And she was afraid that “educated people” would make fun of her grammar. She survived unspeakable atrocity, thanks only to her own daring, ingenuity, and resilience, and published one of the most important political documents of her age. Harriet Jacobs was possibly one of the bravest women who ever lived. She still thought she’d rather drown than not have a boyfriend. Mary Wollstonecraft was over a century ahead of her time on women’s education, and twice as far ahead on women’s sexual freedom. Her letters to Constantin Heger are some of the stupidest things I’ve ever read, a masterful, two-year-long demonstration of one woman’s inability to absorb the fact that the guy she liked did not like her. “Charlotte Brontë was a genius, whose work has resonated for centuries as an example of female intellect and expressive power. Every “ugly” photo of Amy Winehouse, every nasty word typed about Azealia Banks in a comment section, is going to come back the next time we’re vulnerable, and take yet another chunk out of our ability to believe that we can screw up and still be basically worthwhile.” We can’t spend twelve hours a day mainlining ideas of sexual or emotional or aging or ill women as monsters, messes, and freaks, then expect to wake up feeling beautiful and confident in the morning. But, in the context of trainwreck media, a female self-confidence gap is not only predictable, it’s practically unavoidable. Their trainwrecks, and their need for trainwrecks the enduring, self-loathing need to find someone about whom they can say well, at least I’m not that girl. “Every day brings me new evidence that women, by and large, do not like themselves very much: their ambition gaps, their orgasm gaps, their impostor syndromes, their poor body images, their endless variety of real or perceived failures, including their failures to feel good about who and what they are. How many firsts are still waiting for us, in those moldy, decaying old books, needing only a little careful dusting-off to come back to life?” If it can happen to Anne Royall, who left a larger-than-average paper trail, one wonders how many other women’s stories have been lost to us, through the strategic application of “insanity” diagnoses or public humiliation. And yet, for all that, she was remembered by successive generations as a crazy bitch who almost got thrown into a river. And (Alice Morse Earle doesn’t even mention this) she was quite probably the first female journalist in the United States. She wasn’t always right, or even admirable-she was on the wrong side of abolition, for one thing-but she was a historically formidable human being. She could not be scared, and she could not be stopped: Court rulings, public harassment, and attempts on her life notwithstanding, she kept publishing until her death at the age of eighty-five. “If John Quincy Adams was afraid of Anne Royall, he had good reason to be. Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear. ![]() ![]() And yet, approximately 89 percent of Nicki Minaj's press coverage, outside of the feminist blogosphere, tends to focus on: her butt.” Nicki Minaj has done everything in her power to frame herself as a thoughtful black feminist voice, up to and including staging public readings of Maya Angelou poems. She is the best-selling female rapper of all time, and her success had done a tremendous amount to awaken critical and commercial interest in female voices within a genre that was largely seen (fairly or unfairly) as a man's game before she showed up. “And, where white women are slapped down for daring to be sexual, women of color are slapped down for daring to be anything else: Over the course of her career, Nicki Minaj has spoken about abortion rights, the need for female musicians to write their own work, the difficulty of being an assertive woman in a business setting, and the obstacles black women face in being recognized as creative forces.
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