On Our Best Behavior: The Price Women Pay to Be Good

by Elise Loehnen

I’ve chatted with legendary historian Mary Beard about the silencing of women in literature throughout history; physician Gabor Maté about how intergenerational trauma drives addiction; U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy on the epidemic of loneliness; historian Isabel Wilkerson about our unseen but pervasive racial caste system; marriage therapists John and Julie Gottman about why some couples are destined to divorce; and many, many more authors, philosophers, artists, and academics.

We all struggle to be known, to express the truest, most tender parts of ourselves, to feel safe enough to bring our gifts to bear. We wonder: Who am I? What do I want and need? How do I find my purpose and serve?

Good women are tireless and hardworking with no professed interest in or requirements for rest, either at work or at home.

Good women are not too intimidating or confident; they work hard to appear modest, minimizing, and focused on finding other people who can champion their ideas.

Good women are assertive only on behalf of other people. They are quick to forgive and nonconfrontational, content to sacrifice their needs and embrace discomfort to preserve the peace and maintain the status quo.

E. O. Wilson said about the problem of humanity: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

As much as 80 percent of our food supply was generated, and processed, by women.

recent reassessment of prehistoric cave drawings, long held to be hunting scenes painted by men, concluded that the handprints were primarily female.

A wife could easily, without warrant or reason, be demoted to concubine or slave. This ever-present threat coerced dependence and good behavior

The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their preferences.

In Greek, the word dīmon translated to a life energy that wouldn’t obey the rules—that part of ourselves that’s impossible to control—so

central theme of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (ca. A.D. 1300), and they were popularized even more by “The Parson’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

When the government ran out of others to blame, women became the primary focus of frustration and fear.

the first hunted were the “crones,” the wise women, the elders, typically widows who refused to remarry or had no options to do so. These older women had long been the keepers of powerful traditions—they were the culture’s healers, prophets, and midwives; they initiated young girls into the rites of womanhood; they mentored mothers; and they carried intergenerational stories and wisdom. But beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century (dramatically peaking from 1560 to 1760), these women, too old to be seen as sexual objects, and possessing knowledge and skills the church viewed as threatening, were persecuted as witches.[*10] We can see their rejection to this day: Our culture has little tolerance for or interest in women past their procreative prime,

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.

What exactly constitutes a good woman? The patriarchal paradigm of femininity—selfless, physically perfect, nurturing, obedient, compliant, modest, responsible, self-effacing—persists.

“The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women. This cooperation is secured by a variety of means: gender indoctrination; educational deprivation; the denial to women of knowledge of their history; the dividing of women, one from the other, by defining ‘respectability’ and ‘deviance’ according to women’s sexual activities; by restraints and outright coercion; by discrimination in access to economic resources and political power; and by awarding class privileges to conforming women.”

only then we can we stop policing each other for behavior that we’ve been coded to condemn in ourselves.

My mother didn’t believe in boredom. She would meet that refrain with frustration and fierceness. “Life is boring!” she would bark. “I am not here to entertain you! Go outside! Find a book!”

For her—as indeed for many of us—an endless to-do list was her form of therapy, the measure of her time, the record of her productivity, a way to suppress whatever else might have been fermenting below.

emotional absence touched my entire extended family—she created a through-line of neglect for my mom and her siblings, which consisted of food insecurity, coldness, and an emptiness of soul in my grandmother that everyone struggles to explain.

nothing at all. For in determining the value of our minutes, capitalism also determines our values. A CFO gets $300 an hour, a graphic designer’s talents may earn $50, and the enrichment of the minds of future generations through teaching guarantees…a nonlivable minimum wage.

We often estimate that we work sixty or eighty hours a week, but studies reveal that people with full-time jobs “work” much less than that. We aren’t working 24/7—it just feels that way because we’ve lost control of our days. Work feels relentless because it follows us to the gym, to the bedroom, to dinner, to the bathroom at 2 A.M. Work has become a sprawl, something we do, and think about,

the realization that making money, paying bills, and buying opportunity is what is within control is probably why I hold it so tightly as an antidote to the fear that my kids won’t be OK.

women. As activist and writer Soraya Chemaly explains, “In the United States…men engage in relaxing and entertaining activities 35 percent of the time that women are doing chores. For women, that number is almost half, 19 percent…. [On weekends] fathers engage in leisure 47 percent of the time that mothers are taking care of kids…. A [UK] survey…found that women have five hours less leisure time a week than men do. Furthermore, since 2000, men’s downtime has increased, while women’s has shrunk.”

many women who do not have the support I do. But the comparative pain scale is part of the problem we find ourselves in: Our knowledge that it could be worse keeps many of us from putting words to the overwhelm and from fighting against it.

For women, not only is sloth not an option—our work and overwhelm are compounded by the belief from ourselves, each other, and society that we should always be doing more.

Babies need warm, loving bodies to attach to, regardless of gender.

When we sleep, the glymphatic system “washes” our brains, clearing out detritus. And researchers believe other modern crises like ADHD are at least partially sleep disorders.

We don’t have time to fight for our reproductive rights, for equal pay, for paid family leave and reasonable gun laws to keep our children safe. We don’t have time to expand. Denying us space and stillness is the most pernicious way those at the top of the patriarchy keep their feet on our necks.

Not only will we outwork them—let the preceding pages be proof of our unfailing industriousness—we will also outperform them.

girls have outperformed boys in school for a century. But you wouldn’t know that from the power stack in society, or the ways in which women feel like they can’t win.

Fifty-eight percent of jobs that pay less than $11 per hour are held by women, and 56 percent of women live in poverty, particularly women of color.

‘Follow your envy. It tells you what you want,’

I was oblivious of the ways in which envy operated inside of me. I would find myself telling my husband all the seemingly valid reasons I didn’t like someone, only to realize that I had, again, missed the point: Oh, she’s not pretentious, I’m envious that her grade schoolers are doing high school–level math and winning art fairs! Oh, she’s not a sellout, I’m envious that she’s achieving more than me in the world and is always on vacation! In romantic, far-flung locales! What. a. bitch.

“Strong, happy, confident girls and women are breaking our culture’s implicit rule that girls should be self-doubting, reserved, timid, and apologetic. Girls who are bold enough to break those rules irk us. Their brazen defiance and refusal to follow directions make us want to put them back into their cage.”

Typically, envy comes out wrapped in cruelty and masked as opinion. It presents in perverted and unconscious ways, disguised in attacks against other women, women who don’t seem so constrained.

“Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic…but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.” Acknowledging we feel envious is enough.

the women who grate on our nerves are typically telling us what we want. They are the ones who are holding up a mirror.

focuses on what happens to girls in adolescence as they conform themselves to fit within the expectations of the culture. Her work illuminates the moment of suppression, when girls stop saying what they feel and start saying what they think they’re supposed to feel.

patriarchy’s dominance depends on the complicity and compliance of women and on the way we enforce these rules with each other,

children come to insert the word don’t before critical words: For boys, it becomes I don’t care; for girls, it is I don’t know.

Trick Mirror, where she writes, poetically and painfully, of the “complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully,

The real rivalry between mothers and daughters goes unspoken: It’s predicated on a mother watching the girl she cherishes achieve something outside the mother’s reasonable ambition and live a life that wasn’t necessarily available to her.

nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent,

was only when I became a mother myself that I realized that my mother’s sometimes obvious frustration with parenthood was nothing personal, just a function of the time and place we find ourselves in now.

mother of the modern day, with her emerging, frustrated, ambivalent sense of self and her silenced sense of failure, cannot become her daughter’s co-conspirator and join forces with her against a tyrannical, patriarchal system that has done so little to articulate or to solve the dilemma of the mother-as-woman, a person with an imperative need for life and development beyond marriage and maternity.

She would need to reach back for that moment in her life when she too struggled with these issues and turned around to brood about her mother’s life. She would need a great deal of political knowledge and a vast amount of courage and no small store of cunning, and above all she would need permission to tell the truth about her envy and resentment of her daughter.

As parents, this pursuit requires moving past our reflexive judgment of other women to make it clear that whatever our daughters want to do is supportable, achievable, wonderful—that they’re not living our agendas and that they are not an expression of our unfulfilled dreams but are on missions uniquely their own.

We must learn how to express our desires truthfully, prioritize their expression, and normalize this action for girls in the way we do for boys.