A BLAST FROM THE PAST. One of the many list-servs I'm on is the Women, Action, & the Media list run by The Center for New Words in Boston. In the context of a broader discussion about women's worries about being seen as too pushy, I remarked that virtually every powerful woman in Washington about whom I know anything has a behind the scenes reputation as being either crazy or a bitch, and so perhaps people ought not to be so cowed by that word. In reply, Catherine Orenstein suggested that it has been ever thus, and that I read "Joreen" Jo Freeman's 1968 "The BITCH Manifesto". And so I did. Freeman wrote:
