As She Said: Vanity Fair's Women on Women

A compilation of profiles of women written by female contributors to Vanity Fair magazine, going back to the 1980s. Many of the pieces are outstanding, a few, well, not so much to my taste. The subjects are household names and icons – everyone from Audrey Hepburn to Whoopi Goldberg to Emily Post and Julia Child – as are, mostly to a lesser degree, the writers, including outstanding journalists like Gail Sheehy, Leslie Bennets and Marie Brenner, and a few who write as guest contributors.

I particularly enjoyed the piece on Audrey Hepburn, written by Amy Fine Collins, which described her rise as both an actress and a woman of unique style. The profile of Michelle Phillips, by Sheila Weller, gave wonderful insights into the folk and pop music scene of the 60s and 70s. I learned a great deal about Emily Post, as written by Laura Jacobs, and how she impacted so much beyond America's social mores. Those articles have a timeless feeling about them and need no explanatory notes or references.

Others, written at a certain moment of history, serve as background to what these women accomplished in later years – Hillary Clinton and Gloria Steinem are the perfect examples.

The benefit of a collection like this is that you can skip past anybody that you are not interested in without missing anything – I read them all, but it's completely unnecessary. You can cherry pick as you like.

My one overall criticism to this collection is that the pieces are arranged by "types", "The Comedians", "The Renegades", and so forth. I would have preferred to read them in the chronological order in which they were originally published, as that would have made the book also function more effectively as a social history, which it very much is. The odd concession to this is the final grouping, "In Their Own Words", which is the section afforded to the non-journalists writing in 2017 and 2018. The outstanding piece among those, for me, was by Lucy McBath, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2018. She is truly an inspiration, and what we saw of her in sound bites on TV during that race, is so much less than the sum total of who she is. I'm hoping to hear more from her in both our national conversation, and hopefully, on the printed page.