'How To Be a Woman': 8 of Caitlin Moran's stories

Check out 8 stories from writer 'How To Be a Woman,' Caitlin Moran's tongue-in-cheek examination of what it means to be a woman today.

4. Insults in the workplace

GE Plastics/Business Wire

Moran says that when other workers at the Melody Maker began gossiping about who she was involved with on weekends – including one staffer who went so far as to write about her in a column – she wasn't sure at first what to do. "I've read novels about the patriarchy judging ... women," she wrote. "But those books don't give me a great deal of advice on what to do next. By and large, those women end up dying on moors, being excluded by the society of Atlanta, or swallowing arsenic before their daughter is sent off to work in the cotton mills. The coping tactics of grown women in the nineteenth century give me little to work on, and so – without any better role models – I simply regress into the coping methods of my childhood.... The writer who defamed me in the gossip column is told to stand on a chair in front of the whole office and apologize to me, while I point at him and say, 'That column didn't even have any jokes in it.' I can think of no worse insult."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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