Caitlin Moran in the Guardian today

[RoyalCorgi]

I promise I'm not trying to start another argument about Caitlin Moran. It's just that I want to record my annoyance and despair at her rewriting of history. Apparently in the 1980s there were no female role models for girls apart from Mrs Thatcher and Miss Piggy. And no one ever wrote about female masturbation until Caitlin wrote about it in her 2011 book. Plus more in that vein.

I remember back in the 80s reading Dale Spender's marvellous book "Women of ideas and what men have done to them" where she painstakingly writes in detail at the lives of amazing historical women - scientists, philosophers, writers, campaigners - and looks at how they were simply forgotten about and written out of history. Thanks in part to Spender's work, female historians went about the business of researching more forgotten women and writing their biographies.

Now it seems as if all the work of feminists in the 70s and 80s on, for example, female sexuality or in political campaigning has just been forgotten about. Feminists hadn't achieved anything of note until Caitlin Moran wrote How to be a Woman.

Once again, women's achievements are being written out of history.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/29/caitlin-moran-reread-how-to-be-a-woman-marvel-what-i-got-wrong

She's tedious. She's never said anything 'new' but seems to think she's soooo revolutionary. She always looks like she needs a good wash.

Oh YES - Katherine Hamnett!!

Didn't Shere Hite write about it too?

Yes. I was just going to mention Shere Hite - she seems to have been forgotten by most people, but she did some pioneering work on female sexuality. The Hite Report was published in 1976.

For those not familiar with her work, there's a short piece here:

www.bustle.com/p/5-ways-the-hite-report-a-study-on-female-sexuality-is-still-relevant-to-our-sex-lives-today-9688538

It's about time Caitlin Moran stopped calling herself a feminist really.
She's a sporadically funny writer and I have enjoyed some of her books, but she really doesn't speak for anyone other than herself.

Err, in the mid 80s Caitlyn would have been 10 - I was a little older. How many of these women would your average 10-15 year old girl be aware of? Heck, feminists were still women libbers back then. As a slightly younger child Miss Piggy was my only "kick ass, take no shit" female role model.

I'm only a few years older than Moran. I had read the Vindicaton of the Rights of Woman which was written 200 years-ish before i was born. She's a complete fraud and deserves all the shit she gets thrown at her for claiming to have invented feminism

I did raise my eyebrows at the bit where she claims there aren't any stories about the experiences of women aged over 40. How about Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Joanna Trollope, Beryl Bainbridge, Ann Patchett, Iris Murdoch, Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Strout, Virginia Woolf? Chopped liver?

Absolutely. Couldn't believe that article. She is a brand really. Acts like she invented feminism. Eat yer heart out Mary Wollstonecraft.

(not an exclusive list, clearly, but hopefully my point is made)

@MaggieAndHopey

I did raise my eyebrows at the bit where she claims there aren't any stories about the experiences of women aged over 40. How about Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Joanna Trollope, Beryl Bainbridge, Ann Patchett, Iris Murdoch, Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Strout, Virginia Woolf? Chopped liver?

I adore Anne Tyler. There are very few writers whose characters seem like real people and just jump off the page. She is one of them.

I've been watching repeats of The Gentle Touch with Jill Gascgoine and am surprised how feminist it is. She really kicks back at sexism.

Annie Lennox, Alison Moyet, Muriel Gray, Sandi Toksvig (presented the ITV Saturday morning TV show number 73 back in the 80s)

Politically Barbara Castle (more 70's than 80's, but still), Shirley Williams. (I'm sure there are more, but these were just people I was aware of as a child in a not very political family)

Oh YES! I'll play too. Another big thumbs up for Nancy Friday, and I don't think there's been another politician since Shirley Williams who I've wholeheartedly admired.

And Stevie Nicks! Don't ever forget Stevie Nicks.

As for Moran, tongue-in-cheek her writing may be but even the title How to be a Woman makes my hackles rise. I am not 'acting out' or in the process of 'becoming' a woman. I just am one.

Sister, you ain't no feminist ...

I remember the 1980s. Role models included Barbara Castle, Shirley Williams, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman, Martina Navratilova, Sally Gunnell, ...
Books I read included The Female Eunuch, Fear of Flying, ...

@MaggieAndHopey

I did raise my eyebrows at the bit where she claims there aren't any stories about the experiences of women aged over 40. How about Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Joanna Trollope, Beryl Bainbridge, Ann Patchett, Iris Murdoch, Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Strout, Virginia Woolf? Chopped liver?

I missed that bit. I expect my eyes had glazed over by that point.

Great post by Absinthe upthread. CM is earning a living as a media-friendly ‘feminist’ in quote marks. Fair enough. It’s OK. Music journalism is absolutely fucked now so I absolutely don’t blame her for any of that.

But thank fuck we also have actual feminists in the public eye- like JK Rowling, out there writing and informing and leading public debate. I am so bloody grateful for her.

So as piss-boilingly daft as Moran’s claims are, the feminist historians of the future really won’t be interested in what she’s written about herself. Unless they’re studying ‘acceptable feminism in the UK media in 2020’ in which case, great. Because that will be juxtaposed with the news coverage of the unacceptable, controversial, ‘problematic’ feminism of JKR. Globally newsworthy because she has dared to talk in a serious, non-cute, #thisisnotadrill way about today’s actually female experience, modern misogyny, threats to freedom of female speech, threats to single sex spaces and to the safeguarding of children, which is splashed some of the same newspapers that CM writes for. Proving the point really..

@MaggieAndHopey

I did raise my eyebrows at the bit where she claims there aren't any stories about the experiences of women aged over 40. How about Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Joanna Trollope, Beryl Bainbridge, Ann Patchett, Iris Murdoch, Joan Didion, Edith Wharton, Maeve Binchy, Elizabeth Strout, Virginia Woolf? Chopped liver?

Give her ten years or so and she'll burst upon us with the taboo, never-before-mentioned-in-print topic of The Menopause.

That's the daftness isn't it?

She could write all she has written and be precisely what her target audience wants. But she chooses to ruin it with all that "Ooh, I am unique in writing this" twaddle.

Re: authors who write about older women: Anita Brookner, Barbara Pym, Penelope Lively, Elizabeth Gaskell.

But I think she makes a fair point here:

"To be a capable, middle-aged woman, essentially holding society together in the unpaid care you give to those around you is still, in this century, an invisible task"

She makes lots of good points, often making them well. She does serve her audience well.

It's the silly self aggrandisement that grates!

@Deliriumoftheendless

And the Greenham Common women. Just a figment of my imagination?

Gonna send it to my ex. She was a stalwart at Greenham. Luckily her blood pressure is on the low side .

Deeply annoying ever since she was a precocious brat in her teens.

Agree with the PP who have mentioned Cosmopolitan already, and Helen Gurley Brown who wrote a book about Having it All in the early eighties.

I have never read any of CM's stuff, which would be a good thing by the crap she's written in that article. Amazingly I'm older than her and have read books that she says apparently didn't exist in my time. Pity she couldn't recognise and appreciate those who have gone before her.

My friend spent weeks at Greenham common. I tied down with children read "The Womens Room" published 1977 three times. OH got a real life lesson from me when I had absorbed that.

www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0057MLQ4K/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

Patti Smith, Nina Hagen, The Slits, Poly Styrene, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Marianne Faithful...

How about Sally Ride? Martina Navratilova?

I'm near ages with CM. There's no fucking way that she wouldn't have been aware of, if not read, The Female Eunuch.

Yes, the late 80s/90s were a time when a lot of young women decided that feminism was a dirty word and the second wavers were all braless, hairy man-haters, but they were still aware that feminism and feminists were a thing that existed.

And yes, Judy Blume, Nancy Friday, Cosmopolitan and endless smutty bits in popular women's fiction were doing a fine job of demystifying masterbation.