Women Restrictions Quotes

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.

Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.

The queen was my favorite chess piece. Unlike the women I knew in real life, she was powerful. Her job was to defend her husband at all costs, because while he was weak and practically defenseless—only allowed to move one square at a time—she was the strongest player on the board, hindered by no restrictions at all.

The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. The veil sets women apart from men and apart from the world; it restrains them, confines them, grooms them for docility. A mind can be cramped just as a body may be, and a Muslim veil blinkers both your vision and your destiny. It is the mark of a kind of apartheid, not the domination of a race but of a sex.

Wisdom isn’t about accumulating more facts; it’s about understanding big truths in a deeper way. Year by year, with the support and insights of friends and partners and people who have gone before me, I see more clearly that the primary causes of poverty and illness are the cultural, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do—and think they can do—for themselves and their children.

Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.

I had come to worry about those women who were full-time mothers and homemakers by choice. Did other, more career-minded women have the right to devalue them . . . ? Maybe it was time to slow down and look at the role restrictions imposed not only on women but the men around them, to search for the balance that could promote self-sufficiency . . .

Many women do not join organized resis­tance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppres­sion. Under capitalism, patriarchy is structured so that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme re­strictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.

We are women,” she continued, “and nothing short of death stops us from doing precisely what we wish to do. That is what the laws and restrictions binding our lives breed: determination and cunning. The likes of you will not obey me. You will tell me that you intend to be as still as a rock, and yet I know you will dart from shadow to shadow like a fish.

When women are restricted from the service of God in any capacity, the Church is mistakenly allowing an imperfect male-dominated ancient culture to drive our understanding and practice of Christ’s redeeming work, instead of Jesus Christ and the whole of the Scriptures.

it is only in social relations that we are human...to be human women must share in the totality of humanity's common life. Women, forced to lead restricted lives, retard all human progress. Growth of organism, the individual or social body requires use of all of our powers in four areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and social

Until the Quiet Revolution gave women back their bodies and Quebeckers back their lives. It invited the church to leave the womb and restrict itself to the altar. It almost worked.

The sole purpose of the corset was clearly to immobilize a woman's body in a posture considered desirable - it was certainly not intended to allow her free movement. As if intellectual contraints were not sufficent, women had to be hobbled physically. One might almost think that, in imposing such restrictions, men did not so much scorn women as fear them.

Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.

…each woman is a wonderful world unto herself. And monogamy? It’s like choosing to live in a single town and never traveling to experience the beauty, history, and enchantment of all the other unique, wonderful places in the world. Why does love have to limit us? Perhaps it doesn’t. Only fear is restrictive. Love is expansive. And I wonder, since fear of enmeshment impels us to avoid commitment and fear of abandonment makes us possessive, what type of evolved relationship can emerge once those wounds are healed?

Candy in a wrapper, a diamond ring in a box—these analogies are commonly used in Egypt and other countries to try to convince women of the value of veiling. They compare women to objects that are precious but devalued by exposure, objects that need to be hidden, protected, and secured. When it comes to what are described as the Islamic restrictions on women’s dress, women are never simply women. There

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.

The Muslim veil, the different sorts of masks and beaks and "burkas", are all gradations of mental slavery. (...) The veil deliberately marks women as private and restricted property, nonpersons. (...) I felt anger that this subjugation is silently tolerated (...) by so many Western societies where the equality of sexes is legally enshrined.

I, for one, hope for the day when women will know no restrictions because of sex but will be individuals free to live their lives as men are free—irrespective of the continent or country where they happen to live.

The girl you were died; the potion of death was what all of us women swallow sooner or later. Have you noticed how at puberty the Amazon-like energy we are born with fades and we turn into doubt-filled creatures with clipped wings? The woman left trapped in the silo is also you, a prisoner of the restrictions of adult life. The female condition is a disgrace, Isabel, it’s like having rocks tied to your ankles so you can’t fly.

Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control. Feminist thinkers called attention to the way this notion of love served the interests of patriarchal men and women. It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a "crime of passion," plead, "I love her so much i had to kill her.

Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it supposedly made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, hairy, lonely, bitter and prompted them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts. Supposedly women have gotten all they could out of feminism, are now "equal," and so can, by choice, embrace things we used to see as sexist, like a TV show in which some self-satisfied lunk samples the wares of twenty-five women before rejecting twenty-four and keeping the one he likes best, or like the notion that mothers should have primary responsibility for raising the kids. Postfeminism means that you can now work outside the home even in jobs previously restricted to men, go to graduate school, pump iron, and pump your own gas, as long as you remain fashion conscious, slim, nurturing, deferential to men, and become a doting, selfless mother.

Korean clothes, both men’s trousers and women’s skirts, were of one size, with waistbands that could be tightened or loosened as needed. Koreans know that the human body is always changing—so why try to make one’s body fit into some garment of arbitrary size? But Americans seemed quick to bow to the tyranny of a fitted garment—and just as quick to cheat that fit when they could not live up to its restrictions.

The time came to put Iris Duarte back on the plane. It was a morning flight which made it difficult. I was used to rising at noon; it was a fine cure for hangovers and would add 5 years to my life. I felt no sadness while driving her to L.A. International. The sex had been fine; there had been laughter. I could hardly remember a more civilized time, neither of us making any demands, yet there had been warmth, it had not been without feeling, dead meat coupled with dead meat. I detested that type of swinging, the Los Angeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beach kind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part—a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game—it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.

(Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)

In 1936, the federal court struck down all federal restrictions against birth control, in a case memorably named U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries.

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values? The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes". And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing. -Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency

The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the "demon-possessed," menstruating women, those with bodily discharges, those who had recently given birth—none of these were permitted to enter the Temple and take part in the rituals unless first purified according to the priestly code. With every leper cleansed, every paralytic healed, every demon cast out, Jesus was not only challenging that priestly code, he was invalidating the very purpose of the priesthood.

he wonders whether young women raised under such restrictive conditions can ever overcome the disadvantage of deliberately engineered lacunae in their mental, moral, and emotional development. The

A home where a woman is abused is a small-scale model of much larger oppressive systems that work in remarkably similar ways. Many of the excuses an abusive man uses for verbally tearing his partner to shreds are the same ones that a power-mad boss uses for humiliating his or her employees. The abusive man’s ability to convince himself that his domination of you is for your own good is paralleled by the dictator who says, “People in this country are too primitive for democracy.” The divide-and-conquer strategies used by abusers are reminiscent of a corporate head who tries to break the labor union by giving certain groups of workers favored treatment. The making of an abuser is thus not necessarily restricted to the specific values his society teaches him about men’s relationships with women; without realizing it he may also apply attitudes and tactics from other forms of oppression that he has been exposed to as a boy or as a young adult and that he has learned to justify or even admire.

For women, the boundaries of acceptability are strict, and they are many. We must be seductive but pure, quiet but not aloof, fragile but industrious, and always, always small. We must not be too successful, too ambitious, too independent, too self-centered—and when we can’t manage all the contradictory restrictions, we are turned into grotesques. Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women, in centuries’ worth of stories, because stories are a way to encode these expectations and pass them on.

In this martial world dominated by men, women had little place. The Church's teachings might underpin feudal morality, yet when it came to the practicalities of life, a ruthless pragmatism often came into play. Kings and noblemen married for political advantage, and women rarely had any say in how they or their wealth were to be disposed in marriage. Kings would sell off heiresses and rich widows to the highest bidder, for political or territorial advantage, and those who resisted were heavily fined. Young girls of good birth were strictly reared, often in convents, and married off at fourteen or even earlier to suit their parents' or overlord's purposes. The betrothal of infants was not uncommon, despite the church's disapproval. It was a father's duty to bestow his daughters in marriage; if he was dead, his overlord or the King himself would act for him. Personal choice was rarely and issue. Upon marriage, a girl's property and rights became invested in her husband, to whom she owed absolute obedience. Every husband had the right to enforce this duty in whichever way he thought fit--as Eleanor was to find out to her cost. Wife-beating was common, although the Church did at this time attempt to restrict the length of the rod that a husband might use.

It is also clear that the original performances, in public celebrations of all kinds, from religious festivals to the ‘after-party’ of triumphs, were unruly, raucous occasions, attracting a wide cross section of the population of the city, including women and slaves. This is in sharp contrast to classical Athens, where the theatre audience, though larger than at Rome, was probably restricted to male citizens, unruly or not.

...the belief that the threat of rape is everywhere, that it can happen at any time, that it is the worst fate that can befall women, is enough to make us police ourselves and restrict our own mobility. But on the other hand, feminists also want to demystify rape, to begin to see it not as a unique and life-destroying form of violation from which one can never recover, but as (merely) another kind of violence against person.

A culture that treats women as objects, that gleefully supports entertainment that is more often demeaning toward women than it is not, that encourages the erosion of a woman’s autonomy and personal space, is the same culture that elects state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation. Or is it that state lawmakers who work tirelessly to enact restrictive abortion legislation encourage their constituents to treat women as objects? Perhaps this is trickle-down misogyny—which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Calls from the antis to overturn Roe, to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and to defund Planned Parenthood are growing ever louder. Each one of these backward moves will not only restrict women’s access to safe, affordable abortion care, but will diminish women’s access to good health care in general, putting their lives and the lives of their children at risk.

To fight against these falsehoods, though, one needed to be able to see past the present-day and very male-oriented distortion lens to the underlying truth. Beyond question, Molly Valle could do this. A woman whose surface appearance, eyeglasses and conservative clothes, fit the schoolmarm stereotype to a T. Yet she had sloughed off that exterior and society’s restrictions as effortlessly as she had her clothes, and during their lovemaking, she had not only kept up with him but often passed ahead of him. With other women, he had seen the embers of passion but never the flame. Tonight, he had witnessed the bonfire.

My Lesbian history tells me that the vice squad is never our friend even when it is called in by women; that when police rid a neighborhood of 'undesirables,' the undesirables have also included street Lesbians; that I must find another way to fight violence against women without doing violence to my Lesbian self. I must find a way that does not cooperate with the state forces against sexuality, forces that raided my bars, beat up my women, entrapped us in bathrooms, closed our plays, and banned our books.

She grew tired of shielding her body, For societal expectation and propriety, Double standards and sobriety, Ideologies of prudent cries, And boys who made her tell them lies. She wanted a man who’d destroy her reputation, One strong enough to feed her unruly temptation, Not leave her alone in risk of damnation. Someone strong enough to make her feel, Like a free woman who needn’t yield, Run with her naked through a field. Live on the fringe free of restriction, Treat her as a woman, undo the affliction. A man who’d take her breath with desire, Someone with whom her passions could conspire, A man strong enough to keep up with her fire.

One of the lessons I have learned in trying to live with history is that for every repression, we have found a suitable form of resistance. Our history is the chronicle of our vitality, our passion, our cunning, and at many times, our integrity. We must now work out a way by which we can honor both the old and the new. We must look for connections rather than judgments...In these days of Lesbian performers (or, as they call themselves, women performers) singing at Carnegie Hall, the wooing of us by national political parties, of big-budgeted gay civil rights organizations, remember that our battle is to be accepted in the fullness of our difference and not because we promise to be like everybody else.

none of those programs are enough to effectively combat hunger on their own. They need more. More resources, more employees, more efforts by the government to solve the problem across the country. And they don’t have the connections, resources, or time to lobby politicians and provide services. Charity may begin at home, but it is fundamentally incapable of solving a societal ill without some measure of government-funded programs that are less focused on being restrictive or punitive and more focused on making sure that the most vulnerable are cared for regardless of income.

How did these women do it? What was their secret? What unexpected, mystical orifice on their body did they allow these men entry to that in turn made them do whatever unreasonable thing they wanted? Or was it that they simply told them what to do and when to do it, and the imposed restriction of choice made their boyfriends feel safely shepherded rather than ready for slaughter? Had I been treating men too much like adults and not enough like little directionless lambs?

Girls disappear every day. Jeju women, especially, disappear all the time once they are older. They think they are free to act without restrictions and so venture out into the world. They disappear to live with their sweethearts, to hide their pregnancies, to sell themselves, to become gisaengs. The reasons are endless.

On the raptors kept for falconry: "They talk every night, deep into the darkness. They say about how they were taken, about what they can remember about their homes, about their lineage and the great deeds of their ancestors, about their training and what they've learned and will learn. It is military conversation, really, like what you might have in the mess of a crack cavalry regiment: tactics, small arms, maintenance, betting, famous hunts, wine, women, and song. Another subject they have is food. It is a depressing thought," he continued, "but of course they are mainly trained by hunger. They are a hungry lot, poor chaps, thinking of the best restaurants where they used to go, and how they had champagne and caviar and gypsy music. Of course, they all come from noble blood." "What a shame that they should be kept prisoners and hungry." "Well, they do not really understand that they are prisoners any more than the cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being 'dedicated to their profession,' like an order of knighthood or something of that sort. You see, the member of the Muse [where Raptors are kept for falconry] is restricted to the Raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screened perches do not carry Blackbirds or such trash as that. And then, as for the hungry part, they're far from starving or that kind of hunger: they're in training, you know! And like everybody in strict training, they think about food.

Someday in our future it may be possible for women everywhere not to be restricted to those roles society deems natural, God-given, or appropriately feminine. A woman will not need to be disguised as a man to go outside, to climb a tree, or to make money. She will not need to make an effort to resemble a man, or to think like one. Instead, she can speak a language that men will want to understand. She will be free to wear a suit or a skirt or something entirely different. She will not count as three-quarters of a man, and her testimony will not be worth half a man's. She will be recognized as someone's sister, mother, and daughter. And maybe, someday, her identity will not be confined to how she relates to a brother, a son, or a father. Instead, she will be recognized as an individual, whose life holds value only in itself.

Nowadays, most women wed, bear children, and then plan their children’s marriages. Some of the poor might work in the fields, and a rare few are mercenaries or hired soldiers, but … the wealthier they are, the more restricted their freedoms and roles become. You’d think that money would buy you the ability to do whatever you pleased.

I get the sense that many in the contemporary biblical womanhood movement feel that the tasks associated with homemaking have been so marginalized in our culture that it’s up to them to restore the sacredness of keeping the home. This is a noble goal indeed, and one around which all people of faith can rally. But in our efforts to celebrate and affirm God’s presence in the home, we should be wary of elevating the vocation of homemaking above all others by insinuating that for women, God’s presence is somehow restricted to that sphere. If God is the God of all pots and pans, then He is also the God of all shovels and computers and paints and assembly lines and executive offices and classrooms. Peace and joy belong not to the woman who finds the right vocation, but to the woman who finds God in any vocation, who looks for the divine around every corner.

the primary causes of poverty and illness are the cultural, financial, and legal restrictions that block what women can do—and think they can do—for themselves and their children.

I’ve never been fond of propriety, especially when it primarily seeks to control and repress women without placing nearly as many restrictions on men.

The infecting-character type is not restricted to women; it has nothing to do with gender.

What drives abortion bans and restrictions? The belief that women who have sex for pleasure rather than procreation are sluts.

In Israel’s Scriptures, God’s concern is not restricted to insiders: it extends to strangers, to slaves, to women, and to any who are oppressed, for we are all children of God.

On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a fire of thorns, that crackled 'like the laughter of the fool.' Nineteen persons were gathered here. Of these, five women, wearing gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighboring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life companionship, sat beneath the corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever - which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale. ("The Three Strangers")

Women are no longer required to be chaste or modest, to restrict their sphere of activity to the home, or even to realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity. Normative femininity [that is, the rules for being a good woman] is coming more and more to be centered on women’s body—not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance. . . . The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy.

Typical of the new bourgeois sexual morality was Martin Luther’s injunction to the nuns to leave the convents and get married, as marriage and the production of an abundant prole was in his view women’s fulfillment of God’s will and their ‘highest vocation.’ “Let them bear children to death,” he apparently declared. “They are created for that.”3 No sixteenth-century political or religious authority expressed this sentiment as crudely as Luther, but the restriction of women’s sexuality to marriage and procreation, together with wifely unconditional obedience, was instituted

for in contrast to the restrictions imposed on respectable Greek women who only went out of the house as a last resort and even then fully covered, their Egyptian sisters were not only allowed out, but attended market and ‘are employed in trade while the men stay at home and do the weaving’. Further unnatural practices meant that Egyptian ‘women pass water standing up, men sitting down’,

We live in a country where you can electively have your nose broken to reshape it, inject fat from your butt into your face to look younger, but pushing a baby out of your own vagina can be restricted.

The Venus Factor weight loss system has nothing to do with silly exercise machines, cardio, restrictive or pre-packaged diets, or whatever weird berry pill the diet industry is talking about these days.

Throughout the nineteenth century, newspapers were accustomed to receiving this type of correspondence from the many adherents of the temperance movement, who sought to restrict the sale and consumption of alcohol.

And then," said Sarnac, "I remember that I made a prophecy. I made it - when did I make it? Two thousand years ago? Or two weeks ago? I sat in Fanny's little sitting-room, an old-world creature amidst her old-world furnishings, and I said that men and women would not always suffer as we were suffering then. I said that we were still poor savages, living only in the bleak dawn of civilisation, and that we suffered because we were under-bred, under-trained and darkly ignorant of ourselves, that the mere fact that we knew our own unhappiness was the promise of better things and that a day would come when charity and understanding would light the world so that men and women would no longer hurt themselves and one another as they were doing now everywhere, universally, in law and in restriction and in jealousy and in hate, all round and about the earth.

Only once we reach a point where we can recognize that men get hurt from acting "manly" and women are hurt from men being "manly," can we stop the cycle of feeding into regressive and restrictive gender expectations

A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six bodies. The pressure it applied to women's bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, 'It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree.... for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die.

Many feminist legal scholars, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have argued that the Supreme Court should have legalized abortion on grounds of equality rather than privacy.6 Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women’s ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.

First of all, a religion that irrationally restricts women's freedom is a religion that makes half the country unhappy. And if half of a society is unhappy, you cannot create a peaceful country even if you make the other half happy!

The common contaminated foods which would be the major source of Sr-90 might be classified into five grades- A, B, C, D, and E... The A food would be restricted to children and to pregnant women. The B food would be a high-priced food available to everybody. The C food would be a low priced food also available to everybody. Finally, the D food would be restricted to people over age forty or fifty... Most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer.

We hold these truths self-evident: That all men and women are created equal, though we do not live equal lives due to differences in will, motivation, effort, and habit. That we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, but that it is incumbent upon each of us to be vigilant and disciplined should we wish to attain such a vital, free, and happy life. We believe the greatest of human powers is the ability to independently think for ourselves, to choose our own aims, affections, and actions. For in the hearts of humankind lives a natural instinct for freedom and independence, a psychological predisposition for self-direction, a biological imperative toward growth, and a spiritual joy in choosing and advancing one’s own life. It is the main motivation of humankind to be free, to express our true selves and pursue our dreams without restriction—to experience what may be called Personal Freedom.

bikes have also been fundamental to early women’s liberation. While this will hopefully not be an issue in your civilization—you’re starting on a better foot than we ever did, seeing as you don’t have to labor under the hangover of thousands of years of patriarchy—it’s worth noting how something as simple as giving people the ability to cheaply transport themselves under their own power changed European society in the late 1800s CE. This newfound mobility not only allowed women to participate in civilization in ways they couldn’t before, but actually changed the way women saw themselves. They were no longer observers moved around by society: instead, they were active participants who could—and would—move themselves. The clothing women wore also changed in response to the bicycle, as demands for a new “rational dress” that allowed for a modicum of physical activity meant the end of the restrictive corsets, starched petticoats, and ankle-length skirts that had previously been worn.

Threats All threats are unacceptable, whether it has to do with turning off your credit card, abandoning you, or physically harming you. Threats are meant to coerce, restrict your life, and make you unsafe. When you hear a threat of any kind, you can tell you partner this" "That's a threat. You can't threaten me if you expect to have a relationship with me." Be consistent with addressing his treats. If he doesn''t show that he's taking you seriously, then you'll likely know what you need to do.

The females of this planet, raised with pillows and primping and perfumes, had no recourse when the lowlife scumbags, suddenly free of all the rules and restrictions of society, started doing things like forming ‘tribes,’ ‘claiming’ women and taking ‘slaves.

For years we’ve been campaigning against the rule that women can’t vote. That’s the barrier. Once it’s broken down, people will see further concessions as mere technicalities. It will be relatively easy to get the voting age lowered and other restrictions eased.

Historically, those with the least social status have been people of color, women, and those with physical disabilities. The paradox here is that the individuals who had more social power because of their bodies did not experience themselves as defined by their bodies, but they made choices that affected the day-to-day bodily realities of others. Obvious examples of this include men determining the reproductive rights of women, or people without disabilities designing buildings that restrict building access for those with disabilities.

The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.

Much of Chinese society still expected its women to hold themselves in a sedate manner, lower their eyelids in response to men's stares, and restrict their smile to a faint curve of the lips which did not expose their teeth. They were not meant to use hand gestures at all. If they contravened any of these canons of behavior they would be considered 'flirtatious." Under Mao, flirting with./bre/gners was an unspeakable crime. I was furious at the innuendo against me. It had been my Communist parents who had given me a liberal upbringing. They had regarded the restrictions on women as precisely the sort of thing a Communist revolution should put an end to. But now oppression of women joined hands with political repression, and served resentment and petty jealousy. One day, a Pakistani ship arrived. The Pakistani military attache came down from Peking. Long ordered us all to spring-clean the club from top to bottom, and laid on a banquet, for which he asked me to be his interpreter, which made some of the other students extremely envious. A few days later the Pakistanis gave a farewell dinner on their ship, and I was invited. The military attache had been to Sichuan, and they had prepared a special Sichuan dish for me. Long was delighted by the invitation, as was I. But despite a personal appeal from the captain and even a threat from Long to bar future students, my teachers said that no one was allowed on board a foreign ship. "Who would take the responsibility if someone sailed away on the ship?" they asked. I was told to say I was busy that evening. As far as I knew, I was turning down the only chance I would ever have of a trip out to sea, a foreign meal, a proper conversation in English, and an experience of the outside world. Even so, I could not silence the whispers. Ming asked pointedly, "Why do foreigners like her so much?" as though there was something suspicious in that. The report filed on me at the end of the trip said my behavior was 'politically dubious." In this lovely port, with its sunshine, sea breezes, and coconut trees, every occasion that should have been joyous was turned into misery. I had a good friend in the group who tried to cheer me up by putting my distress into perspective. Of course, what I encountered was no more than minor unpleasantness compared with what victims of jealousy suffered in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. But the thought that this was what my life at its best would be like depressed me even more. This friend was the son of a colleague of my father's. The other students from cities were also friendly to me. It was easy to distinguish them from the students of peasant backgrounds, who provided most of the student officials.

I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress. 'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

...'Pro-life' encodes too much propaganda for me: that a fertilized egg is a life in the same sense that a woman is, that it has a right to life as she does, that outlawing abortion saves lives, that abortion is the chief threat to 'life' today, and that the movement to ban abortion is motivated solely by these concerns and not also by the wish to restrict sexual freedom, enforce sectarian religious views on a pluralistic society, and return women t traditional roles. It also suggests that those who support legal abortion are pro-death, which is absurd.

What if Paul was so concerned that Christians in Corinth were imposing their own cultural restrictions on women that he called them on it? He quoted the bad practice, which Corinthian men were trying to drag from the Roman world into their Christian world, and then he countered it.

It is ironic, really, that the girl who didn’t want to be a girl has been one of the most popular literary heroines of all time. Her popularity speaks volumes about the deeply unsettled feelings that girls of all backgrounds have felt as they approached the restrictions of womanhood.

I wish I could imitate the Chinese women letter writers of at least a thousand years ago. Because they were forbidden to go to school like their brothers, they invented their own script—called nushu, or “women’s writing”—though the punishment for creating a secret language was death.5 They wrote underground letters and poems of friendship to each other, quite consciously protesting the restrictions of their lives. As one wrote, “Men leave home to brave life in the outside world. But we women are no less courageous. We can create a language they cannot understand.

To young women, black and white, Baker embodied the possibility of escaping the restrictions that defined conventional femininity. Authoritative yet unassuming, self-confident and assertive, forcing others to take her seriously simply by presuming that they would, Baker was a revelation.

I could observe men and women in their roles while adopting the one or the other disguise and entering either world of social restrictions and behaviours. Sometimes I felt the insane urge to tell them all to cross-dress. How would the world change? I wondered, and laughed at the silly thought.

In his book Politics, which is the foundation of the study of political systems, and very interesting, Aristotle talked mainly about Athens. But he studied various political systems - oligarchy, monarchy - and didn't like any of the particularly. He said democracy is probably the best system, but it has problems, and he was concerned with the problems. One problem that he was concerned with is quite striking because it runs right up to the present. He pointed out that in a democracy, if the people - people didn't mean people, it meant freemen, not slaves, not women - had the right to vote, the poor would be the majority, and they would use their voting power to take away property from the rich, which wouldn't be fair, so we have to prevent this. James Madison made the same pint, but his model was England. He said if freemen had democracy, then the poor farmers would insist on taking property from the rich. They would carry out what we these days call land reform. and that's unacceptable. Aristotle and Madison faced the same problem but made the opposite decisions. Aristotle concluded that we should reduce ineqality so the poor wouldn't take property from the rich. And he actually propsed a visin for a city that would put in pace what we today call welfare-state programs, common meals, other support systems. That would reduce inequality, and with it the problem of the poor taking property from the rich. Madison's decision was the opposite. We should reduce democracy so the poor won't be able to get together to do this. If you look at the design of the U.S. constitutional system, it followed Madison's approach. The Madisonian system placed power in the hands of the Senate. The executive in those days was more or less an administrator, not like today. The Senate consisted of "the wealth of the nation," those who had sympathy for property owners and their rights. That's where power should be. The Senate, remember, wasn't elected. It was picked by legislatures, who were themselves very much subject to control by the rich and the powerful. The House, which was closer to the population, had much less power. And there were all sorts of devices to keep people from participation too much - voting restrictions and property restrictions. The idea was to prevent the threat of democracy. This goal continues right to the present. It has taken different forms, but the aim remains the same.

But some lesbians tried to restrict the definition of abuse to men’s actions. Butches might abuse their femmes, but only because of their adopted masculinity. Abusers were using “male privilege.” (To borrow lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu’s phrase, they were guilty of “[smuggling patriarchy] into lesbian utopia.”) Some argued that consensual S&M was part of the problem. Women who were women did not abuse their girlfriends; proper lesbians would never do such a thing.47 There was also the narrative that it was, simply, complicated. The burden of the pressure of straight society! Lesbians abuse each other!

Men's brains may be bigger, but women's contain more brain cells. Also, male and female brains work differently. When men and women perform identical tasks, different areas of their brains light up in response. In addition, females use both hemispheres, while male brain activity is restricted to one side. (21)

Ginsburg maintained that restrictions on abortion are best understood not as a private matter between women and their male doctors; instead, the restrictions violate women’s constitutional right to equality by limiting their ability to define their own life choices, imposing burdens that are not imposed on men.

Adherence to queer theory forbids any discussion about sex and gender that does not restrict itself to 'gender identity', namely the sexist social construct that gives ideological effect to women's oppression. Faith in 'gender identity' is hardened into its own brand of dogma, ideological conformity and coercion.

fishing, my philosophy is that men will treat women like one of these two things: a sports fish or a keeper. How we meet, how the conversation goes, how the relationship develops, and the demands you make on a man will all determine whether you’ll be treated like a sports fish—a throwback—or a keeper, the kind of woman a man can envision settling down with. And the way we separate the two is very simple, as I explain next. A SPORTS FISH . . . Doesn’t have any rules, requirements, respect for herself, or guidelines, and we men can pick up her scent a mile away. She’s the party girl who takes a sip of her Long Island iced tea or a shot of her Patrón, then announces to her suitor that she just wants to “date and see how it goes,” and she’s the conservatively dressed woman at the office who is a master at networking, but clueless about how to approach men. She has no plans for any ongoing relationships, is not expecting anything in particular from a man, and sets absolutely not nary one condition or restriction on anyone standing before her—she makes it very clear that she’s just along for whatever is getting ready to happen. For sure, as soon as she lets a man know through words and action that he can treat her just any old kind of way, he will do just

Under Zia’s regime life for women in Pakistan became much more restricted. Jinnah said, “No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men. There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a third power stronger than both, that of women.” But General Zia brought in Islamic laws which reduced a woman’s evidence in court to count for only half that of a man’s. Soon our prisons were full of cases like that of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and became pregnant and was then sent to prison for adultery because she couldn’t produce four male witnesses to prove it was a crime.

I told my family that, in my opinion, the remaining traditions of that era were what kept us women in bondage, and not the Koran. Few people know the facts, that the Koran does not call for veiling, nor the restrictions women endure in the Muslim world. It is the traditions passed down that so hinder us from moving forward.

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry -- almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era -- were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science -- anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now -- kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

In our society cultural analysts speak of the “politics of envy,” where politicians, for their own interests, stir up strife among people to create a kind of class warfare. The poor are set against the rich, employees against employers, women against men. Envy is the breeding ground for strife and even war. Envy is not restricted to the poor.

One point is certain: In many Gnostic circles women had a prominence they did not have in society at large. Part of the reason for this was that, since it is the spirit and not the body that is important, the shape of one’s body has little to do with eternal realities. Also, in many of the genealogies of eons with which Gnostics explained the origin of the world, there were female as well as male eons. It is quite possible that it was partly in response to this feature in Gnosticism that orthodox Christianity began restricting the role of women in the church, for it is clear that in first-century Christianity women had roles in the church that the second century began to deny them.

I believe that most, if not all, of the restrictions on women in society have no basis in Scripture, and that those maintained in the Church are based on an inadequate interpretation of a few restrictive passages, which put them in contradiction with the manifest special concern and love of God for women articulated from Genesis to Revelation.

A global world puts unprecedented pressure on our personal conduct and morality. Each of us is ensnared within numerous all-encompassing spider webs, which on the one hand restrict our movements, but at the same time transmit our tiniest jiggle to faraway destinations. Our daily routines influence the lives of people and animals halfway across the world, and some personal gestures can unexpectedly set the entire world ablaze, as happened with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, which ignited the Arab Spring, and with the women who shared their stories of sexual harassment and sparked the #MeToo movement. This global dimension of our personal lives means that it is more important than ever to uncover our religious and political biases, our racial and gender privileges, and our unwitting complicity in institutional oppression. But is that a realistic enterprise? How can I find a firm ethical ground in a world that extends far beyond my horizons, that spins completely out of human control, and that holds all gods and ideologies suspect?

However, such theorising is uninteresting in the context of a comparison with ethno-science and an evaluation in an ecological perspective, though for a dualist philosophy of science restricted to the analysis of ideas alone it is just these fields which are most interesting since they are the most advanced in the reductionist-positivist scheme of thought.

Even today, Hawaii has passed none of the bans and restrictions that other state legislatures have imposed on abortion since the early 2000s—no waiting periods, no parental consent, no counseling rules—and for the vast majority of Hawaiian women living almost anywhere on the islands, abortion is easily available. As far as we were concerned, abortion was a nonissue.

A man who restricts the freedom of his mistress or wife, by any prohibition, rings the death knell of his "eternal love" in advance, which was not strong enough to pass beyond the limits of his own personal egotism. In most cases, this jealous selfishness first flatters young women; but her ideal will be trampled on as soon as she admires his insane fear of his own impotent jealousy.

Misogyny seeks to dehumanize women through restrictive definitions of what their ‘true’ role supposedly is and in making sure they are confined to it. In Western civilization, there had been no more powerful apparatus for imposing such a definition than the Christian churches. But by the middle of the twentieth century, their influence had considerably weakened in most parts of the West.

This natural division of labor was continued only at great cultural sacrifice: men and women developed only half of themselves, at the expense of the other half. The division of the psyche into male and female to better reinforce the reproductive division was tragic: the hypertrophy in men of rationalism, aggressive drive, the atrophy of their emotional sensitivity was a physical (war) as well as a cultural disaster. The emotionalism and passivity of women increased their suffering (we cannot speak of them in a symmetrical way, since they were victimized as a class by the division.) Sexually men and women were channeled into a highly ordered — time, place, procedure even dialogue — heterosexuality restricted to the genitals, rather than diffused over the entire physical being.

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For example, to regard Aristotle’s definition of slaves as ‘living tools’, or the presumption in antiquity that women could not be fully rational agents, merely as ‘mistakes’ – symptoms of an underdeveloped sense of justice – scarcely advances comprehension of the past. After all, radical social inequality was far easier to sustain and more plausible in societies where literacy was so restricted.

For me, women’s attitudes to eating, hunger and their bodies are fascinating and confusing in equal measure. I find myself simultaneously involved and alienated, both a participant and an outsider. Of course I understand what women mean when they talk about food and weight; I understand when they refer to being good (dieting), or feeling guilty (greedy), or treating themselves (cake). I get it when women talk about disliking specific parts of their bodies. But it’s hard too, emerging from a decade of severe eating restriction, to look around me for examples of how to eat normally, and how to accept myself, to find that the majority of women are struggling with these issues too. Rationally we know that getting thinner won’t make us happier or more fulfilled – and yet we never give up trying.

As for the women, it is true to say, with Erikson, that male domination tends to "restrict their verbal consciousness" so long as this is taken to mean not that they are forbidden all talk of sex, but that their discourse is dominated by the male virtues of virility, so that all reference to specifically female sexual "interests" is excluded from this aggressive and shame-filled cult of male potency.

In 1970, Alix Kates Shulman, a wife, mother, and writer who had joined the Women's Liberation Movement in New York, wrote a poignant account of how the initial equality and companionship of her marriage had deteriorated once she had children. "[N]ow I was restricted to the company of two demanding preschoolers and to the four walls of an apartment. It seemed unfair that while my husband's life had changed little when the children were born, domestic life had become the only life I had." His job became even more demanding, requiring late nights and travel out of town. Meanwhile it was virtually impossible for her to work at home. "I had no time for myself; the children were always there." Neither she nor her husband was happy with the situation, so they did something radical, which received considerable media coverage: they wrote up a marriage agreement... In it they asserted that "each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values and choices... The ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside." The agreement insisted that domestic jobs be shared fifty-fifty and, get this girls, "If one party works overtime in any domestic job, she/he must be compensated by equal work by the other." The agreement then listed a complete job breakdown... in other worde, the agreement acknowledged the physical and the emotional/mental work involved in parenting and valued both. At the end of the article, Shulman noted how much happier she and her husband were as a result of the agreement. In the two years after its inception, Shulman wrote three children's books, a biography and a novel. But listen, too, to what it meant to her husband, who was now actually seeing his children every day. After the agreement had been in effect for four months, "our daughter said one day to my husband, 'You know, Daddy, I used to love Mommy more than you, but now I love you both the same.

As a society and as parents we face a challenge without precedent. We have to help girls and boys make a transition to a gendered adulthood, to adult life as women and men in a culture in which women can do anything, including being rocket scientists, and men can do anything, including staying home to raise a baby. We have to find ways to value and cherish gender differences without restricting freedom of opportunity.

Clearly, it is not our biology that makes us more vulnerable to severe climatic events or the degradation and pollution of our planet. Women's vulnerability is socially constructed. By taking away rights, forcing women into poverty, piling on chores and responsibilities that take time away from education and employment, restricting attire, movement and information, women are pushed into situations where they become vulnerable.

Each generation brings progress. The feminist movement liberated women from the roles that restricted their career choices and personal freedom, but it left much to be done regarding the balance of our work and home lives. Women gained access to the working world and professional development, but the more feminine realms—and the nurturing and caregiving roles related to our less visible inner sanctuaries—were often sacrificed in the process.

Dijk and his prolific team examined gene expression in a group of healthy young men and women after having restricted them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, all monitored under strict laboratory conditions. After one week of subtly reduced sleep, the activity of a hefty 711 genes was distorted, relative to the genetic activity profile of these very same individuals when they were obtaining eight and a half hours of sleep for a week.

At a higher level of abstraction, the behavioral correlates of life history strategies can be framed within the five-factor model of personality. Among the Big Five, agreeableness and conscientiousness show the most consistent pattern of associations with slow traits such as restricted sociosexuality, long-term mating orientation, couple stability, secure attachment to parents in infancy and romantic partners in adulthood, reduced sex drive, low impulsivity, and risk aversion across domains. Conscientiousness and (to a smaller extent) agreeableness are also the most reliable personality predictors of physical health and longevity; the contribution of neuroticism is mixed and may depend on the specific facets considered. The life history correlates of neuroticism are much less straightforward; for example, high neuroticism tends to predict increased short-term mating in women but reduced short-term mating in men, with much cross-cultural variation. There is also evidence that slow life history–related traits can be associated with social anxiety and insecurity, which is consistent with a general profile of risk aversion and behavioral inhibition. As a first approximation, then, metatrait alpha can be treated as a broadband correlate of slow strategies, with the caveat that neuroticism may be elevated at both ends of the continuum.

The modern world’s obsession with restriction has led to a wide variety of practices that are detrimental to health. These practices may masquerade as healthy, but they are not. Excess exercise is one of them. Fasting is another. Examples that might be harder to believe but are equally harmful include low-calorie diets, low-fat diets, and vegetarianism. This fact is made all the more unfortunate because these practices are especially harmful for women.

I understand in this moment that there is no right thing to do, no good way to exist as what we are, or even as what we were - mortal women. My worldview, my rules, my morality, were all constructed as a cage for my shame - shame forged by forces outside myself. I've related restriction to virtue, nourishment to gluttony; associated satisfaction with guilt ever since I learned about the Atkins diet, ever since I heard the word 'slut,' ever since I was young.

Too often as women, we have restricted ourselves to the “pink” parts of the Bible. When we identify first and foremost as women, we can begin to believe that knowledge of ourselves will come primarily through passages that speak to women’s issues or include heroines like Ruth or Esther. But when we do this, when we craft our learning and discipleship programs around being “women,” we make womanhood the central focus of our pursuit of knowledge instead of Christ.

Overweight women were randomized to eat calorie-restricted weight-loss diets with or without a teaspoon of added cumin a day (half a teaspoon at both lunch and dinner). Over the three-month study, those in the cumin group lost about four more pounds and nearly an extra inch off their waists, in addition to significantly dropping their triglycerides and cholesterol.2727 Since cumin can be purchased in bulk for less than a dollar an ounce, a teaspoon would cost less than ten cents a day.

Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women...The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. 

restricting access to abortion—despite the fact that it is legal. In twenty-seven states, women are now forced to wait one, two, or even three days between receiving mandatory “counseling” (which often contains bogus information) and obtaining an abortion, a barrier that puts an undue burden on working women, women with children, and women who live in rural areas, requiring them to take time off work and spend additional money to travel back and forth to a clinic that may be two hundred miles from home.

Even in this age of religious fervour, foreigners were amazed by the ritualistic piety of the Russians and their severe code of behaviour. Russian men wore long beards, as sacred tribute to God, and long robes, kaftans, with pleated sleeves that hung almost to the floor, on their heads sable or black-fox hats. Musical instruments and smoking were banned and noblewomen, whether virgins or wives, were restricted to their family terem, the separate living quarters of Muscovite women, where they were veiled and hidden

The Church's obsession with sexual restrictions is and always has been wrong wrong wrong. Wrong to be contemptuous of naïve young women like Philomena and me. Wrong to ignore the men involved in creating "illegitimate" children. Wrong to demonize gays while knowing full well how many men and women of the Church are gay. Wrong to excuse and hide criminal priests, transferring them to new, unsuspecting parishes. Wrong to think that forbidding consensual human sexuality is more important than Christ's message of compassion and forgiveness.

She had learnt many things since the days of her first rebellion, and she knew now that this matter of the man friend and nothing else in the world is the central issue in the emancipation of women. The difficulty of him is latent in every other restriction of which women complain. The complete emancipation of women will come with complete emancipation of humanity from jealousy — and no sooner. All other emancipations are shams until a woman may go about as freely with this man as with that, and nothing remains for emancipation when she can.

Women who opt for short-term relationships can garner the best genes at the cost of paternal care; women who opt for long-term relationships may have to sacrifice some genetic quality in order to secure resources and commitment. “Unrestricted” women who pursue short-term relationships find symmetrical men more attractive and care more about a man’s appearance. When forced to choose between dating an attractive man who is not very loyal versus a loyal man who is averagely attractive, unrestricted women choose the former while restricted women choose the latter.

A staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day. This sounds surrealistic to me—but not to the staff member. She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion. They then feel guilty—and picket even more. This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts.

Frustrations are an inevitable part of life, and learning to deal with them in manageable doses helps us to develop a solid sense of ourselves and of reality. Our parents teach us how to handle frustrations by setting reasonable degrees of restriction for us. The enables us to relinquish the magical expectation that every need or wish we have will always be met. When a child is faced with a disappointment and his parent tells him that "life is full of frustrations but we all have to learn to live with them," the parent is helping the child to learn to cope with reality.

The men and women who forged this nation [USA] were straight-up maniacs about freedom. It was just about the only thing they cared about, so they jammed it into everything. This is understandable, as they were breaking away from a monarchy. But it's also a little bonkers, since one of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough and that they needed the freedom to live by non-secular laws that were more restrictive than that of any government, including provisions for the burning of suspected witches.

Women are, therefore, to be considered either as moral beings, or so weak that they must be entirely subjected to the superior faculties of men. Let us examine this question. Rousseau declares, that a woman should never, for a moment feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her NATURAL cunning, and made a coquetish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire, a SWEETER companion to man, whenever he chooses to relax himself. He carries the arguments, which he pretends to draw from the indications of nature, still further, and insinuates that truth and fortitude the corner stones of all human virtue, shall be cultivated with certain restrictions, because with respect to the female character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with unrelenting rigour. What nonsense! When will a great man arise with sufficient strength of mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread over the subject! If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have the same aim.

In one study, women were told they were going to rate the quality of certain foods. Some women got a milkshake followed by three bowls of ice cream; some just got the ice cream. The restrained eaters who didn’t get the milkshake ate very little of the ice cream (trying to be “good”), but those who drank the milkshake also ate most of the ice cream. (The “what the hell” effect. . . i.e., “I drank the milkshake, I ruined my diet, what the hell, I’ll eat the ice cream, too.”) The idea that there will be a restriction in the future paradoxically motivated these women to act counter to their internal restriction, “to get it while I can.

The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life ; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full posession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place. Thus phrased, in the extremest of terms, the problem may sound remote from the affairs of normal humans. Nevertheless, every failure to cope with life situations must be laid to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general patter for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. therefore, it is formulated in the broadest terms. the individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. who and where are his ogres? those are the reflcetions of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. what are his ideals? those are the symptoms of his grasp of life.

There will always be those seeking to suppress the votes of young people and people of color, to restrict ballot access, to take away drop boxes, to limit early voting and mail-in voting, to facilitate longer lines in minority-majority communities. There will always be those campaigning to strip women of their reproductive rights, or refusing to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ Americans. There will always be those leading efforts to ban books but promote AR-15s. There will always be those waging disinformation campaigns and exploiting a mainstream media apparatus too easily duped by bad actors. There will always be those seeking to break the very government that the country depends upon to function. Those people will always be there.

The movement has, for the most part, been led by educated white middle-class women. There is nothing unusual about this. Reform as movements are usually led by the better educated and better off. But, if the women's movement is to be successful you must recognize the broad variety of women there are and the depth and range of their interests and concerns. To black and Chicana women, picketing a restricted club or insisting on the title Ms. are not burning issues. They are more concerned about bread-and-butter items such as the extension of minimum wage, welfare reform and day care. Further, they are not only women but women of color and thus are subject to additional and sometimes different pressures. (From Voices of Multicultural America)

The female-to-constructed-male transsexual is the token that saves face for the male “transsexual empire. ” She is the buffer zone who can be used to promote the universalist argument that transsexualism is a supposed “human” problem, not uniquely restricted to men. She is the living “proof” that some women supposedly want the same thing. However, “proof” wanes when it is observed that women were not the original nor are they the present agents of the process. Nor are the stereotypes of masculinity that a female-to-constructed-male transsexual incarnates products of a female-directed culture. Rather women have been assimilated into the transsexual world, as women are assimilated into other male-defined worlds, institutions, and roles, that is, on men’s terms, and thus as tokens.

It’s not that the women are any more racist than the men, it’s that White Womanhood consolidates white domination. To succeed, colonialism needed white women to adopt the “angel in the house” persona as a moral justification for its existence, and clearly enough of them did. When they began to agitate for their own rights, chafing against the restrictions placed on them on the pretext they needed protection from the swarthy colonized hordes, they did so without addressing—and in some cases even exploiting—this racism. In effect, white feminists have only attempted to foil one half of the equation that is their own subordination. Sexism and racism go hand in hand in the West: as long as the myth of sex-crazed, aggressive, inferior subject races is allowed to fester, then so too will the implication that white women need to be protected from them.

The great weight shift must be understood as one of the major historical developments of the century, a direct solution to the dangers posed by the women’s movement and economic and reproductive freedom. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. Researchers S. C. Wooley and O. W. Wooley confirmed what most women know too well—that concern with weight leads to “a virtual collapse of self-esteem and sense of effectiveness.” Researchers J. Polivy and C. P. Herman found that “prolonged And periodic caloric restriction” resulted in a distinctive personality whose traits are “passivity, anxiety and emotionality.” It is those traits, and not thinness for its own sake, that the dominant culture wants to create in the private sense of self of recently liberated women in order to cancel out the dangers of their liberation.

Female short- and long-term mating strategies may be another candidate for this kind of frequency-dependent selection. Some women adopt a restricted sexual practice which enables them to evaluate the likelihood that the male will commit to long-term investment as a partner and parent. Others, who look for gene quality in their male partners rather than investment, will be prepared to have intercourse after only a short delay with attractive men. The dynamic that holds the strategies in equilibrium is their relative frequencies. As the number of unrestricted women rises so do the number of “sexy sons” that they produce and hence the value of selecting for good genes diminishes. But as the number of restricted women begins to rise in response, the competition amongst them increases and advantages begin to accrue to women who do not waste time and effort searching for providing fathers.

This generation grew up constantly reminded that they lived in the greatest country in the world, the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all its citizens. Yet, as they matured, members of this generation found a disturbing disparity between this popular American self-image and actual reality. They found that many people in this land—women and certain racial minorities—were, by law and custom, definitely not free. By the sixties the new generation was inspecting closely, and many were finding other disturbing aspects of the United States’ self-image—for instance, a blind patriotism that expected young people to go into a foreign land to fight a political war that had no clearly expressed purpose and no prospect of victory. Just as disturbing was the culture’s spiritual practice. The materialism of the previous four hundred years had pushed the mystery of life, and death, far into the background. Many found the churches and synagogues full of pompous and meaningless ritual. Attendance seemed more social than spiritual, and the members too restricted by a sense of how they might be perceived and judged by their onlooking peers. As the vision progressed, I could tell that the new generation’s tendency to analyze and judge arose from a deep-seated intuition that there was more to life than the old material reality took into account. The new generation sensed new spiritual meaning just beyond the horizon, and they began to explore other, lesser known religions and spiritual points of view. For the first time the Eastern religions were understood in great numbers, serving to validate the mass intuition that spiritual perception was an inner experience, a shift in awareness that changed forever one’s sense of identity and purpose. Similarly the Jewish Cabalist writings and the Western Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckehart and Teilhard de Chardin, provided other intriguing descriptions of a deeper spirituality. At the same time, information was surfacing from the human sciences—sociology, psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology—as well as from modern physics, that cast new light on the nature of human consciousness and creativity. This cumulation of thought, together with the perspective provided by the East, gradually began to crystallize into what was later called the Human Potential Movement, the emerging belief that human beings were presently actualizing only a small portion of their vast physical, psychological, and spiritual potential I watched as, over the course of several decades, this information and the spiritual experience it spawned grew into a critical mass of awareness, a leap in consciousness from which we began to formulate a new view of what living a human life was all about,

We have witnessed hundreds of clients and patients damage their metabolic and hormonal health through low-carb diets. It is becoming increasingly apparent that there is an epidemic of metabolic and hormonal dysfunction emerging in the hordes of people who have been following low-carb diets. This is particularly impactful for women—and especially physically active women—who commonly suffer side effects from their low-carb diets, including: A stopped or irregular menstrual cycle (amenorrhea)418 419 420 421 422 Decreased fertility423 424 425 Hypoglycemic episodes and blood sugar swings426 Depression, anxiety, and irritability427 428 429 Poor libido430 431 432 Disrupted sleep/insomnia433 434 Dysfunctional relationship with food and fear about eating either fat or carbohydrate435 436 Cycles of restriction and binges437 438 Chronic fatigue 439 440 441 442 Poor thyroid function (and a slow metabolism)443 444 445 446 447 448

If the suffragists acquiesced to arguments invoking the extension of the ballot to women as the saving grace of white supremacy, then birth control advocates either acquiesced to or supported the new arguments invoking birth control as a means of preventing the proliferation of the “lower classes” and as an antidote to race suicide. Race suicide could be prevented by the introduction of birth control among Black people, immigrants and the poor in general. In this way, the prosperous whites of solid Yankee stock could maintain their superior numbers within the population. Thus class-bias and racism crept into the birth control movement when it was still in its infancy. More and more, it was assumed within birth control circles that poor women, Black and immigrant alike, had a “moral obligation to restrict the size of their families.” What was demanded as a “right” for the privileged came to be interpreted as a “duty” for the poor.

I tried to pray, but my mind kept wandering. Under all these brims and bows, what were people really thinking? There were few clues, only the fantasies I spun out. Did any of these women ever worry, as I did, that too much thinking might unravel their lives? You were supposed to believe that this way of life was the only true one. You were supposed to tell yourself that the rituals and restrictions were binding and beautiful. And if you felt any rumblings of dissatisfaction, you were supposed to believe that the problem lay with you. My own discontent, I hoped, remained well hidden. It wasn't the sort of thing I would have shared with my mother-in-law or sisters-in-law, who sat beside me wearing hats of their own. Along with the actual rules, there was another set of laws, equally stringent yet more unforgiving, enforced not by a belief in God but by communal eyes that were just as all-seeing and all-knowing. Inside my head, a voice constantly whispered: What will they think?

Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents. Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed "skin beneath their waists or their underwear" and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second.

While the Gregorian chant in its afterlife has flourished as the authentic music of the Roman Church, its original character still remains in doubt. Not until the twentieth century did the Gregorian chant come back into its own. The old melodies had been mutilated into a monotonous plainchant to facilitate organ accompaniment. In 1889 the scholarly Benedictine monks of Solesmes in France undertook to rediscover the medieval practice. Their product was numerous volumes of “Gregorian chants” in a free-flowing nonrhythmic style. By 1903 they had recaptured the Gregorian chant to the satisfaction of Pope Pius X, himself a scholar of musical history, who established their versions of the Gregorian melodies by his encyclical motu proprio. But the rhythms still remain a puzzle. Pius X’s purified Gregorian chant banned the “theatrical style” of recitation, forbade the use of instruments, replaced women by boys in the church choir, and restricted the use of the organ. A Vatican Edition provided an authorized corpus of plainchant, which would prevail in the modern Catholic world.

They never thought about their age, was a common reply; they had once been adolescents, then they were thirty, fifty, sixty, and never gave it a thought, so why should they do so now? Some of them were very restricted, finding it hard to walk or move, and yet there was nowhere they wanted to go. Others were absentminded, confused, or forgetful, but this worried their carers and relatives more than it did them. Catherine Hope insisted that the residents of the second and third levels remain active, and it was Irina’s job to keep them interested, entertained, and connected. “However old one is, we need a goal in our lives. It’s the best cure for many ills,” Cathy insisted. In her case, the goal had always been to help others, and her accident had not altered this in the slightest. On Friday mornings, Irina used to accompany the most active residents on their street protests, to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. She also took part in the vigils for noble causes and in the knitting club; all the women who could wield a pair of needles (apart from Alma Belasco) were knitting

In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren't being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, that by the time you returned home you were always utterly exhausted. The cumulative effect of years of being subject to these gazes was that women who lived in the capital had learned to curb the movement of their own eyes to remarkable degrees, restricting their gazes in public spaces to areas where their eyes couldn't be intercepted, toward their feet or their laps or into the screen of their phones...

Although the association between women and cats who are standoffish and wrapped up in themselves is a longstanding one, there are, as we saw in Chapter 3, plenty of women who feel a need to love and not simply to be loved. (Does Freud restrict women to loving either themselves or children as extensions of themselves, but not men?) In any case, Freud introduces here a curious facet of love, which would seem to apply not only to men, which is that we human beings are attracted to people (women and children, for example) and animals (cats, for example) that show little or no interest in us. Are we then interested in anything that seems narcissistically wrapped up in itself (its interest in itself pointing the way for our own interest or desire?) or are we interested in these things precisely because they seem inaccessible? Do we pursue them because they shun us and wound our own narcissism? Do we pursue them because they seem the most valuable – valuable precisely because they are so difficult to win – because we suspect that we will never win them? Or do we pursue them because we identify with something about them or want to be like them?

Even in government the role of women grew. Cato cried out that “all other men rule over women; but we Romans, who rule all men, are ruled by our women.”12 In 195 B.C.. the free women of Rome swept into the Forum and demanded the repeal of the Oppian Law of 215, which had forbidden women to use gold ornaments, varicolored dresses, or chariots. Cato predicted the ruin of Rome if the law should be repealed. Livy puts into his mouth a speech that every generation has heard: If we had, each of us, upheld the rights and authority of the husband in our own households, we should not today have this trouble with our women. As things are now, our liberty of action, which has been annulled by female despotism at home, is crushed and trampled on here in the Forum. . . . Call to mind all the regulations respecting women by which our ancestors curbed their license and made them obedient to their husbands; and yet with all those restrictions you can scarcely hold them in. If now you permit them to remove these restraints . . . and to put themselves on an equality with their husbands, do you imagine that you will be able to bear them? From the moment that they become your equals they will be your masters.13

Muslim acknowledgement of the positive aspects of female sexuality has historically coexisted with two views that challenge it in different ways. First, certain elements of the classical Muslim tradition treat female sexuality as dangerous, with potentially disruptive and chaotic effects on society. Historians have demonstrated how anxieties about temptation and female sexuality translated into insistence (never fully achieved in reality) on restricting the appearance of women in public spaces. Muslim worry over fitna – chaos and disorder – has often focused on the sexual temptation caused both by women’s unregulated desires and the troublesome desire that women provoke in men. Second, and in a paradoxical relationship to this view of women as sexually insatiable and thus prone to create social chaos, Muslim authorities have stressed the importance of the fulfillment of male sexual needs, especially in the context of marriage. Drawing particularly on several hadith delineating dire consequences for women who refuse their husbands’ sexual overtures, the insistence on men’s sexual needs and wives’ responsibility to fulfill them has competed for prominence in modern intra-Muslim discourses on sex with the recognition of female sexual needs.

Belleville would have us believe that homeowners could bypass all the qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and, simply by virtue of having a church meet in their home, become overseers or elders. She would also have us believe that Lydia, who was a brand-new convert and who had just been baptized, became the overseer of the church at Philippi simply because she said to Paul, “come to my house and stay” (Acts 16:15). This claim is going far beyond the evidence in Scripture. The extra-biblical references that Belleville cites do not prove anything about homeowners having such a leadership role in the churches either.3 This claim is speculation with no facts to support it, and several factors in Scripture contradict it. But by making this unsubstantiated claim, Belleville leads readers to think that “Mary (Acts 12:12), Lydia (16:15), Chloe (1 Cor 1:11), and Nympha (Col 4:15)” were “overseers of house churches.”4 She leads readers to believe that several such women were overseers or elders. And so she makes these verses say something they do not say. This leads people to disbelieve or seek some way to explain away the passages that restrict the office of elder to men, and so it undermines the authority of Scripture. Therefore this claim takes another step on the path to liberalism.

Eleven people have been killed as a result of violence targeted at abortion providers: four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, a clinic escort, and two others. Anti-abortion extremists are considered a domestic terrorist threat by the U.S. Department of Justice. Yet violence is not the only threat to abortion clinics. In the past five years, politicians have passed more than 280 laws restricting access to abortion. In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that would have required every abortion clinic to have a surgical suite, and doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case of complications. For many clinics, these requirements were cost prohibitive and would have forced them to close. Also, since many abortion doctors fly in to do their work, they aren’t able to get admitting privileges at local hospitals. It is worth noting that less than 0.3 percent of women who have an abortion require hospitalization due to complications. In fact colonoscopies, liposuction, vasectomies…and childbirth—all of which are performed outside of surgical suites—have higher risks of death. In Indiana in 2016, Mike Pence signed a law to ban abortion based on fetal disability and required providers to give information about perinatal hospice—keeping the fetus in utero until it dies of natural causes. This same law required aborted fetuses to be cremated or given a formal burial even if the mother did not wish this to happen.

As a key example, consider the role of women in the church. Some early Christian leaders saw women as intellectually and ethically inferior to men, and argued that women should be restricted to subordinate roles in society and in the Christian community. These views were reflected in texts like the First Epistle to Timothy. In one of its passages, this text, attributed to Saint Paul, says, “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (2:11–15). But modern scholars as well as some ancient Christian leaders like Marcion have considered this letter a second-century forgery, ascribed to Saint Paul but actually written by someone else.[54] In opposition to 1 Timothy, during the second, third, and fourth centuries CE there were important Christian texts that saw women as equal to men, and even authorized women to occupy leadership roles, like the Gospel of Mary[55] or the Acts of Paul and Thecla. The latter text was written at about the same time as 1 Timothy, and for a time was extremely popular.[56] It narrates the adventures of Saint Paul and his female disciple Thecla, describing how Thecla not only performed numerous miracles but also baptized herself with her own hands and often

As to the identity of those who had raged through Tabriz, Metrinko swiftly rejected the regime’s claim of “Islamic-Marxists”—and he wasn’t the first to note the inherent contradiction of that label. Instead, he pointed to “the unemployed and the lowest of the working classes, the disaffected and very volatile strata of the male populace who have nothing to lose by rioting and who are easily led by instigators.” As he noted, Tabriz had seen a massive influx of young and poorly educated men from the countryside in recent years. In the city, the luckiest among them toiled long hours in mindless and low-paying factory jobs, and all were condemned to an unrelievedly drab existence. “Given the pervasive and grim religious environment” in which these men dwelled, Metrinko wrote, “with its emphasis on the restricted role of women and condemnation of such mundane pleasures as the cinema and places where women ‘expose’ themselves to men—i.e. organizations such as social clubs, hotels, the Youth Palace, and the Iran-America Society…it is no wonder that such a group can be led into emotional and violent action. Religion is one of the few remaining constants to this class of people, and their limited conception of Islam and veneration of the Shiite hierarchy are among the few things they can retain in a society in which they feel abandoned and threatened.” Of course, what Metrinko was describing was in no way unique to Tabriz. Almost every city and sizable town in Iran possessed such a benighted underclass—which suggested the next wave of riots might come almost anywhere and at any time.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

Today there are countless neurotics who are neurotic simply because they do not know why they cannot be happy in their own way—they do not even know that the fault lies with them. Besides these neurotics there are many more normal people, men and women of the better kind, who feel restricted and discontented because they have no symbol which would act as an outlet for their libido. For all these people a reductive analysis down to the primal facts should be undertaken, so that they can become acquainted with their primitive personality and learn how to take due account of it. Only in this way can certain requirements be fulfilled and others rejected as unreasonable because of their infantile character. We like to imagine that our primitive traits have long since disappeared without trace. In this we are cruelly disappointed, for never before has our civilization been so swamped with evil. This gruesome spectacle helps us to understand what Christianity was up against and what it endeavoured to transform. The transforming process took place for the most part unconsciously, at any rate in the later centuries. When I remarked earlier (par. 106) that an unconscious transformation of libido was ethically worthless, and contrasted it with the Christianity of the early Roman period, as a patent example of the immorality and brutalization against which Christians had to fight, I ought to have added that mere faith cannot be counted as an ethical ideal either, because it too is an unconscious transformation of libido. Faith is a charisma for those who possess it, but it is no way for those who need to understand before they can believe. This is a matter of temperament and cannot be discounted as valueless. For, ultimately, even the believer believes that God gave man reason, and for something better than to lie and cheat with. Although we naturally believe in symbols in the first place, we can also understand them, and this is indeed the only viable way for those who have not been granted the charisma of faith.

As those people are extreamly apt to get drunk, and, when so, are very quarrelsome and disorderly, we strictly forbad the selling any liquor to them; and when they complain'd of this restriction, we told them that if they would continue sober during the treaty, we would give them plenty of rum when business was over. They promis'd this, and they kept their promise, because they could get no liquor, and the treaty was conducted very orderly, and concluded to mutual satisfaction. They then claim'd and receiv'd the rum; this was in the afternoon; they were near one hundred men, women, and children, and were lodg'd in temporary cabins, built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walk'd out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-colour'd bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, form'd a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagin'd; there was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice. The next day, sensible they had misbehav'd in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counselors to make their apology. The orator acknowledg'd the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum by saying, "The Great Spirit, who made all things, made every thing for some use, and whatever use he design'd any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,' and it must be so." And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.

Paul was an educated Roman citizen. He would have been familiar with contemporary rhetorical practices that corrected faulty understanding by quoting the faulty understanding and then refuting it. Paul does this in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7 with his quotations “all things are lawful for me,” “food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,” and “it is well for a man not to touch a woman.”47 In these instances, Paul is quoting the faulty views of the Gentile world, such as “all things are lawful for me.” Paul then “strongly modifies” them.48 Paul would have been familiar with the contemporary views about women, including Livy’s, that women should be silent in public and gain information from their husbands at home. Isn’t it possible, as Peppiatt has argued, that Paul is doing the same thing in 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 that he does in 1 Corinthians 6 and 7?49 Refuting bad practices by quoting those bad practices and then correcting them? As Peppiatt writes, “The prohibitions placed on women in the letter to the Corinthians are examples of how the Corinthians were treating women, in line with their own cultural expectations and values, against Paul’s teachings.”50 What if Paul was so concerned that Christians in Corinth were imposing their own cultural restrictions on women that he called them on it? He quoted the bad practice, which Corinthian men were trying to drag from the Roman world into their Christian world, and then he countered it. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) lends support to the idea that this is what Paul was doing. Paul first lays out the cultural restrictions: “As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church” (1 Corinthians 14:33–35). And then Paul intervenes: “What! Did the word of God originate with you, or are you the only ones it has reached? If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. So, my brethren, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues; but all things should be done decently and in order” (vv. 36–40).

In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues, built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them. For all these reasons, the diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism. Many of these were wellborn women who presided over substantial households and who had likely tried out some of the Eastern mystery cults before settling on Judaism. (Nero’s wife Poppea was almost certainly one of these, and probably the person responsible for instructing Nero in the subtle difference between Christians and more traditional Jews, which he would otherwise scarcely have been aware of.) These gentiles did not, generally speaking, go all the way. Because they tended to draw the line at circumcision, they were not considered complete Jews. They were, rather, noachides, or God-fearers, gentiles who remained gentiles while keeping the Sabbath and many of the Jewish dietary restrictions and coming to put their trust in the one God of the Jews. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, however, could turn out to be a difficult test of the commitment of the noachides. For here in the heart of the Jewish world, they encountered Judaism enragé, a provincial religion concerned only with itself, and ages apart from the rational, tolerant Judaism of the diaspora. In the words of Paul Johnson:

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

People who don’t read science fiction, but who have at least given it a fair shot, often say they’ve found it inhuman, elitist, and escapist. Since its characters, they say, are both conventionalized and extraordinary, all geniuses, space heroes, superhackers, androgynous aliens, it evades what ordinary people really have to deal with in life, and so fails an essential function of fiction. However remote Jane Austen’s England is, the people in it are immediately relevant and revelatory—reading about them we learn about ourselves. Has science fiction anything to offer but escape from ourselves? The cardboard-character syndrome was largely true of early science fiction, but for decades writers have been using the form to explore character and human relationships. I’m one of them. An imagined setting may be the most appropriate in which to work out certain traits and destinies. But it’s also true that a great deal of contemporary fiction isn’t a fiction of character. This end of the century isn’t an age of individuality as the Elizabethan and the Victorian ages were. Our stories, realistic or otherwise, with their unreliable narrators, dissolving points of view, multiple perceptions and perspectives, often don’t have depth of character as their central value. Science fiction, with its tremendous freedom of metaphor, has sent many writers far ahead in this exploration beyond the confines of individuality—Sherpas on the slopes of the postmodern. As for elitism, the problem may be scientism: technological edge mistaken for moral superiority. The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist imperialism in its arrogance; to the technophile, people who aren’t in the know/in the net, who don’t have the right artifacts, don’t count. They’re proles, masses, faceless nonentities. Whether it’s fiction or history, the story isn’t about them. The story’s about the kids with the really neat, really expensive toys. So “people” comes to be operationally defined as those who have access to an extremely elaborate fast-growth industrial technology. And “technology” itself is restricted to that type. I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans before the Conquest had no technology. As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there. Limiting humanity to the producer-consumers of a complex industrial growth technology is a really weird idea, on a par with defining humanity as Greeks, or Chinese, or the upper-middle-class British. It leaves out a little too much. All fiction, however, has to leave out most people. A fiction interested in complex technology may legitimately leave out the (shall we say) differently technologized, as a fiction about suburban adulteries may ignore the city poor, and a fiction centered on the male psyche may omit women. Such omission may, however, be read as a statement that advantage is superiority, or that the white middle class is the whole society, or that only men are worth writing about. Moral and political statements by omission are legitimated by the consciousness of making them, insofar as the writer’s culture permits that consciousness. It comes down to a matter of taking responsibility. A denial of authorial responsibility, a willed unconsciousness, is elitist, and it does impoverish much of our fiction in every genre, including realism.

Reconstruction era, “Black codes” replaced slave codes. Like their predecessors, the Black codes controlled the movements of formerly enslaved Black people, severely restricted liberty in employment and conduct, and continued to empower state police forces and the white population at large to enforce them.

Lincoln found the clearest statement of that spirit in the Declaration of Independence, with its claim for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln’s interpretation of the phrase became the centerpiece of his narrative about the nation. The Founders, Lincoln said, in adopting the Declaration, did not declare that all people were at that time living in a state of equality. To say so would have been absurd, given not only the widespread bondage of black people but the restricted suffrage of many whites and the legal inequality of women. Nor did the Founders declare that they intended to secure complete equality in their lifetimes. The spirit of the Declaration, Lincoln said, was meant to be realized—to the greatest extent possible—by each succeeding generation. The Founders cast off despotism and created the framework for a free republic, invoking, as they did, not arguments of mere self-interest but the ideal of natural, universal, God-given rights. “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society,” Lincoln said, “which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for . . . even though never perfectly attained.

A man may not be a vocational theologian, but in his home he must the resident theologian. The apostle Paul, when he is urging women to keep silent in church, tells them that "if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home" (1 Corinthians 14:35). The tragedy is that many modern women have to wonder why the Bible says they should have to ask their husbands. "He doesn't know." But a husband must be prepared to answer his wife's doctrinal questions, and if he cannot, then he must be prepared to study so that he can remedy the deficiency. This famous passage is not such a restriction for wives as it is a requirement for husbands. If he doesn't know, he must find out.

This disconnect between what these women experienced on a physical level and what they consciously registered is precisely what the theory of differential erotic plasticity predicts. It could well be that the price of women’s greater erotic flexibility is more difficulty in knowing—and, depending on what cultural restrictions may be involved, in accepting—what they’re feeling. This is worth keeping in mind when considering why so many women report lack of interest in sex or difficulties in reaching orgasm.

As they left behind a world of servility and inferiority, consumers adopted beautifying as an essential aspect of becoming modern African-American women. Still, the ideal they favored remained a painfully restrictive one.

The foundation of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392- 1910), with its pronounced Neo-Confucian sympathies, brought an end to Buddhism's hegemony in Korean religion and upset this ideological status quo. Buddhism's close affiliation with the vanquished Koryŏ rulers led to centuries of persecution during this Confucian dynasty. While controls over monastic vocations and conduct had already been instituted during the Koryŏ period, these pale next to the severe restrictions promulgated during the Chosŏn dynasty. The number of monks was severely restricted—and at times a complete ban on ordination instituted—and monks were prohibited from entering the metropolitan areas. Hundreds of monasteries were disestablished (the number of temples dropping to 242 during the reign of T'aejong [r. 1401-1418]), and new construction was forbidden in the cities and villages of Korea. Monastic land holdings and temple slaves were confiscated by the government in 1406, undermining the economic viability of many monasteries. The vast power that Buddhists had wielded during the Silla and Koryŏ dynasties was now exerted by Confucians. Buddhism was kept virtually quarantined in the countryside, isolated from the intellectual debates of the times. Its lay adherents were more commonly the illiterate peasants of the countryside and women, rather than the educated male elite of the cities, as had been the case in ages past. Buddhism had become insular, and ineffective in generating creative responses to this Confucian challenge.

When I asked Dimple what hurts her the most about her father, she said unhesitatingly, ‘He doesn’t trust me. Always restrictions.’ Now Dimple goes out when she wants, but she no longer trusts herself to make any decisions about work or boyfriends. She stays frozen in fear. Restrictions

When I asked Dimple what hurts her the most about her father, she said unhesitatingly, ‘He doesn’t trust me. Always restrictions.’ Now Dimple goes out when she wants, but she no longer trusts herself to make any decisions about work or boyfriends. She stays frozen in fear. Restrictions prepare girls to be fearful even when the restrictions are removed and when they are technically free. Bahar nahin jao , don’t go out, is perhaps the most universal restriction. Aarushi, 19, a student at Lady Shri Ram College who fought with her parents for the freedom to go out, says, ‘Now it is very difficult for me to go out. There is always fear. You know people are watching. You have to protect yourself and there is no one with you. You don’t feel relaxed outside; you feel relaxed only when you are at home. I can’t just go freely anywhere, even when my parents don’t say come home early.

There are more restrictive rules for girls than for dogs, cats or cows. Everyone knows these common boundaries, ‘boundations’. These restrictions often continue through college and even till the day girls get married. Curfew hours range from 6 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. For Abhisha, 20, studying commerce, the curfew hour is still 6 p.m. or 6.30 p.m. She says wistfully, ‘I have a lot of dreams, like sometimes to hang out with my friends, but my mother and father allow nahin karte , they don’t allow it. Because they think it is not safe for women. I feel they won’t allow me sleepovers, so I never ask, I feel anxious that they might refuse. Hesitation hoti hai , there is hesitation.’ Once she hesitatingly asked her father permission to go somewhere and he did not allow her. She did not talk to her father for a year, but she did not defy him or fight back. She says, ‘Now I have let it go. It was something small. But it affected me a lot.

The fear of being receptive also manifests in emotional blocks that restrict dialogue in daily encounters. The feminine side in both men and women is so frail that anything radical coming in from outside has to be censored in order to protect the container against the possibility of shattering. On the other hand, the masculine side often lacks the strength to penetrate; terror of losing oneself in another overwhelms the initial thrust that could lead to deeper intercourse. This biological imagery clarifies the ways in which we all move between our masculinity and our femininity in daily conversation. But how many of us are flexible enough to fully receive another without critical judgment? How many of us are able to trust that we will be received unconditionally? How many of us are able to stand to our own phallic truth when we see our relationships endangered?

As legislators struggled to keep up with social mobility and new fashion trends, the rules took on a frenzied character: almost every aspect of attire was a potential target for legal strictures. Genoa banned the use of sable trims in 1157. In 1249 Siena restricted the length of trains on women’s dresses. In 1258 Alfonso X of Castile reserved scarlet cloaks for the king and silk for the nobility. The papal legate of the Romagna, in 1279, required all women in the region to wear veils; by contrast, Lucca in 1337 outlawed veils, hoods, and cloaks for all women other than nuns. A Florentine law of 1322 forbade women other than widows from wearing black. In 1375 in Aquila, only male relatives of the recently deceased were allowed to go unshaven and grow

The ramifications of this androcentric construction of God, the insistence upon making God male, have been appalling. This restrictive imagery malnourishes everyone: children, women, men and nonbinary people, all those who seek relationship with the fulsomeness of who God is, and who they themselves are.

Anjali, 19, studies at Gargi College, in Delhi. She and her younger sister were raised disguised as boys but without the freedom. They were always dressed in boys’ pants and shirts even as little girls. There were no frocks or dresses. A barber always cut their hair short. No hair clips or ribbons. No make-up, not even kajal. They were denied all signs of femaleness in clothes, hair, jewellery and they were kept at home as much as possible. Once, when Anjali returned home with nail polish on her nails from a friend’s house, her mother hit her and the nail polish was scraped off. These restrictions continue in college. Anjali feels suffocated and slipped me a note in a college classroom requesting me to intervene.

Sending girls to school is good. But the cultural framing around restricting girls is so strong that schools and colleges have become new forms of imprisonment for girls, partly because of cruel parental pressure to perform and partly because schools and colleges don’t teach girls to learn, to question or be curious. Unrelenting pressure to do well in examinations and forget everything else turns girls into dead heads even when they excel in examinations. So living in their heads and going to school are acceptable but having an independent mind is not. Neeru, 21, studying computer science against her wishes, says in despair, ‘Everyone is studying, going to coaching classes every day; it is as if there is nothing else.

Fearful women want protection. The protection offered by society comes at a very high price for women, their freedom. The current assumption is that society cannot be made safe for over 600 million girls and women, but women should be made safe for society by keeping them locked up at home as much as possible, by restricting their movement, by regulating their clothes and by isolating them from the world of men as much as possible. Disguised as women’s safety, all approaches that restrict women contribute to their non-existence and are actually about men and men’s control over society, so that men don’t have to bother to learn self-control or respect for women.

Any public policy measure should be judged by whether it restricts women or it enlarges their freedom. And this too must be accompanied by a public campaign and training that focus on specific behavioural change needed among men without shaming them, so men become allies in spreading change.

My Aunt Beverly sashayed when she walked. ... Her walk made the local boys sweat, well until those 'boys' were octogenarians. Anything she carried in her back pocket would have been as happily dizzy as a kid on a carnival ride. She sashayed like a Southern belle born in a time of dungarees and pedal pushers rather than restrictive skirts and social mores; she sashayed like a beautiful woman who was feeling sassy. She WAS beautiful, and she was sassy more often than not.

justification for locking women up and forcing them to have court-ordered C-sections stems from the same legal justifications developed for restricting abortions.

Feminists felt patriarchy and male technology conspired to restrict women’s reproductive freedom—women’s “right to choose.

The Mahāyāna sūtras clearly re-evaluate the relative roles of the monastic and lay practitioner, making it clear that the new movement put less stress upon formal membership of the monastic community as a prerequisite for pursuit of the Bodhisattva Path. This is suggested by the frequency with which lay people, sometimes women, are shown with high attainments, and reaches its apogee in the figure of Vimalakīrti, the layman Bodhisattva who trounces all the śrāvakas and even the archetypal Bodhisattvas. The principle seems to be that spiritual attainment is not defined by, or restricted to those occupying, formal positions and roles within the monastic Saṅgha.

I follow the holy wheel of the year and the cycles of the moon, doing rituals and seasonally appropriate celebrations. I honor nature and the divinity that is inside me and all living beings, and I strive to spread light and to be in service of something higher than myself: Spirit, the gods, the Goddess, the Mystery—that which language is too restrictive to name.

Wealthy Protestant nativists feared and resented the new immigrants, who were often Catholic, uneducated, disorderly, politically militant, and prone to voting Democratic. They attempted to discipline and control this population by restricting drinking, gambling, and prostitution, as well as much more mundane behaviors like how women wore their hair, the lengths of bathing suits, and public kissing.

Chinese women of childbearing age on average were having 1.6 children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a population, and down from a high of six in the 1960s, before the one-child policy and other birth restrictions were instituted.

As computers gained new status and exploded in popularity, hacker conferences and computer clubs sprang up across the San Francisco Bay Area, and enrollment in computer science classes surged at universities across the country. Demand became so great that some departments began turning students away. There was an overall peak in bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science in the mid-1980s, and a peak in the percentage of women receiving those degrees at nearly 40 percent. And then there was a steep decline in both. It wasn’t that students were inexplicably abandoning this exciting field. It was that universities couldn’t attract enough faculty to meet growing demand. They increased class size and retrained teachers—even brought in staff from other departments—but when that wasn’t enough, they started restricting admission to students based on grades. At Berkeley, only students with a 4.0 GPA were allowed to major in electrical engineering and computer science. Across the country, the number of degrees granted started to fall.

Pulomi did not deserve the pain of failure. No woman did. Simantini knew what it felt like to be isolated from the world for three days and three nights. She had years of experience. Restricted to the corner room of the women’s quarters. Looking out from the only window in the room. Watching the tamarind tree outside. The cradles on its branches. And the high wall beyond. Doing nothing all day except watching the blood flow out of the body and wiping it from time to time. Eating uncooked food. No spices. No meat. No fish. Not even boiled milk or butter. Being forced to mourn for the child that could have been. Feeling dirty and polluted. Touched by death, shunned by the living, finding comfort and empathy only in the arms of other menstruating women.

Both women and nature are protected, restricted, objectified, idealized, and made passive.

The disenfranchisement of women from inheriting land was particular to Israel in the ancient world. Just as Israel was relatively isolated in largely restricting women from public and professional religious roles, they were also virtually alone in legislating women’s exclusion from property law. Women throughout the ancient Near East, from Egypt to Mesopotamia broadly, and specifically in places like Sumer, Ugarit, and Elam, owned and inherited property for more than a thousand years before the codification of Israelite law. The codes of Hammurabi and Israel’s Hittite neighbors also legally enfranchised the property rights of women.

But unless we begin to view historical women through a broader, more inclusive lens—and rewrite them back into the narrative—we will continue to view the past more restrictively than it likely was, and we risk carrying those perspectives over into the present.

The recommended dietary allowance for protein is around 50 g a day (46 g for women, 56 g for men).7815 The researchers took men who were averaging twice that—112 g, which is about the average of what many American men get7816—and randomized them down to 64 g of protein a day. So, the “protein-restricted” group was still getting more than enough protein. Do that, and you can essentially double FGF21 levels in the blood within about six weeks.

As if intellectual constraints were not sufficient, women had to be hobbled physically. One might almost think that, in imposing such restrictions men did not so much scorn women as fear them.

Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, but women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/ abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and their status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color.

It's tempting to base a woman's evil on the abuse of a man or the death of a child, because they are, unfortunately, relatable and understandable motivations. However, insisting that women can only be evil once violence has been done to them robs them of agency and puts them on an unrealistic, restrictive pedestal as literary and critical figures.

But it seems to me that Hedy, her history, and her creation may have even greater symbolic importance. The manner in which her contribution to this world-changing device was largely lost—or ignored—for decades reflects the pervasive marginalization of women’s contributions, a problem that is both historical and modern. Whether Hedy’s work in spread-spectrum technology was purposefully disregarded or unconsciously forgotten, it appears that imbedded in that oversight were misconceptions about her abilities—about all women, really. Faulty assumptions about women’s capabilities, stemming in part from the conscripted roles into which they’d been slotted, has caused many to think more narrowly about the manner in which the past has been shaped. But unless we begin to view historical women through a broader, more inclusive lens—and rewrite them back into the narrative—we will continue to view the past more restrictively than it likely was, and we risk carrying those perspectives over into the present. Perhaps if Hedy’s society had viewed her not simply as a blindingly beautiful creature, but as a human being with a sharp mind capable of significant contributions, they might have learned that her interior life was more interesting and fruitful than her exterior. Her invention might have been accepted by the navy when she offered it, and who knows what impact that might have had on the war? If only people had been willing to look behind “the only woman in the room” to examine the person she was beneath, they might have seen a woman capable of greatness, and not only on the screen.

Sonnet of Short Dress There is no short dress, only short sight, No obscene outfit, only eyes of obscenity. The world is no man's family heirloom, That it should be cherished by the men only. Instead of restricting a girl's right to expression, Teach boys, short dress isn't a sign of consent. If women cannot walk around freely as men do, Better sentence all men to lifetime imprisonment. Let all girls hear it loud, wear what you like to wear, Walk around naked if that's what you really want. And when an animal makes unwanted advances, Activate your knee 'n crush their beloved balls to pulp. Girls don't need protecting, they ain't fragile showpiece. Let's just raise boys as decent humans, not entitled bullies.

In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune, an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil-rights activist traveled through her home state of Florida to encourage women to vote, facing tremendous obstacles at every step along the route. The night before Election Day in November 1920, white-robed Klansmen marched into Bethune’s girls’ school to intimidate the women who had gathered there to get ready to vote, aiming to prevent them from voting even though they had managed to get their names on the voter rolls. Newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware, reported that the numbers of Black women who wanted to register to vote were “unusually large,” but they were turned away for their alleged failure to “comply with Constitutional tests” without any specification of what these tests were. The Birmingham Black newspaper Voice of the People noted that only half a dozen Black women had been registered to vote because the state had applied the same restrictive rules for voting to colored women that they applied to colored men.

Sindhi Hindus, being a religious minority living in a highly feudal society, had long harboured anxieties about the possible abduction and conversion of their women, and so ensured that the latter lived restricted lives.

Monthaversary dinner. How did these women do it? What was their secret?... Was it that they simply told them what to do and when to do it, and the imposed restriction of choice made their boyfriends feel safely shepherded rather than ready for slaughter? Had I been treating men too much like adults and not enough like little directionless lambs?

From what Steel was learning, the language of the deals made them look less like aboveboard legal transactions and more like cover-ups. The agreements included one restrictive clause after another. The women were obliged to turn over all their evidence—audio recordings, diaries, emails, backup files, any other shred of proof—to O’Reilly and his lawyers. They and in one case their attorneys were prohibited from helping any other women who might have similar claims against the host. If they received subpoenas compelling them to talk, they were required to notify O’Reilly and his team, who could fight their being called to testify. The lawyer for one of the women agreed to switch sides, to “provide legal advice to O’Reilly regarding sexual harassment matters,” according to the language of the agreement. Another of the alleged victims promised never to make disparaging statements about O’Reilly or Fox News, “written or oral, direct or indirect,” and not to respond—ever—to any journalists who might contact her about the matter. As part of the deal, she confirmed that she had not filed a complaint with any of the government agencies responsible for fighting sexual harassment, including the EEOC. In return, one alleged victim received about $9 million, and another got $3.25 million. If either woman violated any of these clauses, she could lose the money. Whatever O’Reilly had or hadn’t done to the women was thus dropped down a deep well, never to be recovered. Cash for silence; that was the deal.

Individuals with Eds evaluate food and body related cues as emotional events and these events trigger dysregulated responses, including deficits in healthy coping strategies and use of maladaptive strategies. Emotional dysregulation and disordered eating worsen in a vicious cycle: engaging in disordered eating, such as restricted food or purging, provides escape from negative emotion particularly when it is stimulated from a food or body related cue, like shopping for a new workout clothing.

Risks for escalation from disordered eating to an ED include the use of food to cope with life events or emotions, adherence to restrictive or fad diets, and negative self-evaluation based on consumption or body image.

One of our central tasks with patients with eating disorders is facilitating the capacity to postpone action in favor of reflection. We inevitably find especially early on, that this is challenging: the pull to binge, or purge, or restrict is difficult, often impossible, to resist. To understand this fact, in this chapter we begin with a discussion of Freud’s (1914) notion of the compulsion to repeat and then formulate the eating disordered patient's symptoms as repetitions against traumatic themes from childhood, never-ending (because never fully successful) attempts to magically undo the pain of the past.

We all need to feel safe, that the world is predicable, that obstacles can be overcome, and conflicts resolved -in short, to maintain narcissistic equilibrium. When such conditions are met, infants can pleasurably engage with their environments. When faced with overwhelming experience, internal or external, they must find a way to restore their fragile self-esteem. Some infants, especially when faced with overwhelm that cannot be overcome, turn away from reality and toward omnipotent solution. This learned response feels dependable and, over time, takes on an addictive quality, restricting her access to other solutions and pathways to further growth.

material for her book. Despite the restrictive laws on women and children in the Papal States, Margaret had experienced more freedom of opportunity, both professionally and personally, in Rome than in New England or New York. And now she had a family, a child whose “little heart clings to mine” and a husband whose companionship, Margaret wrote to her sister, Ellen, is “an inestimable blessing.” Giovanni had remained loyal when she was “more sick, desponding and unreasonable in many ways than I ever was before,” and he had cheered and sustained her with “the sacred love, the love passing that of women.” “In him,” Margaret wrote to her mother, “I have found a home.

The capacity to think about, to reflect upon, difficult feelings is what allows us to forego expressing them in more problematic ways, such as, for patients with eating disorders, through a binge, or a purge, or food restriction.

most women wed, bear children, and then plan their children’s marriages. Some of the poor might work in the fields, and a rare few are mercenaries or hired soldiers, but … the wealthier they are, the more restricted their freedoms and roles become. You’d think that money would buy you the ability to do whatever you pleased.

Picasso and Modigliani’s ‘Venuses’ represent a sort of iconoclasm in their self-conscious rejection of the cold, perfectly-finished, stuffy beauty of the Western tradition of art. For the contemporary viewer they have become a reassuring confirmation of left-of-centre politics, of anti-establishment positions and of an intellectual kudos that doesn’t need art to look classical to be meaningful. And the frankness of the male artist’s unflinchingly libidinal vision is taken as evidence of the separation from restrictive bourgeois respectability and taste.

Elaine once replied, “I was going to quote from the Old Testament, and say that ‘a man sharpens his face on the face of his friends.’ This is why important movements in art have always taken place where groups of artists could get together. And then something happens. It’s some kind of electricity. A movement is never started by one; it’s always give and take.”27 Elaine’s and Bill’s relationship involved a continual exchange of ideas that wasn’t restricted to conversations with friends.