1913 - Suffragette throws herself under the King's horse. 1969 - Feminists storm Miss World. Now - Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool and demands to know why pants are getting smaller. There's never been a better time to be a woman: We have the vote and the Pill, and we haven't been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain....
Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should you get Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina? Why does your bra hurt? And why does everyone ask you when you're going to have a baby? Part memoir, part rant, Caitlin Moran answers these questions and more in "How To Be A Woman" - following her from her terrible 13th birthday ("I am 13 stone, have no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me") through adolescence, the workplace, strip clubs, love, fat, abortion, TopShop, motherhood and beyond.
Caitlin Moran had literally no friends in 1990, and so had plenty of time to write her first novel, The Chronicles of Narmo, at the age of fifteen. At sixteen she joined music weekly Melody Maker and at eighteen briefly presented the pop show Naked City on Channel 4. Following this precocious start she then put in eighteen solid years as a columnist on the Times - both as a TV critic and also in the most-read part of the paper, the satirical celebrity column "Celebrity Watch".
The eldest of eight children, home-educated in a council house in Wolverhampton, Caitlin read lots of books about feminism - mainly in an attempt to be able to prove to her brother, Eddie, that she was scientifically better than him. Caitlin isn't really her name. She was christened "Catherine". But she saw 'Caitlin' in a Jilly Cooper novel when she was 13 and thought it looked exciting. That's why she pronounces it incorrectly: "Catlin". It causes trouble for everyone.