Women

subject – the devaluing of older women,’ wrote Susan Flockhart in the Herald (Scotland).

‘Yet, aside from a few statistics on the comparative earning power of older males and females and the shortage of middle-aged women in the public eye, Smith presents little scientific evidence to support her thesis, favouring instead a series of anecdotal comments gleaned from social media posts or classic texts by feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin and Naomi Wolf, as well as conversations with contemporary women. All the same, Hags is a cracking read. Bubbling with wicked wit, it is sure to raise hackles as well as cackles.’

Friendaholic Confessions Of A Friendship Addict Elizabeth Day

Fourth Estate, 416pp, £16.99 cost, that having too many can have a negative impact on one’s mental health. The perfect number is apparently four to five, and a bit of ‘natural pruning’ is therefore ‘healthy and necessary’, wrote Hughes, going on to describe how Day even recommends sending potential friends ‘the equivalent of a pre-nup before agreeing to a first coffee date’. Subotin concluded that Day’s book is ‘perceptive, compassionate and filled with relatable insights’, while Stroud carped that the ‘most galling thing about it was the banality of its advice’. She couldn’t think of ‘any reader who would be glad to wade through 400 pages of Day’s anecdotes to be told that’, surprise, surprise, it is “quality not quantity” that counts.’

Smith has in her sights ‘those people who, even as they loudly proclaim their righteous politics, are apt to label older women as Karens and Terfs’, wrote Rachel Cooke in the Guardian, people ‘who either roundly ignore or demonise the views of such women, however wellfounded or based in experience’.

Hags ‘brilliantly and unrelentingly exposes all the weasel ways in which ageist misogyny enables regressive beliefs to be recast as progressive. In my eyes, it’s a future classic, up there with Joan Smith’s Misogynies and Susan Faludi’s Backlash.’

Smith’s ‘eloquent, clever and devastating’ book describes the ‘strange modern witch-hunt’ against older women, wrote Janice Turner in the Times, but also ‘traces the hatred and fear of the middle-aged woman back through history’. Turner praised its ‘lively erudition. Smith, she said, ‘draws on the second-wave feminists I read as a student: Dale Spender, Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, Sheila Jeffreys and dear problematic Germaine Greer. All have fallen from fashion for no good reason except that, while every other social justice movement cherishes its elders, feminism cries wrong-think and burns them as hags. Smith deftly reconnects these snipped intellectual threads.’

This book offers ‘a spirited and enjoyable reworking of a familiar

‘Until recently Elizabeth Day wasn’t simply passionate about friendship, she was addicted to it,’ wrote Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, confessing that she too was a ‘recovering friendaholic’, and therefore found it ‘essential reading’. Charlotte Stroud in the New Statesman pointed out that ‘emotional exhibitionism is now a lucrative business’, and that the book is an offshoot of Day’s podcast series Best Friend Therapy. That it will be a commercial success is a ‘foregone conclusion’ as ‘Many people will find in Day’s relatable prose an everywoman figure who, like them, has survived the harrowing experience of being ghosted by a friend’.

Stroud confessed that it was a book she ‘loved to hate’. For much of it, she felt ‘like [she] was rubbernecking a car crash, unable to tear [her] head away from the scene of the disaster’. Friendaholic ‘finally made me understand the Cult of Day’, wrote Charlotte Ivers in the Sunday Times ‘To see the level of scrutiny usually reserved for romance applied to friendship feels striking and almost disorientating.’

Lilly Subotin in the Daily Mail related how Day, who had been bullied at school, realised as she got older that she was ‘great at making friends’ and ‘set out to collect as many as possible’. But she found, to her

Feminism Against Progress

MARY HARRINGTON

Forum, 224pp, £16.99

Have women been sold a pup in the name of ‘progress’? Mary Harrington thinks so. According to Janice Turner in the New Statesman: ‘Her central thesis is that the liberal shibboleth of humanity being on a perpetual up-escalator towards progress – or at least “progress” that benefits women – is a lie. In pursuing a freedom from our embodied selves and in “the replacement of relationships by individual desires” we end up broken into constituent parts: “Meat Lego”, which capitalism surges in to exploit. The results are commercial surrogacy, porn culture, soulless hook-ups, plastic surgery and gender reassignment treatments, a low birth rate, and a universal, atomised loneliness.’

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph was among many who drew a line at the book’s solutions (‘I threw the book against the wall’) but loved the exhilarating ride of ideas. ‘This is one of most challenging, inspiring and often irritating books I have read in a long time. Harrington is so annoyingly brilliant; she makes you rethink everything. That is progress all right.’

Charles Haywood in the journal IM-1776 was another fan. ‘Harrington’s aim is not mere complaint. Rather it is to tell us that both women and men can truly flourish, even in this age of liquid modernity, by building a new system — one informed by the wisdom, not of the 1950s, but of the pre-industrial age.’

In Quillette, Marilyn Simon was less keen on the return to thepast. ‘Harrington’s solution moves too far in the other direction, becoming regressive rather than reactionary. Her call to rewild women’s bodies is a pill I can try to swallow, but it only goes half of the way down.’

The book even provoked a heated discussion on Mumsnet with one poster stating: ‘It’s a critique of capitalism as much as one of gender politics, and how the transactional values of capitalism and the market have infiltrated our personal, emotional, sexual and familial lives. I’m finding it very interesting.’

Women Without Kids Ruby Warrington

Orion Spring, 240pp, £16.99)

Ruby Warrington, now 47 and a former editor of the Sunday Times style supplement, now lives in Miami. According to Kate Ng in the Independent, both Warrington and her husband ‘identify as being “childless by choice”.’

Warrington’s book is about and for people (mostly women) like her: who have simply decided not to have children. Ashley Holstrom of Foreword Reviews describes the book as a ‘feminist exploration of being child-free, treating that decision

Maternity is not for every woman as one of empowerment.’

As Warrington herself put it: ‘I was also at a stage in my personal development where I felt ready to unpack my deeper “whys” for not having children—the better to understand myself and my path.

‘Zooming out, I realised that these “whys” were inextricably bound to the society, culture, economy, and environment that had been the backdrop to my becoming a woman, and that these same factors had influenced all of our decisions about our procreative potential, leading to the drop off in the birth rate globally.

‘As such, the project took a more anthropological turn, the question I seek to answer with the book going from: “why did I not want kids?” to “why have WE stopped having kids?”’

Marianne Power reviewed it in the Times and concluded: ‘At times, the writing felt cumbersome and I couldn’t quite follow the connections she was making, but ultimately it didn’t matter. By the end, I felt informed and blessed to live in a time when women can shape their lives in a way that my mother’s and her mother’s generations could not.’

Good Girls A Story And Study Of Anorexia

Hadley Freeman

4th Estate, 288pp, £16.99

Hadley Freeman’s unflinching account of the two decades in which her life was dominated by anorexia nervosa is, wrote Sarah Haight in the

TLS,‘wry and diligently researched’, a harrowing exploration of why a disease so ‘medically and culturally visible should have such a poor rate of recovery and be so persistently misunderstood.’

In the Guardian, Kate Kellaway found a ‘curious sense of separation between the suffering younger self and the aloof older self, but Freeman is a brave, illuminating and meticulous reporter and uses her experience wisely.’

Suzanne Sullivan in the Times, praised a ‘frank and insightful’ depiction of a disease that for Freeman came from a ‘need to be perfect and a horror of growing up. It is an erasure of all womanly parts.’

A need to be perfect and a horror of growing up

Several reviewers concluded that Freeman deeply explores questions but does not (cannot?) answer them. ‘The clues she brings to the surface are prefaced by disclaimers,’ observed Haight. Emma Seaber in the Telegraph was more critical. ‘Freeman follows a well-trodden path to an intellectual dead-end. The book contains numerous errors. Some are trivial; others gross distortions.

At one point, Freeman claims that 10 per cent of anorexics and 45 per cent of bulimics are alcoholics, citing a research paper that does not support this.’

But Seaber conceded that the book captures the ‘existential wasteland’ of life with anorexia.