Will the ‘bunny boiler’ tag continue to haunt single women?
From the femme fatale of noir to Fatal Attraction’s Alex, the unattached female has often been feared and scorned
The enduring miracle of human birth – a history
Everyone who has ever lived came out of a woman’s body – a fact even more extraordinary when narrow hips and large skulls mean the human form is hardly precision engineered for such a feat
What was millennial girl power really about?
In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘empowerment’ was a girl’s watchword. But she was empowered primarily to be pleasing to men and, above all, never grow up
Urban gothic: I Want to Go Home, But I’m Already There, by Roisin Lanigan, reviewed
A rented London flat starts to exude hostility and malevolence – or could our impressionable heroine just be imagining it?
How the war on Roe was won
When did it become certain that American women’s abortion rights would fall? The Supreme Court’s ruling that ‘Roe was egregiously…
Be careful what you wish for
The problem for feminism is men. Not, specifically, in the sense that men are the source of women’s problems, although…
Atwood adrift
Margaret Atwood is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. This is a very boring way to…
A right old song and dance
All the questions around Britney Spears can be condensed into this one: who should we blame? For a long time,…
Twin rebels
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
Angry about everything
Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was…
A man with a plan for Manhattan
What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…
More magical thinking
Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and…
Seeing anew
The title of this collection of journalism is a problem. Not the Kant’s Little Prussian Head bit, which, though opaque,…
Brains and beauty
There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless…
The great juggling act
The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that:…
A stranger to herself
How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this…
Difficult women
The director of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, talks to Sarah Ditum about her new biopic of Marie Curie, exile from Iran and her fears for the future of democracy
Patti Smith had a bad year in 2016
In the Chinese zodiac, 2016 was the year of the monkey, a trickster year full of the unhappy and the…
A New York state of mind – Doxology reviewed
Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a…
The trail-blazing women writers of the 1960s were quite different from the male Angries
The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and…
Why are we so obsessed with Jack the Ripper, but care so little for his victims?
Before she was the subject of true-crime mythologising, Catherine Eddowes made her living from it, selling ballads based on real-life…
Caryl Phillips’s new novel manages to make Jean Rhys boring!
The problem with writing about writers — and a particular blight on the current vogue for autofiction — is that…
Kitty Marion: too radical even for the suffragettes
The suffragettes are largely remembered not as firestarters and bombers but as pale martyrs to patriarchy. The hunger artists refusing…
Who is Sylvia – what is she?
In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother…
Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip?
Sarah Ditum 6 September 2025 9:00 am
When oversharing – and even inventing – stories of personal trauma is considered ‘validating’ and laudable we are in real trouble, says Darren McGarvey, speaking from experience