In praise of difficult women

Mo Mowlam is one woman who deserves our sympathy. Work like a dog to bring peace to Ireland and what do you get? People calling you a bitch. Perhaps she hasn't behaved with perfect judgment every inch of the way since she took over the Northern Ireland portfolio a mere 12 months ago. But were her predecessors perfect? Yet Mowlam finds herself being pilloried for her use of bad language, and having to defend her reputation, yet again in an interview with UTV last week, as "difficult".

The former head of information in the Northern Ireland Office, Andy Wood, took up much space in an English Sunday paper recently bleating about Mowlam's foul tongue. Egad, man, I think there was maybe one other incident of this in history, but that was Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he was male, so it was all right.

But pity Mo: hard-working, straight-talking, committed, intelligent - where do they come from, this breed of English politician whose members are prepared to risk health, life and sanity in pursuit of a peaceful and honourable settlement in Ireland? The health problems Dr Mowlam has suffered would be sufficient to retire most people but she has soldiered on, reacting with dignity to the initial unkind stories about her weight gain, and later being unashamed (to the shock of the all too-easily shocked Mr Wood) to ditch the prickly and uncomfortable wig made necessary by chemotherapy as soon as she was out of the public gaze.

She probably can be difficult. Most people who have strong opinions, who want to get things absolutely right, and have plenty of arguments, can be regarded in this way. But to be a "difficult" woman is still something that society has more problems with than being an "assertive" man.

Dr Mowlam is probably not pretty or neurotic enough to be of much interest to Elizabeth Wurtzel, who has written a book, Bitch: In Praise Of Difficult Women. Wurtzel's difficult women are, principally, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaux Hemingway, Amy Fisher (more of her later) and Nicole Brown Simpson, the ex Mrs OJ (RIP). They are the stuff of glamour, if glamour gone wrong, and, in the case of Hillary Clinton, intellect gone to glamour gone wrong.

Wurtzel, some might remember - more likely from the topless picture which adorns the book than from her name - is the young American woman who wrote the best-selling Prozac Nation about her own and others' experiences with the 1990s antidepressant of choice. From drugs she has leaped to sex, with a discussion of women's role and how it is being rewritten, although not very much, at the end of the century.

And boy, can that Elizabeth Wurtzel run on. Set her off and it just washes over you - popular culture, tabloid scandal, what-happened-to-me, men are bastards and women are beautiful, the Old Testament, and among it all the occasional piece of hard common sense. Is she difficult to understand? Is she difficult to understand because of substance abuse? Or is she just plain difficult?

For a worthwhile reading of Wurtzel it would be handy to have been a regular subscriber to USA Today for the past decade, as much of her cultural references are the scandals for which tabloid media live and die. There is a lengthy, oft-interrupted, discussion of the case of the "Long Island Lolita," Amy Fisher, who in 1992 shot the wife of a man twice her age with whom she was having a tacky affair, leaving the woman permanently disabled and scarred. Young Amy (16 at the time) was no doubt behaving in a manner one could describe as "difficult", but I'm not quite sure why we should praise her. Even in the text Wurtzel only seems able to muster pity, and some rage at society which increasingly pressures young girls to be sexual beings but then heaps opprobrium and worse when, sexualised too early, they misbehave accordingly.

Much of her "argument" is diffuse and woolly. Although saying that she herself will always prefer the woman in high heels and lipstick to the one who rolls in wearing a shapeless tracksuit, she is keen to criticise the imposition of a beauty standard on women - the "keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved" criterion under which women have laboured into the semi-liberated 1990s. British comedian Alexei Sayle's recent TV skit in which he strapped two china shepherdess figurines to his chest and walked around London, rebuffing startled gazes with "Well, haven't you ever seen a pair of these before?" was a much more effective, and succinct, way of drawing attention to and debunking the "tits-on-legs" syndrome. In the epilogue to this tract on women who have been notorious, if not difficult, comes a rather sad lament for the difficulty of remaining single by choice. Wurtzel, who on the surface has so much going for her, confesses to being miserable at being single at the age of 30, and frightened that a decade later she will still be.

All through the book she has referred to The Rules, a popular handbook on "Tried and Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right". Tragically Wurtzel can't bring herself to dismiss this work, but seems a little in awe of it. Heavens, if a liberated, beautiful, sophisticated (not that she sounds it very often) American woman at the turn of the century is still mainly worried about getting A Man, what help is there for the rest of us? That slogan, used by cigarette companies, "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" rings pretty hollow when the social pressure to pair is still so strong.

Prozac Nation was an often-gripping, immediate book. Wurtzel is not so good when getting away from her own experience to the wider issue of being a woman in a world where gender prescriptions change but are ever more the same. But the problem with many contemporary diatribes about the condition of women - and the criticism from the opposite side, about how women have come so far forward that they are pushing men off the dancefloor - is that they have no sense of history. Women, in much of our world, had a role inextricably linked to their biology for hundreds, thousands, of years. It is only in this century that any change has started in this, partly because of the decimation of the male population caused by the two world wars and partly because of the spread of education. Access to information liberated millions of women.

Now they are no longer content with the "secondary" role of propagation. Their advances are small so far, for traditional attitudes run deep. A few small victories do not mean that women rule the world and men are to be cast down in despair. Women are rewriting their job description, and men, when they have gotten over the shock, will have to do the same thing.

Wurtzel and those like her need to realise they are in the middle of a process. Women's "Liberation" is not all over; it didn't happen, end, and then go away. We are in an ongoing dynamic state. It is difficult - for us all.

Bitch: In Praise Of Difficult Women, by Elizabeth Wurtzel, is published by Quartet Books, £12.50 in UK.