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.
The detail that moves me is the muted “don’t trust that man”…. because that’s not gossip, and it was never gossip, whatever it was called to discredit it. It’s risk intelligence, transmitted in the only medium that couldn’t be seized or burned. The absence of footnotes was the point. What lives in a footnote can be challenged, revised, suppressed by whoever controls the next edition. What lives in a tone of voice has no edition.
There’s something almost subversive about the medium itself, that the most durable repository of counter-knowledge turned out to be the one institutional power consistently underestimated. Not stone, not parchment, not the official record. The kitchen, the warning, the gesture, the pause before speaking that every daughter learned to read before she learned to read.
Libraries burn…. That’s policy. And yet here we are, still in possession of something!
Happy International Women’s Day to you too, dear Clara, and thank you for receiving my essay with that depth of feeling! It means more than the general sort of gratitude can hold.
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.
I can’t say that what your mother did in that moment was a decision since there was no time for one. Which means it came from somewhere below calculation, some layer of person that doesn’t wait for permission. That’s the force I was trying to name in my essay, and you watched it in its most literal, unambiguous form at 7, which is probably the best possible age to receive that particular education. It goes in before the theories do.
The healthy fear you’re describing… I think that’s actually the correct response to encountering something genuinely formidable. Not the fear that diminishes, but the one that recalibrates, adjusting your sense of what’s possible. Most people who struggle with the idea of women’s strength never had their model of the world updated that viscerally, that early.
The jewelry store did more than most classrooms manage.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing your mother here, it means a lot to me!
Tamara, struck by the discipline with which you refuse the sentimental shortcuts that usually accompany this subject. Writing about women without collapsing into either grievance or sanctification is quite rare. You manage it by treating women as historical actors rather than moral symbols. Absolutely remarkable.
Your metaphor of the cathedral avoids the modern habit of treating resilience as a kind of spiritual virtue while acknowledging that resilience is often nothing more than the engineering solution to a hostile environment. Cathedrals, after all, are not strong because stone is noble. They are strong because medieval builders learned how to distribute weight. Women, historically speaking, have been performing a similar structural feat. And that is why I admire them.
What you hint at, and what I think deserves expansion, is the difference between adaptation and design. Much of the competence you describe, the emotional calibration, the capacity to hold multiple registers of thought, the simultaneous internal and external conversation, belongs to the category of adaptation. It emerges because the system required it.
But adaptation is not the same thing as optimality.
A biologist would immediately recognize the pattern. Species become extremely good at surviving particular ecological pressures, even when those pressures are absurdly costly. The peacock’s tail is the classic example. Magnificent, elaborate, and evolutionarily wasteful, it exists because a certain system of selection demanded it.
Women’s psychological vigilance, the constant reading of the room you describe so well, has something of that character. It is impressive. It is also inefficient. The real analytical question is not whether it should be admired or mourned (as you put it so nicely), but whether a society that requires half its population to run such an expensive cognitive operating system can possibly be considered well-designed.
You mentioned unpaid labor. When economists finally started measuring household production seriously in the late 20th century, the numbers were embarrassing. If domestic labor were priced at market rates, national GDP figures would look very different. The invisible economy you describe is not a metaphor at all. It is a structural subsidy.
And yet your essay identifies something even more interesting than the labor itself, that is the transmission system. Informal knowledge networks are one of the most durable institutions in human history. Anthropologists will tell you that when formal power structures collapse (wars, revolutions, economic breakdown), it is precisely these informal female networks that keep communities functioning. Not heroically. Practically! Someone still has to make sure children are fed and language is remembered.
Civilization, it turns out, runs partly on logistics and partly on grand narratives. Women have historically been assigned the logistics.
Which brings me to something men often misunderstand in this conversation. When men notice the perceptiveness you describe, the ability to read a room, they interpret it as a talent. What they miss is that it is often the result of asymmetric risk. The person who must detect subtle changes in tone is usually the person who cannot afford to ignore them.
Put more bluntly, the nervous system becomes sophisticated when the consequences of misreading the environment are high.
None of this diminishes the force you describe. If anything, it clarifies it. What you call a “dangerous competence” is dangerous because competence accumulates power quietly. Systems that rely on invisible labor eventually become dependent on it. Dependency, historically, is where leverage appears.
There is also a paradox here that your you brush up against in a very elegant way, the same traits cultivated for survival often become the traits that make women formidable once constraints loosen. Emotional acuity, multi-register thinking, social navigation are executive skills in modern institutions.
Which may explain why contemporary debates about women sometimes feel so strangely anxious. Systems tend to become nervous when previously invisible competencies become visible forms of authority.
Your essay’s final strength is its refusal to pretend that the present moment is either triumph or catastrophe. The tote bags and the retreats in Tulum (which I suspect will become an anthropological curiosity someday) are exactly what happens when capitalism metabolizes a moral language. It does this with everything. It did it with rebellion, it did it with spirituality, and it will happily do it with feminism until the last slogan can be printed on ethically ambiguous cotton.
That observation requires intellectual honesty, and you handle it with admirable precision, and just enough irony to prevent the essay from becoming doctrinal.
If I may add one final thought from the male side of the room, many men only begin to understand the scale of the infrastructure women have maintained for centuries. It is a bit like discovering that the building you’ve been living in has an entire structural system you never noticed. The pipes were always there. The wiring too. One only starts paying attention when the lights flicker.
You do something valuable because it turns the lights on without pretending the building is about to collapse.
And perhaps that is the most serious compliment one can offer a piece of writing like this, it enlarges the map without shouting about it.
Also, any essay that manages to move fluently from Simone de Beauvoir to tote bags without intellectual whiplash deserves a small literary medal.
Sharp thinking, carefully done, you brilliant Tamara.
The peacock’s tail…. that’s quite memorable because it’s precise and because it exposes something the admiration-versus-mourning framing misses entirely… the question isn’t emotional, it’s thermodynamic!
What is the cost of running this system, and who has been subsidising it, and what might have been built with that energy under different selective pressures? That reframe moves the conversation out of ethics and into something colder and more useful.
Your point about asymmetric risk is the sharpest thing in an already sharp comment. Perceptiveness isn’t a gift distributed unevenly by temperament (it would be too simple). It’s a capacity developed in proportion to the cost of missing something, which means that when men find women’s social acuity impressive, they admire the scar tissue without realising it. The sophistication is real. So is what produced it.
But I’d add a little friction to your biological framing. Adaptation also produces genuine capability that exceeds its original function. The peacock’s tail is wasteful, yes, but the nervous system that developed under asymmetric risk doesn’t stay confined to defensive use once the asymmetry shifts. It becomes something else. Something that doesn’t have a clean evolutionary analogy yet, because we haven’t been watching it operate freely for long enough.
That’s the part I find interesting and unresolved.
The building metaphor at the end is generous and I’ll take it, though I’d note that the pipes and wiring didn’t install themselves, and the architect’s name on the façade was rarely the person who figured out how to make it stand.
Thank you for this incredible comment, Alexander, you’ve built your own cathedral!
"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."
This paragraph is a perfect illustration of what women deal/dealt with every damn day.
Also, your statement about how women have been holding up the world for well, "forever" and what would happen if we stopped, well, we're seeing a portion of that endgame play out with the moronic, power-hungry, and greedy men that are ruining everything in their path to bolster their non-existent masculinity.
Great piece. Thank you for saying what needs to be said.
The connection between the compulsion to flatten women into legibility and the compulsion to dominate everything that resists control… these aren’t separate pathologies. They’re the same one. The need to simplify, to fix, to possess, to reduce complexity to a hierarchy someone can sit on top of, it operates on women, on institutions, on ecosystems, on entire economies. The scale changes. The logic doesn’t.
What we’re watching now is the same fear of uncontrollable complexity that has always gone for the thing it can’t contain first. Women know that fear intimately. They’ve been its preferred object for a very long time.
The world those men are trying to build is, at its core, a world with fewer contradictions in it, which is another way of saying… a world with less of what’s actually alive.
Sharp reading, Michelle, I’m glad you liked my essay.
ah Tamara, thank you for this piece. I found myself nodding emphatically more than once. I hate HATE being told I'm "resilient". I mean. i know I'm strong but that's not the point. Its like a merit badge I didnt ask for. Would far rather be lying in a hammock in the sun eating grapes. But here we are anyway. Thank you
“Resilient” has become the acceptable way to admire someone for surviving something that shouldn’t have happened. It relocates the achievement entirely onto the person who endured, which is convenient for everyone who didn’t have to. The hammock and the grapes are a fantasy of a world where your strength was never required in the first place. That’s the actual demand underneath the word… not recognition, but a different set of conditions entirely.
The merit badge no one asked for…. That’s exactly it!
The second time through reading this essay, I stopped early on at the part when you suggest someone should write about the things women carry. These are my notes.
The things they carry:
- the dreams that you are told aren't practical or realistic because you're going to get married and have a family - you won't need those dreams then
- the talents that make your work efficient, effective, and essential, and how that work gets co-opted by bosses (mostly men) all too often as their own work
- their strength, their stubbornness, and their ability to avoid being corralled (inspired by a response of yours long ago)
- the memories of what needs to be done, how to do it, and how to ensure others know how to help get it done
- more memories: why it matters, how it matters, to whom it matters (both history and lineage)
- the capacity to experience loss, that includes the inner strength to keep going, not as endurance, but because you believe it's worth it
There's more, of course, and I saw some of it as I read through the comments of others and your responses. This is what came to my mind.
I was also caught by your statement: "The woman who is shaped by constraint and exceeds it simultaneously, without needing a label for the excess." It reminded me of how you wrote of the constraint of poetic forms making a poem more precise and powerful. I suppose that holds true here as well.
Thank you for the gift of this essay. Thank you for not even attempting to tie it up into a neat bow. Thank you for creating a salon that draws both men and women who pay attention and aren't afraid to write down their thoughts and ideas, and aren't afraid to take leaps from your inspiration.
"...in recognition, across whatever distance separates us, of something shared that neither of us has found the exact word for yet." From across the ocean and my side of the table, I thank you, Tamara.
Your list does something my essay couldn’t quite do… it gets granular. And granularity is where the real weight lives. The dreams pre-emptively retired before they could fail or succeed. The work that disappears upward into someone else’s name. The memories of how and why and for whom, which never appear on any inventory but without which nothing would be remembered at all. These aren’t abstractions.
The connection to poetic form is amazing . Constraint as the condition of precision rather than its enemy, yes, and the excess you produce inside the constraint is different in kind from what you’d produce without it! More concentrated. More exact. The sonnet knows something about survival that free verse doesn’t. I hadn’t thought to apply that back to the essay’s argument about women, but now I can’t unthink it.
What you’ve written here is, in its own way, a companion piece, a continuation, the essay finding its next room in someone else’s attention.
From this side of the ocean, across the table, thank you for reading twice, Doc, and for bringing what the second reading produced! That sort of return is the highest compliment a piece of writing can receive.
I love your insistence that women are not simply survivors of systems but practitioners within them, people who have developed a kind of mastery that the culture still struggles to name. Your idea that what gets called “intuition” is often actually trained perception is sharp. It reminded me that we often misunderstand women’s competence because it operates in domains that history rarely bothered to measure.
I want to add another dimension to the force you describe. Women are not only managers of the impossible, they are also archivists of reality.
Not archivists in the official sense, but in the older human sense, the people who remember what actually happened when the public version of events becomes tidy, heroic, or convenient.
Think about how many family histories survive because a grandmother remembers the details no one wrote down, who left which country, which cousin disappeared in a war, which marriage was unhappy but endured anyway. In many cultures, when historians later try to reconstruct the past, they rely on the knowledge that moved through kitchens and letters and conversations between women. The official record tends to capture power, the informal record captures truth.
You see this pattern everywhere once you look for it. In literature, someone like Toni Morrison deliberately wrote novels that restored the emotional memory of Black American life that archives had erased. In science, Rosalind Franklin produced the data that made the discovery of DNA’s structure possible, yet the story of the discovery was edited in ways that made her nearly disappear. What women often preserve, whether in stories, observations, or documentation, is the layer of reality that institutions find inconvenient.
This connects to the perceptive double-conversation you describe. The internal monitoring women perform is not only about safety. It also produces historical accuracy. When you are trained to watch tone, implication, and shifts in atmosphere, you become difficult to gaslight about what actually occurred. Many women walk away from meetings, relationships, or workplaces carrying a clearer record of events than the official narrative will later admit. That, too, is a form of intelligence we have not named properly.
And perhaps that is why systems have always been ambivalent about women’s attention. A person who notices everything is harder to control. A person who remembers everything is harder to rewrite.
You beautifully defend women’s complexity against the flattening that culture repeatedly attempts. What I admire the most is that you refuse both sentimental praise and cynical dismissal. That balance is so Museguided-style. You write about women with admiration that still leaves room for irony, critique, and the strange comedy of modern empowerment culture. It gives your piece an intellectual honesty that many essays about gender lose.
But the most distinctive thing you did here is the metaphor of women as cathedrals with burn marks. It captures endurance without romanticizing the fire that caused it. That image alone carries more truth than a dozen slogans. We can all be Notre Dame.
Essays about women often try to conclude with clarity. Yours does something more interesting, it ends in recognition. And that feels natural and stunning. And you are a fabulous woman, Tamara. Thank you for being.
The point about gaslight résistance deserves to sit in plain light for a moment. The same attentiveness that exhausts, the perpetual calibration, the reading of implication beneath implication, also produces a witness that is very difficult to corrupt. You cannot easily revise events for someone who was tracking the temperature of the room in real time and filed it somewhere the official narrative can’t reach. That’s the epistemological consequence of vigilance.
Rosalind Franklin is the case that never stops being instructive because it’s legible. The data existed. The contribution was real and documented and used. And still the story got edited into a shape that required her to be peripheral. Which tells you the erasure wasn’t accidental or even primarily personal, but some kind of structural preference expressing itself through the available mechanisms. The archive wasn’t burned. It was simply… reframed until she nearly disappeared inside it.
Toni Morrison understood that the novel could do what the archive refused to, hold the emotional truth of what happened alongside the factual record, so that neither could be separated from the other. That’s a different kind of preservation, and a more complete one.
Thank you, Céline, for reading me with an open mind, and for the generosity at the end, which I receive without deflecting!
This is a Hestian essay, full stop. The hearth, the focus about which we dwell amidst the family and home, and convene for our daily rituals, and the fires that go to make our meals, and around which we speak as if in the presence of the gods of old, sharing the stories and the ties that bind and hold us together, is the work of the household upon which we inhabit, even in our modern kitchens and the microwave oven. Hestia pertains to a gender role, tending the hearth and family through the seasons, facilitating the growing up years of the children and care of the elders and living "moccasin" networks in the greater community.
I was brought up by a single parent, our mother, who worked full time and on call on days off, at times, raising six of us kids through the decade of the sixties & most of the seventies, and as a Catholic family to boot, when divorce was almost taboo at the time. So we didn't really have a mother per se, but luckily the greater extended family was nearby, and the grandparents next door. Being schooled by nuns during this time is also in the vein of this essay's focus on women, too, in some kind of way?
The real take from this essay on women for me though, is my wife, whose story, before her stroke at 77 (and even now, as the force of her character is etched into her very being) attests to the intelligence of a person whose strategies for survival and success began very early and reveal her breaking through the bounds of gender roles in the workplace in the 60's, where she competed and worked with men in the some of the most extreme and rugged terrains and demanding economies, as a young woman, and thereafter throughout the career of her many businesses and pursuits, all with their divers challenges that come with being a single owner and operator, continuously, till she disapperaed into the blue of the screen one fateful morn, on a Friday the 13th, one year, in January.
The fact that she's half Native American and chose to grow up on the Rez as a child, may make her an exception to the social norms that most women grew up with in the debilitating double standards of anglo-saxon society. If so, it only goes to show that without the strait-jacket of onerous and damming expectations, women, like my wife, can take on all comers, hands down, and succeed and be genuinely human, in touch with the earth and sky and all our relations in the sinfonia de la vida...what joy, to be able to fully inhabit who you have laboured to become, and be apt to skillfully engage with relevant community concerns, while being able to send love letters to your newest and dearest friends, with caritas in spades, through all your days!!!
Thank you Tamara, from the love of the woman in my life, Turquoise, who can cry in recognition of this portraiture of her, read out loud. :)
Turquoise. The name alone carries something, and the fact that she cried in recognition while you read it aloud is the kind of reception that makes the writing feel like it found its exact destination. I have tears in my eyes too now.
The Hestia frame is illuminating precisely because Hestia is the deity who gets overlooked, no mythology of conquest or transformation, no dramatic narrative arc, just the fire that keeps going, the centre that holds without announcing itself. Which is, as you’ve understood, exactly the point. The hearth isn’t passive. It’s the condition of everything else being possible. You named it.
Your wife’s story, the extreme terrains, the rugged economies, the businesses, the half-Native American roots and the choice to grow up on the Rez, contains more of what I was trying to say than most theoretical frameworks manage. The strait-jacket of expectation removed, or refused, and what emerges isn’t exception but the actual thing, the full human capacity that the double standards were always suppressing. She didn’t transcend gender roles so much as operate from a place where different knowledge was available. The earth and sky and all relations, that’s a different epistemology entirely.
Friday the 13th, January, the blue of the screen. I felt that sentence in my brain!
To Turquoise, with admiration across the distance, and to you, Michael, for reading it to her!
The fire of Hestia though is the element that makes us human and whose derivation is a Titanic myth of its own! Because it is outside our "dramatic narrative arc" to achieve, it behooves us to become focused, and see in the Promethian miracle of this gift to our humanity, from powers greater than us, which, by providing the "condition from whence everything else becomes possible," is the portal for each of us, to attune to the hearth's centre most point in our lives, with the reverence due to the gods, whose presence as from olden times, compose the mythos of our sacred cosmos.
Prometheus stealing fire is always told as the hero’s story…. the theft, the punishment, the defiance. But what happened after the fire arrived? Someone had to tend it. The mythological drama of acquisition eclipses the equally essential, considerably less dramatic work of maintenance. Hestia inherits what Prometheus seized, and the cosmos runs on her continuity rather than his rupture.
So the hearth is the condition of everything else (cooking, warmth, the gathering of community, the marking of sacred time) which means Hestia’s fire is less an element than a threshold. The point where nature becomes culture. Where the raw becomes the prepared. Where the scattered become the gathered.
I like you’re pointing at a re-consecration of attention, the return to the centre point as orientation. In a culture that mistakes motion for meaning, that’s quite a proposition!
The gods whose presence composes the sacred cosmos recognised Hestia’s necessity even when the myths forgot to dramatize it. Perhaps that’s the oldest form of the invisible labour my essay was tracing.
Yes, Hestia's fire is a threshold dynamic, when elemental fire is harnessed and contained for human use. Thank you for articulating this key operating metaphor of The Raw and the Cooked.
I just can't fathom why our humanity has forgotten what even the gods acclaimed to be the first and last in their hierarchy of tributes, to Hestia. Maybe its that we've forgotten their representations in our sacred cosmos, tout court, and thereby, the order inherent in their theomorphic valuations was also lost, and with it, the centre of the sacred in our daily rituals, having given way to the mercurial Hermes and the "motion is meaning" syndrome of On the Road.
And yes, this is a root image of what your essay was tracing, of the invsible labour underwriting/feeding all of our endeavors in the dramatic narrative arc of achievement and conquest.
Without divine representation in and through the acts of our day, makes for an hollowed out existence. The secular post-, post-, post-, world today becomes a manifestation of Yeats's famous lines to reveberate through and through our contemporary world view leaving us to the wonder at the embodiment of ultimate significance and meaning in our biographical lives.
We have been so deeply conditioned into becoming the women we are that sometimes it takes another woman to pause us to question, to hold up a mirror, to ask us to reflect on what we have quietly accepted as normal.
I often think about how much of the life we live today has been made possible by women before us and women beside us through a shared womanhood that keeps pushing the world, gently and fiercely, toward something better.
And as long as there are women like you who say it out loud when it matters, womanhood will be celebrated every day in new ways of existing, speaking, and becoming a woman.
The mirror image is right, but I’d add that the most useful mirrors are the ones that show you something slightly unfamiliar, not a reflection that confirms, but one that makes you pause at the gap between who you are and who you were in the process of becoming without noticing. That’s the looking I hope my essay might provoke. Not recognition of what’s already known (because we do know as women), but recognition of what had been accepted so silently it stopped being visible.
The women before us and beside us, I think the beside us is undervalued. We’re good at honouring the lineage, the grandmothers, the ones who made the path. We’re less practiced at acknowledging the lateral transmission, the woman next to you who holds something open long enough for you to walk through it, without announcement, without record.
That silent, fierce pushing you’re describing rarely looks like history while it’s happening. It looks like a Wednesday… and I want us to be more aware that it is history in the making.
I am happy that you received my essay as something that speaks for a shared experience, and not just a private one, Thank you for that, and for reading me so deeply!
This is even more powerful — recognising and acknowledging the women in lateral transition. That is a rare outlook to have and there is no markets making cards for that. I reckon we all will have to make that conscious choice when we can. I know I will:)
Very few people really understand chainsaws. The way they can fell a tree in minutes. Sever large branches almost like flossing teeth. Hand held power leveraged into great destructive force. Nothing is more efficient for cross cutting than a trusty chainsaw. But even the mightiest chainsaw would die a slow, miserable death if someone put it to the task of splitting a tree down the middle. The master of the horizontal cut is brought to its knees when asked to shift to vertical. Yet a single lightning strike will split a tree wide open in the blink of an eye. The lumberjack can wreak havoc to a forest with determined diligence. But he can not duplicate the ferocity of a single, unpredictable, uncontrollable snap of nature.
This is the power a woman carries. With the look of an eye, she can change the course of history or rouse the child to tidy his room. She induces motion. A man may act, but a woman moves. A man moves with efficient boldness, but a woman acts with calculated courage. On the whole I think men will always take the path of least resistance. Hence every historical system elevates efficiency above all else. Too often death and destruction has been the most efficient course of action.
And as much as the world would flatten everything into this kind of equality of efficiency, true equity establishes appropriate hierarchy. Negotiation determines priorities. With the power of choice, a woman holds the coherence of the world. In any given moment, a woman can assess the stakes of the situation, determine the proper order and assume the posture necessary to her survival. She is more force of nature than machine of man. Perhaps this is one reason history has so discounted her. Silenced her. (Feared her?) Efficiency cannot hold complexity. Men, through efficiency, have proven to be myopic. Women face reality with eyes wide open.
In this way, she inhabits the courage of choosing. I do not subscribe to the biological explanation of developmental nurturing. Hers is simply the unsung courage of stepping up. Herein lies the source of her ferocity. Movement, like water, fills the need where it is. Choice defines hierarchy. Choice constructs. It is strategic. It promotes life. It contains complexity. Where a man will hack his way through the jungle of life, the uncontrollable force that is woman gives life to the jungle.
The chainsaw is a fantastic image, precise where it needs to be, and honest about its limits. The tool that masters one axis and fails completely on the other. Efficiency as a form of blindness dressed as capability.
Where I’d introduce a bit of friction, if you allow me, Andrew… I’m wary of the move from “women have historically operated differently” to “women are more force of nature than machine”. It is poetic and beautiful, but nature is exactly the category that has been used to remove women from history… she is elemental, therefore ungovernable, therefore unrecordable, therefore absent from the archive. The lightning bolt doesn’t get a biography. What I was trying to argue in my essay is precisely the opposite, that what women do is not natural in the sense of pre-cultural or instinctive, but skilled, learned, transmitted, and therefore historical. Recoverable. Nameable. The distinction matters because nature can be admired and still ignored, while skill demands account.
The courage of choosing rather than the biology of nurturing, that part I’ll take without reservation. Choice is the hinge. It’s what makes the act meaningful rather than simply functional.
But I’d rather women be complex historical actors than magnificent weather phenomena, although I see them like that too. The weather doesn’t get credit. The actor does.
Thank you, Andrew, for the image that will stay with me even where I’m arguing with it! It is majestic, women are majestic, but we need more than just perception today.
Your willingness to introduce friction makes me happy; I welcome it. I take it as a form of respect, that you are fully engaged in the exchange. Thank you, truly.
In this instance I think we are less misaligned than my writing was able to communicate. The transition line between paragraphs one and two may be where the derailment first happens. It was meant to connect that random concept to the general thesis, but instead it acts as a pair of skies fitted to the lightning strike image sending it roughshod through the rest of comment.
It declares the image “is” the power a woman carries. That is the point of miscommunication. What follows attempts to demonstrate how a woman’s active agency, deliberate discernment, and courageous calculation all contribute to her living force. One as powerful as but not identified in the lightning. That even her “nurturing” characteristic is not natural, but chosen as a response to the environment in which she finds herself. That she holds the complexity of real hierarchies strategically such that real, animated choice defines her, as opposed to mere efficiency.
In my mind, that kind of exercised power promotes life, where patriarchal, divisive systems do not (I used the word “historical” systems to suggest patriarchy rather than stating it plainly, my second point of imprecision), and indeed, there is nothing elemental or instinctive about it.
Ultimately, what I wanted to say, without succeeding, was that women move in the world with the force of natural phenomenon, but not ‘as’ a phenomenon, which I hoped celebrated your thesis, not moved away from it. Of course the line “She is more force of nature than machine of man” reads as diametrically opposed to that intent. But even there, I hung my hat on her movement of power over his mechanics power. So if we were to edit the transition line above and this badly worded sentence here, it might be easier to see how we aren’t that far apart.
Excuses aside, please, introduce friction, make corrections, send me to the corner of the room to your hearts content. I'm glad to know there is an actual person on the other side of the words.
The distinction between moving with the force of a natural phenomenon and being one is essential for me, and I’m glad you held the line on it. Agency requires a subject. The lightning doesn’t choose. Your woman does, which is precisely what makes her formidable rather than merely powerful. Power without choice is weather. Power with choice is something history has consistently found more threatening.
And yes, once I read “historical systems” as the stand-in for patriarchy, the whole argument reorients. Efficiency as the operating logic of systems that found destruction cheaper than complexity, that’s a sharp observation and one my essay would have been glad to contain.
The corner of the room remains available, but I don’t think you need it. Imprecise writing that knows where it went wrong and can diagnose the exact sentence is already most of the way to precision. The edit practically writes itself from here.
The actual person on the other side is glad you pushed back. That’s what the salon is for, Andrew! I’m so happy you’re part of it.
Sunny 8th of March feels like the universe making a small, unsubtle gesture. I’ll take it!
The difficult things are only difficult until someone says them, after that they become obvious, which is its own satisfaction. The fear before is always larger than the thing itself. That’s worth remembering on the days when the thing feels unsayable.
Thank you for receiving it in that morning light, Alexandra! I miss you!
Thank you Tamara! I have no intelligent comment, I just woke up and finished reading your essay. It simply resonates from top to bottom, because I'm in this weird state or phase where I'm casting aside some of the imprinted agreeableness and it gives me a sharp edge I'm very VERY aware of. It feels uncomfortable, as if I'm being the naughty girl, but it's what my psyche, body, mind, soul even, demands of me. I also love the art in your essays, and how you implement them. I live there too. All the best from the Netherlands.
The discomfort you’re describing is almost diagnostic, Janneke, the fact that refusing to be agreeable feels like being naughty tells you exactly how deep the conditioning goes. Behavioural yes, but also moral, as though your own boundaries were someone else’s property and you’re stealing them back.
That feeling of transgression when you’re simply declining to perform is the internalised enforcement mechanism doing its job. The fact that you feel it and keep going anyway is the interesting part.
The sharp edge isn’t a phase. It might be the first accurate self-portrait.
All the best back to you, no matter the distance, we are all together today!
Thank you Tamara. That's exactly how I experience it. And I'm very interested in the interesting part....so as you say, the sharp edge might be the first accurate self-portrait (in a loooong time).
Continuing from my previous comment, which was prematurely posted:-
No one can be closer to any person than their mother, the only person of who’s body we were once part.
And whilst male, I nevertheless also inhabit both an external & internal world which I think most men do not. If they did, they’d understand me better, for a start
I’m aware at eg work meetings that I’m expected to be brash, confident, of few words, action oriented. I observe that those who are, act too quickly, consequently making too many mistakes, for which they blame underlings, & women!
Some see me as a little shy , ‘artistic’, or gay (I’m not). That I naturally use language well, with a larger vocabulary, causes impatient amusement & snide insults amongst men, & eye rolling amongst some women.
I refuse to wear a blue suit, in spite of blue being the most popular colour in the west, because I like only warm blues. And that I refuse to have an upside down head, where the hair which should inhabit the top of my head instead descends to my chin, whilst my head would be a shiny ball, they see as an impertinent, if not unacceptable, display of independence, disinterest in ‘male bonding’, if not outright subversion.
And I think it’s ironic than men, emerging head-first from women at birth, spend the rest of their lives trying to reenter women, once again head first, one way &/or the other. To say nothing of the most popular of heterosexual male fetishes, reconnecting with breasts they first suckled as infants.
I interpret all this as a peek into what many women feel. It is not good. Women are relentlessly assaulted by mostly unspoken pressure to appear a certain way, dress a certain way, speak a certain way, think in a certain way, & engage in work & other activities of a certain kind.
Some men are treated similarly, because of their personality. Because of that, they are at least aware of what’s happening.
On the matter of certain kinds of feminists attributing all problems in eg relationships, workplace etc., solely to men, I’d recommend the writings of Australian Bettina Arndt, if you are not already familiar with her.
Do feel free to be specific if you think any of my comments are out of line, given your essay focusses on women, of whom I necessarily have little expertise, when of course compared to women themselves.
The warm blues are doing real philosophical work here because the refusal is precise. Not a rejection of convention for its own sake but an insistence on accuracy… this blue, not that one. That kind of specificity is exactly what the conformity pressure can’t tolerate, because it’s harder to argue with than outright refusal. You’re not being difficult. You’re being exact. And exactness, in contexts that reward approximate compliance, reads as provocation.
The observation about meetings is one I recognise from the essay’s other side, the man who performs brashness, acts too fast, and distributes the consequences downward. That’s the performance of confidence, which is a different and considerably more dangerous thing. You’re watching the same dynamic I’m describing, just from inside the room where it’s being enacted rather than against you.
The birth observation is either very funny or very profound and I haven’t decided which, which probably means it’s both.
Nothing here is out of line. My essay was always in conversation with anyone willing to think carefully inside it, regardless of which side of the experience they arrive from.
Indeed. Much of human behaviour IS both very funny & very profound. Whilst I prefer sketch comedy to standup, standup is a superb medium for illustrating that very dichotomy. Katie Hopkins & Nicholas de Santo are excellent exponents, even if one can’t abide their politics. But I do, as I expect, your being so perspicacious, you’ve divined by now.
When the truth is laid bare and raw, there we hope... Hope for what specifically? Perhaps to finally be acknowledged and be completely recognised for our necessary part in the creation of this world... That we shouldn't only be acknowledged and recognised when we play by their rules but when we are naturally who we are.
Thank you, Tamara, for this marvelous gift. I feel seen and heard.
Hope is always in that slightly embarrassing position of not being able to finish its own sentence cleanly, and I think that’s honest rather than weak.
The completion keeps shifting because what’s being asked for keeps being refused in new forms. Acknowledgment arrives, but conditional. Recognition appears, but framed. Seen, but through someone else’s lens, adjusted for their comfort.
The recognition without the prerequisite of compliance is actually the harder demand. Easier to be seen performing the expected version. The real ask is to be legible on your own terms, in your own register, without having translated yourself into something the room finds easier to hold.
That that still feels like hope rather than certainty tells us exactly where we are.
I’m glad my essay reached you, Abigail! Being felt seen by someone who articulates it matters to me more than I can express.
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!
The detail that moves me is the muted “don’t trust that man”…. because that’s not gossip, and it was never gossip, whatever it was called to discredit it. It’s risk intelligence, transmitted in the only medium that couldn’t be seized or burned. The absence of footnotes was the point. What lives in a footnote can be challenged, revised, suppressed by whoever controls the next edition. What lives in a tone of voice has no edition.
There’s something almost subversive about the medium itself, that the most durable repository of counter-knowledge turned out to be the one institutional power consistently underestimated. Not stone, not parchment, not the official record. The kitchen, the warning, the gesture, the pause before speaking that every daughter learned to read before she learned to read.
Libraries burn…. That’s policy. And yet here we are, still in possession of something!
Happy International Women’s Day to you too, dear Clara, and thank you for receiving my essay with that depth of feeling! It means more than the general sort of gratitude can hold.
There are no words to express my gratitude for who you are and what you write. The world needed a voice like yours.
Thank you, Clara, I have no words…… only gratitude.
I find the intellectual exchange between the two of you incredibly rewarding to read.
Thank you!
Happy International Women's Day!
Thank you too, Nadia! La mulți ani!
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.
I can’t say that what your mother did in that moment was a decision since there was no time for one. Which means it came from somewhere below calculation, some layer of person that doesn’t wait for permission. That’s the force I was trying to name in my essay, and you watched it in its most literal, unambiguous form at 7, which is probably the best possible age to receive that particular education. It goes in before the theories do.
The healthy fear you’re describing… I think that’s actually the correct response to encountering something genuinely formidable. Not the fear that diminishes, but the one that recalibrates, adjusting your sense of what’s possible. Most people who struggle with the idea of women’s strength never had their model of the world updated that viscerally, that early.
The jewelry store did more than most classrooms manage.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing your mother here, it means a lot to me!
What a blessing to have parents like yours, Andrew. That explains your way of thinking, reasoning, and expressing your personality in this world.
Thanks, Alexander! I really appreciate that. I am very lucky that my parents were good people.
I can tell. I was raised the same way.
I'm not at all surprised.
Tamara, struck by the discipline with which you refuse the sentimental shortcuts that usually accompany this subject. Writing about women without collapsing into either grievance or sanctification is quite rare. You manage it by treating women as historical actors rather than moral symbols. Absolutely remarkable.
Your metaphor of the cathedral avoids the modern habit of treating resilience as a kind of spiritual virtue while acknowledging that resilience is often nothing more than the engineering solution to a hostile environment. Cathedrals, after all, are not strong because stone is noble. They are strong because medieval builders learned how to distribute weight. Women, historically speaking, have been performing a similar structural feat. And that is why I admire them.
What you hint at, and what I think deserves expansion, is the difference between adaptation and design. Much of the competence you describe, the emotional calibration, the capacity to hold multiple registers of thought, the simultaneous internal and external conversation, belongs to the category of adaptation. It emerges because the system required it.
But adaptation is not the same thing as optimality.
A biologist would immediately recognize the pattern. Species become extremely good at surviving particular ecological pressures, even when those pressures are absurdly costly. The peacock’s tail is the classic example. Magnificent, elaborate, and evolutionarily wasteful, it exists because a certain system of selection demanded it.
Women’s psychological vigilance, the constant reading of the room you describe so well, has something of that character. It is impressive. It is also inefficient. The real analytical question is not whether it should be admired or mourned (as you put it so nicely), but whether a society that requires half its population to run such an expensive cognitive operating system can possibly be considered well-designed.
You mentioned unpaid labor. When economists finally started measuring household production seriously in the late 20th century, the numbers were embarrassing. If domestic labor were priced at market rates, national GDP figures would look very different. The invisible economy you describe is not a metaphor at all. It is a structural subsidy.
And yet your essay identifies something even more interesting than the labor itself, that is the transmission system. Informal knowledge networks are one of the most durable institutions in human history. Anthropologists will tell you that when formal power structures collapse (wars, revolutions, economic breakdown), it is precisely these informal female networks that keep communities functioning. Not heroically. Practically! Someone still has to make sure children are fed and language is remembered.
Civilization, it turns out, runs partly on logistics and partly on grand narratives. Women have historically been assigned the logistics.
Which brings me to something men often misunderstand in this conversation. When men notice the perceptiveness you describe, the ability to read a room, they interpret it as a talent. What they miss is that it is often the result of asymmetric risk. The person who must detect subtle changes in tone is usually the person who cannot afford to ignore them.
Put more bluntly, the nervous system becomes sophisticated when the consequences of misreading the environment are high.
None of this diminishes the force you describe. If anything, it clarifies it. What you call a “dangerous competence” is dangerous because competence accumulates power quietly. Systems that rely on invisible labor eventually become dependent on it. Dependency, historically, is where leverage appears.
There is also a paradox here that your you brush up against in a very elegant way, the same traits cultivated for survival often become the traits that make women formidable once constraints loosen. Emotional acuity, multi-register thinking, social navigation are executive skills in modern institutions.
Which may explain why contemporary debates about women sometimes feel so strangely anxious. Systems tend to become nervous when previously invisible competencies become visible forms of authority.
Your essay’s final strength is its refusal to pretend that the present moment is either triumph or catastrophe. The tote bags and the retreats in Tulum (which I suspect will become an anthropological curiosity someday) are exactly what happens when capitalism metabolizes a moral language. It does this with everything. It did it with rebellion, it did it with spirituality, and it will happily do it with feminism until the last slogan can be printed on ethically ambiguous cotton.
That observation requires intellectual honesty, and you handle it with admirable precision, and just enough irony to prevent the essay from becoming doctrinal.
If I may add one final thought from the male side of the room, many men only begin to understand the scale of the infrastructure women have maintained for centuries. It is a bit like discovering that the building you’ve been living in has an entire structural system you never noticed. The pipes were always there. The wiring too. One only starts paying attention when the lights flicker.
You do something valuable because it turns the lights on without pretending the building is about to collapse.
And perhaps that is the most serious compliment one can offer a piece of writing like this, it enlarges the map without shouting about it.
Also, any essay that manages to move fluently from Simone de Beauvoir to tote bags without intellectual whiplash deserves a small literary medal.
Sharp thinking, carefully done, you brilliant Tamara.
The peacock’s tail…. that’s quite memorable because it’s precise and because it exposes something the admiration-versus-mourning framing misses entirely… the question isn’t emotional, it’s thermodynamic!
What is the cost of running this system, and who has been subsidising it, and what might have been built with that energy under different selective pressures? That reframe moves the conversation out of ethics and into something colder and more useful.
Your point about asymmetric risk is the sharpest thing in an already sharp comment. Perceptiveness isn’t a gift distributed unevenly by temperament (it would be too simple). It’s a capacity developed in proportion to the cost of missing something, which means that when men find women’s social acuity impressive, they admire the scar tissue without realising it. The sophistication is real. So is what produced it.
But I’d add a little friction to your biological framing. Adaptation also produces genuine capability that exceeds its original function. The peacock’s tail is wasteful, yes, but the nervous system that developed under asymmetric risk doesn’t stay confined to defensive use once the asymmetry shifts. It becomes something else. Something that doesn’t have a clean evolutionary analogy yet, because we haven’t been watching it operate freely for long enough.
That’s the part I find interesting and unresolved.
The building metaphor at the end is generous and I’ll take it, though I’d note that the pipes and wiring didn’t install themselves, and the architect’s name on the façade was rarely the person who figured out how to make it stand.
Thank you for this incredible comment, Alexander, you’ve built your own cathedral!
Chapeau bas, Madame!
"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."
This paragraph is a perfect illustration of what women deal/dealt with every damn day.
Also, your statement about how women have been holding up the world for well, "forever" and what would happen if we stopped, well, we're seeing a portion of that endgame play out with the moronic, power-hungry, and greedy men that are ruining everything in their path to bolster their non-existent masculinity.
Great piece. Thank you for saying what needs to be said.
The connection between the compulsion to flatten women into legibility and the compulsion to dominate everything that resists control… these aren’t separate pathologies. They’re the same one. The need to simplify, to fix, to possess, to reduce complexity to a hierarchy someone can sit on top of, it operates on women, on institutions, on ecosystems, on entire economies. The scale changes. The logic doesn’t.
What we’re watching now is the same fear of uncontrollable complexity that has always gone for the thing it can’t contain first. Women know that fear intimately. They’ve been its preferred object for a very long time.
The world those men are trying to build is, at its core, a world with fewer contradictions in it, which is another way of saying… a world with less of what’s actually alive.
Sharp reading, Michelle, I’m glad you liked my essay.
ah Tamara, thank you for this piece. I found myself nodding emphatically more than once. I hate HATE being told I'm "resilient". I mean. i know I'm strong but that's not the point. Its like a merit badge I didnt ask for. Would far rather be lying in a hammock in the sun eating grapes. But here we are anyway. Thank you
“Resilient” has become the acceptable way to admire someone for surviving something that shouldn’t have happened. It relocates the achievement entirely onto the person who endured, which is convenient for everyone who didn’t have to. The hammock and the grapes are a fantasy of a world where your strength was never required in the first place. That’s the actual demand underneath the word… not recognition, but a different set of conditions entirely.
The merit badge no one asked for…. That’s exactly it!
Thank you so much for this!
The second time through reading this essay, I stopped early on at the part when you suggest someone should write about the things women carry. These are my notes.
The things they carry:
- the dreams that you are told aren't practical or realistic because you're going to get married and have a family - you won't need those dreams then
- the talents that make your work efficient, effective, and essential, and how that work gets co-opted by bosses (mostly men) all too often as their own work
- their strength, their stubbornness, and their ability to avoid being corralled (inspired by a response of yours long ago)
- the memories of what needs to be done, how to do it, and how to ensure others know how to help get it done
- more memories: why it matters, how it matters, to whom it matters (both history and lineage)
- the capacity to experience loss, that includes the inner strength to keep going, not as endurance, but because you believe it's worth it
There's more, of course, and I saw some of it as I read through the comments of others and your responses. This is what came to my mind.
I was also caught by your statement: "The woman who is shaped by constraint and exceeds it simultaneously, without needing a label for the excess." It reminded me of how you wrote of the constraint of poetic forms making a poem more precise and powerful. I suppose that holds true here as well.
Thank you for the gift of this essay. Thank you for not even attempting to tie it up into a neat bow. Thank you for creating a salon that draws both men and women who pay attention and aren't afraid to write down their thoughts and ideas, and aren't afraid to take leaps from your inspiration.
"...in recognition, across whatever distance separates us, of something shared that neither of us has found the exact word for yet." From across the ocean and my side of the table, I thank you, Tamara.
Your list does something my essay couldn’t quite do… it gets granular. And granularity is where the real weight lives. The dreams pre-emptively retired before they could fail or succeed. The work that disappears upward into someone else’s name. The memories of how and why and for whom, which never appear on any inventory but without which nothing would be remembered at all. These aren’t abstractions.
The connection to poetic form is amazing . Constraint as the condition of precision rather than its enemy, yes, and the excess you produce inside the constraint is different in kind from what you’d produce without it! More concentrated. More exact. The sonnet knows something about survival that free verse doesn’t. I hadn’t thought to apply that back to the essay’s argument about women, but now I can’t unthink it.
What you’ve written here is, in its own way, a companion piece, a continuation, the essay finding its next room in someone else’s attention.
From this side of the ocean, across the table, thank you for reading twice, Doc, and for bringing what the second reading produced! That sort of return is the highest compliment a piece of writing can receive.
I love your insistence that women are not simply survivors of systems but practitioners within them, people who have developed a kind of mastery that the culture still struggles to name. Your idea that what gets called “intuition” is often actually trained perception is sharp. It reminded me that we often misunderstand women’s competence because it operates in domains that history rarely bothered to measure.
I want to add another dimension to the force you describe. Women are not only managers of the impossible, they are also archivists of reality.
Not archivists in the official sense, but in the older human sense, the people who remember what actually happened when the public version of events becomes tidy, heroic, or convenient.
Think about how many family histories survive because a grandmother remembers the details no one wrote down, who left which country, which cousin disappeared in a war, which marriage was unhappy but endured anyway. In many cultures, when historians later try to reconstruct the past, they rely on the knowledge that moved through kitchens and letters and conversations between women. The official record tends to capture power, the informal record captures truth.
You see this pattern everywhere once you look for it. In literature, someone like Toni Morrison deliberately wrote novels that restored the emotional memory of Black American life that archives had erased. In science, Rosalind Franklin produced the data that made the discovery of DNA’s structure possible, yet the story of the discovery was edited in ways that made her nearly disappear. What women often preserve, whether in stories, observations, or documentation, is the layer of reality that institutions find inconvenient.
This connects to the perceptive double-conversation you describe. The internal monitoring women perform is not only about safety. It also produces historical accuracy. When you are trained to watch tone, implication, and shifts in atmosphere, you become difficult to gaslight about what actually occurred. Many women walk away from meetings, relationships, or workplaces carrying a clearer record of events than the official narrative will later admit. That, too, is a form of intelligence we have not named properly.
And perhaps that is why systems have always been ambivalent about women’s attention. A person who notices everything is harder to control. A person who remembers everything is harder to rewrite.
You beautifully defend women’s complexity against the flattening that culture repeatedly attempts. What I admire the most is that you refuse both sentimental praise and cynical dismissal. That balance is so Museguided-style. You write about women with admiration that still leaves room for irony, critique, and the strange comedy of modern empowerment culture. It gives your piece an intellectual honesty that many essays about gender lose.
But the most distinctive thing you did here is the metaphor of women as cathedrals with burn marks. It captures endurance without romanticizing the fire that caused it. That image alone carries more truth than a dozen slogans. We can all be Notre Dame.
Essays about women often try to conclude with clarity. Yours does something more interesting, it ends in recognition. And that feels natural and stunning. And you are a fabulous woman, Tamara. Thank you for being.
The point about gaslight résistance deserves to sit in plain light for a moment. The same attentiveness that exhausts, the perpetual calibration, the reading of implication beneath implication, also produces a witness that is very difficult to corrupt. You cannot easily revise events for someone who was tracking the temperature of the room in real time and filed it somewhere the official narrative can’t reach. That’s the epistemological consequence of vigilance.
Rosalind Franklin is the case that never stops being instructive because it’s legible. The data existed. The contribution was real and documented and used. And still the story got edited into a shape that required her to be peripheral. Which tells you the erasure wasn’t accidental or even primarily personal, but some kind of structural preference expressing itself through the available mechanisms. The archive wasn’t burned. It was simply… reframed until she nearly disappeared inside it.
Toni Morrison understood that the novel could do what the archive refused to, hold the emotional truth of what happened alongside the factual record, so that neither could be separated from the other. That’s a different kind of preservation, and a more complete one.
Thank you, Céline, for reading me with an open mind, and for the generosity at the end, which I receive without deflecting!
The Museguided salon is live and alive :)
I am smiling. Nothing further to add. Restacked x
And I’m grateful, dear Paul.
This is a Hestian essay, full stop. The hearth, the focus about which we dwell amidst the family and home, and convene for our daily rituals, and the fires that go to make our meals, and around which we speak as if in the presence of the gods of old, sharing the stories and the ties that bind and hold us together, is the work of the household upon which we inhabit, even in our modern kitchens and the microwave oven. Hestia pertains to a gender role, tending the hearth and family through the seasons, facilitating the growing up years of the children and care of the elders and living "moccasin" networks in the greater community.
I was brought up by a single parent, our mother, who worked full time and on call on days off, at times, raising six of us kids through the decade of the sixties & most of the seventies, and as a Catholic family to boot, when divorce was almost taboo at the time. So we didn't really have a mother per se, but luckily the greater extended family was nearby, and the grandparents next door. Being schooled by nuns during this time is also in the vein of this essay's focus on women, too, in some kind of way?
The real take from this essay on women for me though, is my wife, whose story, before her stroke at 77 (and even now, as the force of her character is etched into her very being) attests to the intelligence of a person whose strategies for survival and success began very early and reveal her breaking through the bounds of gender roles in the workplace in the 60's, where she competed and worked with men in the some of the most extreme and rugged terrains and demanding economies, as a young woman, and thereafter throughout the career of her many businesses and pursuits, all with their divers challenges that come with being a single owner and operator, continuously, till she disapperaed into the blue of the screen one fateful morn, on a Friday the 13th, one year, in January.
The fact that she's half Native American and chose to grow up on the Rez as a child, may make her an exception to the social norms that most women grew up with in the debilitating double standards of anglo-saxon society. If so, it only goes to show that without the strait-jacket of onerous and damming expectations, women, like my wife, can take on all comers, hands down, and succeed and be genuinely human, in touch with the earth and sky and all our relations in the sinfonia de la vida...what joy, to be able to fully inhabit who you have laboured to become, and be apt to skillfully engage with relevant community concerns, while being able to send love letters to your newest and dearest friends, with caritas in spades, through all your days!!!
Thank you Tamara, from the love of the woman in my life, Turquoise, who can cry in recognition of this portraiture of her, read out loud. :)
Turquoise. The name alone carries something, and the fact that she cried in recognition while you read it aloud is the kind of reception that makes the writing feel like it found its exact destination. I have tears in my eyes too now.
The Hestia frame is illuminating precisely because Hestia is the deity who gets overlooked, no mythology of conquest or transformation, no dramatic narrative arc, just the fire that keeps going, the centre that holds without announcing itself. Which is, as you’ve understood, exactly the point. The hearth isn’t passive. It’s the condition of everything else being possible. You named it.
Your wife’s story, the extreme terrains, the rugged economies, the businesses, the half-Native American roots and the choice to grow up on the Rez, contains more of what I was trying to say than most theoretical frameworks manage. The strait-jacket of expectation removed, or refused, and what emerges isn’t exception but the actual thing, the full human capacity that the double standards were always suppressing. She didn’t transcend gender roles so much as operate from a place where different knowledge was available. The earth and sky and all relations, that’s a different epistemology entirely.
Friday the 13th, January, the blue of the screen. I felt that sentence in my brain!
To Turquoise, with admiration across the distance, and to you, Michael, for reading it to her!
The fire of Hestia though is the element that makes us human and whose derivation is a Titanic myth of its own! Because it is outside our "dramatic narrative arc" to achieve, it behooves us to become focused, and see in the Promethian miracle of this gift to our humanity, from powers greater than us, which, by providing the "condition from whence everything else becomes possible," is the portal for each of us, to attune to the hearth's centre most point in our lives, with the reverence due to the gods, whose presence as from olden times, compose the mythos of our sacred cosmos.
Prometheus stealing fire is always told as the hero’s story…. the theft, the punishment, the defiance. But what happened after the fire arrived? Someone had to tend it. The mythological drama of acquisition eclipses the equally essential, considerably less dramatic work of maintenance. Hestia inherits what Prometheus seized, and the cosmos runs on her continuity rather than his rupture.
So the hearth is the condition of everything else (cooking, warmth, the gathering of community, the marking of sacred time) which means Hestia’s fire is less an element than a threshold. The point where nature becomes culture. Where the raw becomes the prepared. Where the scattered become the gathered.
I like you’re pointing at a re-consecration of attention, the return to the centre point as orientation. In a culture that mistakes motion for meaning, that’s quite a proposition!
The gods whose presence composes the sacred cosmos recognised Hestia’s necessity even when the myths forgot to dramatize it. Perhaps that’s the oldest form of the invisible labour my essay was tracing.
Yes, Hestia's fire is a threshold dynamic, when elemental fire is harnessed and contained for human use. Thank you for articulating this key operating metaphor of The Raw and the Cooked.
I just can't fathom why our humanity has forgotten what even the gods acclaimed to be the first and last in their hierarchy of tributes, to Hestia. Maybe its that we've forgotten their representations in our sacred cosmos, tout court, and thereby, the order inherent in their theomorphic valuations was also lost, and with it, the centre of the sacred in our daily rituals, having given way to the mercurial Hermes and the "motion is meaning" syndrome of On the Road.
And yes, this is a root image of what your essay was tracing, of the invsible labour underwriting/feeding all of our endeavors in the dramatic narrative arc of achievement and conquest.
Without divine representation in and through the acts of our day, makes for an hollowed out existence. The secular post-, post-, post-, world today becomes a manifestation of Yeats's famous lines to reveberate through and through our contemporary world view leaving us to the wonder at the embodiment of ultimate significance and meaning in our biographical lives.
Pure brilliance! Thank you, Michael! What else can I add… :)
Thank you for saying this, Tamara.
We have been so deeply conditioned into becoming the women we are that sometimes it takes another woman to pause us to question, to hold up a mirror, to ask us to reflect on what we have quietly accepted as normal.
I often think about how much of the life we live today has been made possible by women before us and women beside us through a shared womanhood that keeps pushing the world, gently and fiercely, toward something better.
And as long as there are women like you who say it out loud when it matters, womanhood will be celebrated every day in new ways of existing, speaking, and becoming a woman.
The mirror image is right, but I’d add that the most useful mirrors are the ones that show you something slightly unfamiliar, not a reflection that confirms, but one that makes you pause at the gap between who you are and who you were in the process of becoming without noticing. That’s the looking I hope my essay might provoke. Not recognition of what’s already known (because we do know as women), but recognition of what had been accepted so silently it stopped being visible.
The women before us and beside us, I think the beside us is undervalued. We’re good at honouring the lineage, the grandmothers, the ones who made the path. We’re less practiced at acknowledging the lateral transmission, the woman next to you who holds something open long enough for you to walk through it, without announcement, without record.
That silent, fierce pushing you’re describing rarely looks like history while it’s happening. It looks like a Wednesday… and I want us to be more aware that it is history in the making.
I am happy that you received my essay as something that speaks for a shared experience, and not just a private one, Thank you for that, and for reading me so deeply!
This is even more powerful — recognising and acknowledging the women in lateral transition. That is a rare outlook to have and there is no markets making cards for that. I reckon we all will have to make that conscious choice when we can. I know I will:)
It’s up to us, yes, you’re right!
Very few people really understand chainsaws. The way they can fell a tree in minutes. Sever large branches almost like flossing teeth. Hand held power leveraged into great destructive force. Nothing is more efficient for cross cutting than a trusty chainsaw. But even the mightiest chainsaw would die a slow, miserable death if someone put it to the task of splitting a tree down the middle. The master of the horizontal cut is brought to its knees when asked to shift to vertical. Yet a single lightning strike will split a tree wide open in the blink of an eye. The lumberjack can wreak havoc to a forest with determined diligence. But he can not duplicate the ferocity of a single, unpredictable, uncontrollable snap of nature.
This is the power a woman carries. With the look of an eye, she can change the course of history or rouse the child to tidy his room. She induces motion. A man may act, but a woman moves. A man moves with efficient boldness, but a woman acts with calculated courage. On the whole I think men will always take the path of least resistance. Hence every historical system elevates efficiency above all else. Too often death and destruction has been the most efficient course of action.
And as much as the world would flatten everything into this kind of equality of efficiency, true equity establishes appropriate hierarchy. Negotiation determines priorities. With the power of choice, a woman holds the coherence of the world. In any given moment, a woman can assess the stakes of the situation, determine the proper order and assume the posture necessary to her survival. She is more force of nature than machine of man. Perhaps this is one reason history has so discounted her. Silenced her. (Feared her?) Efficiency cannot hold complexity. Men, through efficiency, have proven to be myopic. Women face reality with eyes wide open.
In this way, she inhabits the courage of choosing. I do not subscribe to the biological explanation of developmental nurturing. Hers is simply the unsung courage of stepping up. Herein lies the source of her ferocity. Movement, like water, fills the need where it is. Choice defines hierarchy. Choice constructs. It is strategic. It promotes life. It contains complexity. Where a man will hack his way through the jungle of life, the uncontrollable force that is woman gives life to the jungle.
The chainsaw is a fantastic image, precise where it needs to be, and honest about its limits. The tool that masters one axis and fails completely on the other. Efficiency as a form of blindness dressed as capability.
Where I’d introduce a bit of friction, if you allow me, Andrew… I’m wary of the move from “women have historically operated differently” to “women are more force of nature than machine”. It is poetic and beautiful, but nature is exactly the category that has been used to remove women from history… she is elemental, therefore ungovernable, therefore unrecordable, therefore absent from the archive. The lightning bolt doesn’t get a biography. What I was trying to argue in my essay is precisely the opposite, that what women do is not natural in the sense of pre-cultural or instinctive, but skilled, learned, transmitted, and therefore historical. Recoverable. Nameable. The distinction matters because nature can be admired and still ignored, while skill demands account.
The courage of choosing rather than the biology of nurturing, that part I’ll take without reservation. Choice is the hinge. It’s what makes the act meaningful rather than simply functional.
But I’d rather women be complex historical actors than magnificent weather phenomena, although I see them like that too. The weather doesn’t get credit. The actor does.
Thank you, Andrew, for the image that will stay with me even where I’m arguing with it! It is majestic, women are majestic, but we need more than just perception today.
Your willingness to introduce friction makes me happy; I welcome it. I take it as a form of respect, that you are fully engaged in the exchange. Thank you, truly.
In this instance I think we are less misaligned than my writing was able to communicate. The transition line between paragraphs one and two may be where the derailment first happens. It was meant to connect that random concept to the general thesis, but instead it acts as a pair of skies fitted to the lightning strike image sending it roughshod through the rest of comment.
It declares the image “is” the power a woman carries. That is the point of miscommunication. What follows attempts to demonstrate how a woman’s active agency, deliberate discernment, and courageous calculation all contribute to her living force. One as powerful as but not identified in the lightning. That even her “nurturing” characteristic is not natural, but chosen as a response to the environment in which she finds herself. That she holds the complexity of real hierarchies strategically such that real, animated choice defines her, as opposed to mere efficiency.
In my mind, that kind of exercised power promotes life, where patriarchal, divisive systems do not (I used the word “historical” systems to suggest patriarchy rather than stating it plainly, my second point of imprecision), and indeed, there is nothing elemental or instinctive about it.
Ultimately, what I wanted to say, without succeeding, was that women move in the world with the force of natural phenomenon, but not ‘as’ a phenomenon, which I hoped celebrated your thesis, not moved away from it. Of course the line “She is more force of nature than machine of man” reads as diametrically opposed to that intent. But even there, I hung my hat on her movement of power over his mechanics power. So if we were to edit the transition line above and this badly worded sentence here, it might be easier to see how we aren’t that far apart.
Excuses aside, please, introduce friction, make corrections, send me to the corner of the room to your hearts content. I'm glad to know there is an actual person on the other side of the words.
The distinction between moving with the force of a natural phenomenon and being one is essential for me, and I’m glad you held the line on it. Agency requires a subject. The lightning doesn’t choose. Your woman does, which is precisely what makes her formidable rather than merely powerful. Power without choice is weather. Power with choice is something history has consistently found more threatening.
And yes, once I read “historical systems” as the stand-in for patriarchy, the whole argument reorients. Efficiency as the operating logic of systems that found destruction cheaper than complexity, that’s a sharp observation and one my essay would have been glad to contain.
The corner of the room remains available, but I don’t think you need it. Imprecise writing that knows where it went wrong and can diagnose the exact sentence is already most of the way to precision. The edit practically writes itself from here.
The actual person on the other side is glad you pushed back. That’s what the salon is for, Andrew! I’m so happy you’re part of it.
"I am not going to make this poetic." Well, I know poetry when I feel it, and I'm feeling it here.
Thank you so much, Rick! You made me smile.
What a beautiful gift to read this in the morning of a sunny 8th of March.. thank you for never being afraid of saying the difficult things!
Sunny 8th of March feels like the universe making a small, unsubtle gesture. I’ll take it!
The difficult things are only difficult until someone says them, after that they become obvious, which is its own satisfaction. The fear before is always larger than the thing itself. That’s worth remembering on the days when the thing feels unsayable.
Thank you for receiving it in that morning light, Alexandra! I miss you!
Thank you Tamara! I have no intelligent comment, I just woke up and finished reading your essay. It simply resonates from top to bottom, because I'm in this weird state or phase where I'm casting aside some of the imprinted agreeableness and it gives me a sharp edge I'm very VERY aware of. It feels uncomfortable, as if I'm being the naughty girl, but it's what my psyche, body, mind, soul even, demands of me. I also love the art in your essays, and how you implement them. I live there too. All the best from the Netherlands.
The discomfort you’re describing is almost diagnostic, Janneke, the fact that refusing to be agreeable feels like being naughty tells you exactly how deep the conditioning goes. Behavioural yes, but also moral, as though your own boundaries were someone else’s property and you’re stealing them back.
That feeling of transgression when you’re simply declining to perform is the internalised enforcement mechanism doing its job. The fact that you feel it and keep going anyway is the interesting part.
The sharp edge isn’t a phase. It might be the first accurate self-portrait.
All the best back to you, no matter the distance, we are all together today!
Thank you Tamara. That's exactly how I experience it. And I'm very interested in the interesting part....so as you say, the sharp edge might be the first accurate self-portrait (in a loooong time).
Continuing from my previous comment, which was prematurely posted:-
No one can be closer to any person than their mother, the only person of who’s body we were once part.
And whilst male, I nevertheless also inhabit both an external & internal world which I think most men do not. If they did, they’d understand me better, for a start
I’m aware at eg work meetings that I’m expected to be brash, confident, of few words, action oriented. I observe that those who are, act too quickly, consequently making too many mistakes, for which they blame underlings, & women!
Some see me as a little shy , ‘artistic’, or gay (I’m not). That I naturally use language well, with a larger vocabulary, causes impatient amusement & snide insults amongst men, & eye rolling amongst some women.
I refuse to wear a blue suit, in spite of blue being the most popular colour in the west, because I like only warm blues. And that I refuse to have an upside down head, where the hair which should inhabit the top of my head instead descends to my chin, whilst my head would be a shiny ball, they see as an impertinent, if not unacceptable, display of independence, disinterest in ‘male bonding’, if not outright subversion.
And I think it’s ironic than men, emerging head-first from women at birth, spend the rest of their lives trying to reenter women, once again head first, one way &/or the other. To say nothing of the most popular of heterosexual male fetishes, reconnecting with breasts they first suckled as infants.
I interpret all this as a peek into what many women feel. It is not good. Women are relentlessly assaulted by mostly unspoken pressure to appear a certain way, dress a certain way, speak a certain way, think in a certain way, & engage in work & other activities of a certain kind.
Some men are treated similarly, because of their personality. Because of that, they are at least aware of what’s happening.
On the matter of certain kinds of feminists attributing all problems in eg relationships, workplace etc., solely to men, I’d recommend the writings of Australian Bettina Arndt, if you are not already familiar with her.
Do feel free to be specific if you think any of my comments are out of line, given your essay focusses on women, of whom I necessarily have little expertise, when of course compared to women themselves.
The warm blues are doing real philosophical work here because the refusal is precise. Not a rejection of convention for its own sake but an insistence on accuracy… this blue, not that one. That kind of specificity is exactly what the conformity pressure can’t tolerate, because it’s harder to argue with than outright refusal. You’re not being difficult. You’re being exact. And exactness, in contexts that reward approximate compliance, reads as provocation.
The observation about meetings is one I recognise from the essay’s other side, the man who performs brashness, acts too fast, and distributes the consequences downward. That’s the performance of confidence, which is a different and considerably more dangerous thing. You’re watching the same dynamic I’m describing, just from inside the room where it’s being enacted rather than against you.
The birth observation is either very funny or very profound and I haven’t decided which, which probably means it’s both.
Nothing here is out of line. My essay was always in conversation with anyone willing to think carefully inside it, regardless of which side of the experience they arrive from.
Indeed. Much of human behaviour IS both very funny & very profound. Whilst I prefer sketch comedy to standup, standup is a superb medium for illustrating that very dichotomy. Katie Hopkins & Nicholas de Santo are excellent exponents, even if one can’t abide their politics. But I do, as I expect, your being so perspicacious, you’ve divined by now.
When the truth is laid bare and raw, there we hope... Hope for what specifically? Perhaps to finally be acknowledged and be completely recognised for our necessary part in the creation of this world... That we shouldn't only be acknowledged and recognised when we play by their rules but when we are naturally who we are.
Thank you, Tamara, for this marvelous gift. I feel seen and heard.
Hope is always in that slightly embarrassing position of not being able to finish its own sentence cleanly, and I think that’s honest rather than weak.
The completion keeps shifting because what’s being asked for keeps being refused in new forms. Acknowledgment arrives, but conditional. Recognition appears, but framed. Seen, but through someone else’s lens, adjusted for their comfort.
The recognition without the prerequisite of compliance is actually the harder demand. Easier to be seen performing the expected version. The real ask is to be legible on your own terms, in your own register, without having translated yourself into something the room finds easier to hold.
That that still feels like hope rather than certainty tells us exactly where we are.
I’m glad my essay reached you, Abigail! Being felt seen by someone who articulates it matters to me more than I can express.