“If bitch is to be reclaimed, only women can reclaim the word. But reclamation isn’t the answer for everyone... we have to concede that bitch hasn’t been entirely rehabilitated. But we have to acknowledge its fluidity. Bitch is a flexible word that can be both good and bad. For centuries, bitch was an insult. In recent decades, some women have adopted bitch as an empowering label. Others reject the word. Bitch is battling a long history of invective use and many simply don’t like the word and don’t want to reclaim it.”
— Bitch
Karen Stollznow’s Bitch: The Journey of a Word, published last year, is a fascinating cultural history of ‘bitch’. The book covers changing social attitudes towards the word, and feminist efforts to reappropriate it: “Taking control of the word and turning the definition on its head, bitch got a feminist facelift, becoming a descriptor for an ambitious, independent, and strong woman.”
It was Jo Freeman, in The Bitch Manifesto, who launched the first campaign to reclaim ‘bitch’: “A woman should be proud to declare she is a Bitch, because Bitch is Beautiful. It should be an act of affirmation by self and not negation by others.” (The Bitch Manifesto first appeared in a 1970 anthology of feminist theory, alongside Kate Millett’s essay Sexual Politics.) The word’s reclamation went mainstream in the 1990s, when Bitch became the title of a long-running feminist magazine and a hit Meredith Brooks single.
Stollznow’s book is well researched and comprehensive, though it does become quite repetitive. For example, she poses the same question at least three times: “Has bitch truly been rehabilitated to mean something wholly positive? Can bitch be reclaimed... should it be?... Has bitch been — can it be — reclaimed?... Can bitch ever be fully reclaimed? The truth is that it probably won’t be.”
Also, when it comes to answering this question, Stollznow tends to sit on the fence: “Of course, there are ongoing attempts to reclaim bitch, to take out its sting. There is also much backlash against this reclamation, which will likely continue too... Some people will continue to try to reclaim the word. But for others, bitch isn’t reclaimed, and can’t be, because of its considerable baggage.” Ultimately, she concludes that the word’s reappropriation must be universal before it can be effective: “Unfortunately, the ways women try to reclaim bitch do not diminish its stigmatizing power in the hands of others, and especially men.”
— Bitch
Karen Stollznow’s Bitch: The Journey of a Word, published last year, is a fascinating cultural history of ‘bitch’. The book covers changing social attitudes towards the word, and feminist efforts to reappropriate it: “Taking control of the word and turning the definition on its head, bitch got a feminist facelift, becoming a descriptor for an ambitious, independent, and strong woman.”
It was Jo Freeman, in The Bitch Manifesto, who launched the first campaign to reclaim ‘bitch’: “A woman should be proud to declare she is a Bitch, because Bitch is Beautiful. It should be an act of affirmation by self and not negation by others.” (The Bitch Manifesto first appeared in a 1970 anthology of feminist theory, alongside Kate Millett’s essay Sexual Politics.) The word’s reclamation went mainstream in the 1990s, when Bitch became the title of a long-running feminist magazine and a hit Meredith Brooks single.
Stollznow’s book is well researched and comprehensive, though it does become quite repetitive. For example, she poses the same question at least three times: “Has bitch truly been rehabilitated to mean something wholly positive? Can bitch be reclaimed... should it be?... Has bitch been — can it be — reclaimed?... Can bitch ever be fully reclaimed? The truth is that it probably won’t be.”
Also, when it comes to answering this question, Stollznow tends to sit on the fence: “Of course, there are ongoing attempts to reclaim bitch, to take out its sting. There is also much backlash against this reclamation, which will likely continue too... Some people will continue to try to reclaim the word. But for others, bitch isn’t reclaimed, and can’t be, because of its considerable baggage.” Ultimately, she concludes that the word’s reappropriation must be universal before it can be effective: “Unfortunately, the ways women try to reclaim bitch do not diminish its stigmatizing power in the hands of others, and especially men.”