How to be a Woman

Little a is Daddy Camping. Appropriately enough for Father's Day, fithusband and friend have taken their daughters off to the wild and I am revelling in the guilty pleasure of some me-time. Obviously that doesn't stop me mainly worrying that the weather is terrible and the night was cold and windy and did they take a spare pair of knickers? But I'm also loving the peace, and the Friday night I had out with my amazing girlfriends who inspire and nurture me.

And last night - bliss - an empty house, a bowl of cherries and a bar of chocolate; and curling up under a blanket to read HOW TO BE A WOMAN by Caitlin Moran.

I'm loving this book. The first chapter - in which she talks with hilarious, searing honesty (I work in publishing. I'm allowed to use this phrase. In fact, it's virtually compulsory) about getting her first period - I was thinking: 'Fantastic. I am going to buy a copy of this now, wrap it in tissue and put it in a drawer as a present for little a on acquiring her womanhood'. Then I read chapter two - more hilarity, more searing honesty - which moves on to masturbation. And started to worry about people reading it over my shoulder on the bus. And thinking maybe I'll just leave it in a drawer for little a to find for herself on acquiring her womanhood ...

I am laughing out loud. Which I do very rarely, and almost never with non-fiction. Who am I kidding? I never read non-fiction unless I have to. Maybe because I want to learn something, or escape into beauty, like with WATER LOG by Roger Deakin. But for laughs? That's more Marian Keyes's job.

I'm also fighting a weird compulsion to buy every song I ever remember from the eighties and listen to it: Kate Bush, Fleetwood Mac, Fairground Attraction - all receiving unexpected royalties this weekend. Which makes me think that maybe Caitlin Moran hasn't succeeeded in writing a timeless manual of womanhood but rather, David Nicholls' ONE DAY-like, is simply holding up a very very funny and onthenose mirror to my own experience. Frankly, little a isn't going to get even three quarters of any of the references in this book.

But what I'm mainly wondering is whether she will read the experiences with a similar sense of datedness. Sexism in the workplace? she will wonder - that sounds really odd. Unequal pay - yeah, and didn't they used to send children up chimneys?

And, having spent that fantastic Friday night with some of my favourite women in the world, I'm also thinking that there's this deep rooted problem it's going to take a long time - longer than the 70 years since we got the vote - to shift. There we all were, successful women with our own careers, eleven gorgeous children between us, happy relationships, and every one of us confessing at some point during the evening to some discomfiting sense of unease, of things not being quite right. Frankly, of us not being quite right. And reading HOW TO BE A WOMAN, when I'm not laughing, I'm also trying to work out how to raise little a not so that she's thinking she can be great, but with the straightforward understanding that she is great, and the world is a better place for having her in it.

I think that's what we give our boys, in the main, but don't quite yet give our girls.

It's a generalisation, I know. But all this talk of feminism is. And no more so than the page of articles in The Times yesterday about the oversexualisation of women in the media and the impact it has on developing girls' self esteem. A high profile head teacher is concerned that this is leading to her pupils having eating disorders. Of course, they illustrated the article with pictures of Britney Spears and Rhianna, rather than Lauren Laverne and Jemima Khan. And on the opposing page was a full page ad featuring a beautiful woman wearing nothing more than a man's dinner jacket. It reminded me of the pictures I used to tear out of magazines and put on my wall as a teenager. And I remember reading similar articles then, too. So it seems there's still work to be done.

I went to a top notch all girls' school, with impeccable academic credentials. There, we were pushed not only to get the best A level results and go on to Oxbridge, but also to use our spare time being talented artists and musicians and sportswomen. And a lot of us were. But I also watched so many of those beautiful and talented young women struggle with eating disorders, and depression, as we dressed ourselves in jumble-sale clothes and never washed our hair. This was the eighties. Many of those girls had fathers who owned whole countries. We were surrounded by images of wealth and success, and over-sexualisation of women (remember 'Hello, Boys?' That was then). But we weren't anorexic, or living only on cereal, because we wanted to look like Madonna. It was because it was our way of coping with the pressure to be perfect. The only rebellion, at a boarding school, where we had no other freedom or control, and the only way of showing the world that, actually, we were struggling to be all that, and it would be nice, just once, to hear that we were doing okay, and that someone loved us just the way we were.

And it occurs to me, as I putawashonmakethebedtidythecupboardthatwon'tcloseanymorefinallyoilthatsqueakydoorwriteabloggoforaruncleanthehouseipaymostofthemortgageon all before ten on a Sunday morning, so that I have time to visit bestfriend A and her newborn baby in hospital before I go to see bestfriend B on the complete other side of town, that if I can raise my daughter to do all of that without at the same time beating herself up for not looking like a model and also squeezing in somegardeningputtingthatenormouspileofcleanclothesawayohgodandtheironingthenametapesneedsewingonsortingoutourfinancesandwereallyshouldwriteawill then maybe, just maybe, I'll be going some way to improving the lot of womankind.