Like her or loathe her, you can't deny that she made her mark. And you had to feel sorry for her, the way they got rid of her just like that. They suddenly decided she was 'out of touch', and dumped her. She was swept onto the scrapheap by a tide of misogynism. Yes, the sacking of Jill Tweedie from the Guardian's women's page was the signal for the end of feminist journalism. We'll have no more issues and theories in the Nineties. We're all post-feminism now.

Barbara Ehrenreich, however, is a feminist: an East Coast Tweedie but with a strong taste for satire. The Worst Years of Our Lives is a collection of her journalism from the Eighties and, as you'll gather from the title, it was not a time of which she was fond. She