There was a time when the title of this book felt like a promise of liberation. I even had a T-shirt with those words on it, which I wore with pride.
Later, during an afternoon in an Italian bookstore, I came across this volume and became convinced that I simply had to read it.
The writing is fluid and simple, yet it left me with a sense of incompleteness. The book loses itself in a list of precepts, a series of “do this” and “behave like that”, without a trace of a guide that teaches us, first and foremost, how to listen to ourselves and decipher our own inner world.
It is on the anger, however, that I have the most to say. The author seems to want to push women toward an aggressiveness that I find sterile. She suggests we should not fear it, that we should manifest it openly and not dread making a “scene”. I disagree: a scene is a surrender. It is the moment when pain deforms into a spectacle that others, above all men, observe with annoyance, labelling us as “pests” or attention-seekers. Anger is an emotion that burns and, if not observed with the necessary detachment, ends up consuming the person feeling it. Our right to equality remains absolute, even if we don’t growl.
What left me with a bitter aftertaste is the excessive focus on the male figure. Everything seems to be constructed as a reaction to men, either to reach them or to fight them, using the man as the only possible point of comparison. But a woman does not need to measure herself against a man to find her own value. Being a woman is a way of being in the world that is already, in itself, whole.
As a phrase I read at the National Gallery here in Edinburgh says: “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition”.
Ultimately, in my view, it remains too general a book, perhaps suited for those taking their first uncertain steps out of their shell, needing encouragement after realising how much a patriarchal society has damaged women.
However, this is not a book for the woman who feels no need to prove her worth, least of all to men. It is not a book for those who have already understood that it is not comparison with men that makes us feel beautiful, complete, or sufficient, but rather the awareness, residing exclusively within ourselves, of our existence as inherently worthy of rights, regardless of men.
Author: Ute Ehrhardt
Year First Published: 1994