04/21/2026
If you are seeking “root cause”, I hope this will help you understand a little more. And also, help is available for those who want to be survivors and victorious instead of victims. I’m rooting for us all. Every single one of us.
“Somebody told you how to sit and how to eat and how much space to take up and how to laugh without being too loud about it, and you were maybe five or six, and by the time you were old enough to think about whether any of that made sense, it was already in your muscles. Shirley Abbott grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas in the 1940s and she put it frankly in Womenfolks, her memoir of Southern girlhood. To grow up female there was to inherit a set of directives that warp you for life, if they don't actually send you mad. She said it like a joke. It is a joke, in the way that the funniest things you can say about being a woman are also the ones that should probably make you cry.
The Southern directives were their own special breed. Be passionate and modest at once, be strong and act helpless, be sexy and frigid, ideally simultaneously. Abbott wrote about women who could slaughter a hog and set a beautiful table and pretend they hadn't done the first one, and the performance was so total that the women themselves stopped being sure where the real person ended and the act began. Directives that come to you that early stop feeling like instructions. Karen Horney, writing decades earlier about neurosis in women, called it the tyranny of the should, the way external demands become so deeply embedded that they feel like your own standards and taste. They feel like preferences by the time you notice them. I like being thin. I prefer to let him finish talking first. The language of personal choice covers the directive so completely that you can't see the join anymore.
Abbott said the South, and she meant the South. But most of us, reading it, know she could have said anywhere. The content changes and the mechanism stays the same. A girl growing up in suburban Surrey in the 1970s got told to be agreeable and clever and skinny and accommodating and to do well at school without being intimidating about it. A girl growing up in a professional family in Dublin or Edinburgh got told to have opinions and be independent and still somehow make the men around her feel central. The directives are different and the warp is the same, because what gets into you before you're old enough to reject it doesn't leave when you get old enough to see it. You can describe the whole system and teach a seminar on it. And yet you still apologise when someone else bumps into you in the supermarket.
You'd think that seeing it clearly would be enough. Simone de Beauvoir made that case in The Second S*x, that femininity is assembled and imposed from outside, and that the woman who could see how she'd been made had already begun to unmake herself. It's a compelling argument, and there are days when you believe it. But Abbott's quote says "for life." Warped permanently, the shape set, the bend in the metal fixed. And the lived experience of being, say, sixty-two and still feeling a flush of guilt when you don't reply to an email within the hour, still wondering if you've been too assertive in a meeting, still checking your face before you walk into a room, that experience suggests Abbott might be closer to the truth. The understanding and the reflex seem to live in entirely different places, and they don't talk to each other much.
The warping runs so deep partly because it was done with love. That's why it's nearly impossible to unravel. The directives came from women who'd followed the same directives themselves, who were genuinely trying to make your life easier, to prepare you and help you fit. Your grandmother who told you to cross your legs didn't think she was warping you. She thought she was protecting you from the consequences of not crossing them. And she was right, in the sense that there were consequences, and she'd lived through them, and she wanted better for you, where "better" meant "smoother." The love and the damage travelled together, in the same sentence, in the same gesture, and pulling them apart now, in your fifties or sixties, feels like trying to separate salt from water after you've already drunk it.
Abbott wrote Womenfolks from New York. She'd left Arkansas decades earlier, built a career and lived an entirely different life. And she still wrote about the directives in the present tense. She was, by the time of writing, a woman who could see the whole system with total clarity, name every piece of it, hold it up to the light, and the warp was still there. She once said she'd learned to respect history from being a Southerner. But respecting something and being free of it don't tend to happen at the same time, and she seemed to know that, and the book seems to know it on every page. We can see the whole thing for what it is, and we still check our face in the mirror on the way into the room.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
Somebody told you how to sit and how to eat and how much space to take up and how to laugh without being too loud about it, and you were maybe five or six, and by the time you were old enough to think about whether any of that made sense, it was already in your muscles. Shirley Abbott grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas in the 1940s and she put it frankly in Womenfolks, her memoir of Southern girlhood. To grow up female there was to inherit a set of directives that warp you for life, if they don't actually send you mad. She said it like a joke. It is a joke, in the way that the funniest things you can say about being a woman are also the ones that should probably make you cry.
The Southern directives were their own special breed. Be passionate and modest at once, be strong and act helpless, be sexy and frigid, ideally simultaneously. Abbott wrote about women who could slaughter a hog and set a beautiful table and pretend they hadn't done the first one, and the performance was so total that the women themselves stopped being sure where the real person ended and the act began. Directives that come to you that early stop feeling like instructions. Karen Horney, writing decades earlier about neurosis in women, called it the tyranny of the should, the way external demands become so deeply embedded that they feel like your own standards and taste. They feel like preferences by the time you notice them. I like being thin. I prefer to let him finish talking first. The language of personal choice covers the directive so completely that you can't see the join anymore.
Abbott said the South, and she meant the South. But most of us, reading it, know she could have said anywhere. The content changes and the mechanism stays the same. A girl growing up in suburban Surrey in the 1970s got told to be agreeable and clever and skinny and accommodating and to do well at school without being intimidating about it. A girl growing up in a professional family in Dublin or Edinburgh got told to have opinions and be independent and still somehow make the men around her feel central. The directives are different and the warp is the same, because what gets into you before you're old enough to reject it doesn't leave when you get old enough to see it. You can describe the whole system and teach a seminar on it. And yet you still apologise when someone else bumps into you in the supermarket.
You'd think that seeing it clearly would be enough. Simone de Beauvoir made that case in The Second S*x, that femininity is assembled and imposed from outside, and that the woman who could see how she'd been made had already begun to unmake herself. It's a compelling argument, and there are days when you believe it. But Abbott's quote says "for life." Warped permanently, the shape set, the bend in the metal fixed. And the lived experience of being, say, sixty-two and still feeling a flush of guilt when you don't reply to an email within the hour, still wondering if you've been too assertive in a meeting, still checking your face before you walk into a room, that experience suggests Abbott might be closer to the truth. The understanding and the reflex seem to live in entirely different places, and they don't talk to each other much.
The warping runs so deep partly because it was done with love. That's why it's nearly impossible to unravel. The directives came from women who'd followed the same directives themselves, who were genuinely trying to make your life easier, to prepare you and help you fit. Your grandmother who told you to cross your legs didn't think she was warping you. She thought she was protecting you from the consequences of not crossing them. And she was right, in the sense that there were consequences, and she'd lived through them, and she wanted better for you, where "better" meant "smoother." The love and the damage travelled together, in the same sentence, in the same gesture, and pulling them apart now, in your fifties or sixties, feels like trying to separate salt from water after you've already drunk it.
Abbott wrote Womenfolks from New York. She'd left Arkansas decades earlier, built a career and lived an entirely different life. And she still wrote about the directives in the present tense. She was, by the time of writing, a woman who could see the whole system with total clarity, name every piece of it, hold it up to the light, and the warp was still there. She once said she'd learned to respect history from being a Southerner. But respecting something and being free of it don't tend to happen at the same time, and she seemed to know that, and the book seems to know it on every page. We can see the whole thing for what it is, and we still check our face in the mirror on the way into the room.
© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
