Cailtin Moran - 'How to be a Woman'

Sometimes the text is impossible to distinguish from the cultural artefact. On the one hand, we have an engaging memoir, the story of a woman rising from an impoverished Black Country background, through the pages of the Melody Maker and a boho London squat, to the rarefied surroundings of the Times arts pages. On the other, you have a mess of hype portraying the author as a twenty-first century Greer, dispensing her strident feminist philosophy from a metropolitan barstool. This has given ‘How to be a Woman’ far greater significance than it may otherwise have achieved, and yet it is also its greatest drawback.

‘How to be a Woman’ veers from story-telling to sermonising. The first two chapters deal with Moran’s coming of age; later, she will devote consecutive chapters to why women should and should not have children. The style is anecdotal throughout. When discussing her own life, the style draws the reader in; when the message veers towards the philosophical, the same tone undermines her arguments. The thought that ‘you really haven’t done much research, have you?’ pops up in the back of the reader’s mind. And this is a shame, as much of what she says makes sense.

It is easy to caricature Caitlin Moran. Like Christopher Hitchens, she feels the need to drop reminders of her louche lifestyle into the text at every opportunity. At points, you can virtually smell the red wine and stale cigarettes emanating from the page. There is an air of ‘first world problems’ to the book; for example, we have half a chapter on why it is okay for a feminist to hire a cleaner, compared to one paragraph on the burka. But then she can change tone dramatically and write with real effect; her description of childbirth packs huge emotional impact, and can resonate with anyone who has had a similar experience.

The whole book is a high wire act. As I have said, a lot of issues could be classified as first world problems, but at her best, Moran can drag wider implications from personal anecdotes, using her life as a microcosm and exploring the wider societal impact of individual choices. She is funny without being flippant, and generally manages to talk about her own life without coming across as a liberal arts London elitist. Her position could broadly be summed up as ‘libertarian feminism’, and she makes a great go at having her cake and eating it too.

There are plenty of faults with her arguments. For example, I am deeply uncomfortable with the fag-hag feminism of the middle chapters, where she equates women and gay men as being united in oppression. Many gay men will object to being regarded as essentially feminine, whilst I’m not aware of any significant pay gap between hetero and homo males. There’s also a totally uncynical take on Lady Gaga, which seems to get disproportionate space, especially when previous chapters have discussed the negative impact of fashion on women’s choices.

It would be unfair to say that Moran takes on easy targets, though. It is important for a woman with a mainstream voice to focus their ire on raunch culture, to damn the proliferation of strip clubs and the all-reaching monoculture of pornography. Time after time, readers will find themselves agreeing, and may well be inspired by the strident nature of Moran’s arguments. There are few times when you think ‘she’s got that totally wrong’. The problems come with the presentation. This is not ‘The Female Eunuch’. It’s not even ‘Living Dolls’, as far as a manifesto goes. Unlike Natasha Walter, for example, Moran doesn’t interview women who have been affected by the issues she explores, and she very rarely seems to take recourse to actual research. This is very much feminism through the filter of personal experience. As a memoir, this doesn’t diminish its strength at all. It’s just that this isn’t how the book is sold.

In terms of a broader reading, How to be a Woman fits in with a school of thought which is beginning to move feminism away from academic waves towards an analysis of individual choices. As in Living Dolls, we see how women have been sold short by the free market concept of freedom. For example, she presents a strong argument on the way in which fashion has sold women a proscribed and limiting version of freedom, akin to the post-Soviet assurance that Eastern Europeans were now free to buy as many pairs of Levi’s as they liked, if they could afford them. As in the former Soviet world, the freedom to purchase the consumer dream is beyond the majority, whose lives are as circumscribed as ever. But the book works best on a personal level. It is funny, touching, moving, hugely readable, accessible to both sexes, and deserves a large audience. Just don’t expect a lifestyle guide.