Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That are Used to Undermine Women

Journalist Skurnick (That Should Be a Word) curates a sharp-witted and intimate essay collection examining how language is used to disempower women. Each piece addresses a single word, as writers including Laura Lippman, Dahlia Lithwick, Rebecca Traister, and Meg Wolitzer take on ostensibly admiring adjectives (nurturing, sweet), outright slurs (shrill; crazy), and veiled insults (ambitious; feisty). Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch’s “Professional” explores how women are viewed in the workplace, while essays by South African writer Lihle Z. Mtshali and Asian-American memoirist Beth Bich Minh Nguyen address the cultural stereotypes behind yellow-bone and small, respectively. The collection’s confessional nature—feminist critic Kate Harding wrestles with identifying as a victim after a sexual assault, and novelist Jennifer Weiner admits that being called fat has the power to “shut me up and shut me down”—packs a punch but leaves little room for charting concrete solutions. The diverse contributor list offers new perspectives on mainstream, white-dominant culture, even though the essays largely share a similar and somewhat traditional notion of what femininity connotes. Nevertheless, this eloquent inquiry into how language enshrines gender stereotypes will resonate with feminists, wordsmiths, and fans of the personal essay. [em]Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency. (Mar.) [/em]