Beautiful
                  was top of the list.
                  As though I can control that,
                  she said to herself
                  and ran her eye down:
Clever                                                       but not too clever
Good company
Patient
Compassionate
Helpful
                  She wondered why beauty preceded all these virtues
                  and thought, Oh well, perhaps if I am all these other things
                  the physical beauty will follow.
Sexy
Chaste                                                        except when no one’s looking
                  Sexy and chaste?
                  Surely, she thought, a contradiction,
Headstrong
Wilful
                  Fine,
Acquiescent
                  Oh dear,
Rich
Hardworking
High flying
Mother
                  She became exhausted just looking at it
                  and it occurred to her that being a woman
                  was probably easier in the days when
                  all they had to be was item number one:
Beautiful
                  (and in most cases items fifteen and twenty-one)
Admirers of nice clothes and jewellery                of course to enhance her own beauty
Modest
Not vain
                  She blinked, and looked again
                  at item one,
Beautiful
                  and at item eighteen,
Not vain
                  Now how, she asked, can I make myself beautiful
                  without making myself vain?
Lover
Young
Wife
Young looking                                                      by whatever means possible
Faithful
Exciting                                                                 she may find herself discarded in favour
                                                                   of a more perfect woman if she becomes
                                                                              unexciting (quite understandably)
Heedless of her own excitement…
                  She laughed.  There is,
                  she said, no such woman.
                  And she took the list,
                  and tore it up, and scattered the pieces,
                  and she wrote a new list
                  of all the things a woman should be:
Herself