Women, Unedited
Force, fracture, and the long labour of becoming
This essay is a gift. To the women who have loved me: my mother, my late grandmothers. To my friends, women whose loyalty has been the closest thing to grace I’ve experienced. To the women on Substack who have chosen to read me, subscribe to me, become patrons, and sometimes argue with me in the comments – I am in your debt. And to the women I will never meet, who carry something I recognise across the distance: this is for you!
No one ever tells you, when you are a girl, that the force you are being taught to supress is the most dangerous thing in a room. There is a kind of intelligence that has no name because the people who named things didn’t think it counted, and women have been running on it for centuries. We have written endlessly about what women suffer. Somebody should write about what they carry, and the first thing I can say about women, in this particular cultural moment, is that I find them extraordinary, not despite the evidence, but because of it.
Not in the pink-ribbon, Instagram-caption way. Not in the you are a goddess, you are enough, you are the universe wearing a body way, which is the sort of affirmation that sounds profound at 2 a.m. and completely hollow by Thursday. I mean it in the way you are astonished by something that has endured damage and did not become only damage. In the way you look at a cathedral that survived a war and notice that it’s still standing, still doing the thing cathedrals do, holding light, holding the weight of what people bring to it, but now with burn marks visible, and cracks you can date if you know where to look.
Women have burn marks. And we know where to look.
But this is not an essay about suffering. I am bored to tears by the suffering-as-identity genre that has colonised a certain strain of feminist writing, the one that catalogues wounds with literary precision as though the wound, beautifully described, becomes its own liberation. It doesn’t. Pain is not a credential. Survival, though real and hard-won, is not the whole story. And I think we do women a kind of injustice when we reduce them to what they endured, however accurately.
There is a particular force that women carry, and I am not speaking metaphorically… or not only. I mean something physiological, structural, almost geological. Women have been managing the impossible for so long that the impossible no longer registers as exceptional. Consider the ordinary arithmetic of a woman’s day: the emotional management that doesn’t appear on any spreadsheet, the invisible negotiations with tone and timing and the management of other people’s comfort that most men have never had to perform before breakfast. The double shift, not the one economists write about in papers, but the deeper one, the psychic shift between what you feel and what the situation requires you to present. Women are extraordinarily skilled at this. The question I want to ask is whether the skill should be admired or mourned or, more uncomfortably, both.
Because we’ve been too quick to celebrate endurance as though it were the same as freedom. Simone de Beauvoir saw this coming. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, she wrote, meaning that the becoming is always someone else’s project before it is your own. And what gets made, through centuries of that project, the daughter trained to serve, the wife trained to yield, the worker trained to smile, the mystic trained to hush, is not weakness. It is a very specific, very dangerous kind of competence, the competence of knowing how to inhabit a shape that was cut for you by hands that were not yours.
Dangerous, because it is mistaken for naturalness. Because it erases the labour. Because we call women intuitive, empathetic, nurturing as though these were gifts from the sky and not skills drilled into the bone across generations of necessity.
And yet... And here is where I start to trouble myself, which is generally a good sign.
The women who shaped me were not legible through that framework alone. My grandmother, who carried her Eastern Orthodox faith the way she carried her body, not performing it, just inhabiting it, fully, without explanation, she was not diminished by the tradition she lived inside. She had a ferocity in her that the tradition could not fully contain. Something in her exceeded the frame. She read Dostoevsky and argued with the priest on Wednesday afternoons and made bread on Friday mornings with a focus that felt, honestly, liturgical. She would have laughed at being called a feminist. She would have laughed at not being one.
That is the complexity I want to hold. The woman who is shaped by constraint and exceeds it simultaneously, without needing a label for the excess.
History, when it bothers to include women at all, tends to remember the exceptions. Joan of Arc, lit and mythologised. Cleopatra, desired and weaponised. Marie Curie, footnoted as the woman who also won the Nobel Prize, as though the also were necessary. The implication is structural, women who made it into the record were anomalies, and the anomaly becomes the alibi. See? She made it. The system isn’t closed.
But history’s silence about ordinary women, the ones who ran households as complex as small economies, who transmitted languages and stories across generations, who kept religious practice alive through the domestic and the daily, that silence is not absence. It is suppression. What was not written down was often what mattered the most. The midwife who knew more about the body than the physician who would later replace her. The herbalist whose knowledge was tried as witchcraft. The abbess who ran a scriptorium and translated texts and governed a community of women with more political acuity than most of the noblemen around her, and whose name you do not know.
Their anonymity is not accidental. It is a record of what was considered worth recording. Which is to say: a record of power.
And still, somehow, it all got passed on. Something survived. The knowledge moved through different channels, through women’s work, through song, through the body, through the kitchen, through childhood, and emerged, improbably intact, in daughters who hadn’t been told they were receiving it. That is a form of transmission so ancient and so sturdy that even organised forgetting couldn’t fully dismantle it.
I find that genuinely extraordinary.
Then, let’s talk about what women are doing now, without pretending it’s uniformly heroic, because some of it is deeply, darkly funny. We have arrived in an era when empowerment has become its own cottage industry, in which a woman can purchase a tote bag that says girlboss while the company that made it pays its garment workers below survival wages. In which sisterhood is invoked at networking events to disguise what is, in fact, professional competition dressed in more palatable clothing. In which the language of feminism – boundaries, centre yourself, do the work, hold space – has been so thoroughly absorbed by the self-help market that it can now be used to sell expensive retreats in Tulum to women who have never once interrogated the economic conditions that allow them to attend expensive retreats in Tulum.
This is not a polemic against women who go to Tulum but against the way capital absorbs critique and resells it. Feminism is not immune to this. Nothing is.
And yet, the critique itself has been weaponised too. There is a reactionary pleasure in pointing to Instagram feminism as the death of real feminism, a convenient distraction from the fact that structural inequalities in wages, in reproductive rights, in the global feminisation of poverty, in the statistical ordinariness of male violence against women remain emphatically, brutally real. The tote bag is absurd! The tote bag is also not the point!
This is territory I have walked before, the question of what happens when a movement built on oxygen starts to suffocate itself, when the language of liberation hardens into a kind of ideological gatekeeping that punishes nuance more swiftly than it punishes injustice. If that thread interests you, How Feminism Made Men The Villains is where I pulled that thread until it frayed.
The point is that women are doing what they have always done, which is negotiate a world that was not designed with them in mind, using whatever language and tools the present moment offers. Sometimes those tools are ridiculous. Sometimes they are genuinely subversive. Often, they are both in the same week.
Something I’ve noticed, walking through Paris in the grey February light, watching women (on the métro, in cafés, at school gates, in boardrooms I’ve been invited into and some I’ve walked into uninvited) is that most women are conducting at least two conversations at once. The external one, which is audible, professional, charming, or efficient as the occasion demands. And the internal one, which is monitoring the room’s temperature, the other person’s mood, the implication beneath the question, the way the air changed when she said a particular thing. And it is not paranoia but a survival skill so deeply internalised that it no longer feels like a skill at all. It feels like perception. And it is accurate, honed perception, but the fact that it was made necessary by threat does not make it any less real or any less remarkable.
Men notice this sometimes. They call it reading the room and they find it impressive. They rarely ask why women needed to become so expert at it! I also wrote about the men still in the room, still trying, at length elsewhere, and with more tenderness than I expected to feel while writing it. Men, Actually is the companion piece this essay didn’t ask for but probably needs.
I’m not going to be gracious about that perception I mentioned above. It costs us. The attentiveness that looks like emotional intelligence from the outside is also, from the inside, exhausting. To be perpetually calibrating is to never quite be off. And women who try to be off, who are blunt, or take up space loudly, or simply decline to perform warmth on demand, are usually punished for it, not by laws anymore, in most places, but by something subtler: being called difficult, cold, a lot, which is another way of saying: you are not maintaining the performance we require, and yet… Difficult Women Are Divine.
So, the force I am trying to name is not just the force of endurance. It is the force required to remain yourself inside a system that is constantly proposing a different version of you. To not become entirely the thing you were pressed into. To find, somewhere in the middle of all that pressing, something that is still stubbornly, privately, sometimes secretly yours.
I was seven when I encountered French for the first time. It arrived late, and foreign, and demanded something. Not only memorisation, that was easy enough, but a whole new way of holding thought. Every language I have learned since has felt like a new room inside myself, furnished differently, lit from different angles. Women know something about this, about carrying multiple registers simultaneously, about the fluency required to move between the language of the house and the language of the world, about the translation work that is never fully acknowledged.
We contain multitudes and we rarely get credit for the containment.
Here is what I want to say to the women in my life, and to those who read me, and to those who have made me feel less alone across the distance of a screen:
You are not required to be legible to everyone! You are not required to explain yourself into simplicity! The woman who contains contradictions, who is tender and ruthless, ambitious and uncertain, devout and questioning, sexual and severe, is not a problem to be solved. She is the actual thing.
The flattening of women into saints or seductresses, into mothers or mistresses, into victims or victors is aesthetic poverty. It is the story told about women by people who cannot hold complexity. And you are not obligated to perform the simplifications they find comforting.
Lilith, in the older mythologies before she was cleaned up and cast out, refused to be positioned as secondary. She left Eden rather than submit to a cosmology that required her to diminish. This gets told as a story about female transgression. I have always read it as a story about the cost of integrity. She lost paradise. She also refused the terms.
Women have been doing this ever since. Refusing the terms, even when the terms were all that was on offer. Even when refusal meant exile. Even when no one wrote it down.
And now, something I’ve held back until this point, the thing that feels too plain to say in an essay that has been wearing its learning so visibly…
Women have kept the world going. Not symbolically. Literally. The unpaid labour, the care work, the emotional maintenance, the raising of human beings who might otherwise become something worse than they turned out to be… all of this has been performed mostly by women, mostly without recognition, mostly without pay, across every culture and every century we can account for. The global economy would collapse, genuinely collapse, if women stopped doing what they currently do for free.
I am not going to make this poetic. It’s not poetic. It’s material. It’s arithmetic.
What I want to say, without sentimentality, is that this essay exists because women are still here. Still writing, still reading, still building communities of thought in corners of the internet that feel, against all odds, like something real. The salon I have tried to make of my Substack comments section (and it is one, I am not being precious about that), is a salon because the people in it are extraordinary, men and mostly women. Women who read difficult things and say more difficult things back. Women who refuse the algorithm’s preference for comfort. Women who are still, still, still trying to think.
Thinking doesn’t save you. But it’s honest! Insight doesn’t lead to liberation, but it’s more interesting than the alternative! I do not know how this ends. None of us do. But here we are.
Written on the eve of the 8th of March, with admiration that has no clean edges, and gratitude that refuses to be brief, yours in the unfinished business of becoming, in the dignity of the difficult, and in the long, stubborn love of women who think, not in solidarity as slogan, not in sisterhood as brand, but in the older sense: in recognition, across whatever distance separates us, of something shared that neither of us has found the exact word for yet,
Tamara
P.S. The essays mentioned above:
There’s another force in women that history rarely names. That is archival intelligence.
Not the archive of institutions, but the living one, the way knowledge survives in gestures, recipes, warnings, tones of voice, the muted “don’t trust that man” passed between generations without footnotes. Civilizations write their laws in stone. Women have carried their counter-knowledge in memory, where power can’t easily confiscate it.
Empires fall and libraries burn, but somehow the practical wisdom of survival keeps reappearing in daughters who were never formally taught it. Endurance, sure, but also a parallel system of preservation running beneath official history.
Your essay feels like opening one of those hidden archives, Tamara. It illuminates, it is unsentimental, and fiercely intelligent, a remarkable piece of writing that made me very emotional. Thank you for that.
And Happy International Women’s Day tomorrow!
My father owned a jewelry store. When I was around 7 or 8, I was at the store with both my parents during business hours when a large man - larger than my father, who was pretty tall - walked in and asked my dad to show him some rings that were inside the front showcase. He unlocked the case and pulled out the display bed with around 20 rings embedded in it. The "customer" then asked to see something in the case on the back wall, and the second my dad turned to open the case, the guy grabbed the entire bed of rings and bolted for the door. My mother, who was on the other side of the show floor, lunged at him and grabbed onto the back of his jacket, sliding out the door with him like she was water-skiing.
She couldn't stop him, but my young, impressionable mind was permanently altered. It's the reason why, as a man, I've never had trouble admitting that women could be formidable. It made me afraid of my mother, in that healthy, respectful way, and as I got older that fear matured with me, into admiration. I feel bad for the "gender warriors" on both sides for having bad role models; I got lucky on that random day, in my dad's jewelry store.
You're a formidable woman, Tamara. You do the creative and intellectual equivalent of what I witnessed my mother do to someone three times her size. I hope both the men and women who read you appreciate that.