Despite the title and snarling lips on its cover, this book of essays by 26 feminist writers, is not a male-bashing anthology. Rather, it is a heartfelt exploration of the inner doubts, resentments, and debates that go on in the minds of women over the topics that matter most – work, marriage, motherhood, sex, and solitude.
Now that I’m finished reading it, I’m planning to hand it over to my husband so he can see what the enemy is up to. Being married to me - Mrs. Assertive - I’m sure none of it will come as a surprise to him.
The collection started out with a bang with the article: “Excuse Me While I Explode” by E. S. Maduro, the pen name for a writer and youth counselor.
I laughed as E.S. worked herself into a lather when she came home late to find her significant other playing around on the Internet instead of making an effort to start dinner.
Banging pots and pans until her boyfriend appeared in the kitchen and offered to make dinner, she hurled invective where she might otherwise have hurled a dinner plate.
“Well, I’m starving and exhausted and I don’t really feel like waiting around for you to finish your fucking Internet search so that I can eat something before nine o’clock.”
What woman doesn’t know THAT feeling? The few, the proud, the lucky?
I consider myself fortunate when I can put my feet up and have a cup of coffee made and handed to me, or when he lets his fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages and a steaming pizza arrives at our door almost the same time I do.
But it doesn’t drive me up a wall. I would suspect that a lot of women are more like me – they simply refuse to try to be everything to everybody and they don’t sweat it if perhaps only 1 or 2 in 7 dinners takes more than 30 minutes to prepare.
I can recall as a child growing up in the age of Gloria Steinem that I always said I would never marry. Before somebody explained the birds and the bees, I always thought that marriage “automatically” led to children and children automatically led to a lifetime of never doing anything fun or exciting again.
These impressions were strengthened by the television shows of my day. The kids were off getting into mayhem and the dads and uncles got to do all the exciting stuff, like drive the spaceship, go camping, ride the horses. The mom characters just stood around in the background, shaking their heads, or being the supportive character to the dashing dad. 1960s television – and the lifestyles that our moms lived ( in those days 2/3 of moms stayed home) were enough to fan the flames of feminism into a mighty conflagration for girls of my era.
Then the 1970s ushered in the empowered woman – supposedly represented by women like Gloria Stivic, who put her bigoted dad in his place weekly, but who ruined her image for me every time she sat on Michael’s lap and said something dumb like “Oh, Michael.”
I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who said what every man wants is a warm, loving, sexy, smart, wonderful woman who will leave him the hell alone.
That’s not far from what I want a lot of the time. We both appreciate the massive amount of space we give each other and have to remember at times to interact occasionally – more or less because we feel it’s what normal married people do.
A prevailing theme through “The Bitch in the House” is the exhaustion many women feel balancing their many responsibilities. But these women acknowledge in the end that they wouldn’t want a life without the mental stimulation of their fulfilling careers. Some would feel equally empty without a loving partner and children to come home to.
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