Back in 1993, a young wife named Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband’s male part. When Lorena went on trial, she had to disclose something she did not want to share. According to her, she had been enduring physical and sexual abuse in her relationship for too damn long. 
I was so young and naive. I actually believed that her case would help people understand that that kind of trauma could drive anyone insane and that we all needed to get on board with changing marital rape laws as a country. Like I said, I was young and naive.
I can’t tell you how much patience it took to sustain the battle for marital rape laws. Listening to men tell us that “we don’t understand” in more than a million ways… The fight was interpreted as being against men rather than for humanity and for healthy families. Some things never change.
Men have always appointed themselves as the authority on women. They have told women what our bodies meant, what our minds could handle, what we wanted, and what our place should be. Often, the explanation came with the authority to make us live by it.
These examples are mainly from British and American history. The bold lines below summarize the arguments rather than quote them.
1. “Your suffering comes from your female nature.”
The history of hysteria includes doctors attributing women’s symptoms to supposed disorders of the womb. Real suffering could become evidence of female instability instead of a reason to investigate what was happening to a particular woman. Women had to challenge both the explanation and the authority behind it.
2. “We know how much education your body can tolerate.”
In his 1873 book Sex in Education, physician Edward H. Clarke argued that educating girls in the same way as boys could damage their health and reproductive development. A girl’s desire to learn could therefore be answered with a medical warning about what her body supposedly required. He could present a limit on her future as concern for her well-being.
3. “Marriage means your husband represents you.”
Under the common-law doctrine of coverture, a married woman’s independent legal standing was substantially restricted, with rules varying by place and period. Her husband’s authority reached into matters such as property and contracts. The language of protection helped justify an arrangement that denied her independence.
And as we covered, it was only fairly recently, too recent, that married women even had laws protecting them from marital rape in the United States. People who didn’t believe in Christian anything were telling us, “A wife must make herself ready and available to her husband; ‘for the Bible tells us so.'”
4. “Your highest purpose tells us which ambitions you may have.”
In Bradwell v. Illinois in 1873, Justice Joseph Bradley’s concurrence defended excluding women from legal practice by invoking women’s supposed natural role as wives and mothers. This was a judge explaining the proper destination of women’s lives while a woman sought entry into a profession.
The assumption was that knowing her sex meant knowing enough to decide her future.
5. “You do not need a political voice of your own.”
Women fighting for suffrage confronted the claim that men could represent them. In her 1892 speech “Solitude of Self,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton challenged the presumption that a man could do a woman’s voting in the state and her praying in the church. Women were insisting that being someone’s wife or daughter did not replace being an individual citizen.
6. “Your freedom will destroy the very things you love.”
Some opponents of women’s suffrage actually warned that voting would make women less womanly and damage the home. Women themselves sometimes promoted these arguments. That is part of the history too: an explanation can become so familiar that women help enforce it against other women.
And there is a revealing contradiction running through these examples. Women were supposedly “too delicate” for education or public authority, yet those ideals of protected womanhood never described every woman’s life.
What connects these histories is not that every explanation was identical. It is the habit of treating women as people to be interpreted by an authority outside ourselves.
Which feeling would make us women?
Now women are to believe that we are a condition or feeling or something…..
I have known women who loved motherhood and women who never wanted children. Women who loved being pregnant and women who felt like their bodies were being taken over and invaded. Some delighted in getting dressed up. Others would happily attend every occasion in the same comfortable shoes. Their differences never made their womanhood difficult to understand.
So when someone says womanhood is a feeling, a reasonable question follows: which feeling? What sensation do all women share that makes us women?
A woman recovering from a mastectomy does not need to feel feminine to remain a woman. Neither does a girl growing into adulthood who hates the expectations people attach to her body. We should be widening the room for women to live freely, without making their belonging depend on an emotional test.
In the middle of tense discussions some women have asserted that being female doesn’t matter that much anyway because “this part is hard” or “that part seems useless.” I hate it anyway.
You do not have to enjoy a single expectation or indication of being female to know that you are a female human being. You just are.
Our grandmothers did not challenge the limits placed on women so we could inherit a more fashionable obligation to obey.
Affirmation
My compassion has room for me. I do not need to make my life fit somebody else’s personal and fact-lacking explanation.
