Category: Women

At the 99 Vintage store in the centre of Winchester, curated rails of worn-in Dickies trousers sit alongside paint-splattered band T-shirts and a 1964 track-and-field hoodie with the left cuff ­falling off. “We call it the trashed look,” said Jack Edwards, 27, who co-owns the family business. “In the past, I would have rejected things […]

My work used to land in the form of harsh clacking on a titanium-reinforced MacBook, but these days I prefer to write in a pale blue suedette notebook that was given to me by a relative a few Christmases ago. It is an object that until recently I had kept at the back of a […]

“I’m not in pain, which is unusual!” laughs ultra-distance cyclist Lael Wilcox over a patchy WhatsApp call from somewhere in rural Serbia. She is almost a month into an attempt to be the fastest woman to circumnavigate the globe on a bicycle and, despite being able to follow her mile-by-mile progress online, it’s surprisingly hard […]

The question I am a woman in my 50s and I have recently fallen deeply in love with someone I’ve known for many years. Beyond the strong physical attraction between us, we seem to have in common several emotional and intellectual attributes and, for the first time, I feel I am perfectly compatible with a […]

Ruth, 51 I started trying to avoid sex and that fuelled Lawrence’s suspicions. He thought I was having an affair But it stems from the fact that I had an episiotomy when I was in labour with my daughter, which means the doctor made an incision in my vagina to make it easier for me […]

Fertility tourism is booming for single Chinese women with hopes of future motherhood. China’s birthrate is at a record low, yet unmarried women are not legally allowed to freeze their eggs there. We meet Lei and Abu, as they travel to the US for the procedure, battling self-doubt and scepticism along the way. What does […]

A brat, said Charli xcx – describing not so much her album, Brat, as the spirit of brat – has a “pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”. This is “brat summer” – not to be confused with rat girl summer (2023, a TikTok trend centred on living […]

To screenwriters in the 1950s, she was a major power player, fighting for pay rises and striking rights. To the Hollywood studio heads, she was “the meanest bitch in town”. Now, a new book aims to restore Mary C McCall Jr’s reputation as one of the film industry’s most important figures, a trailblazer who was […]

‘When things go wrong, it is now possible for the first time in history for the women in a marriage to say, “I’m off,”’ wrote the Observer in 1976. Since the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, divorces were rocketing – 120,000 petitions a year – but was it inevitably an ‘emotional disaster’ or the ‘unacceptable face […]

I got angry yesterday, which is unlike me, a lady of peace and careful breaths. I felt like that guy who kicked in his telly when the Sex Pistols swore and I may have done similar had this not been a work laptop and had I not been a little bit sleepy after lunch. The […]