Kindle
$16.99
Available instantly
Audible Logo Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial
Hardcover
$14.98
Kindle Price: $16.99

Save $11.01 (39%)

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Audiobook Price: $17.05

Save: $4.06 (24%)

Read with our free app
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

Buy for others

Give as a gift or purchase for a team or group.
Learn more

Buying and sending eBooks to others

  1. Select quantity
  2. Buy and send eBooks
  3. Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs

Follow the authors

Winter Miller
+ Follow
Lizzie Skurnick
+ Follow
See all
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Pretty Bitches: On Being Called Crazy, Angry, Bossy, Frumpy, Feisty, and All the Other Words That Are Used to Undermine Women Kindle Edition

by Lizzie Skurnick (Author), Rebecca Traister (Introduction) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 82 ratings
See all formats and editions
Great on Kindle
Great Experience. Great Value.
iphone with kindle app
Putting our best book forward
Each Great on Kindle book offers a great reading experience, at a better value than print to keep your wallet happy.

Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.

View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.

Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.

Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Get the free Kindle app: Link to the kindle app page Link to the kindle app page
Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.
These empowering essays from leading women writers examine the power of the gendered language that is used to diminish women -- and imagine a more liberated world.

Words matter. They wound, they inflate, they define, they demean. They have nuance and power. "Effortless," "Sassy," "Ambitious," "Aggressive": What subtle digs and sneaky implications are conveyed when women are described with words like these? Words are made into weapons, warnings, praise, and blame, bearing an outsized influence on women's lives -- to say nothing of our moods.

No one knows this better than Lizzie Skurnick, writer of the New York Times' column "That Should be A Word"and a veritable queen of cultural coinage. And in Pretty Bitches, Skurnick has rounded up a group of powerhouse women writers to take on the hidden meanings of these words, and how they can limit our worlds -- or liberate them.

From Laura Lipmann and Meg Wolizer to Jennifer Weiner and Rebecca Traister, each writer uses her word as a vehicle for memoir, cultural commentary, critique, or all three. Spanning the street, the bedroom, the voting booth, and the workplace, these simple words have huge stories behind them -- stories it's time to examine, re-imagine, and change.
Read more Read less
Previous page
  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Seal Press
  5. Publication date
    March 3, 2020
  6. File size
    4093 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
Next page
Add a debit or credit card to save time when you check out
Convenient and secure with 2 clicks. Add your card

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Clever and potent.... The book's smart premise and the incisive essays themselves are immensely relatable and should provide a great catalyst for personal introspection and thoughtful and productive discussion."―Booklist (starred review)

"Sharp-witted and intimate.... An eloquent inquiry into how language enshrines gender stereotypes."―Publishers Weekly

"This uplifting collection serves as a good first step toward highlighting what's wrong with how women are talked about.... A galvanizing, sharp compendium."―Kirkus

"Note to men: When you describe an ex-girlfriend or wife 'crazy,' all it tells me is that you're an emotional idiot. Note to women: This great new book by Lizzie Skurnick recasts the various insults directed at us for decades and centuries, breathing confident life into what it means to be an unabashed, bossy, crazy-ass bitch."―Anna Holmes, founder of Jezebel and editor of The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things and Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters from the End of the Affair

"This book is hilarious, amazing, and inspiring. An incredible anthology of brilliant women. Buy this book today, preferably more than one copy."―Molly Jong-Fast, author of The Social Climber's Handbook and Girl [Maladjusted]: True Stories from a Semi-Celebrity Childhood

"Lizzie Skurnick has been the go to person for words for as long as I can remember. Now, she has gone even further, redefining the way we use them. This collection of breathtaking essays shows how seemingly innocuous words (and some pretty ugly ones, too) were once used to keep women down -- but not anymore. Take that, mansplainers. Pretty Bitches is truly something."―Marcy Dermansky, author of Very Nice and The Red Car

"Funny, trenchant, moving, breathtaking -- the essays here remake a language that has been used so often to trap women so that it can free them instead. A prismatic look at the state of being a woman today, from some of our best living writers."―Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh, The Queen of the Night, and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

About the Author

Lizzie Skurnick is the creator of the long-running New York Times Magazine word-coinage column "That Should Be a Word." Her coinages have been featured in Entertainment Weekly, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, Entertainment Weekly, on NPR's Weekend Edition, and more. She served a term as Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle, and has been a judge for the LA Times book prize and the PEN Book awards. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, NPR, Elle, Jezebel, and many other publications, she teaches at NYU. She lives in New York City.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07V33849N
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seal Press; Illustrated edition (March 3, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 3, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4093 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1580059198
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 82 ratings

About the authors

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Previous page
  1. Winter Miller

    Winter Miller

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Winter Miller is an award-winning playwright who lives in Brooklyn. Not a Cat, Winter’s first picture book, is the story lived by her extraordinary cat Gato.

    Her published plays include No One Is Forgotten, In Darfur, and The Penetration Play. She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Boston Globe, and her plays and essays appear in multiple anthologies. Winter was previously a journalist in the editorial department of The New York Times, at Fox News, and at Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. She has been profiled in The New Yorker, Bomb, and on NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show and All of It with Alison Stewart.

    Winter writes funny, tender and provocative plays to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Eartha Kitt once held her hand for five minutes.

    www.wintermiller.com.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Lizzie Skurnick

    Lizzie Skurnick

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Lizzie Skurnick is the author of "That Should Be a Word," a compendium of words for the modern age, based on her New York Times Book Review column of the same name. She's also the author of "Shelf Discovery," a collection of essays on the best teen reading of her youth, based on her "Fine Lines" column on Jezebel.com, and the editor of Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint of Ig publishing, which reissues the best young adult books from the 30s to the 80s, including the popular "All-of-a-Kind Family" series. She lives in Jersey City, NJ.

    See more on the author's page
Next page

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
82 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Just a guy that plays guitar
5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, smart, and thought-provoking
Reviewed in the United States on May 2, 2020
Verified Purchase
(Reviewed by the wife of the guy that plays guitar). This was a really good read. The contributors are top-notch writers; each one packed a punch. Some of the stories were hilarious, some shocking. Together they represented a cross-section of what it is like to be a woman now.
Helpful
 Report
Birdnerd
5.0 out of 5 stars Every human should read this book
Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2020
Verified Purchase
This book handily takes apart so many words that demean women. I felt empowered to push back myself and came away equipped with tools to empower the young females I teach.
Helpful
 Report
Clarissa
5.0 out of 5 stars awesome!
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2020
Verified Purchase
great book
Helpful
 Report
Schizanthus Nerd
3.0 out of 5 stars A Few Standouts But More That I Could Take or Leave
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2020
While I’d never heard of a couple of the words explored in this book before, most have been attributed to either myself or women I know. I expected to get fired up reading this book and assumed I’d finish it with an overwhelming need to fix something, anything, everything, like I did after reading ‘Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture’.

Unfortunately, while some chapters stood out to me and made me want to know more about their authors (I’ve included a quote from each of these) I could take or leave others and even had a few ‘did you seriously just say that?!’ moments with one author.

The quotes either spoke to me, said something I wanted to remember about what I’d read or most accurately summed up my experience of reading it.

Warning: I don’t usually include swearing in my reviews but a couple of the quotes I chose include it.

Preface by Lizzie Skurnick

“I began to realize these words weren’t pinpricks. They weren’t the punishment. They were the justification for the punishment: the jobs we lost, the promotions, the houses, the money, our respect, our bodies, our voices.”

Introduction by Rebecca Traister

“But now I mostly hear it as an aggressive word, a mean word, a word that suggests that the act of f***ing itself is mean and aggressive and often particularly aggressive toward women … It’s really a shame.”

Yellow-Bone by Lihle Z. Mtshali

“Yellow-bone is a loathsome term that we borrowed from American blacks. Though it refers to all light-skinned black people, in South Africa, it is mostly used to refer to light-skinned black women. Yes: people are woke, black pride is a thing, and #melaninpoppin is a popular hashtag. But black men post pictures of light-skinned black women, writing that the “yellow-bones” will give them beautiful kids.”

Good by Tova Mirvis

“You are allowed to change. You are allowed to decide what you believe. You are allowed to think what you think, feel what you feel.”

Exotic by Emily Sanders Hopkins

“They didn’t ask him his race; they just typed “white.” (Maybe race is just what you look like to white people.)”

Fat by Jennifer Weiner

“And there it was. Fat. The other F word.”

Content warnings and a quote from each of the other chapters are included in my Goodreads review.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, for the opportunity to read this book.
10 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Suzi Sam Barbee
5.0 out of 5 stars Meaningful, humorous, and well written essays
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2020
I can only read a couple of essays at a time because each is thoughtful, well written, and interesting. I am giving copies to several friends. I have found insight into my own life and into our culture. During the self-isolation and social distancing of COVID-19, I'm reading escapist books as well as some meaningful and introspective books like this. Many of the essays are fun. Plus each author is published so I have new books to look for. It's not at all as dull as I make it sound.
Helpful
 Report
Jenn D
5.0 out of 5 stars Like a master class with your smartest girlfriends
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2020
This collection is serious, funny, angry, hopeful, raw, honest - authentic and real. Somewhere in the voices and experiences of the authors, the reader might reflect on the microaggressions and roadblocks in their own life, know they're not alone, and be inspired to keep moving forward. Or, the generously shared, deep and personal stories might open one's mind to another point of view. A joy to read.
One person found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
David Skurnick
5.0 out of 5 stars Writing is terrific
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2020
Each essay is moving and informative. Lizzie Skurnick recruited a terrific group of authors. The book is very well-written and a pleasure to read. Each author writes about herself and about incidents that changed her life.

I'm politically conservative. I particularly appreciate this book, because it opened my eyes to a different POV.
Helpful
 Report
Reader
5.0 out of 5 stars Likes it
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2021
Thoughtful and interesting.
Helpful
 Report
Report an issue

Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report