Wild Women Talk Back: Audacious Advice for the Bedroom, Boardroom, and Beyond

By Autumn Stephens

Rejoice in your wild side with insightful, motivational, and wickedly funny wisdom from women who made history in art, music, politics and more.

In Wild Women Talk Back, great women of all stripes remind us to be unapologetically ourselves. Their powerful words cut to the truth about being a woman in this world, from the harsh realities to the unique joys. The women quoted here offer their own brash brand of counsel, commentary, and comic relief as a source of empowerment for all women.

This book is more than a compilation of inspirational quotes—it’s an invitation to embrace your wild and beautiful feminine self. These empowering quotes will get you thinking about life and women’s invaluable role in the world. Wild Women author Autumn Stephens introduces each section, shedding light on the collection of quotes from unforgettable women such as Madonna, Lucille Ball, and Mary, Queen of Scots.

Wild Women Talk Back offers you:

• Insight into everything from sex to motherhood, physical appearance to self-esteem, and coping with a career to finding wisdom
• The hilariously and shockingly relatable experiences of women throughout the ages
• The timeless wit and wisdom that women have to offer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2004
• ISBN: 9781609253196

Autumn Stephens

Autumn Stephens is the editor of Roar Softly and Carry a Great Lipstick and the Wild Women series of biography and humor. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and various newspapers and magazines. A former book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Autumn leads book group discussions and conducts writing workshops for women with cancer. She lives in Berkeley with her husband and two children.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

One-size-fits-all usually doesn't—a rule that applies equally to pantyhose and pertinent advice. And why, indeed, should it, given the teeming multitude of female forms, the panoply of human psyches? Of course, if you find it impossible to squeeze 60 percent of your body mass into a miniscule bit of fragile, flesh-colored nylon tubing, it is probable that you will lead an interesting and useful life nonetheless. Queen Elizabeth I, after all, never heard of Queen Size. Madam Curie didn't know from Control Top. Isadora Duncan managed to turn modern dance on its head without ever purchasing a single garment labeled Nude, Size B.

Likewise, we can all survive just fine without any more one-size-fits-all advice of the horizontal stripes make the midriff appear massive, and never let a strange man have his way with you ilk. As for the first statement, wouldn't that mondo midriff actually be an asset in fending off amorous attentions? And as for the second, as feminist author Robin Morgan once noted, "All men are strange." Zero population growth is all well and good—but do you really want it to start with you?

This, however, is not your mother's advice. Ten to one, Mama never mentioned that some women are only interested in one thing. (To wit, the actress Valerie Perrine, quoted herein: I don't care what a man thinks of me as long as I get what I want from him—which is usually sex.) Unlike comic Roseanne Barr, your mother probably also failed to point out the positive side of PMS: I think of it as the only time of the month when I can be myself. And unless your maternal progenitor was the essayist Amy Krouse Rosenthal, she almost certainly never urged you to polish off that second slab of pie, cooing that Nobody's last words have ever been, ‘I wish I had eaten more rice cakes.’

From sex to motherhood (not, incidentally, unrelated phenomena), from physical appearance to self-esteem, from coping with a career to attaining wisdom, the dozens of Wild Women in this collection offer their own brash brand of counsel and commentary on themes common to most women's lives. Unlike those pesky pantyhose, the following tips and quips will do absolutely nothing to flatten your tummy. But surely they will lift your spirits.

CHAPTER ONE

Self-Esteem: On Being the Bee's Knees

Along with a few million other Baby-Girl Boomers, I was fortunate enough to grow up in an era when it wasn't a crime for a young woman to call attention to herself. Scholastic achievement, in particular, was an okay way for a girl to get her props. Yet outright showing off, at least in my household of origin, remained taboo. I still squirm to recall my mother's reaction when, during the course of a Girl Scout meeting which she was leading, I fell histrionically to the floor and lay there flopping like a landed flounder. I no longer recall the reason for this bit of childish buffoonery (I was perhaps ten or eleven at the time), or the reaction of my cookie-selling compatriots. But my mother's disapproving face and stern admonition reverberate through my memory cells to this day. Why, that's just like saying, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ she scolded.

Okay, so I adore my (loving, funny, shockingly smart) mother; I really do. And in the early sixties, with the sweeping cultural changes of that decade scarcely spawned, no doubt her reaction to a crassly attention-seeking daughter was the norm. Yet why, I now wonder, in a world where the wind can so easily be knocked out of a woman's sails (whether deliberately