, workshops and discussion as well as the chance to network with other Christian feminists. Find out more and sign up.

No wizards; no vampires: what this 80s child read

Last week marked 15 years since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and a generation of Potter fans has been reminiscing about their introduction to the world of the boy wizard. I'm too old to have read the books as a child - I actually read them for the first time at the age of 19 - and it's got me thinking about some of my most-loved books, wondering if they're still popular now, and wondering what the primary school students and tweens of today are into. Do they still read The Baby-sitters Club books in all their ghostwritten, predictable glory, which I notice were re-released in 2010? Where are all the fans of historical fiction? Are they mainly into vampires these days thanks to That Series That Shall Not Be Named?

Gracing my bookshelves back in the early/mid-90s and providing fond memories today, here are ten childhood favourites (all images show the editions I owned):

Children of Winter - Berlie Doherty

My favourite childhood books usually involved several key elements: the past, events from history (the more gruesome the better), magic and mystery, and time travel. Children of Winter has it all. Three children sheltering from the weather in a barn get transported back in time to the 17th century and the time of the Great Plague. Ker-ching! Books like this featured heavily in my childhood; they seemed to be a popular choice with teachers, helping us learn about events in history, which I obviously had no objection to whatsoever.

Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild

Despite not being even remotely inclined towards dancing (I had a couple of lessons, aged three, and hated them) or acting, I couldn't get enough of Ballet Shoes. The quirky upbringing of Pauline, Petrova, and Posy - the Fossil sisters - probably had a lot to do with this, and I remember adoring the illustrations by Ruth Gervis. Didn't the ending make you misty-eyed? Altogether now: "We three Fossils vow to try and put our names in history books..."

Lady Daisy - Dick King-Smith

Not one of Dick King-Smith's better-known efforts, but seriously. A talking doll. From the past. My eight-year-old self is jumping up and down with glee. Found in an attic by a boy named Ned, Lady Daisy educates him about the 19th century, which comes in handy for his school project on the Victorians. He gets picked for owning a doll by the school bully and it's also a source of anxiety for his father, who would prefer him to be carrying a football around instead (down with restrictive gender stereotyping!).

Moondial - Helen Cresswell

A lot of people remember the cult 1988 BBC adaptation of Moondial, which is how I first came across it too. Once again it's got that combination of magic, mystery, history, and time travel, with a touch of morbidity and creepiness - hooded figures in the dark, covered mirrors, and a girl who's known as the 'Devil's child'. Having seen the television series first, I was delighted to get my hands on the book a few years later.

St Clare's and Malory Towers books - Enid Blyton

Bit obvious, this one, but Enid Blyton's tales of boarding school were ones I read and re-read, having inherited my mum's copies. The midnight feasts! Swimming and lacrosse! The alien concept of 'the honour of the school'! The character tropes that were a feature of both schools: the Mean Girl, the Tomboy, the Snob, the 'Outlandish' Foreign Girl, the 'Mouse' - were predictable, and it's easy to cringe at some of the less-enlightened language used by the author. But I'm not going to deny that I was once a fan.

An Enemy at Green Knowe - Lucy M Boston

We were big fans of Lucy Boston's super-whimsical Green Knowe books in our house. They were based locally, and we even named our dog after key character Tolly. Predictably for me, the series is full of history, mystery, and magic. An Enemy at Green Knowe was always my favourite, thanks to the fact it features the evil Melanie Powers and her witchcraft. Of course, good triumphs over evil, and Melanie's schemes are thwarted by Tolly and his friend Ping.

Anastasia's Chosen Career - Lois Lowry

How awesome was Anastasia Krupnik? I was hooked on her exploits as a tween. I could identify with Anastasia in so many ways, from her secret notebook scribblings to her hatred of gym class. In the editions of the books carried by my local library, each cover was emblazoned with the strapline "The girl who thinks for herself" (oh yes!). In Anastasia's Chosen Career, our heroine enrolls in modelling school in an attempt to boost her self-confidence and poise, hoping it'll help her on her way to becoming a bookstore owner.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit - Judith Kerr

Judith Kerr's classic, based on her childhood experience of fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, satisfied my love of history. The story follows Anna, a nine-year-old Jewish girl, as she and her family hurriedly leave their old lives behind to move to Switzerland, then Paris. Anna's tales of acclimatizing to life in a new country have stayed with me. Weirdly I have never read the two further books Kerr wrote to continue the story - that's something I've always planned to do as an adult but haven't yet got round to.

The Little House series - Laura Ingalls Wilder

In the early 1990s, Channel 4 re-ran the television series adapted from the Little House books. As soon as I could, I got my hands on them, and became totally obsessed with the Ingalls family. In my make-believe world, being a pioneer girl was one of my favourite things to 'pretend' - living through the 'long winter', exploring the prairie, and wondering what the hell 'molasses' and 'cornbread' were. I'm really keen to get my hands on The Wilder Life, in which Wendy McClure explores the Little House world.

The Ordinary Princess - M M Kaye

One of Princess Amethyst's fairy godmothers tells her "You shall be ordinary!" - and so instead of growing up like your typical fairytale princess, she ends up with straight mousy hair and freckles, prefers to be called Amy, and likes playing in the woods. When she finds out that her concerned parents are hatching a plan to get her married off to some Prince Charming character, she runs away. Amy soon realises that she needs to earn a living and gets a job as a kitchenmaid, where she meets a new friend. A nice twist on the whole 'princess' thing.

Honourable mentions for books I wanted to include: The Witches and Matilda - Roald Dahl; the Ramona Quimby books - Beverley Cleary; Witch Week - Diana Wynne Jones; The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis; The Railway Children - E. Nesbit; The Whitby Witches - Robin Jarvis; Emily of New Moon - L. M. Montgomery; Little Women - Louisa May Alcott.

The Fifties: a warning from history

I purchased The Fifties Mystique, Jessica Mann's new memoir-cum-warning, at the weekend after reading her piece for the Guardian entitled "What do you mean, the good old days?" The article was an intriguing read, discussing how Mann feels that today's women are wrong to wish for a return to the supposedly simpler or happier times before the massive societal changes that the 1960s and 1970s brought, and the new opportunities and choices they afforded women. Mann remembers this so-called golden age, and doesn't remember much of it with affection. It's less "the golden age" and more "The Fifties: a warning from history".

As the country has struggled with recession and assorted economic woes in recent years, the newspaper or magazine feature about the women who simply long for the "good old days" has become a bit of a cliche. The unhappy career woman who's sick of slogging her guts out at the office in return for little in the way of fulfillment. The woman who's found she can't "have it all". The middle class stay-at-home mother who has found new joy in making cushion covers, baking and wearing floral dresses. The women who idolise the 1950s as a time when they could "just be women". We keep hearing about this fad called "the new domesticity" and it's possible to track down a plethora of articles discussing whether it's fun, empowering, or a step in the wrong direction for women.

I suspect that much of this "new domesticity" fad has a great deal to do with trends in "women's interest" journalism and selling products to affluent families rather than anything else. It's about marketing a lifestyle over encouraging a genuine interest in what it involves, and I think it's also possibly on its way out as a fad, as people grow tired of ditsy print cake tins and Kirstie's Homemade Home and circular debates about cupcakes and what is and what isn't "feminist". 

But "new domesticity" aside, Mann says she is concerned that too many of today's women are wishing they lived in the past without realising what this truly would have meant for them, and for society in general. She quotes one woman as saying "I'd love to be a captive wife," one describing the post-war years as "prettier and nicer", and another, commenting on the unfairness of having to "bring home the bacon as well as cooking it". What she sets out to do through telling the story of her early life, is make people more aware of the limitations and frustrations of the era she describes in terms of its greyness, boredom, bigotry, hypocrisy and obsession with deference, while warning them not to be complacent about gender equality.

Several times, she refers to reading Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique as an important turning point for her, because it led her to realise that she was not alone. Mann had a happy marriage and loved her young children, but she was also bored and frustrated, and felt that there must be "something more" out there for her to get involved in and challenge herself. I've been reading The Feminine Mystique this year, and while I don't agree with all Friedan's assertions and see the limitations of the book, it's fascinating as a book that really hits you with just why the women's liberation movement was so angry. It's a bit fashionable these days to sneer and smirk at those ranting second wavers, and for the more conservative critics of feminism to disapprove of their unbecoming behaviour, their supposed desire to do away with "the family" and their imagined anti-children stance. Maybe fewer people would sneer if they read through some of the quotes I ended up highlighting as I read the book.

Mann is correct in saying that things today have changed to the extent that there are obviously a lot of things that many people take for granted, things that don't figure in their nostalgia for the post-war years. Ignorance and complete shame about sex and bodily functions would be one of them - from anatomical terminology to the female orgasm to contraception, Mann describes the weirdness of being totally in the dark about it all - from the antenatal classes that would start with a discussion on "How did baby get there?", to a problem page in a women's magazine that featured a letter from a mother of four asking how she could prevent having any more children. The printed answer was that she should send a stamped addressed envelope to the magazine to receive a personal response - the point being, of course, that it would have been beyond the pale for the magazine to print advice about contraception.

Another of these things that has changed beyond recognition is the position of women in public life and in the workplace. While it's obviously not ideal even now, we've moved beyond the "good old days" when women didn't have a place in public life, and a job was something you did to keep you occupied until you got married, and many jobs were simply out of bounds. Mann remembers applying for jobs and being told "Certainly not - we don't take women". She remembers never learning about the achievements of women in history at school, the uncomfortable attitudes that still faced women who went to university and took their studies seriously. The issue of women and education is something that Friedan looked at extensively in her book, and I don't think I'll forget how completely miserable I felt reading through the descriptions of accepted thinking on women and learning from the time.

Being "too bright" was supposedly a hindrance, as was wanting to "compete with men" in terms of having a job and being able to manage money. A girl who "got serious" about her studies would be "peculiar, unfeminine", while young women undergraduates told Friedan that it was most important to them to "graduate with a diamond ring on your finger" and to not be "too educated" because that wasn't what men wanted. Personal ambition for the middle class woman acceptably extended to a husband with a good job, a lovely house and a brood of beautiful children. There was little sense of sisterhood among most women because they were set up to be in constant competition for a man. It hadn't always been like this - both Friedan and Mann contrast the 1950s glorification of the housewife with the "new woman" heroines of magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, and focus on its relationship with consumerism and post-war backlash. The women of the 30s and 40s were described in terms of their dreams and ambitions. Romance was often a factor in their lives, but they were portrayed as being adventurous, being involved in a variety of jobs, being pioneers and standing up for their beliefs.

By the 1950s, dreams and ambitions were described in terms of the happiness brought by a new pair of curtains or a kitchen appliance; fulfillment was a compliment bestowed by a husband following the purchase of the latest shade of hair dye; feeling depressed was solved by deciding to have another baby. Ultimate joy was realising that you were best off in your role as the "little woman", who didn't tax herself by attempting to go back to college or understand the family finances. I think you'd be hard pressed to find many women today who could identify with any of that, despite the media's insistence on wheeling out panic pieces entitled "Do men REALLY want an intelligent woman?" or "Men: still threatened by successful women" every so often.

More alien to most women today (whether it's a feature of their own lives or not) would be the concept of having no personal ambition, no sense of self, no right to want time alone or time for personal development. Mann highlights the more open, confessional, talk-about-everything culture of the 21st century, and this is often particularly evident in the books, websites and self-help articles that encourage us to get the job we really want, achieve the goals we're really passionate about, take up new interests, have a career change, sort out our relationships, find ourselves. Mann remembers how talking about feelings, or expressing discontent with your lot in life was simply not done, particularly if that involved feeling miserable about being a housewife and mother. And gender equality was old hat, the preserve of terrifying yet slightly comical 1930s spinsters in tweed suits.

By the end of The Fifties Mystique, Mann has dealt engagingly with her own early years as an evacuee, schoolgirl, student, young wife, mother and finally, a woman looking for "more". She turns her efforts to encouraging today's women not to look at inequality and their dissatisfaction and see turning back the clock as the answer, but to look towards the problematic issues of the 21st century that are causing it instead. She mentions the stressful long hours culture of work today, the still-elusive dream of shared parenting and equality in relationships, the admonitions that we "can't have it all" that discourage women and fuel judgmental attitudes, the "old-fashioned sexism" of biological determinism (quoting Natasha Walter's excellent Living Dolls), the one-sided and exploitative approach to women's sexuality and appearance, and the fact that as during the 1950s, mothers are still to blame for everything.

"The history of women in the last one hundred and fifty years could be described as two steps forward, one step back, as when they took useful roles during the Second World War and were herded back to domesticity afterwards. Those who take hard-won rights for granted and have choices and chances once undreamed of, should recognise that the price of women's liberation is eternal vigilance," she writes.

In her article for the Guardian, Mann writes about her daughter's complaint that today, not working outside the home and enjoying motherhood is looked upon with scorn. What I see is the wider issue that most of our choices, as women, are looked upon with scorn. To work, or stay at home. Have a "career", or a "job". Have children when we're 20, or when we're 30. Send them to nursery while we work, or spend all our time with them. Pursue personal interests, or have none. Be open about enjoying sex, or be open about having issues with it. Society sets us up to judge the choices of others, creating "wars" and "catfights" rather than encouraging us to press for change. And it is this that often prevents us from seeing the bigger picture, so keen are we to assert the validity of whatever choices we've made.

This is a round-up

The Independent - Caring costs - but so do riots

"It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped."

Barbara Ehrenreich for CiF - How America criminalised poverty 
  
"In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalisation of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty. So concludes a recent study from the National Law Centre on Poverty and Homelessness, which finds that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more "neutral" infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container."

Ekklesia - Rich thugs, poor thugs  

"I oppose the corporations who have looted the treasury through their tax avoidance, the bankers who assaulted society through the financial crash and the arms dealers who profit from selling weapons to tyrants. I oppose Cameron, Clegg and their gang of thugs who are launching a daily assault on the poorest members of society with their vicious cuts to public services and the welfare state."

Rachel Held Evans - My story is more interesting than that  

"I am not a supporting character in a story that a man is writing. 
My story is more interesting than that. 

I am not defined by my sexuality, my past, my marital status, or my body. 
My story is more interesting than that. 

I have not cried into my pillow waiting for someone else to give me purpose and direction in life. 
My story is more interesting than that." 

Elizabeth Esther - How to live a good love story: a top-eleven list for my daughters 

"1. Avoid advice from middle-aged, unmarried men who have yet to live one successful love story. 
2. Be wary of the man who always refers to women as “girls.”..."

Another Angry Woman - When not reporting a rape seems like a sensible option  

"Layla Ibrahim was attacked and raped by two men. She was courageous enough to report this to the police, even though the police had a track record of repeatedly arresting her twelve year old brother and failing her sister after a beating, due to being a mixed-race family in a predominately white area. Despite overwhelming forensic evidence, the police chose not to believe Layla. She was sent to prison for three years."

The F Word - When we are very wrong  

"We must always respect the lived experience of those we have privilege over, and take note when they take the time to tell us about it. So if a black woman challenges something racist said by a white woman, or a disabled woman challenges a disablist attitude, or a working class woman challenges middle class privilege, it is time to listen."

Thought Catalog - Surviving an 80s childhood  

"If you survived a childhood in the 80s, you’re probably starting to feel a bit long in the tooth, even though you’re not really. You just can’t help feeling old when you’re at a bar and you meet someone who was born in 1993. If you survived a childhood in the 80s, you may, from time to time, wonder what growing up with an iPhone, Katy Perry and the Internet must be like, and how you survived without all the things that seem so intrinsic to your survival now." 

Thought Catalog - Surviving a 90s puberty

"You wish could still throw your phone against a wall and it wouldn’t break. You miss how everything was riddled with layers of meaning, and you probably have a secret yearning for the earnestness of the decade that defined your coming of age. You revel in having grown up through the 90s, because it’s sort of like being part of a secret, special club that no one understands except the ones that were there with you, and even still they don’t really understand you; because despite your cynicism, you still hold onto a scrap of that poor, tortured, isolated, misunderstood soul a puberty in the 90s gave you."

Cosmopolitics - Fundamentally fearful fashion


"What’s ‘fun’ or ‘fearless’ (hah!) about feeling unable to wear even a loose, opaque, drapy garment without an expensive, uncomfortable underdress to control your unacceptable (and entirely natural) curves? Curves which you’re elsewhere instructed to ‘flaunt’: wearing nothing but a bra (‘be sure to flaunt the cutest of bras!’ Let’s infantilise feminine sexuality!) and an unbuttoned cardi, apparently, is a good idea."

Nostalgia edition

I don't know about you but I spent a significant proportion of my primary school years reading the Little House on the Prairie books and watching the television adaptation of the series, which used to fit nicely into the slot between coming home from church and eating lunch on a Sunday, if I remember rightly. The obsession became so great that I even remember re-enacting favourite scenes in the playground at school - the typhus epidemic from the TV show and the 'Long Winter' among others in case you're wondering; I suppose it helped that, like most people, we had a friend who was not dissimilar to Nellie Oleson. I read and re-read those books so many times, propped up in bed with a cup of tea and biscuits, that I can still remember huge chunks of their storylines.

So you can imagine how much I loved reading Samira Ahmed's piece for the Guardian, entitled 'Spirit of the Frontier'. Ahmed writes about being a childhood Ingalls fan, re-enactions and the fascination with maple syrup poured onto pans of snow (or with whatever 'molasses' and 'cornbread' were, in my case). As an adult it's intrigued me how preserving the memory of Laura and her family has become such an industry, with books, a newsletter, museums, festivals and a musical - among other things. I mean, there's even a conference called 'Laurapalooza'. This year's extravaganza included presentations such as Looking for Laura: Place, Memory, and the Authentic “Little House” and What is at Stake in Staking a Claim?. I'm not even writing this in a mocking way; to be honest I'd definitely relish taking part in a panel discussion entitled Loving Laura in a Lindsay Lohan World.

Now a couple of years ago I discovered that Christian fundamentalists of a certain persuasion don't like the Little House series. This is bemusing, as it's basically got everything that they usually love - the 19th century, large families, agrarian living and plenty of learning of Bible verses and stories with a moral. With it having been years since I read the books (I still have them but they're packed away in a box) I couldn't remember what it could be that might have caused so much offence. The piece in the Guardian cleared that one up, or at least I'm 99% sure it has, anyway. Ahmed writes about Laura:

"She married in her black cashmere dress to save the trouble and expense of an elaborate wedding, and refused to say 'I obey' in her marriage vows, defying social convention. She wrote, 'I could not obey anybody against my better judgment'..."

Of course I had to go and check this out and there it is, for all to see within the pages of These Happy Golden Years:

"Then she summoned all her courage and said, 'Almanzo, I must ask you something. Do you want me to promise to obey you?' Soberly he answered, 'Of course not. I know it is in the wedding ceremony, but it is only something that women say. I never knew one that did it, nor any decent man that wanted her to.' "

" '... even if I tried, I do not think I could obey anybody against my better judgement.' 'I'd never expect you to,' he told her. 'And there will be no difficulty about the ceremony, because Reverend Brown does not believe in using the word 'obey'.' 'He doesn't! Are you sure?' Laura had never been so surprised and so relieved, all at once. 'He feels very strongly about it,' Almanzo said. 'I have heard him arguing for hours and quoting Bible texts against St. Paul, on that subject.' "

Clearly Reverend Brown knew his stuff! You learn something new every day.