In Praise of Difficult Women by Karen Karbo

Each of them inspires me in different ways. I’m often asked who of the 29 heroines is my favorite. Do I even need to say that a woman who speaks up is difficult? A woman whose primary goal in life is not to please, or be pleasing – yes, so very difficult. Any woman who cares less about what other people think than what she thinks about herself is difficult. Any woman who honors her true self more than she does the expectations of the culture in which she lives is difficult. It doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. It turned out to be much easier than you might imagine. We made a joke about Binders of Difficult Women, and suddenly there I was, outlining a book of essays in which I would examine the lives of celebrated women through the lens of their difficult personalities. About how they were fervid and brave and stubborn and more independent than any man I knew.

I started telling her about all the women who had come to feel like family, about Frida and Martha and Amelia and Josephine and Jane. Like most writers, there are always a few ideas simmering away on the front burners. Then, a few years ago, I was talking to my editor about what I might write next. Like the women I’d admired, I wanted to be the leading lady of my own life. I really had no idea how to create the kind of life I wanted, one where I was my own woman, beholden to no one. I collected their stories and took them to heart. It became second nature to me to look to women in the public eye for guidance and substance, since I was otherwise quite alone in the world. They helped me figure out what it was like to be a woman in the world with a rich and full life. They became my role models, my personal icons and household saints. In college, I found solace reading about women like Frida Kahlo (her work was finally being celebrated), Martha Gellhorn, and Josephine Baker.

The first “grown-up” book I owned and loved was Born Free, naturalist Joy Adamson’s story about raising the lion cub, Elsa. I had always been an avid reader of biographies. I was an only child from a small family, and there were no other older women – no grandmothers, aunts, or cousins – to model for me what it meant to be a woman in the world. The research took a solid year, and the writing another two, but I’ve been working on this book without knowing it my entire adult life. Writing and publishing books continues to be the occupation of the tortoise living in the era of hares on speed. When I began writing In Praise of Difficult Women in 2014, I had no idea that it would publish during a time when women, by and large, had had enough.

In Praise of Difficult Women by Karen Karbo