We girls had been taught kindness from a young age; kindness had been stressed. But there was another lesson in that, one the adults hadn’t known they were teaching, how kindness could be expected of a girl, demanded of her really, and then levied against her. We girls didn’t talk about this, but we knew it was true—of course we knew it was true—and so we would dare each other to venture into the forbidden area past kindness, where, we hoped, toughness might exist.
