Undying Women

why defeated and scorned women are more interesting than bad-behaved ones

My first real job was as a bookseller at my local Barnes and Noble. I worked there for four years, learning everything from upselling memberships and Mastercards to reading picture books aloud during story time. As my knowledge of the store’s departments and their distinct procedures grew, so did my understanding of pop culture.

Working in a bookstore is a huge life hack for the less culturally-fluent. Consistent exposure to the fluctuations of the bestseller list, the new music releases, and the fiction titles that have sold so well for the past forty years that they are always kept in stock, will give you a bird’s eye view of what the country has collectively deemed important and/or entertaining much more effectively than years in a public high school can. Before I turned twenty and before I ever began using Twitter in earnest, I knew who Joan Didion was, how much people enjoyed Sarah J. Mass’s ACOTAR series, and what films belonged in the Criterion Collection. All this without having ever cracked open a single one of those books or DVDs.

This experience primed me to excel in my college Liberal Arts classes and to converse easily with my very online co-workers at the nonprofit where I worked after graduating. My years at Barnes and Noble overlapped with the election of Donald Trump and the only months of pre-COVID normalcy in 2020, and they gave me a unique exposure to what people were reading, raging against, and excited about during a period that now feels like the Bizzaro Jerry equivalent of today’s political landscape.

At the time, the millions of dollars publishing companies poured into marketing their big releases seemed to go much farther—and that’s accounting for inflation. Customers were happy to buy what was being offered. A cohesive aura of righteous outrage at the orange man permeated the store. When I worked in the Children’s department, I saw that the supply of titles that honored the STEM field and the then-en-vogue brand of feminism met customer demand. Over and over I assembled displays featuring titles like Women in Science, Quantum Physics for Babies, Notorious R.B.G.: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and the iconic She Persisted and She Persisted in Science, co-authored by Chelsea and Hillary Clinton. I kept a large quantity of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In stocked in the Business section. I recall the release of Michelle Obama’s Becoming: copies were piled everywhere around the store and displayed on tables and endcaps. At the time, those books always found homes in the arms of their progressive target audiences.

It was quite the moment for American politics, but, more specifically, it was quite the moment for women in American politics. Feminine figures rose up from the Left and the Right, wielding powerful public images and working their way into the minds, mouths, and Facebook feeds of friends, co-workers, and customers. Tomi Lahren, Meghan Kelly, even Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin carved out spaces for themselves in the cultural consciousness that no one can usurp. A pessimist might argue that these women really just made beds for themselves that no one would want to lie in, but they must then concede that anyone trying to follow in their footsteps today will simply be scorned as a grifter. These women created a cultural time capsule and stretched out in it with book deals, TV appearances, speaking engagements, podcasts, and video commentary.

Now, I have a question: When was the last time you thought about R.B.G.? What about Sarah Palin? When your conversations turn political, does the topic still center around women in STEM?

Finally, do you believe that, “thanks to Barbie, [or D.E.I. or Michelle Obama’s cultural influence or the teachings of ‘Biblical Womanhood’ or _______ ] all problems of feminism have been solved”?

Perhaps I should have prefaced this essay with a disclaimer: This is NOT an “anti-woke,” “anti-feminist” hit piece. Far too many of those exist already, and I am less than qualified to write one. My purpose here is to explore a phenomenon I observed while working as a bookseller, and in the years since. My qualifications are that I’m a woman, a bookseller with four years of experience, and someone who is (probably too) online.

Here’s what I’ve observed: publishers, PR agents and marketers still put a lot of time, effort, and money into promoting these books and others like them, but demand no longer seems to match the supply. Obsession with women in science like Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace seems to be lagging, relegated to the archives of Tumblr and Goodwill book sections. I have not thought about Tomi Lahren, Meghan Kelly, Chelsea or Hilary or Ruth Bader Ginsberg in quite some time. Neither have I seen discussion of them or their achievements on my timeline.

No one is currently swooning over Michelle’s poise and fabulous dresses like they did in 2010. Instead, conversation centers around what is underneath those dresses. I don’t see women in my age group donning pink pussy hats. Bonnie Garmus’s book, Lessons in Chemistry, and its Apple TV adaptation, have been getting some attention, but more liberal friends of mine have told me the show’s feminist themes feel a bit forced and heavy on the man-hating. Kamala Harris has been recognized by Left and Right for her infinite meme-ability, but does anyone take her seriously enough to be triggered by her anymore? 

Is this cultural amnesia the result of generational differences in aesthetic taste? Are these women’s images trapped in the now-dead zeitgeist of millennial girl-boss feminism and Obamacore? Are women in STEM cheugy?

The women who cornered the attention market during Trump’s presidency were paragons of Western, progressive virtue: they advocated for freedom of speech, freedom of choice, gender equality, and scientific advancement. Yet the West suffers a collective amnesia regarding these figures and their causes. The relevancy machine must work overtime, churning out books and Time Magazine features, to ensure these women and their political opinions remain fresh in our minds.

We remember other women effortlessly. We romanticize them, build shrines to them, write music about them. Women like Stevie Nicks, Lana Del Rey, Princess Diana, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe all exist rent free in countless women’s minds. Taylor Swift and Florence + The Machine write songs about Homer’s Cassandra, Hozier about Dante’s Francesca. So, why the latter group of women—none of whom

exemplify our current shiny, Western, feminist ideals—and not the former?

The reason, I argue, transcends the political binary and the effects of ‘cancel culture.’ Sure, many of the women I’ve named have been canceled in one form or another since their heyday, but, had they not been, would it really make a difference? If we actively hated these women because of the things they did to get canceled, we would still be thinking about them.

Instead, we forget the Michelle Obamas and Tomi Lahrens of the world because they exemplify lives free of messy personal ethics, inner turmoil, and corrosive relationships. They’ve figured out social justice, they’ve figured out feminism, they’ve figured out capitalism, they’ve figured out science. According to them, all we need to do is catch up or be left behind. Nowadays, trads scorn their outdated girl-boss style while shouting the same message, repackaged: retvrn or die out in your gay wasteland of seed oils and abortion pills.

The assumption lurking behind both the progressive ideal and the trad wife dream is that feminism is dead and all of our doubts about the security and justice of our world are phantoms that we must forget. But our continued obsession with tortured women gives the lie to this gaslighting: we identify with their pain, romanticize their struggles, and recognize that their problems could never be guaranteed a solution, even in this progressive era. Neither shiny self-empowerment nor nuclear family harmony will bring about a Utopian end of history, despite what we are constantly told.

The female archetypes we can’t help thinking about exude a pathos that feels like relief. The root of pathos is Greek, and it connotes "suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity," literally "what befalls one." We are rarely encouraged to truly mourn the calamities of this world (if everyone just voted like I did, we wouldn’t be in this mess), so stories that befall one, that force one to suffer anger and sorrow at the destruction of someone intangibly beautiful, feel like an indulgence.

The Mad Woman, the Persecuted Woman, the Cheated Woman: These figures represent the boldness of feminine dreaming and the devastation of its failure. It’s more than, “well-behaved women seldom make history.” It’s “defeated and scorned women affirm our existence in history, and they inspire us to continue it, even if it’s just for a little longer.”

When Stevie Nicks stared down Lindsey Buckingham, singing, “You will never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you” like an incantation, women felt that. They feel it still, this fury of a woman scorned, as the video circulates and re-circulates the internet. When Lana Del Ray memorializes the incandescent, unavoidable pull that attraction to a man stirs in a straight girl’s soul, we feel it, despite whatever clean-cut, feminist ideals we might profess. We remember the glorious struggle and devastating despair of Marilyn and Sylvia, the torment of Francesca’s life-altering love for Paulo. When artists revisit the injustice of Princess Diana’s broken marriage and early death, of Cassandra’s violent murder, we understand, we stop and re-learn how to feel, and how vital emotion is to the meaning and richness of our existence.

We identify with these stories, we remember these women, because they assure us that we’re not crazy. We’re not the only ones who found that the simple, logical formulas we were taught for fixing the world didn’t calm the raging of our souls. They didn’t stop the chaos. These stories help us remember that we’re not wrong for being awake to the contradictions and heartbreak of being alive. 

graphics by @revolvingstyle