The spouse that roared

This book was a great success in its native America, where women are allowed to have everything and to complain about it, too. In this country, neither is entirely permitted and to do both is unthinkable.

Cathi Hanauer's explanation of her project, in which she commissioned 26 women to write essays on various aspects of their personal lives, includes the bold admission that "this book was born out of anger", and frankly it is not hard to see why. For she and the vast majority of her 26 co-bitches - successful, educated women every one, raised in a world of washing machines and equal rights - are accomplices in the daily mental and emotional torture of their own sexual inequality.

They claim to value "co-partnership" and yet co-partnership is what they glaringly don't have. Their husbands are as shielded from the reality of family life as any Victorian patriarch. "At home," writes one woman who at work is the executive editor of a well-known women's magazine, "I am wife, mother, babysitting and housekeeping manager, cook, social secretary, gardener, tutor, chauffeur, interior decorator, general contractor and laundress." Well, why? Why are you all those things? Why isn't your husband (invariably described as "lovely", which is just what people used to say about their wives before they became bitches) doing a few of them? The term "bitch" itself expresses some of their confusion and ambivalence, their fear of censure and yet the violence that is at the tips of their tongues. If we were half the bitches you think we are, it says, we would have put our husbands' heads in the Magimix by now.

The essays are arranged roughly to describe the arc of female experience from early woman to grandmotherhood, but they linger around marriage and motherhood as around the scene of the crime. "Even before I'd begun to resent him," writes one woman of her first husband, "we'd sit in front of the TV watching wars on the news and getting quietly drunk so that there would be no possibility of even contemplating doing it." "It" being sex.

At the other extreme, novelist Helen Shulman exhibits what is to be hoped are passive-aggressive tendencies when describing a period of her life in which her father was gravely ill and she was responsible for caring for both her parents, her children and her husband while writing a film script about mental illness: "At night, after I'd bathed and fed the children and put them to bed, after I did the laundry and the bills, after I'd ignored the phone messages from my friends and made dinner for my husband - elaborate gourmetish things like risottos and fish in parchment, just to remind him that he had a wife - I read trial transcripts and autopsy reports and everything I could about schizophrenia." Excuse me? Fish in parchment? To remind him of what? Such bizarre modern martyrdom comes across merely as an ill-fitting camouflage for feelings of murderous rage.

Only one woman here, another women's magazine editor, complains because her husband does too much for their child. In the mornings, when the baby awakes, they jostle each other in the hall to be the first in her room.

Irritatingly, my guess is that more women would claim to be more horrified by that prospect than by the tales of life as a sort of human Best Western Hotel with which this book is otherwise full. Because, for all the angry posturing and use of the b-word, one cannot but conclude that if there is inequality in these and other women's lives, it's there because in one covert way or another, women require it.

The Bitch in the House should be mandatory reading for one reason only, which is the proof it provides for the fact that women are not dupes, but can and do get the relationships they want. The question it suggests is not what can be done to address inequality in the home and the resultant anger women feel, but why they choose to situate themselves so far from what is reasonable and right.