Freud famously asked what women want, and we still haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer. After the first wave of feminism, the female sex seems more miserable and more confused than ever. Should we have fabulous careers, or stay at home with our children? Should we embrace the signs of ageing, or shell out for facelifts and boob-jobs? Should we nobly renounce sleeping with other people’s husbands, or resign ourselves to no sex at all after the age of 45? It’s a jungle out there, but some mighty alpha females are at hand to guide us through it.
Caitlin Flanagan, a writer at The New Yorker, caused a stir in America with her essays on family life in To Hell with All That (Virago £12.99). The subtitle, Loving and Loathing Your Inner Housewife, gives a clue to the inflammatory nature of some of her opinions. Those of us who do not actually possess an inner housewife, never mind loving her, might well be alarmed.
All that Flanagan seems to be doing, however, is looking back at the 1950s and 1960s and wondering if we threw the baby out with the bathwater. Let us face the fact, she says, women are hardwired to cook, clean, and like gingham. No matter how much we achieve in our careers, we hanker for the traditional lifestyle of the surrendered female. We get all starry-eyed about our mothers’ lives, seeing only the becoming frilly aprons and overlooking the coal dust. This is the reason, Flanagan says, for the rise of pinny-porn, most notoriously in the work of the American superstar Martha Stewart. Suddenly, millions of us are “obsessed with a drag-queen ethos, in which femininity must be communicated by exaggeration and cartoon”. Flanagan suggests we might be happier if we gave in to our nurturing impulses. Through the nostalgia, however, she keeps a strong sense of reality. “For those who may be distressed by the ideas herein,” she says sadly, “there is infinite solace: it is only a book about a ruined city.”
Fay Weldon is picking about in the same ruins — some of the opinions expressed in What Makes Women Happy (Fourth Estate £12.99) have an unashamedly retro tinge. Don’t moan to her about guilt. “If you don’t want to feel guilty,” she says, “don’t do it. If you want to be happy, try being good.” No, seriously, what does make women happy? “Nothing, not for more than 10 minutes at a time.” This is a brimstone-and-treacle view of life: wise, witty, barbed and slightly barmy. It is interspersed with “parables” about various aspects of modern behaviour, but these are not nearly as entertaining as the philosophy. Weldon seems to have matured into a strict yet humorous Mother Superior, telling us to Climb Every Mountain and to say our prayers. Yes, you heard. We don’t have to believe in anything, but if we try to pray, “angels will attend us, and we can take pleasure from the gentle air of their beating wings”. Who’d have thought it? Move over Patience Strong.
Religion, like gardening and lumbago, may be something that comes with age. Joan Bakewell’s The View from Here (Atlantic £16.99) is about turning 70 and realising you are finally old. “To most people, old age is a bad smell, a nasty place,” she says. But it doesn’t have to be like that. More and more people in their seventies are hale and hearty, with decent disposable incomes. “
I’m not saying old age is a bed of roses. But now we’re all going there, let’s fix it so we enjoy the journey.” Bakewell’s philosophy is gentle, but by no means feeble — she thinks we should be the kind of oldies who go on long walks and learn Italian. It sounds dreadful, but perhaps when the hormones have receded we will all enjoy such harmless pootling.
Arianna Huffington takes an altogether tougher view of female existence, as you might expect from the woman once known as “the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus”. On Becoming Fearless (Little, Brown £16.99) is a typically American self-help manual full of upbeat maxims and positive soundbites. Women allow their lives to be governed by all kinds of fears, most of them without foundation. Her research is excellent, her quotations and statistics cleverly deployed. But I would have liked more asides, such as this on Hugh Hefner: “You wonder if with all that Viagra coursing through his system he’s got enough blood circulating above his waist.” When her claws are out, La Huffington is a fine role model.
You needn’t bother with the stuff about going on long walks “toting along backpacks filled with healthy food”. People who live in the country often have this obsession — but they are generally ex-townies who think this is what you do in the sticks. Moving to the country is such a classic female fantasy (the Aga, the dogs, the apple-cheeked kids) that even I have it sometimes. But don’t give in. Read Judy Rumbold’s Reasons Not to Move to the Country (Short Books £12.99). It is a wonderfully forthright account of swapping a trendy urban house for a picturesque hovel in a sea of mud. Rumbold is to mud what Dickens is to fog: “thin, liquid mud; thick, deep,brown, viscous mud; mud like clay or, in best Starbuck’s tradition, mud with frothy scum on top”. She found the charms of the country eventually, but not before she had come to terms with the bitter fact that it was nothing like the Boden catalogue. And that seems to be the message lurking in all these books — accept reality, however unappetising, because you’ll only be truly happy when you do.
All available at Sunday Times Books First prices (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
