Spanning the street, the bedroom, the voting booth, and the workplace, these simple words have huge stories behind them - stories it's time to examine, re-imagine, and change. And in Pretty Bitches, Skurnick has rounded up a group of powerhouse women writers to take on the hidden meanings of these words, and how they can limit our worlds - or liberate them.įrom Laura Lipmann and Meg Wolizer to Jennifer Weiner and Rebecca Traister, each writer uses her word as a vehicle for memoir, cultural commentary, critique, or all three. No one knows this better than Lizzie Skurnick, writer of the New York Times' column 'That Should be A Word'and a veritable queen of cultural coinage. Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That are Used to Undermine Women.

'Effortless,' 'Sassy,' 'Ambitious,' 'Aggressive': What subtle digs and sneaky implications are conveyed when women are described with words like these? Words are made into weapons, warnings, praise, and blame, bearing an outsized influence on women's lives - to say nothing of our moods. They wound, they inflate, they define, they demean. She is the author of That Should Be a Word: A Much-Needed Lexicon for the Modern Era, and Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We’ll Never Stop Reading. Spanning the street, the bedroom, the voting booth, and the workplace, these simple words have huge stories behind them - stories it's time to examine, re-imagine, and change.These empowering essays from leading women writers examine the power of the gendered language that is used to diminish women - and imagine a more liberated world. Lizzie Skurnick’s most recent work is Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That Are Used to Undermine Women. And in Pretty Bitches, Skurnick has rounded up a group of powerhouse women writers to take on the hidden meanings of these words, and how they can limit our worlds - or liberate them.įrom Laura Lipmann and Meg Wolizer to Jennifer Weiner and Rebecca Traister, each writer uses her word as a vehicle for memoir, cultural commentary, critique, or all three. This was a concentration camp, not a hospital. than Lizzie Skurnick, writer of the New York Times column That Should be A Word and a veritable queen of cultural coinage. No one knows this better than Lizzie Skurnick, writer of the New York Times' column 'That Should be A Word' and a veritable queen of cultural coinage. 2 stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life.

Pretty Bitches by Lizzie Skurnick