I had been brought up to believe that sorrow, like menstruation, was something women were meant to suffer in secret, hidden from the eyes of the world. The everyday suffering of women was as ineluctable as their bleeding each month, and as inappropriate to show. Good women did not reveal tear-stained faces or blood-stained clothes, besmirching the reputation of their families by these untoward displays of the weaknesses of their minds and bodies. They wept, like they bled, in quiet, darkened rooms and emerged out of them only when they were clean again, clear of all tell-tale signs of bodily
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