the crow’s nest

On resistance and recovery in Rich and Plath

Both Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” confront how women’s identities are not only shaped by patriarchal culture but also the ways in which they have been seriously distorted, damaged, and constrained by it. Each poet handles this trauma differently. Rich turns inward, seeking introspection and reclamation; while Plath takes a loud, defiant approach, embracing resistance and revenge. Through their varying strategies, the poems depict the struggles women endure to reclaim themselves from a society that has attempted to narrate their stories or erase them entirely.

Rich depicts her speaker journeying into an underwater world, symbolizing male-dictated histories used to define women’s roles and potential. The “wreck” symbolizes both personal trauma and the collective inheritance of patriarchal culture. The speaker claims she has come for “the wreck and not the story of the wreck” (Rich). She isn’t interested in patriarchal myths around what happened; she wants to see the truth plainly. The ladder she descends serves as a symbol for the systems that dictate how women are educated and how they are allowed to express themselves. She dives deliberately and methodically, seeking to recover and reclaim what has been lost. The speaker is performing an act of salvage, seeking to bring to the surface women’s experiences that have been historically silenced.

Plath’s poem shines light on how patriarchal culture has turned women into spectacles. In “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker’s pain is turned into entertainment for the “peanut-crunching crowd” who “Shoves in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot” (Plath). Her body becomes something to be displayed and judged. Plath’s speaker refuses to remain as an object. She rises “Out of the ash” to “eat men like air” (Plath), violently subverting the narrative. The poem suggests rage is a sacred, appropriate response to patriarchal oppression.

Though they approach the matter in different ways, both poems assert that women must actively reclaim the authority to define their own identities. Rich and Plath argue that patriarchal stories and expectations suppress the female self, and that it is both the woman’s duty and right to recover or reinvent the story herself.

Works Cited

Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025.

Romance consists of many forms of cruelty.

Both historically and into our modern day, women have been taught from infancy that to be loved romantically is the greatest badge of worthiness. To be chosen is to be happy, and to be unchosen is to be miserable. This message, of course, fails to draw attention to the price many women must pay to be “in love.” Jackie Kay’s “Late Love” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” both expose how social structures around romantic love have turned it into theater, a contract, and a hunger that consumes individual agency. In both works, affection comes at a cost. Whether a woman is “loved” or “unloved,” her body and identity are collateral.

In “Late Love,” Kay paints lovers as nearly divine:

“How they strut about, people in love, how tall they grow… their skin shining” (Kay).

Love transforms them into mythological, cinematic beings, “filmic,” radiant, and untouchable. Romantic love is seen as the ticket to leave behind an ordinary existence, to depart from the previous self. The lovers’ enviable glow depends on amnesia: they “don’t remember who they have been” (Kay). “The lot that are not in love” are described as “shabby,” their “skin lustreless” (Kay). They aren’t merely single, but socially invisible.

Machado’s heroine in “The Husband Stitch” reveals the price women pay to become these “filmic” beings in love. Her story begins in a perfectly cinematic way: her husband adores, cherishes, and desires her. Despite this, every loving gesture he performs embodies a sense of ownership. Before marriage, he tells her:

“I feel like I know so many parts of you… And… I will know all of them” (Machado).

Soon enough, her ribbon, the only thing that belongs to her alone, becomes his fixation. To withhold anything from him is treated as betrayal. “A wife,” he says, “should have no secrets from her husband” (Machado).

The story’s title is a reference to an “extra stitch” the doctors made after her difficult childbirth, when she was suffering pain and exhaustion. The stitch was made at her husband’s request, supposedly to tighten the vagina for his pleasure. The narrator has no say on this matter, just as her request for a fully natural birth is ignored. Through this scene and others, Machado shows us that to be loved, a woman must surrender not only her body but her boundaries, privacy, and self-authority. At the end of the story, her husband fulfills his wish of removing her ribbon, her final boundary, only for her head to fall off her body. Fittingly, the narrator’s final words are:

“I love you… more than you can possibly know” (Machado).

Works Cited

Kay, Jackie. “Late Love.” Darling: New & Selected Poems, Picador, 2007, p. 63.

I saw myself staring back.

From the fairy tales we’re fed as children to the heavily edited social media posts that bombard us today, womanhood has been sculpted by the male gaze. As Laura Mulvey famously articulated in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” women on screen are “coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connotate to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey). We’re expected to move through the world as if a camera is focused on us, to compose our lives for an unseen audience. To be a woman is to be one’s own voyeur.

Maria Tatar’s essay “Children’s Fairy Tales and Feminine Beauty” reveals that this conditioning starts long before we learn to name it. Fairy tales, she writes, “associate women’s beauty with goodness” (Tatar). Beauty becomes proof of moral worth, a passport to survival, riches, and blessings. The ugly woman is punished; the beautiful one is saved. This is one of the earliest representations of morality we’re exposed to. As a young girl (as many girls do), I wished I could be a princess. “So that I could be pretty,” I reasoned, “If I’m pretty, I can be loved.” Imagine my surprise when my parents showed me pictures of real-world princesses who didn’t fit the beauty standard! I stared at those images, confused. Fairy tales had promised me glowing skin, symmetrical faces, and shining eyes. But here were women who looked imperfect, and so very human. Wrinkles. Laugh lines. Tired gazes. It seemed like an error in the code. If beauty was proof of virtue, how could princesses (the most virtuous of all) look so ordinary?

We learn early on that love is conditional upon how we present to the world. In fairy tales, it’s the girl who is gazed upon who is saved. It’s the beautiful maiden to whom the crown is presented. These stories reward the woman who can best embody an image of desirability. Maria Tatar explains that these tales “train the eye as well as the heart,” teaching us both what to strive for and how to perceive. The moral binaries of “fair and foul,” she writes, “instruct children in aesthetic and ethical hierarchies.” Goodness is reflected by physical beauty, and evil dwells in the deformed and disfigured. Anything that falls between these poles is lost in the background.

The fairy tale and the male gaze operate on the same principle: women are to serve as symbols, not authentic individuals.

Laura Mulvey describes how “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (Mulvey). The man looks; the woman performs being looked at. Even when no camera is holding us captive, we learn to frame ourselves as desirable. We smooth our gestures, edit our expressions, and turn living into performance. To be watched is to exist; to remain unseen is to vanish.

But what happens when a woman refuses to be seen on those terms? What happens when she flips the script?

In myth, she becomes the monster.

Medusa’s story begins like a fairy tale. She’s a beautiful girl, a temple maiden, favored by the gods. When she’s violated, her beauty becomes her undoing. Athena’s punishment transforms her from a pleasing object to an active threat: serpents for hair, and a gaze so terrible it turns men to stone. Although no longer beautiful, Medusa’s power continues to lie in her being looked at.

Perseus, unable to face her directly, uses his polished shield as a mirror. He looks at her reflection in place of her person: the perfect metaphor for Mulvey’s theory. “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female form,” she writes, “which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey). Perseus’s shield is that fantasy. It allows him to conquer her without truly facing her.

Even in death, Medusa is aestheticized. Her head is mounted on Athena’s shield, and her image is used to uphold the very system that destroyed her. Her body becomes a symbol; her suffering is rebranded as beauty. Medusa’s gaze exposes what the fairy tale and the film both conceal: that the image of “woman” was always a reflection built for someone else’s comfort. Mulvey names it; Tatar historicizes it; Medusa shatters it. She looks back, not to destroy, but to remind us of what’s hidden behind our reflections: our true selves, unposed and authentic.

Perhaps, if we look Medusa in the eyes, we won’t turn to stone. We’ll simply see ourselves looking back.

Works Cited

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.

On seeing beyond the frame, and the impossibility of killing a phantom.

There’s a moment in Mona Lisa Smile when Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) asks her students not to simply look at the painting, but to look beyond the frame: to consider what might lie outside what is presented, what is silenced by convention, what possibilities are left unseen. For Watson’s students at Wellesley, the “frame” is both literal and metaphorical. It represents the established expectations for what a woman should admire, desire, or become. In the 21st Century, I ask myself how much the “frame” has truly changed. While the objects of our ambitions may have shifted to include extensive educational or career attainment, the borders of what is permitted, admired, or expected continue to press in from all sides. We do well to ask ourselves: whose vision am I inhabiting when I define my goals?

This question haunted not only Katherine Watson’s classroom, but the writing of authors such as Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. Woolf’s “Professions for Women” warns of the “Angel in the House,” an inner voice urging women to be pleasing, charming, and unthreatening, to “use all the arts and wiles of our sex” (Woolf). This “Angel” costs us our authenticity, persuading us to filter our thoughts until they become unrecognizable. Eliot’s “I Grant You Ample Leave” asks if a woman can ever truly claim herself, or if she is always, in some sense, an echo of what society expects. 

In 2025 I attended a special program at Vassar College, one of the Seven Sisters, the historically women’s colleges that orbit the Ivy League and count Wellesley among their number. For someone like me, for whom higher education was never a given, the world of elite liberal arts colleges is inherently foreign. As I walked through Vassar’s halls, I couldn’t help but be burdened by the sense that my every word, gesture, and aspiration was quietly measured against a legacy I hadn’t inherited. I felt like a trespasser in a world designed for someone else: someone from an educated lineage, someone who instinctively understood how to speak the language of privilege and potential, someone who was certainly constrained by a “frame” of their own–but a dazzling, ornate, gilded one. Even when I was asked for my raw, unfiltered analysis, I caught myself softening my questions, worrying about being too blunt or abrasive. Woolf’s “Angel” had made herself at home in my head:

“Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive… Above all, be pure” (Woolf).

But (and perhaps I’m letting the Angel win for a moment) none of this is to bash Vassar or the social class it caters to. My world of origin has its own rigid expectations: listen, obey, and submit. (Cults do have quite the way of subduing individuality.) Whether I was preaching a doomsday message or cosplaying privilege, the “Angel” always had something to say. I’ve yet to find a place immune to her demands; neither the cult nor Vassar has proved an exception. One environment told me to submit, to hide my intelligence and swallow my questions. The other rewards dissent, but only in the right register–clever, but not too sharp; confident, but never threatening. Both spaces, in their own way, are obsessed with staying inside the “frame.” As Eliot writes:

“Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’ / Turns nought but object, melts to molecules” (Eliot).

What does it truly mean to step outside of the “frame”? Can the “Angel in the House” be slayed, or does she possess some form of cruel immortality? Woolf herself confessed:

“it is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality” (Woolf).

Maybe her approach only gets cleverer, adapting to each new context. I suspect the work is not about winning once and for all, but about becoming increasingly aware of her cunning little tricks, and resisting her in any way I can. Some days, my resistance is loud: a challenge voiced in the classroom, or an unapologetic argument in an essay. Other days, it’s quieter: allowing myself to doubt freely, or refusing to dish out fake smiles just to seem disarming. Perhaps it’s not escaping the frame that matters, but learning to see it clearly. Maybe the important thing is to keep looking beyond, to keep asking, to keep troubling the picture. If I cannot slay the “Angel,” then I can at least deny her the satisfaction of obedience. And just like Woolf herself:

“My excuse, if had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense” (Woolf). 

Works Cited

Eliot, George. “I Grant You Ample Leave.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47458/i-grant-you-ample-leave. Accessed 10 Oct. 2025.

Mona Lisa Smile. Directed by Mike Newell, performances by Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, Columbia Pictures, 2003.

A brief history of medical misogyny.

The story of "The Yellow Wallpaper," which depicts the act of silencing women under the guise of care, echoes the modern day experience of many women and girls. False diagnoses and the subsequent dismissal of the female patient’s concerns are rampant as ever. As a young woman with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and its accompanying diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder, I’m no stranger to the misogynistic tendencies of the medical field. For over a decade, my symptoms were dismissed as: “obsessive tendencies,” “neuroticism,” “growing pains,” “psychosomatic,” “attention seeking," the list goes on. I might just riot if I have to be met with another, “Nothing’s wrong, your labs are normal.” 

Dismissing women’s concerns is nothing new. In ancient Greece, physicians believed a woman’s uterus could wander the body, causing everything from fainting to fits of rage (McGill). This “wandering womb” explanation was a convenient scapegoat, and its successors have proven to be just as effective (McGill). The term “hysteria” (based on the word "hystera," meaning uterus), coined circa 400 BCE, worked its way into the medical diagnoses of the 19th century. It was believed that hysteria affected only women, reinforcing cultural ideas about female fragility, emotionality, and irrationality. Pain, anxiety, fainting, emotional distress, and even creativity and sexuality commonly fell under this diagnostic umbrella (McGill).

For much of history, medical science focused only on men. For example, for decades, autism was considered almost exclusively a male phenomenon, leaving girls and women out of the picture entirely (Pearson; Russell et al.). While it’s true that autism in women tends to present differently than autism in men, autistic women are by no means a small population. As of 2025, the male-to-female ratio is expected to be close to 2:1. This contrasts with the previously accepted belief that for every autistic woman, there were four autistic men (Pearson). Early research, diagnostic criteria, and representations in popular culture centered exclusively on young boys. The clinical archetype was male. Girls and women were nearly invisible, and their symptoms were attributed to “personality,” “mood,” or even “that time of the month” (Pearson; Russell et al.).

The legacy of rebranding women’s suffering as some mysterious “female malady” is exactly what "The Yellow Wallpaper" lays bare. The narrator’s distress is pathologized and minimized, and her voice, desires, and perceptions are filtered through her husband’s medical authority. John, her husband and physician, diagnoses her with “a slight hysterical tendency,” rather than investigating the true cause of her symptoms (Gilman).

“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression–a slight hysterical tendency–what is one to do?” (Gilman)

The “rest cure” is imposed on the narrator, requiring her to be quiet, obedient, and passive. She isn’t even allowed to write, but does so in secret, hiding this fact from her husband and sister-in-law. The narrator is discouraged from expressing her feelings (which, of course, are always dismissed), and literally confined to a nursery, as if her body and mind are childish and untrustworthy. When she tries to speak up for herself, her concerns are trivialized:

“John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” (Gilman)

Her husband’s dismissal echoes what so many neurodivergent women experience today: the feeling that their symptoms must not be real if they can’t be easily seen or measured (Pearson; Russell et al.). 

Even the narrator’s attempts to claim agency are seen as part of her “illness”:

“He said I was not to work until I was well again. … Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman)

She’s again denied trust that her own experience is valid. This struggle is painfully familiar to autistic women, or anyone who has spent years having their suffering renamed, rebranded, or outright erased by those given authority.

The wallpaper, with its suffocating pattern, becomes a symbol for centuries of medical misogyny and social control:

“I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” (Gilman)

It’s only in her isolation that the narrator is able to see through the pattern. She then witnesses the woman “creeping” behind it, a woman “stopping down and creeping about behind that pattern,” desperate for escape (Gilman).

"The Yellow Wallpaper" isn’t just a story about one woman’s breakdown. It’s a record of the cost of silencing, of the centuries-old assumptions that still shape the way women are diagnosed, treated, and often, entirely dismissed. For as long as those patterns remain present in our society, many more of us will find ourselves trapped behind the wallpaper, clawing to get out. 

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Project Gutenberg, 1997,https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1952/1952-h/1952-h.htm.

McGill Office for Science and Society. “The History of Hysteria.” McGill University,https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-quackery/history-hysteria.

Pearson, Catherine. “Why More Women Are Getting Diagnosed With Autism Than Ever Before.” The Washington Post, 31 Mar. 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/03/31/autism-diagnosis-women-girls/.

Erasure is a form of violence.

“Until the lions have their own historians, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” —African proverb

Countless stories have been lost to history. Among these are those detailing the perspectives of women and minorities. Kate Chopin’s short story, "Désirée’s Baby," calls attention to whose voice gets to define reality. Due to patriarchal power structures, Armand, Désirée’s husband, has (and uses) the power to erase his wife from her own tale. His authority is nearly absolute. He makes decisions, delivers accusations, and tells Désirée to leave without once considering her perspective. Even her racial origins are decided upon by him, despite her attempts to assert her European ethnicity. Désirée pleads with Armand, but her reality is dismissed in favor of his. Even his feelings take center stage:

“He thought Almighty God had dealt cruelly and unjustly with him; and felt, somehow, that he was paying Him back in kind when he stabbed thus into his wife’s soul. Moreover, he no longer loved her, because of the unconscious injury she had brought upon his home and his name” (Chopin).

In the end, it is implied that Désirée takes her life in response to her husband’s scorn. Armand controls not only Désirée’s circumstances, but also holds the power to rip away her life in its entirety. All of this occurs not simply because Désirée is a woman, but because her husband believes her to be “racially impure,” and thinks she is hiding a secret Black ancestor. In the end, Armand discovers it was not Désirée whose lineage included a slave, but his.

Chopin’s story is not just about one man’s cruelty. It’s a meditation on how entire systems of power conspire to erase those who are inconvenient to the dominant narrative. In their article, “It’s a Man’s World: Re-examination of the Female Perspective in Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’ and ‘The Story of an Hour’,” Ahmetspahić and Kahrić emphasize how the story’s structure mirrors the oppressive social order of nineteenth-century Louisiana:

“Chopin’s women are denied narrative sovereignty and are instead subject to the authority and interpretations of men” (Ahmetspahić & Kahrić 24).

The power to define reality is tightly bound to race as well as gender. The source article notes that Désirée’s desperate assertion—“look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand”—and the way it is subsequently ignored, is not just a plot device. Chopin’s writing reflects a broader social order in which “race, gender, and class intersect to create a social order in which women and people of color are systematically silenced and disempowered” (Ahmetspahić & Kahrić 26).

Chopin, and scholars like Ahmetspahić and Kahrić, call us to question: Who gets to be the historian? Whose truth survives? Until the lions have their own historians, the hunt will always glorify the hunter. It is up to us, as readers, as writers, and as witnesses, to break the silence and insist on the preservation of a more truthful history.

Works Cited

Ahmetspahić, Adisa, and Damir Kahrić. “It’s a Man’s World: Re-examination of the Female Perspective in Chopin’s ‘Désirée’s Baby’ and ‘The Story of an Hour.’” ESSE Messenger, vol. 29, no. 1, Summer 2020, pp. 23–37. https://essenglish.org/messenger/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/08/29-1-S2020-ahmetspahic.pdf

Kate Chopin's heroines and the price of sensibility.

As children, we experience the world with an intensity our adult selves struggle to recall. A scraped knee pushes us to tears, a disapproving look from a caregiver floods us with shame, and somehow, we know what we desire without straining ourselves to discern it. We move freely, naturally, and boldly, until, at the incessant chiding of adults, we finally give in to the pressure to sit still and behave. Our bodies know what our minds shouldn’t have to deliberate on, yet we silence them in favor of becoming “civil” and “sensible” youths. Somewhere along the way, under the weight of rules, warnings, and punishments, we surrender our somatic wisdom.

We internalize the lesson: the world rewards the child who ignores their body’s signals, who sits still, who swallows their hunger. By adolescence, most of us have mastered the art of shrinking. We gradually slice ourselves into digestible, palatable, bite-sized pieces. For girls, especially, this loss is no accident. To “become a woman” is to diminish oneself. A girl is admonished against loudness, against anger, and against the honest naming of her desires. Our bodies are molded into objects to be disciplined or to be ashamed of. Even hunger is a sin. We learn to suppress our appetites so that we may maintain an appearance others find appealing. Our desires become liabilities—if expressed, we may face judgment, ostracization, or a stern reprimand for being so “difficult.” We’re given little choice but to trade authenticity for safety, and instinct for adaptation.

Kate Chopin’s heroines stand at the threshold of this divide. They know very well how to be “sensible,” but their bodies haven’t forgotten how to want. In The Story of an Hour, Mrs. Mallard receives news of her husband’s death. Although she knows that the “sensible” thing to do is to grieve, to be heartbroken, her body responds before her mind can override its instinct:

“Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body” (Chopin).

It isn’t relief at her husband’s absence she feels, but the sudden presence of her true self (her own desires, her own life) filling the void where duty and restraint had been. The sensation is so rooted within her body that her mind lags behind, struggling to “beat it back with her will” (Chopin). She tells herself it’s monstrous to feel joy at such a time, but her body is honest. Her body knows she has reason to celebrate.

In A Respectable Woman, Mrs. Baroda’s longing for her husband’s friend is a sudden, shocking experience. As she sits beside Gouvernail under the cover of darkness, she experiences a raw, elemental form of desire:

“She was not thinking of his words, only drinking in the tones of his voice. She wanted to reach out her hand in the darkness and touch him… as she might have done if she had not been a respectable woman” (Chopin).

Mrs. Baroda’s body knows her desires before her mind dares to admit them. She considers informing her husband of this development, but decides against it. As a “respectable woman,” to even admit the possibility of desire would risk her reputation, her status, and her marriage.

So, both women do what they’ve been trained to do: they suppress. Mrs. Mallard fights to suffocate her joy, while Mrs. Baroda flees her home entirely. These women have been socialized to believe that experiencing emotions contrary to what’s expected of them is shameful. Their virtue is measured by their willingness to betray and discipline their own bodies, silencing themselves at the core.

I see this pattern at the center of my own life. I’ve spent years in environments (religious, familial, social) where the price of adaptation was my own disembodiment. I was taught to judge and condemn every instinct. If I was tired, I was lazy. If I was hungry, I was indulgent (and I was certainly going to gain weight!). If I was angry, I was unreasonable, hysterical, or “probably on my period.” If I wanted anything, really, I was warned that desire was dangerous, a slippery slope towards selfishness and sinfulness. I learned to suppress not just my emotions, but every signal my body sent: pain, pleasure, intuition, and even fatigue became problems to be solved, rather than information to be considered.

To be a “respectable woman,” it isn’t enough simply to appear good or act fairly. You must also feel nothing that cannot be contained or justified. Sensibility has become a synonym for self-erasure. We’re told—implicitly or explicitly—that maturity is never wanting too much, never making others uncomfortable with our hunger, rage, suffering, or longing. When we inevitably slip up by expressing something thoroughly human, we must apologize for our error or face the consequences.

What’s lost in this transaction? What do we give up when we make ourselves legible to a world that has no interest in reading us? For Chopin’s heroines, the cost is everything. Mrs. Mallard, having glimpsed the possibility of living a self-possessed, authentic life, can’t return to the one she’s been living. When her husband reappears, alive and well, she dies, and the doctors pronounce her dead by “the joy that kills.” The reader knows better. Mrs. Mallard dies of the shock of losing herself again. Her body knows it will never be allowed to truly live.

Mrs. Baroda’s fate is quieter. She returns to her home with her mask firmly in place, assuring her husband that she’s “overcome everything.” He’s satisfied, and she’s maintained her role as a “respectable woman.” But what has she overcome? Is it her longing for Gouvernail, or her own capacity for honesty? She fights her battles in silence, not daring to let another know the shame of her natural impulses.

If you see yourself in these examples, you aren’t alone. What did you learn to silence in yourself to become acceptable or good? What did it cost to let your body speak, and to listen to it without shame? Kate Chopin’s heroines couldn’t honor their somatic knowledge, but we can learn to respect and acknowledge the parts of us they were forced to suppress. We can be sensible and respectable while pausing to listen to our bodies, observing our physical sensations honestly and without shame. Every time we name a need, a want, or set a boundary, we refuse the inheritance of self-betrayal. To be human isn’t a sin. Our bodies don’t need to be punished. May we be brave enough to reconnect with the truth within our veins, and the hunger that shows us we’re alive. To exist fully within our bodies is nature’s wish for us. We were never born to be erased.

Works Cited

Chopin, Kate. A Respectable Woman. 1894. American Literature, https://americanliterature.com/author/kate-chopin/short-story/a-respectable-woman. Accessed 18 Sept. 2025.

Using your brain is a radical act.

“The neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore, and... women are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes…” - Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

The early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft posited that a system which restricts female education is not only cruel, but one that fundamentally undermines a woman’s potential and capacity for virtue. In doing so, it harms not only the female sex, but humankind as a whole. More than two centuries ago, she wrote that “virtue can only flourish among equals” (Wollstonecraft), meaning that it is impossible for women, or anyone, to truly be good without first being treated as rational, intelligent, and educable beings.

I experienced, firsthand, what it means to be a girl denied education. For much of my childhood and adolescence, my access to knowledge was intentionally and systematically restricted. Raised in a conservative Christian high-control group (aka: a cult), I was subject to the view that women were most virtuous when they were obedient, silent, and unquestioning. Since I had been born a stubborn, curious girl whose favorite word was “why?”, this notion and I were a complete mismatch. After sixth grade, I was pulled from formal schooling and “homeschooled” in a fashion that offered little true learning. It was drilled into my head that higher education—particularly studies in the liberal arts and sciences—was dangerous, prideful, and sinful. I was raised not to think, but to serve. From day one, my future had been written out for me: marriage, subordination, and a life of “pleasing” those who held real power.

“…they are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless…” (Wollstonecraft)

Women are taught to please, to be charming, pretty, submissive little trophies for men to display in their homes. We are not encouraged to be strong or rational. In fact, if we dare to display such traits, it isn’t long before some conventionalist pseudointellectual feels the need to oh-so-cleverly point out our “unladylike behavior.” I’ve been told countless times—by friends, authority figures, and even my father—that I “think like a man.” When I press for further explanation, I’m almost always hit with something along the lines of “you’re just too logical for a woman.” Once, a stranger in a coffee shop assumed I was a closeted trans man since “no woman could reason like that”! There’s a certain poetry in it: their denial summoned its own undoing. The very paradox they refused to accept was staring them in the face (and silently deeming them all idiots). Their words are delivered with a sort of backhanded admiration (e.g., “you’re not like the other girls!”), but the implication is always that to be reasonable, ambitious, or bold is to violate some core principle of femininity.  

Wollstonecraft took note of this centuries ago:

“I am aware of an obvious inference: from every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women; but where are they to be found? If, by this appellation, men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be, against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of animal being, when they are comprehensively termed mankind—all those who view them with a philosophical eye must, I should think, wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine” (Wollstonecraft).

Masculine virtues—logic, reason, autonomy, strength—are not masculine at all. They are human. The only reason they are “masculine” is that, for centuries, we have told women to be small, soft, yielding, and easy to digest. I once had a “friend” (I use quotation marks because I soon realized he was nothing of the sort) claim that the natural way of things is for women to be subordinate to men. Any truth there may be to this, Wollstonecraft brings to balance:

“In... the physical world, it is observable that… the male pursues, the female yields—this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman… But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment” (Wollstonecraft).

When I requested said “friend” to elaborate, he told me, and I quote:

“I think you, at least, as an individual who’s smarter and more sensitive than most women, can be trusted not to misuse any equal power/freedom in such a way so as to hurt any men in your life.” - Some 4chan-user

There it is again—that trusty old backhanded admiration. I would stand to guess that any man who holds this opinion has had little to no genuinely intimate experience with women.

Yet, it’s men like this who have, throughout history, exerted dominion over half of the human race. The rules of the game are written to protect their sense of order, their power, and their comfort—even when this means denying generations of women their birthright to curiosity and education. For every girl like me, who fought back and successfully claimed her right to knowledge, there are thousands whose questions went unanswered, and whose capacity for greatness was whittled down to the dimensions of some man’s comfort zone.

I’ve spent years unlearning the reflex to shrink away, to mask the way my mind works, to sink myself in the sea of silent submission. I’ve had to fight for my own education, not simply when it comes to securing a seat in the classroom, but in the simple act of allowing myself my right to exist as a rational, bold, ambitious, feminine being. Each small victory of mine is an act of reclamation, a way of honoring all the women who came before me, and all those still denied their “vindication” in the present. The struggle for women’s education, autonomy, and respect is not a relic of Wollstonecraft’s era. It’s alive and well in our time, still writhing, biting, and refusing to be put down. Its cry echoes through every “why?” that will not be silenced.

“I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves” (Wollstonecraft).

Works Cited

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wollstonecraft-mary/1792/vindication-rights-woman/introduction.htm. Accessed 12 Sept. 2025.

For me, knowledge has always been forbidden fruit.

I was born into a cult. My parents pulled me out of school when I was just twelve years old. At thirteen, I made a public declaration of my life to the leadership, thinking I was dedicating myself to God. This was considered by fellow members to be my "wedding day." For the next decade, my entire soul would be devoted to cult activities. At the time, I was content with this. What could be better than serving my Grand Creator? I thought. I "didn't need school anyway," to quote my father. "It's not like you're going to college," he said. Of course I wasn't.

Members were heavily discouraged from seeking higher education. To do so could result in shunning and loss of "privileges" for both the student and their family. Given that my family was of considerably high rank, any deviation from what was expected of us could result in a far fall from grace. Any information we received needed to be through cult-approved sources. Reading critical takes on the organization was grounds for shunning and expulsion, not only from the cult, but from our families and social circles, which were inextricably tangled within it.

Like Eve in Genesis, I learned early that seeking knowledge was an act of rebellion. Education, questioning, and even—gasp!—independent thought were always just out of reach. (The cult frequently reminded us to avoid “independent thinking.” To think for yourself was akin to imitating Satan. Yes, really!) When Eve reaches out for the fruit of knowledge, she’s not simply being disobedient. She’s risking everything for the chance to understand the world for herself (Genesis 3:6).

Eventually, I started waking up. After escaping my abusive family under the cover of the COVID-19 lockdown, I moved across the country and enrolled at a community college. As I filled out the application, my hands shook. Should I really be doing this? I questioned myself. The fruit was now in my hand—ripe, red, and shiny—but I feared what could happen if I sank my teeth into it. Surely... I would certainly die (Genesis 2:17). I pushed my start date off to the following semester, throwing my therapist into a fit. “What are you hiding from me?!” she hissed. I wasn't sure if she sounded more like the serpent or God Himself. “Why do you keep postponing your life?!” Unsure how to explain that I was wrestling with the realization that I was in a cult, I dodged the question. Even in the mandated confidentiality of our therapeutic relationship, I feared word of my deviance would slither its way back to leadership. At this point, I was starting to feel a bit more like Adam: I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid (Genesis 3:10).

It wasn’t long until my hunger for knowledge could no longer be satiated by academia alone. I needed to know if my intuition was right—was I in a cult? I remember when I found Steven Hassan’s appropriately named “BITE” model, a tool designed to identify the markers of authoritarian control: Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional manipulation (Hassan). It was then that I tasted the forbidden fruit in all its complexity: sweet, sour, and bitter all at once. My eyes flew open. There was no turning back.

In “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women,” Aemilia Lanyer reframes Eve’s sin as an act of love:

“If Eve did err, it was for knowledge's sake; The fruit being fair persuaded him to fall: No subtle Serpent's falsehood did betray him, If he would eat it, who had power to stay him? Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love, Which made her give this present to her Dear, That what she tasted, he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more clear” (Lanyer 77–84).

Eve offered Adam the fruit because she wished for his eyes, too, to be opened. I understand her all too well. Likewise, I want my loved ones to see the truth about “The Truth.” Yet, if I share this fruit of knowledge with them, it won't come without cost. If they accept it, they may also be cast out... "For in the day that they eat from it, they will surely die" (Genesis 2:17).

Many pre-Christian traditions teach that death is not only an end, but also a beginning. To die is to be made new. The story of Eve is not just a cautionary tale about disobedience, but a myth of awakening, sacrifice, and the longing to bring others into the light—even if the cost is exile. When I left my own Eden, I lost friends, comfort, community, stability, and the false womb of unquestioned belief. But in exile, I obtained the freedom to know, to wonder, to remake myself, and to invite others to do the same. To taste the fruit of knowledge is to risk everything in hopes that what lies beyond the garden gates is not only suffering, but the raw possibility of becoming fully alive. In the end, the story of Eve (and all of us who follow after her) is not just about what we lose when we seek knowledge, but about all we have to gain.

Works Cited

The Bible. New International Version, Zondervan, 2011.

Hassan, Steven. “The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control.” Freedom of Mind Resource Center, https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model/.