Columnists: How to Succeed as a Slut

She rewrites the marriage vows: “Dost thou, Algernon, promise to laugh at this woman’s jokes, push the car until it starts and bring her sherry in the bath?” She loathes trading stamps: “If I want to buy a watch, I want to buy a watch; I don’t want to buy 27,720 Ibs. of self-raising flour and then get a watch free.” She loves sluts, and enlists herself bravely in their cause.

In her 31 years as fashion columnist for the London Observer, Katharine Whitehorn, 35, may have permanently revised the British notion of what a slut really is. To the uninitiated, a slut may remain a woman of easy virtue. But the dictionary’s first definition is “a slovenly woman; a slattern,” and that’s the one the Observer’s Whitehorn also likes. She asks: “Have you ever taken anything out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing? Changed stockings in a taxi? Could you try on clothes in any shop, any time, without worrying about your underclothes? How many things are in the wrong room—cups in the study, boots in the kitchen?” The right answers, says Whitehorn, make “you one of us: the miserable, optimistic, misunderstood race of sluts.”

Far Afield. Defending untidiness may be a strange crusade for a fashion columnist. But Katharine Whitehorn is that kind of fashion columnist. The world of haute couture distresses her: ” ‘A useful little dress’ means one with no distinguishing characteristics; ‘romantic’ means ‘cleft to the waist.’ ” She regularly takes excursions far afield. Sometimes she drafts axioms that are applicable to the opposite sex: “No nice men are good at getting taxis.” “If your wife looks like a sow’s ear, try dipping into the silken purse.” She excoriates local hairdressers: “I left the salon at 7:15, by 8 it was slipping, by 9 it was down, and it was not even that sort of evening.”

The Observer’s freewheeling columnist tacked into journalism in a typically roundabout feminine way. The offspring of a long line of Presbyterian ministers, she proved impervious to the polish of six secondary schools and Cambridge University, toured the U.S. working as a waitress and short-order cook, then returned to England and became a journalist.

“Feel Like a Blonde.” Along the course she picked up a husband—British Author and Journalist Gavin Lyall—and a berth on the Observer, one of London’s seven Sunday papers. The Observer has sensibly refrained from fettering its most uninhibited and uninhibitable staffer, whether she is attacking the trade (“Any journalist may be exchanged for any other journalist without penalty”) or rinse jobs (“I am not sure which is worse—to look like a blonde and feel like a journalist, or look like a lady and feel like a blonde”) or her own kin: “My aunt’s problem was remembering to remove a moustache she could no longer see, and trying not to wander around the house with her mouth open.” As for the sluts of England—they may still feel miserable and optimistic, but they know they are no longer misunderstood.