Women often serve as the emotional glue—the connective tissue, if you like—that keeps nuclear and extended families and communities together. It is no coincidence they suffer far more than men do from diseases of actual connective tissue, among which lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, fibromyalgia, and their multiple relatives are variants. Thus, these conditions, as most chronic maladies do, reflect social dynamics along the lines we have been investigating throughout, not simply individual physiology gone rogue.
