Review | The 1990s, decade that failed women – ask Monica Lewinsky – and why they are still paying for lost promise of ‘girl power’
- In new book, author Allison Yarrow considers how society reduced – or ‘bitchified’ – women, and how, the more they assumed power, the faster it was taken away
- This decade of Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, Courtney Love and Roseanne Barr was one hostile to women who defied social expectations
90s Bitch: Media, Culture and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, by Allison Yarrow, Harper Perennial, 4 stars
By Ashley Murray
As a girl in the 1990s, I idolised the Spice Girls, spent my birthday and Christmas money on “girl power” notebooks and scrunchies, and saw many a Victoria’s Secret catalogue arrive in the postbox. I was awash in a hot pink, midriff-bearing, MTV culture that was rewarding and punishing women in weird ways, to say the least.
Punchlines about battered women who fought back? I thought it was normal. My middle school history teacher talking about the president and his intern in the Oval Office? That too. The decade taught me that I had to look good, like boys (but not too much), buy stuff and, most of all, use the women that society praised as a yardstick for my own development while making sure I did not become like the ones we were all collectively judging.
Those lessons, akin to walking a tightrope and not dropping the juggling pins, are the subject of journalist Allison Yarrow’s 90s Bitch: Media, Culture and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality.