Three books on feminism: tackling abortion rights, toxic masculinity and being a ‘good woman’
Caitlin Moran gets serious in More Than A Woman, abortion provider Dr Meera Shah takes on the stigma surrounding the procedure in You’re the Only One I’ve Told, and with Untamed, Glennon Doyle details the deconstruction and reconstruction of her family
More Than A Woman by Caitlin Moran, Harper Perennial
If “feminism lite” describes Caitlin Moran’s past writing, she has become a light heavyweight with her follow-up to 2011’s How To Be A Woman. More Than A Woman continues in the author’s funny/insightful/chick-friendly style, with a gag here, a jab there but, this time, with radical suggestions to improve the lot of middle-aged women holding the fabric of society together “for no pay”.
Care work is a job, she points out, arguing that working parents should pay their non-working partners’ (tax-deductible) childcare fees so both remain financially independent. She also suggests creating a women’s union to facilitate collective action, tackling problems affecting not only women’s jobs but also their safety and sanity.
Chapters are named after the hours of the day, with noon being “The Hour of Housework”, skills for which, as a girl, she was persuaded to perfect to succeed. Without books or magazines for boys explaining the domestic world, she muses, it is invisible to them. Most thought-provoking is her 5pm chapter, which cites a comment her brother made about how everything these days is about women. “What about the men?”
It’s here that Moran takes on the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, explaining they are both shorthand for old ideas about what it is to be a man or woman. If gender clichés are causing you problems, she continues, “that’s gonna be down to the patriarchy, bro […] We didn’t write the Bible, or preach, or make laws, or decide society’s rules.”
