These ‘Difficult’ Women Wrote, and Lived By, Their Own Rules

“If you obey all the rules, you miss all
the fun,” Katharine Hepburn once remarked. So, in honor of Mother’s
Day^[1], we have asked Karen
Karbo, author of In
Praise of Difficult Women^[2], to talk about some of
the iconic women that have inspired her, from aviator Amelia
Earhart^[3] to newscaster Rachel
Maddow and National Geographic Explorer Jane Goodall. What links
them all is a determination to trust themselves and the courage to
break the rules.

Speaking from her home in Portland,
Oregon, Karbo explains why Jane
Goodall^[4] was one of her childhood
heroes; why she finds the demands of modern American
womanhood^[5] such a challenge; and
why women are often labelled “difficult” just for being
themselves.

Being difficult is usually a negative character trait. But
you celebrate it as a virtue. Unpack the paradox for us and explain
how it links the diverse
women^[6] you profile.

There are invisible quotes around “difficult” that don’t appear
in the title. Women who are strong,
passionate and determined^[7]
don’t walk around saying, “Oh, look, I’m difficult.” They
just believe they’re living their lives. It’s a word slapped on
them by other people. If you don’t care too much what people think,
you risk being called a difficult woman because you’re not staying
in your lane or doing what is expected of you. For the most part,
any time a woman doesn’t do that she can be called
difficult. When a woman inconveniences somebody she can be
called difficult. A woman who believes her own needs, goals,
and desires are at least as important as everyone around her risks
being called difficult. One of the first reviewers said,
“That’s a pretty low bar.” I said, “Thank you for making my point
for me.” Because it actually doesn’t take much to be considered a
difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us. [laughs]

In the book, there are 29 women and each woman has what I
believe to be her very specific traits. That was the lens that I
used when I wrote these essays. If you look at someone like Rachel Maddow^[8], she’s brainy.
Oftentimes a woman who is not afraid to display her intelligence
can be considered difficult. It’s like, “What is she, a
know-it-all?

The first person in the book is J.K. Rowling^[9], whom I call “scrappy.”
She is someone who, given the position she finds herself in, could
rest on her laurels, continuing the Harry Potter franchise or
writing adult mysteries. But she takes to Twitter, calls people
out, speaking truth to power, and so gets in a lot of hot water.
But that’s her nature. She needs to express her opinion
regardless of the fallout.

One of National Geographic’s most celebrated explorers is
Jane Goodall. Tell us about that
key moment when she stood her ground in the face of criticism from
male superiors, and why trusting yourself is so important for a
woman.^[10]

Jane Goodall was one of my very first idols. My parents had a
subscription to Nat Geo and before I could even read I would flip
through pictures of Jane Goodall in Africa, squatting down in her
khaki shorts, talking to a chimp. But it is important to look at
where she came from. She was one of only eight people ever allowed
to do a Cambridge PhD program without having an undergraduate
degree. Everything she knew, she knew from the field.

When she had to meet with the Cambridge dons, you can imagine
how intimidating it must have been. They were sort of mocking her
because she insisted on giving the chimps names, and believed they
not only had a very specific social structure, but specific
personalities, which sounded extremely silly in that day and age.
When they expressed that to her, she went back to her own childhood
and said, “Anyone who has ever had a pet dog knows that an animal
has a personality.” Imagine the courage it took to say, “Look, I
know what I know and all of your grandeur, authority and power is
not going to move me off of my position.”

You write, “We are exhausted—or at least I am—by the demands
of American womanhood.” Talk about that feeling and whether it has
got harder—or easier—to be an independent woman today?

Women today feel like they have to be better all the time. I
remember a friend in college who would run a mile every day. It was
like she was headed for the Olympics! Now, if you run a mile a day
it’s practically like you’re not even exercising. [laughs] We all
have to be super fit, which takes a lot of time; we have a baby and
then eight hours later we have to be ready to walk the red carpet;
we have to have a great career; and we have to be up to date,
having read all the good books and seen the good movies.

The Internet hasn’t helped because we can now hop on 24/7 and
see all the ways in which we are not trying to improve
ourselves. [laughs] It used to be women’s fashion magazines, but
those came out once a month! Once you had read that, you were good
for three weeks. Now, it’s ever present—10 ways you can improve
your tennis game, 9 ways to improve your love life. All of that,
coming at you all of the time, doesn’t give you a lot of headspace
to think of anything other than yourself. You also
wind up thinking, “Oh, God, my tennis game is crappy and I
didn’t think about that until this moment!” [laughs] It’s
insane!

Amelia Earhart^[11] once said, “Women, like
men, should try to do the impossible.” She also had some very
unconventional views on marriage, didn’t she?

She married George
Putnam^[12] and they were the
perfect couple because he was a born promoter. He was the heir to
the GP Putnam Sons Publishing house, who had published a lot of
explorers and adventurers, and he was one himself. So what was so
great about falling in love with Amelia was that she was the
perfect person to promote. Not only was she courageous, she was
very photogenic and polite; she wore clothes well; and she had a
lot of stamina and a genuine interest in talking to people.

On her wedding day, she gave Putnam a letter saying, ‘I’m not
gonna stop doing what I’m doing to be a traditional wife.’ There
was also a veiled subtext, saying ‘I’m going to try and be loyal to
you if I can, but don’t have too high expectations on that front.’
[laughs] I included her specifically because I was interested in
including women who were introverted. When we think of difficult
women, we tend to think they’re extroverted and opinionated. But
there are a lot of quiet, introverted women, like Jane Goodall and
Amelia Earhart, who were doing exactly what they wanted to do and
moving under the radar.

Martha
Gellhorn, the writer and journalist, is best known for
being the partner of Hemingway. But she was much more than that,
wasn’t she?^[13]

When I give shorter interviews, Martha is always Hemingway’s
third wife. I know she is spinning in her grave, because she was a
writer and intrepid journalist in her own right. In fact, she wound
up leaving the marriage to Hemingway, the only wife who did leave,
because she couldn’t bear the insular life they had. She wanted to
be where the world was being made or unmade, as the case may
be.

She was extraordinarily courageous. She made it to the
front in WWII by hook or by crook. She was forever sneaking aboard
a ship, or flying under false pretenses, or pretending to be a
nurse, in order to get to the front lines. Throughout her life, she
was concerned with injustice—particularly economic injustice—for
people all over the world who were not getting a good deal. She was
smart, very difficult, and also glamorous! She was blonde,
long-legged, and would wear these great hunting outfits.

Like the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, quite a number of
the women you celebrate have fluid attitudes to sexuality and
gender. Is this part of “being difficult,” or, at least,
different?^[14]

Women tend to be people-pleasers. But the problem of being a
people-pleaser is that you wind up shuttering off more and more of
your personality, like someone in a big house who keeps shutting up
empty rooms until they are living in the kitchen and the front
room. Difficult women have all the doors open in all the
rooms. They are so fully human that, to keep the metaphor going
longer, they are happy to walk through every door.

I don’t think is has anything specifically to do with being
difficult, but difficult women tend to be in touch with all the
different parts of their personalities. They’re inhabiting the
fullness of themselves. So, being gender-fluid, as we say today, or
having sexual proclivities you’re not willing to ignore, is often
true of difficult women.

Billie Jean King was recently celebrated in the movie
Battle of The
Sexes. But her tennis match against Bobby
Riggs was a small part of her contribution to women’s liberation,
wasn’t it?^[15]

The battle of the sexes was obviously the headline event, but
there was a lot of interesting backroom politics, when she broke
with the USTA^[16] and started the women’s
tour, in protest of the fact that, as tennis became more popular,
men were paid more and more while women’s wages remained stagnant,
or even declined.

When Billie Jean first hit the tennis courts in the 70s, women’s
tennis was a kind of nice sideshow to men’s tennis. They wore these
little skirts, they were pretty and would glisten with sweat. It
was all great, but nobody took it seriously. From the get-go,
though, Billie Jean was a competitor. Today, we take it for granted
when we see someone like the Williams sisters out there being
competitive, grunting and groaning and hitting that ball for all
they’re worth. But that wasn’t always the case. Billie Jean was the
first female competitor to show that she was competitive and
what it meant to be a serious professional athlete.

She also became an inspirational figure for the LGBT
community, right?

She did, though she grew up in a conservative part of Southern
California that was very homophobic. She openly admits that when
she first came to terms with her own sexuality she was also
homophobic! So, it was very confusing. When she was outed
by her partner^[17], Marilyn Barnett,
everyone said, “Deny it, deny it, deny it!” But she couldn’t. She
had to be honest and it was extraordinarily difficult for her. It
made things complicated with her parents. The book is not just a
celebration of difficult women. It is also, sub-textually, saying,
‘You can be difficult and get through these tough parts of
your life. You will survive it.’

If you could have dinner with just one of these women, who
would you choose, and why?

OMG! Give me a moment. [laughs] You know, one of the women
people don’t talk about much is Vita
Sackville-West^[18]. I think I would have
dinner with her. She was a writer and a poet who married fellow
writer Harold Nicholson. She was also Virginia Wolf’s lover. We
talk about gender fluidity now as if we all know what that is and
it’s no big deal. But she was one of the first people who really
struggled with this. She lived a long life and had two sons, one of
whom wrote a wonderful biography of her marriage to Harold
Nicholson. She even created a world-class garden, at Sissinghurst Castle^[19]. So I would, for sure,
want to hear her gardening tips. [laughs]

This interview was edited for length and clarity.