Under extreme torture, women betrayed each other—friends turned in friends, daughters their mothers. We came to learn that glancing contact can be dangerous; it’s best to keep to your own. I have to wonder if the emotional sediment of this is one of the reasons women today can be wary of each other and are often willing to watch each other get cut down: This trauma is in our DNA. I suspect this fear is one of the reasons we self-restrict. We continue to hold the line, enforce our own smallness, and struggle with the idea that we’ll be called out, put back in our rightful place, blamed.
