the woman essay question

“The woman question”—the problem specifically of women’s suffrage, and more broadly of changing political, economic, and professional roles for women and of social and sexual liberation—gained increasing urgency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as activists grew more militant and the government responded with ever more oppressive measures. The question was further complicated by the onset of the First World War and the participation of women in a wide range of war work both at home and on the battlefield.

Suffrage was granted to women over thirty on 6 February 1918, more than fifty years after John Stuart Mill brought a petition for the reform before Parliament. It might be worth beginning with those Victorian origins in order to understand and contextualize “the woman question” that so gripped society at the turn of the century up to the Great War.

Victorian Roots

Victorian attitudes towards women’s power and place in society were complex, governed by an ideology of “separate spheres.” Men functioned in the public sphere, working in a world driven by ambition and grasping, a world where perhaps they had to sacrifice a certain moral rectitude to maintain economic and social position and power. Women, on the other hand, governed the realm of the home; it was their job to create and ensure an oasis for men, a regenerative space to which men could return after a grueling day out in the world. Within the framework of “separate spheres,” a woman’s clearly delineated position was that of moral beacon and source of peace and comfort for a man who every day was forced to fall in order to gain. Within their constrained and clearly defined roles, women were believed to have transformative power. While these roles granted power, however, they simultaneously limited and restricted that power.

Yet it was within these roles, and their investment in the power they conferred, that Victorian women’s activism—including the feminist movement—was located. Victorian women entered the public sphere through their work for social change. In the 1850s and 1860s, early women’s movements were cause-driven and reform-based, focusing primarily on issues of particular material concern to women: marriage, property, employment, education. The movements were led mainly by middle-class, liberal women, and their work in philanthropy, public works, and organizing showed many that women could participate in the public sphere. The mid-Victorian period saw greater roles for women outside the home, roles still governed by an ideal of womanhood and the notion that women could improve the moral character of society. Barbara Caine writes that Victorian feminism was characterized by a “celebration of women’s self-sacrifice, which is seen as having the capacity to bring social and moral transformation, alongside a protest against the prevailing sexual hierarchy and an endorsement of rather conservative familial and moral values” (80-81). Activists sought to effect what change they could within the ideological framework of the time, questioning the ways women enacted their roles in society while maintaining the values underlying those roles.

Victorian feminism and the drive for suffrage had its origins in these early reform movements and provided the roots for later activism. The shift out of the home and into the street gave women a sense of their own importance as citizens and the vital role they could play in the workings of their nation. If they were to bring about the kind of serious social change they worked for out of duty and commitment to uplift, the vote was a necessity. In 1865, the Kensington Society, a woman’s discussion group, took up the question of women’s suffrage. In 1866, Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and Elizabeth Garrett drafted a petition calling on Parliament to consider the question. They got 1499 signatures and presented their document to John Stuart Mill (whose stepdaughter was a member of the group). Mill brought the petition before Parliament and called for an amendment to the Reform Bill before the body which would grant suffrage to women. This proposal was defeated 196 to 73. Mill’s participation in this debate in part led him to write The Subjection of Women (1869) . In response to this defeat, the women of the Kensington Society founded the London Society for Women’s Suffrage; this organization would, in 1897, join with seventeen other organizations to become the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). By the early twentieth century, the NUWSS would be a powerful—though by no means the only—voice in the debates surrounding “the woman question.” The end of the nineteenth century brought reforms for women, but the battles surrounding suffrage would be played out in the public square and the home, in political, literary, and cultural arenas, calling into question the very nature of women’s subjectivity and the ways they are represented by themselves and others.

The New Woman and “the Woman Question”

These questions of subjecthood and representation surrounding the conception of “womanliness” were at the crux of the idea of the New Woman. The late Victorian period saw a number of developments that advanced the cause of women: the founding of Girton and Newnham Colleges (1873 and 1876), the Contagious Diseases Act (1883), the Married Women’s Property Acts (1882 and 1891), and the organization of the NUWSS (1897). These developments arose out of what Christina Crosby calls “the ceaseless posing of “the woman question”” (1); however, the idea of the New Woman was just as much part of a literary debate as it was part of the social debates that surrounded “the woman question.”

The New Woman emerged at the end of the century as a type, a symbol, a social force. To her supporters, she was liberated from the domestic ideology that governed women’s place in the Victorian era. To her detractors, she was a symptom of the decadence and decline of social values in the fin de siècle . The New Woman chose independence over marriage and childrearing, rejecting monogamy and bourgeois conventions for sexual freedom, political consciousness, and professional identity. In the 1880s and 1890s, she was implicated in a wide range of social problems and upheavals. She was viewed as a threat to middle-class hegemony, to the ideology of domestic space. In a gendered world governed by a strict dichotomy—angel in the house or fallen woman—the New Woman was a site of slippage, a figure that served to interrogate the nature of sexual identity and the ways it dictated public roles and representations.

In many ways, the New Woman was more of a literary construction. The term was first used by Sarah Grand in 1894 in an article in the North American Review . It referred to a wave of novels centered around a “modern” woman, raising issues of women’s subjectivity and their place in both the public and private spheres. Novelists such as Grand herself, Olive Schreiner, Grant Allen, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing explored the woman who occupied a space outside social convention, who chose to exist on the margins, and who would often be punished for doing so. Unlike much of late Victorian society, however, these novelists saw the New Woman not as a pathology but with a sympathetic eye; as Teresa Mangum writes, the New Woman and those who wrote about her “expanded the nineteenth-century imagination by introducing what we would now call feminist issues and feminist characters into the realm of popular fiction” (1). Other critics and literary historians, such as Ann Ardis, note the importance of New Woman fiction to the development and concerns not only of the feminist movement but to modernism as a whole. The questions of subjectivity and representation were key to the modernist project, even if feminist literature was seen (at the time) as outside that project. The negotiations between modernist aesthetics and activism, particularly for writers like Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, give lie to the supposed opposition between modernism and politics. Ultimately, the New Woman allowed for a transition from Victorian ideals of “womanliness” to modern(ist) ideas of womanhood.

The Suffrage Movement

The period between 1905 and 1914 saw a rise in activism and may be considered the height of the suffrage movement, a time of great energy only brought to an end by Britain’s entrance into the First World War. This rise in activism created some opposition to the suffrage movement, particularly among those who did not advocate the more militant activity of the suffragettes, the members of the movement who pursued radical means of activism in contrast to suffragists, who pursued more moderate means of advancing the cause. However, the period did also see increase in support for female suffrage. The declaration of war led to an cessation of militancy; this concession, coupled with women’s participation in the war effort, the directing of their public energies to the cause of ensuring the safety of the state, led many to call for legal recognition of their citizenship through enfranchisement.

Several trends are worth noting here: the rise of militancy and the split between constitutional and militant organizations; the growth of the anti-suffrage movement; the role played by politicians, parties, and the Government; and the shutting down of the militant suffrage movement at the start of the war.

Even as historians and critics speak of “the woman question” and all its aspects—suffrage, equality, and professional, economic, domestic, and sexual issues—one must be wary of thinking of the “women’s movement” as monolithic. The movement as a whole, and the suffrage movement in particular, was throughout its history roiled by tensions not simply of faction but of philosophy. There were tensions among women seeking only the vote and women seeking full emancipation, radical liberation from the sexual and economic enslavement that had been their lot for centuries. There were tensions between those who sought greater representation and rights for the working class (whose franchise was still limited at this time) and those whose concerns were primarily feminist. These tensions, in many respects, go back to the Victorian roots of British feminism. As Sophia van Wingerden has noted, “Since the nineteenth century, two types of feminism had existed, which may be described as liberal feminism, which sought acceptance for women in the world as it was, and cultural feminism, which believed that women’s influence could be used to change the world” (101). The different elements of the women’s movement during the Edwardian period could be cast in this light. The direction of the movement, the true nature to a certain extent of “the woman question,” is the question of the public and private roles of women, how those roles should be defined, and whether women should be liberated from them.

The means employed by the suffragists and the suffragettes, and the nature of militancy itself, get to the crux of this question. The NUWSS was the largest organization devoted to suffrage. Nonmilitant and constitutional, rooted in the social reform movements of the nineteenth century, it saw the suffrage movement as part of a greater project promoting liberal, democratic civilization. Its manifesto says, “We claim that women are also citizens, and that it will be a gross insult and injustice to give the suffrage to every man in virtue of his manhood while denying it to every woman in virtue of her womanhood. We take our stand on the citizenship of women and demand the representation of women as citizens” (qtd. in van Wingerden 129). The NUWSS sought recognition of the citizenship of women and the role they could play in national life, while not really calling for a radical rethinking of the nature of women’s lives either private or public. As this organization conceived of the movement, women’s private, domestic concerns could be broadened into an agenda for social reform; they worked traditional social networks, founded in nineteenth-century activism.

In contrast, the WSPU called for a revisioning of women’s roles. The WSPU broke away from the NUWSS in 1903 and was run with autocratic control by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. The WSPU originally had connections to the Labour movement, but once the Pankhursts decided that Labour was not willing to devote its full support to the suffrage cause, they severed ties. Sylvia Pankhurst, another daughter, maintained ties to Labour, however, and broke away from her mother’s organization to form the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). Christabel, in the later years of the movement, also redirected her attention to include crusades for moral reform, speaking against male vice and the sexual double standard. In these cases, one can see both the many public and private concerns that formed the women’s movement, and the call to redefine women’s roles.

The WSPU, and the Pankhursts, have received a great deal of attention in histories of “the woman question,” some have argued unduly so. While the organization and its founders remain controversial, one cannot deny the importance of the years 1905 to 1914 and the significance of the rise of militant action. In that time span, 1000 women were imprisoned for arson, window-smashing, vandalism of postboxes, demonstrations, and other forms of civil disobedience. Thousands of pounds’ worth of property were destroyed. The issue was debated regularly in the pages of The New Age during these years. Volume 5, for example, is full of such discussions–especially the issues for October 14 and 21, 1908 (see 5.25:438, and 5.26:458-460). (A search of the first 10 volumes will turn up over a hundred issues that discuss suffrage.) Militancy reached its height in 1913 with the death of Emily Wilding Davison, who threw herself in front of the King’s horse at Derby; she quickly became a martyr for the cause, and her death gained sympathy for the movement. However, this might also be regarded as the tipping point in “the woman question,” as people began to turn against the more violent manifestations of female activism.

The death of Davison raises an important point about the tactics of those who participated actively in the movement, and about how they were represented, both by themselves and by others. Both the suffragists and suffragettes used their womanliness to their advantage as they pursued their agenda. Historians such as Lisa Tickner and Barbara Green have shown that Edwardians didn’t quite know what to make of crowds of beautiful, tastefully dressed and well-educated middle and upper class women taking to the streets. The kinds of public demonstrations held by respectable ladies that characterized the suffrage movement—the “Women’s Parliaments,” the marches on Parliament, Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace, the Coronation Procession of 1911 upon George V’s taking of the throne—these spectacles forced those who held to a particular ideology about the place of women in public life to question that ideology. Sophia van Wingerden writes, “On the one hand . . . suffragettes were ordinary criminals because their vigorous and violent protest clearly contradicted what was expected of them as women. On the other hand, however, the suffragettes equally clearly fulfilled their expected roles in all other respects” (79). These were not mannish, threatening New Women. They seemed to represent ideals of womanliness and womanhood, yet their radical shifting into the public sphere, into the streets themselves, subverted those ideals and forced the spectators—those in power—to acknowledge that the roles were not as stable as believed.

These demonstrations reached a key moment on 18 November 1910, also known as “Black Friday.” In 1910, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who with Bonar Law and Ramsey MacDonald, came to support limited suffrage, proposed the Conciliation Bill. This bill, supported by the Earl of Lytton and H. N. Brailsford, bringing together Liberals and Conservatives, militants and constitutionalists, would have granted limited suffrage to women, but was defeated. A contingent of women went to Parliament to meet with Asquith and were met with unprecedented police brutality. Women—young and old, mothers and grandmothers—were beaten, spit at, and cursed. There were reports of sexual assault, and the women were imprisoned.

The images of respectable ladies suffering such indignities increased support for suffrage, as did hunger strikes, which became a popular tactic around the same time. Women who undertook hunger strikes in prison would be forcibly fed; many would get physically sick from the introduction of liquid food into their lungs and rectums, and many reported sexual assault. The passage of the Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act, also known as the “Cat and Mouse” Act, further turned public support against the government and police. Women who went on hunger strike in prison would be kept until they were sick enough to be released. Once they recovered, they would be summoned back to prison. These events, along with the death of Emily Davison, did much to cast the suffragettes as martyrs and gain sympathy for the cause.

However, the increased and sustained militancy, the vandalism and the violence, probably did more to hurt the movement than these images of suffering martyrs did to help. The anti-suffrage movement had always had significant numbers. A petition circulated in 1908 by the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage gathered over 300,000 names. As Brian Harrison has noted, what impelled the anti-suffragists was their “central belief that a separation of the spheres between the sexes had been ordained by God and/or by Nature” (56). This separation had to be maintained and preserved in the home and by the state. More moderate organizations like the NUWSS sought to effect political change through constitutional measures, pursuing allies in the political process. Yet after the failure of the Conciliation Bill, even the NUWSS vowed to work only with politicians who would explicitly support suffrage; this rejection of political compromise marked a turn in the constitutionalists’ policy. It also, however, marked the beginning of a loss of public and political support, a loss that would only grow more pronounced with the approach of war.

Women and the Great War

Reading the impact of the war on suffrage is complicated. Some claim that it created a new space for women to work within the public sphere. It forced men to account for female citizenship and forced women to define what they meant by such a concept. Others, like Jane Marcus, argue that it destroyed the feminist movement. Women replaced feminism with patriotism and tensions between the sexes were brought to the fore. Furthermore, differing notions over the role women play during wartime make resolving the impact the war had on “the woman question” difficult. Pacifist feminists, such as those who started the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, believed that women were meant for peace, and that women all over the world should be united in their pursuit of emancipation. Yet women were also cast in much wartime rhetoric and propaganda as the reason to fight: the home was to be protected. Still others, those more radical in their thinking, saw the home itself as a site of war—the war between the sexes.

The question as to whether militancy would have succeeded is almost impossible to answer, as militant action was suspended almost immediately after the declaration of war. War was declared on 4 August 1914. On 10 August, suffragettes were granted amnesty. On 13 August, Emmeline Pankhurst called for a cessation of militant activity and suspended publication of the WSPU’s periodical, The Suffragette . A little more than a year later, the periodical was issued with the new title Britannia ; its subtitle was “For King, For Country, For Freedom.”

Initially, the WSPU planned to maintain its agenda of militant activism. In the early years of the war, the Pankhursts called for the destruction of “man-made” society; only after it was clear that the war, which quickly stalemated, would be unprecedented in its destruction did they shift their focus away from enfranchisement and towards war work. The Pankhursts forged an alliance with David Lloyd George and worked to campaign for a greater place for women in the war industries. In 1915, during a munitions shortage, they called for the opening of industries previously closed to women; this culminated in The Right to Serve March. Once Lloyd George was appointed Minister of Munitions, he continued to work with the Pankhursts to prevent strikes and reduce the influence of the trade unions (which some saw as a betrayal of the alliance between feminism and labor, although Emmeline Pankhurst had long ago disavowed any connection with Labour).

Women’s commitment to war work, to the preservation of the state, did more than prewar militancy to convince political leaders and the public of the need to grant female suffrage. The role women played during the war affirmed their value as citizens and their right to fully participate in public life. Emmeline Pankhurst’s speeches during the war illustrate this shift in the feminist agenda and the commitment to the allied cause. In a speech titled “What Is Our Duty?,” given in April 1915 in opposition to the Peace Conference at the Hague, she said, “And so it is a duty, a supreme duty, of women, first of all as human beings and as lovers of their country, to co-operate with men in this terrible crisis in which we find ourselves” (qtd. in Speeches 361). Other organizations, such as the NUWSS, kept the suffrage agenda in play. Still others, such as the ELFS, criticized the war effort and those who would profit from it, including women, at the expense of the poor; this group maintained a feminist, pacifist, socialist agenda. Ultimately, though, it was the attention of feminists redirected towards the war effort that proved their value as citizens. The vote became secondary, and part of the overall cause for allied victory and democracy. As Emmeline Pankhurst said in her speech “Woman Suffrage a Necessary War Measure,”“We want the vote so that we may serve our country better. We want the vote so that we shall be more faithful and true to our Allies. We want the vote so that we may help to maintain the cause of Christian civilization for which we entered on this war. We want the vote so that in future such wars is possible may be averted” (qtd. in Speeches 368).

The contribution of women to the war effort was noted, as was their willingness to cease agitation. In a speech on 28 March 1917, Asquith said, “Since the war began . . . we have had no recurrence of that detestable campaign which disfigured the annals of political agitation in this country, and no one can now contend that we are yielding to violence what we refused to concede to argument” (qtd. in Harrison 205). In April 1917, Lloyd George, who had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister the previous winter, agreed to meet with a group of suffragists. On 15 May 1917, the Representation of the People bill was introduced to the House of Commons, passed the House of Lords on 10 January 1918, and received royal assent on 6 February 1918. The WSPU reformed as the Women’s Party, with a platform of war until victory and harsh peace terms, as well as equality in marriage and work. Still, the achievement of women’s suffrage did not decide the question of women’s roles in public life; for example, Volume 22 of The New Age (see 22:5:88 and 22.22:425) reveals a continuing skepticism towards the public role of women as fully enfranchised citizens, and particularly towards the creation of the Women’s Party.

“The woman question” was one of the most divisive and urgently contested issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With the Great War and the passage of women’s suffrage came some resolution of that question, although, as James Longenbach argues in his essay “The Women and Men of 1914,” the debates surrounding the relationships, both public and private, between men and women in the modernist period were far from over.

— Janine Utell

Appendix 1: Chronology of the “Woman Question” in the 20th Century

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) founded
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) founded
Liberals come to power.
First use of the term “suffragette” in the Daily Mail (10 January).
First march and demonstration by WSPU at Parliament in February.
WSPU moves to break away from Labour.
First march by NUWSS.
WSPU “Women’s Parliament,” followed by march on Parliament and 51 arrests.
WSPU breaks away from Labour.
Women’s Freedom League (WFL) formed.
Women’s Suffrage Bill defeated.
Herbert Asquith becomes Prime Minister; opposes votes for women.
WSPU “Women’s Parliament,” huge meeting in Albert Hall and demonstration in Hyde Park.
First window-breaking.
Largest march on Parliament.
First hunger strike by Marion Wallace Dunlop; forcible feeding introduced.
Large demonstrations outside London.
Liberals returned to power in General Election.
Conciliation Bill for limited franchise introduced by Asquith, killed.
Black Friday (18 November): WSPU deputation to meet with Asquith met with police brutality.
Coronation Procession: 40,000 women march.
Asquith announces the introduction of a manhood suffrage bill and says an amendment for women might be possible.
Resumed militancy on the part of the WSPU.
Window-smashing, arson, post attacks, arrests.
Height of militant activity, destruction of public and private property.
Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act (“Cat and Mouse” Act) introduced in April: hunger-striking prisoners released until they recover, and are then rearrested.
Emily Wilding Davison throws herself in front of the King’s horse in Derby and dies.
First World War. Militancy suspended. Suffrage workers, militant and nonmilitant, come out in support of the war effort.
David Lloyd George replaces Asquith as Prime Minister.
Lloyd George meets with suffragists.
Representation of the People Bill clause to give women the vote passes the House of Commons 387-57.
Representation of the People Act enfranchises women of 30 years of age and older who are householders, wives of householders, property owners (worth £5), or university graduates. Mrs. Humphry Ward weeps.

Appendix 2: Names and Organizations to Know

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS):

Founded in 1897. Democratic, constitutional, nonmilitant. Led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Pursued equal franchise for men and women. Highest number of members: 53,000+ (1914).

Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU):

Founded in 1903. Militant. Led by Emmeline Pankhurst with her daughter Christabel. Originally affiliated with Labour, the WSPU broke with the organization in 1905. Supported by Margaret Haig (Lady Rhondda), who wrote for the organization’s newspaper Votes for Women (later The Suffragette [1912], and then Britannia [1915] ); and by Lady Constance Lytton, who was sent to prison and went on hunger strike (Lady Constance’s husband, the Earl of Lytton, sponsored the Conciliation Bill). Highest number of members: 4459 (1909). Became the Women’s Party after the passage of the Representation of the People Act.

Women’s Freedom League (WFL):

Founded by Teresa Billington-Greig in 1907 as a breakaway group from the WSPU. More democratic. Highest number of members: 4000 (1914). “Truculent Teresa,” as some journalists called her, wrote some columns in the first volume of The New Age . But the magazine printed pieces on both sides of this debate, which makes it a good place to study the history of suffrage before the War.

Votes for Women Fellowship (VWF):

Founded in 1912 by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence as a breakaway group from the WSPU.

The Women Writers’ Suffrage League (WWSL):

Founded in 1908. Maintained neutrality regarding tactics. Members included Olive Schreiner, Elizabeth Robins, Cicely Hamilton, Sarah Grand, Evelyn Sharp, May Sinclair, and Edith Zangwill.
Another important outlet for writers committed to suffrage was The Freewoman ; Dora Marsden was the editor, and one of its main writers was Rebecca West. The Freewoman later became The Egoist , when it was taken over by Ezra Pound and transformed into one of the more important “little magazines” of the modernist period. West stopped writing for the magazine after this shift and became a regular contributor to Time and Tide .

National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage:

Founded in 1908 as the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League. Collected 337,018 signatures for an anti-suffrage position that same year. Aristocratic, opposed to women’s public activity. Prominent members included Mrs. Humphry Ward, Lord Cromer, Lord Curzon, Lady Jersey. Membership reached 10,000 in 1909, and by 1913 there were 255 branches.

Works Cited and Consulted

Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism . New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990.
Caine, Barbara. English Feminism, 1780-1980 . New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Cooper, Helen M., Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier, ed. Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation . Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
Crosby, Christina. The Ends of History: Victorians and the “Woman Question” . New York: Routledge, 1991.
Green, Barbara. Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage, 1905-1938 . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Harrison, Brian. Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Woman Suffrage in Britain . New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978.
Longenbach, James. “The Women and Men of 1914.” In Cooper et al. 97-128.
Mangum, Teresa. Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel . Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998.
Marcus, Jane. “Corpus-Corps-Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War.” In Cooper et al. 129-150.
Purvis, June. Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography . New York: Routledge, 2002.
Speeches and Trials of the Militant Suffragettes: The Women’s Social and Political Union, 1903-1918 . Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999.
Tickner, Lisa. The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914 . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
van Wingerden, Sophia. The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866-1928 . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign . New York: St. Martins’s Press, 1995.

The “Woman Question”

“ Bodily strength from being the distinction of heroes is now sunk into such unmerited contempt that men, as well women, seem to think it is unnecessary; the latter, as it takes from the feminine graces…; and the former, because it appears inimical to the character of a gentleman” – Mary Wollstonecraft, 1791

During the time of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, on the issue of the conversations in British, French and Germany salons of the educated upper class was the role and status of women in society. These salons, private gatherings in the home of wealthy upper-class men and women from the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, dedicated to discussions about arts and sciences, society and politics, gave women a unique opportunity to address the gender relations. One example of such a female host was Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699 –1777), who has been referred to as one of the leading female figures in the French Enlightenment. From 1750 to 1777, Madame Geoffrin played host to many of the most influential Philosophes and Encyclopédistes of her time.

The debate in these salons was according to historian Karen Offen therefore important for “asserting women’s equality to men, for criticizing male privilege and domination, for analyzing historically the causes and construction of women’s subordination, and for devising the eloquent arguments for the emancipation of women from male control.” The enlightened debate surrounding women’s equality and rights have come to be collectively referred to as the “Woman Question,” which was discussed by most famous contemporary philosophers.

One of the first French philosophers to address this issue was René Descartes (1556-1650). He argued that women had equal capacity to reason, because “reason operates independently of the body.” In addition, his claim for gender equality was grounded in the Christian doctrine of the “equality of souls.” Descartes’ idea influenced other writers such as François Poulain de la Barre (1647-1725), who published an essay titled On the Equality of the Two Sexes in 1673, in which he built on the Cartesian model, suggesting that “the mind has no sex.”

One of the most significant impacts of Descartes’ argument of gender equality was that it shifted traditional views on marriage. Referring to Descartes, the French scholar Louis Jaucourt (1704-1779) argued in the French Encylopédie that “the reasons that can be alleged for marital for power could be contested, humanly speaking.” Jaucourt’s statement suggested that husbands and wives should be equal on the basis of reason, demonstrating how the “ Cartesian” gender ideology could be used to argue for equality of women in both the public and private spheres of their lives.

Another approach to the “Woman Question” was the Neo-Platonic theory of gender complementarity. According to the historian Dena Goodman, the idea behind the Neo-Platonic argument was that “human beings are by their nature social and sociable, and that only in coming together do they achieve their humanity.” Unlike the “ Cartesian” gender ideology, the Neo-Platonic philosophy argued that women deserved rights not because they are equal to men but because of what they provide to society as women, mothers, and wives. French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) used this argument to suggest that in order to “appreciate women, one must not only recognize their difference from [men], but also the fact that [men] can never really penetrate ‘their’ mystery.” Diderot presented an important aspect of the Neo-Platonic argument that gender differences should be appreciated rather than used to give men superiority.

The Neo-Platonic ideas were used in arguments made by some female writers as well. They believed that “women’s values, the claims of the heart and of emotions—of sentiments, [were] complement to ‘masculine’ rationality.” These women, according to Goodman, “highlighted women’s disadvantaged legal and economic situation in institutionalized marriage and called for an acknowledgment of women’s rights as women.” One of the main rights that women demanded was to receive an education. The complementation theory supported their arguments for this right by insisting that they needed legal rights and education to make them better mothers and wives.

In contrast to the “ Cartesian” and “Neo-Platonic” responses to the “Woman Question,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) argued that the subordination of women was crucial to society. Rousseau believed that the natural differences between women and men were the most important cause of their different gender character and their different roles in the economy and society. They made women for him inferior to men. Rousseau “believed that women’s nature, different from that of man suited her exclusively to the sphere of the household, whereas wife and mother she achieved respect and a new dignity.” Thus, he argued, a women’s education should only prepare them to serve to their husbands and children. The arguments made by Rousseau demonstrates the opposition that supporters of the “Cartesian” or “Neo-Platonic” theories had to face during discussions in the salons.

These three responses to the “Woman Question” elucidate the ambiguous and inconclusive conception of women’s rights during the era of Enlightenment. The arguments often contradicted each other, showing deep divides based on ideology, religion, science, and philosophy. The debate over the “Woman Question” continues until today, but in the present, it is more framed as a “women’s and men’s question,” which challenges gender roles and hierarchy. The role and status of women in society have changed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the regards to women’s voting rights, education, and job opportunities. However, there are still many signs of the oppression and subordination of women even in Western societies”

Kate Nicholson , Biology and History double major, Class of 2019

Literature and Websites

“René Descartes.” The Biography.com , at: https://www.biography.com/people/ren-descartes-37613 (Accessed April 21, 2018).
Goodman, Dena. “Women and the Enlightenment,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History Becoming Visible , ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, Merry E. Wiesner, 233-262. Third edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Offen, Karen. European Feminism 1700-1950 (, 31-49. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 31-49..
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Sarah Grand and the Woman Question: Dialectical Progress and Hope

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The Feminine Mystique

Betty friedan, everything you need for every book you read., the woman question quotes in the feminine mystique.

Only men had the freedom to love, and enjoy love, and decide for themselves in the eyes of their God the problems of right and wrong. Did women want these freedoms because they wanted to be men? Or did they want them because they were also human?

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Woman Question at The Victorian Times

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The Woman by Kristina Rungano

“The Woman” appears in Kristina Rungano’s first collection of poetry, A Storm is Brewing (1984). She is the first female Zimbabwean poet to publish a book of poetry. It is the only poetry collection of post-independence Zimbabwean-English literature. In her poem, Rungano talks about the role of women in rural Zimbabwean society and how they are treated in the prevalent pro-patriarchal system. The essence of the poem alludes to the indigenous expression, “vakadzi ngavanyarare,” meaning “women should keep quiet.” This piece records how a woman’s voice is muted, burdened with the big earthenware of duty and domestic oppression.

Read the full text of “ The Woman ”

Analysis of The Woman by Kristina Rungano

In “The Woman,” Rungano talks through a lyrical persona who belongs to the rural scene of her country. She represents the majority of the women who are oppressed in the macro-level societal framework, family. This woman is seen invested in various works such as fetching water, working in the fields in scorching heat, bearing children, doing domestic works, etc. She does what he is destined to in a patriarchal society. In contrast, her husband stays busy in worldly pleasures without caring about the pain of his wife. He returns home, sadistically draws pleasure from his weary wife. This cycle keeps repeating in the speaker’s life until her death.

Structure & Form

Rungano’s lyric poem “The Woman” contains 36 lines that are grouped into a single stanza. As there is no regular rhyme or meter, it is a lyric poem. Besides, the text is written from the perspective of a first-person speaker (a rural woman) who talks about the cyclical suffering of womanhood. This piece showcases the feature of 20th-century confessional poetry, where the speaker talks about the untold cruelties, mental agony, and hopelessness. Apart from that, Rungano stylistically uses dashes in some instances for the sake of emphasizing particular terms: “And how feared for the child – yours – I carried.”

Poetic Devices

Rungano’s “The Woman” contains the following poetic devices that make the subject matter more appealing to readers.

Enjambment: It occurs throughout the text. Rungano uses this device to make readers go through consecutive lines to grasp her idea. For instance, she enjambs the first three lines of the poem.
Simile: This device is used in the following lines: “Where young women drew water like myself” and “As I hire the great big mud container on my head/ Like a big painful umbrella.”
Imagery: The poet uses olfactory imagery in the phrases “the smell of flowers” and “sweet smell of the dung.” She uses visual imagery in “the stream that rushed before me,” “How young the grass around,” “the great big mud container on my head,” etc. Besides, she also uses organic imagery in order to convey the internal feelings of the speaker.
Metaphor: Readers first come across a metaphor in the phrase “sound of duty/ which ground on me.” Here, the sound comes from the speaker’s subconscious mind and keeps her tied to her role as a dutiful mother, devoted wife, and relentless worker. Rungano also uses this device in these phrases, “the pleasures of the flesh,” “angry vigilance of the sun,” etc.
Repetition: There is a repetition of the term “big” in lines 9-10. It is used to emphasize the magnitude of the speaker’s burden.
Personification: The poet personifies the “sun” as an angry, vigilant, and male representative. It symbolizes ever-watchful patriarchy.
Rhetorical Question: The poem ends with two rhetorical questions asked indirectly to the patriarchs, with an undertone of bitter sarcasm.

Rungano makes use of a number of themes in her poem “The Woman.” These include patriarchy, womanhood, women’s suffering, and struggle, motherhood, and society. The poem revolves around a Zimbabwean rural woman who has been married at a young age. She does all the domestic work and looks after her family. Even she has to work in the fields under harsh weather in order to make a living. In contrast, her husband does nothing but intensify the suffering of the wife. Through this story, Rungano shows how a woman is treated in a patriarchal framework. The last two lines pose a serious question to readers regarding how women are brainwashed to take up their gender roles.

Line-by-Line Analysis & Explanation

A minute ago I came … … the grass around it.

Kristina Rungano’s poem “The Woman” presents a rural woman who is married at an early age. She works all day relentlessly under the strict schedule of duty. It is important to mention how Rungano begins her poem. She creates a sense of urgency from the very beginning.

The speaker had just returned from the well a minute ago. She has no time to think about other things except her family and chores. It does not happen with only herself. Several young women face a similar fate in Zimbabwe’s rural scene.

Working under the strict vigilance of the ticking clock makes the woman’s body weary and her heart tired. In the next line, the speaker manages to look at her surroundings. She can feel the force of the rushing stream, the smell of fresh flowers, and the lush beauty of the grass. Here, the “stream,” “flowers,” and “grass” are used as a symbol of youth and freedom. These images from nature are contrasted with the lives of young women who fetch water from the well, including the speaker.

And yet again I heard … … toiled in the fields.

The speaker has no time to heed to such uplifting thoughts inspired by nature. A “sound of duty” rings directly from her subconscious mind. She has to leave her self-fulfilling thoughts aside and attend to duty’s tough call. The speaker is still a girl. Naturally, she has to be drawn to nature’s freeing call. In reality, she can’t.

The bond of marriage has already chained her wings. It has clipped her young feathers right before she could learn to fly. The sound of dutifulness feels like a heavy burden on her back. But, she has to carry it throughout her life and pass it onto her next generation, especially her daughters.

The burden makes her feel old. As she bears the “great big mud container,” a symbol of women’s responsibilities, she can feel how withered her heart is. It is not her age but her duties that make her feel aged. In the next line, Rungano uses a simile in order to compare the earthenware to a “big painful umbrella.” The “umbrella” of patriarchy gives women apparent protection by drawing out their personal desires and sense of freedom.

After fetching water from the well, she got home and cooked a meal for her husband. As she works without any break, her husband has been out drinking and carousing with his friends. He keeps himself busy in the “pleasures of the flesh,” a metaphor for drinking and having intercourse. In contrast to that, his wife toiled in the fields to make a living for both.

Lines 14-21

Under the angry … … applied to the floors

Rungano uses an important symbol in the first line of this section, “the angry vigilance of the sun.” As readers can see here, the “sun” is depicted as a male counterpart. With its scorching heat, it intensifies the suffering of the woman toiling in the fields. Like her husband is indifferent to her suffering, so is the sun. Unlike the symbolic significance of the “sun” in other romantic poems, here the sun is depicted as a tyrant, a vigilant overseer of women’s suffering.

Nobody is there to share the suffering of the woman. Interestingly, only her “womb” is there to share her pain of childbearing. It hints at the fact that the woman is pregnant. Given the fact that she is bearing a child, her husband does not even care to look after her or even help her with her chores.

After returning from the fieldwork, the speaker washed the dishes. Rungano especially emphasizes the term “yours” (the husband’s) by using a semicolon. In the next line, she dexterously uses the pronoun “we” that readers may ignore while reading. Here, “we” include not the speaker’s husband but the child she is bearing.

In reality, she swept the room her husband also shared. Then, she prepared his bedding in the finest corner of the hut. These lines hint at the privilege a man enjoys in his family. Most of the work is done by the woman, but the man is there always to receive special perks like having the finest corner in the hut. She bathed his husband’s cost corner with the “sweet smell of dung” that she applied to all the floors.

Lines 22-30

Then you came … … I hated you

Finally, the lord, with his drunken gait, came in. Then he made his demands to the speaker without looking at her condition. She tried to explain how weary she was after all day’s work. But, he did not care. She brooded over the infant in her womb that was also his child.

The agonized words could not soothe the patriarch’s, cold heart. He beat her and forcefully had his way into her. After he had satisfied his lust, he left her like an object.

The speaker felt unhappy and bitter. She hated him after all he did to her. But, who was there to listen to her agonized request? She had to suffer the pain alone.

Lines 31-36

Yet tomorrow I shall again … … the fruit of the land?

This abominable cycle keeps repeating in women’s lives. Readers can find this scene in any rural society of the world. The unspeakable suffering of women is universal in nature. This cycle has been in motion from time immemorial.

The next day, the same woman who was tortured last night by her husband and her duties should wake up to his duties. She had to milk the cow, plough the land, and cook his food as usual. He should be her divine “Lord” again. Here, Rungano capitalizes the first letter of the term for sake of emphasis. It also has an ironic undertone.

The last three lines contain the crux of the poem. These lines pose two important questions to society. Firstly, the speaker asks whether it is not right that a woman should obey, love, serve, and honour her man. Here, she tries to say that women are destined to be subjugated figuratively. Then she uses a patriotic metaphor, “the fruit of the land.” She asks whether women are not the fruit (children) of the land. This question is not for the women to answer. Rungano asks this question to men.

Historical Context

Kristina Masuwa-Morgan, better known as Kristina Rungano, depicts Zimbabwean society and culture in her best-known poem “The Woman.” This piece was published in Rungano’s first and only published poetry collection in Zimbabwe, A Storm is Brewing . The book was published in 1984 when the poet was 21 years old. She wrote this poem a few years ago when she was studying in Zimbabwe. In this poem, she describes how women are seen in Zimbabwean society and culture. They are treated like objects and subordinates to their male counterparts. The patriarchal framework of the country promotes women’s silence and their utter subjugation. Rungano describes all modes of suffering a woman is entitled to in her family, ranging from doing all the household work to mutedly digesting domestic violence.

Questions and Answers

Kristina Rungano’s poem “The Woman” is about women’s life in Zimbabwe’s rural scene. Rungano describes how a woman has to perform her duties relentlessly and serve her lordly husband throughout her life.

The poem was published in Kristina Rungano’s first collection of poetry, A Storm is Brewing , in 1984.

The speaker of this poem is a young woman who is married at an early age. Rungano uses the first-person narrative technique in order to describe her feelings and sufferings to readers.

Throughout this piece, Rungano talks about a woman who is seen chained to her duties. She works under a strict schedule. Alongside that, she has to work in the fields for a living. On top of that, her drunken husband intensifies her suffering by his indifference.

Rungano repeats the term in the lines, “As I bore the great big mud container on my head/ Like a big painful umbrella.” This repetition depicts the magnitude of the speaker’s pain and her duties.

The tone of this piece is complaining, sad, and hopeless. By using a complaining tone, Rungano tries to pose a series of questions to patriarchal society. It makes the speaker’s case more piercing and appealing to readers.

Rungano uses the “sun” as a symbol of patriarchy. Neither the woman’s husband nor the sun cares for her suffering. It rather intensifies her pain with scorching heat.

These lines hint at the fact that the speaker’s heart is still young. But, the burden of her duties makes her feel aged. Rungano uses these images to contrast them with the speaker’s condition.

The speaker’s heart, the source for personal desires, is tired of the burden of her duties. She has no time to think about herself. For this reason, her heart is gradually weakened.

This line hints at worldly pleasures such as drinking and having sex. The speaker’s husband keeps himself busy in entertainment while she works throughout the day.

The use of dashes naturally puts emphasis on the term “yours.” Here, the speaker wants to point at the fact that the child she is bearing also belongs to her husband. But, he does not care about either her or the child.

The last few lines of the poem describe the cyclical nature of the woman’s suffering. No matter how tired she was for the last night’s torture, she should wake up the next morning and have to follow the same routine. She dejectedly asks herself whether women are destined to serve men.

Similar Poems about Patriarchy & Women’s Suffering

“Marrying the Hangman” by Margaret Atwood — This poem is based on a real event where a woman marries a hangman to save herself from capital punishment.
“I’m “wife” — I’ve finished that —” by Emily Dickinson — This piece taps on the themes of women’s suffering and patriarchy.
“Bequest” by Eunice de Souza — The speaker of this poem describes how patriarchy shapes the fate of women.
“The Survivor” by Marilyn Chin — In this poem, Chin depicts women as survivors of patriarchal oppression.

External Resources

Check out New Daughters of Africa — This famous anthology includes literary works of more than 200 African women writers, including some best-known poems of Kristina Rungano.
Society and Culture of Zimbabwe — Learn about women’s pathetic condition in Zimbabwean society.
About Kristina Rungano — Read about the poet’s life and her best-loved poems.
Profile of Kristina Masuwa-Morgan — Explore the academic profile of the poet on the University of Greenwich’s website.

Access and Info for Institutional Subscribers

"new aspect of the woman question".

In March 1894, Sarah Grand's “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” was published. The essay in North American Review , vol.158, no.448, March 1894, pp.270–6 has been credited with identifying the "New Woman."

Meaghan Clarke, “1894: The Year of the New Woman Art Critic”

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Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway & The Woman Question

It was common for women writers to address the so-called woman question in their works during the 19th and 20th centuries. This is true of one of the well-known authors, Virginia Woolf, whose life spanned from the end of the Victorian to the start of the modern era. She was born in 1882 to Leslie Stephen, a man of prominence during the Victorian era, and she was primarily self-educated in his vast library. Woolf was one of the artists that helped start the famous Bloomsbury Group where many writers gathered to discuss their belief in the importance of the arts in society at the time.

In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a member of the group as well as a remarkable supporter of her writing ability. She published many novels and essays pertaining to womens issues, one being Mrs. Dalloway in 1925. Following that, she published two well-acclaimed works, To the Lighthouse and A Room of Ones Own. She developed a distinctive style that includes stream of consciousness and a poetic rhythm in a prose form. She fought against traditional Aristotelian plot and created an experimental style.

She, in an essay on Modern fiction, wrote: The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful nd unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the latest fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn.

But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in this customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this? Woolf was admired for her contributions to literary criticism . However, she fell victim to a lifetime of mental illness and thus committed suicide in 1941. Although Woolf is not alive today, her works are still highly acclaimed and helped define feminism in the 20th century . During the 19th century womens roles where strongly defined by their marriage.

The idea was that women stay dependent on a man: first as a daughter then as a wife. They fell into a self-effacing role that entailed almost complete subordination to their husband, children, or even guest and friends. Coventry Patmore conveys the popular sentiment of the time in his poem Angel in the House. Patmore describes woman as a flower, delicate and meek, and sings praises for these simple and delicate features. As much is said by what is not written about the characteristics of a woman, such as her intellect or her political insight.

Interestingly Woolf later attacks the concept of the angel in the house through her essay Professions for Women. After describing the angel as immensely charming and utterly unselfish she claims to have encountered the for-mentioned creature while writing a review for a novel by a popular male author of that time. In order to review honestly without conceding o the better graces fit for a woman of the time, she caught her by the throat and did her best to kill the angel. Afterward Woolf claims, Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

Women were to be the moral overseers of men. The man, who faced the secular vulgarities of the world, was to have his moral anchor as woman. Sarah Stickney Ellis, a popular essayist and educator of the mid 19th century wrote that in womens hands the high and holy duty of cherishing and protecting the minor morals of life, from whence springs all that is elevated in purpose and glorious action. Women were to be the lighthouse unto man, whom without would be dashed upon the rocks of sedition. Women of the 19th and early 20th century were often impeded from a scholastic education.

They usually depended upon friends or themselves for any education beyond the domestic type. As stated earlier, even Woolf received her education in her fathers elaborate library collection. Many women believed that if education was equal to that of a man they could realize accomplishments equal to man. Mary Wollstonecraft pleaded the case in her Vindication of the Rights of Women attempting to convince, by proving women equal to men, that women deserve n equal education. She argues, If a woman be allowed to have an immortal soul, she must have, as the employment of life, an understanding to improve.

Womens roles beyond the home were almost non-existent except for factory worker, seamstress or nun. Women were little more than domestic attendants and child bearers in most cases. Many women including Florence Nightingale lamented on the lack of opportunity for women. She writes, The intercourse of man and womanhow frivolous, how unworthy it is! Can we call that a true vocation of womanher high career? Virginia Woolf herself, in A Room of Ones Own, ncourages women to move away from the space defined by men and begin anew in a time of great opportunity for women.

She also stated in her essay Professions for Women that, the cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions, noting that women writers are not necessarily given the same respect as men, but that it is easier to come by than other careers. Woolf was a proponent of the concept of the androgyny of the mind. She believed that the perfect mind could see issues through male and female eyes. A ind that had the ability to empathize with the opposite sex was advanced beyond that of those that could only see one point of view.

She argues her point when she writes: I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the mans brain, the man predominates over the woman, and in the womans brain, the woman predominated over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together , spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse ith the man in her.

The struggle for women’s equality in Great Britain started long before the turn of the twentieth century . The ideal woman at the turn of the century was to maintain a composed facade, a delicate and demure manner, and distaste for all things violent. Since early times women have been uniquely viewed as a creative source of human life . Historically, however, they have been considered not only intellectually inferior to men but also a major source of temptation and evil. Woolf confronts several of these issues in her novel Mrs. Dalloway just as many other women writers did in literature at the time.

Through the development of the characters , Woolf touches on education, marriage and the sense of moral virtue expected of a woman. For instance, take the passage when Clarissa referred to herself saying: Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed. She realizes that she lacks a good education and later credits Sally as the soul that sheds light on her sheltered life at Bourton.

Peters character, a revious suitor to Clarissa, reveals the educational standing of women at the time: He hadnt blamed her for minding the fact, since in those days a girl brought up as she was, knew nothing; but it was her manner that annoyed him; timid; hard; something arrogant; unimaginative; prudish. The death of the soul. Peter clearly knew that Clarissa was missing out on the many wonders that life offered. However, it was unheard of for a woman to receive the education equal to that of a man. Clarissa recognizes her duty as a woman when she refers to herself as flowers of darkness during a time when she feels abandoned by Richard.

While Clarissa was aware that she was to be the fruitful flower in the marriage, she also realizes that something was missing. However, she knows that life could be worse without Richard her husband, who was the foundation of it all. Richard is a conservative man of the Victorian era unlike Peter, much more a product of modern times. Peter cannot help but lament Clarissas marriage to Richard saying, theres nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. Peter is willing to give Clarissa a life of freedom with him and realizes that his demands pon her were absurd.

He expects things of Clarissa that she, as a woman of the Victorian day, is not willing to accept. This point is most powerfully depicted in the parallel between Clarissa and the young shell shocked Septimus. It is in the juxtaposition of these two characters that one comes to recognize the bleak situation in which Clarissa stands. Septimus eventual suicide is analogous to Clarissas choice to marry Richard. Even when Clarissa steps out onto the balcony to ponder Septimus suicide it seems that her choice to be happy is a sort of suicide.

She felt somehow very like himthe young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. Peter later verbalizes a womans dependency on a man and notes that women attach themselves to places; and their fathersa womans always proud of her father. This pride and attachment is eventually transferred to the husband. While Clarissa at one point felt this attachment, she comes to feel entrapped in her marriage to Richard when she states: With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyesone of the tragedies of married life.

With a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richardas if one couldnt know to a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a morning! These parties for example were all for him, or for her idea of him. Clarissa sees that she has no say for herself and is at Richards beckon call at the cost of any self identity. To tolerate this distaste for marriage she fills her life with parties, something she truly loves, to get her through this suffering.

As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Upholding her duty as a consummate hostess, Clarissa claims her only gift is nowing people almost in instinct. Since it was not expected of women to work , they filled their lives with other unnecessary duties, such as that of parties. Clarissa was doomed to be the perfect hostess which Peter referred to as something maternal on many an occasion.

She acted as if she did not fancy the idea of this perfect mannered hostess as a young woman, but quickly resigned to the social instinct when she was betrothed to Richard. Peter knew, had Clarissa led a life with him, she would be leading the life of a capable woman going about her business. Clarissa first experiences androgyny of the mind when she feels something acking in her life which began as this feeling that was warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together, Clarissa dimly perceived that she had felt what a man feels.

While she knew it was only momentarily, it was enough to bring this sudden revelation to her life. Clarissa later has a truly intimate moment with Sally on the porch at Bourton. Clarissa had always noticed a purity in Sally, however, it was when Sally kissed Clarissa that she felt the emotions a man would feel flow through her body and: She felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep t, not to look at ita diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

Looking at the affects of aging, the psychological impacts of World War I, the role of friendships, how people view the past and the complexity of human emotions, Woolf makes the reader question what really is important in our lives. The descriptions put you in the world of Mrs. Dalloway and by using stream of consciousness she is able to capture the perspective of many characters in the book. She illustrates a seemingly insignificant June day in the life portrait centered on Clarissa Dalloway, a wife of a wealthy politician, to depict the issues at hand with women in 1920s London.

As she immerses us in each inner life, Woolf offers exquisite, painful images of the past to the present with the desires overwhelmed by society’s demands. The feelings that emerge behind such mundane events as buying flowers, the social alliances, the exchanges with shopkeepers, the fact of death — that give Mrs. Dalloway a sense of richness Woolf stands as a chief figure of modernism in England. Interestingly, to keep ith the issues of the time, the book carries the name of the key character .

As Woolf introduces the character, Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself, the identity is that of her husbands, not of her own. It isnt until the second paragraph that Woolf gives the nameClarissa. By building the character without a sense of self-identity, Woolf establishes a firm ground based on the women question of that time. While the novel may seem hard to follow the artistic stream of consciousness Woolf exercises truly depicts the times in a way that will only capture a reader over the course of the book.

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Guest Essay

Looking Away From an Epidemic of Rape

An African woman presses a hand to her forehead.

By Maebel Gebremedhin

Ms. Gebremedhin is a co-founder and the president of the Tigray Action Committee and United Women of the Horn.

In the summer of 2023, while I was negotiating the price of a pair of cloud-shaped wire sunglasses, a man walked behind me and sexually assaulted me. I was at a stall in one of the many open-air markets in Mekelle, Ethiopia’s second-largest city. The man touched my body, attempting to feel as much of me as possible. I stood for a few seconds, unsure of what was happening, until his hands went further and his body got closer.

Jolted out of my shock, I turned to face him and started yelling. My mother, who was standing next to me, did her best to defuse the confrontation and quietly shooed the man away. As soon as he left, many people who had witnessed what happened — from the boys selling peanuts nearby to a woman strolling with her children — laughed. The laughter is what stays with me.

It was not the first time I encountered the troubling consequences of sexual assault during my trip to Mekelle last year, nor was it the last. My assault was just one of many painful encounters that highlighted the pervasiveness and intense normalization of sexual violence in Ethiopia, especially in regions like Tigray that are warped by other kinds of violence.

Two weeks earlier, I had flown to Mekelle from Brooklyn. It was the first time I had returned to Ethiopia in 20 years . One of my reasons for visiting was to speak with women who were survivors of conflict-related sexual violence as part of my work with the Tigray Action Committee, a nonprofit my sister and I founded to raise awareness about people’s suffering during the two-year civil war between Ethiopia and Tigray, the country’s northernmost regional state. Many of the women I spoke to were assaulted during the central government’s war on Tigray, which has been described as one of the deadliest of the 21st century to date, with an estimated death toll of over half a million . Although a cease-fire was reached in 2022, sexual violence continued for months after that , countless families remain displaced , and the country is at risk of sliding into famine .

Women in Tigray were subjected to unimaginable crimes during the war and its ongoing, tumultuous aftermath. Over 100,000 women in Tigray are thought to have experienced conflict-related sexual violence. Health experts recently estimated that over 40 percent of Tigray’s women experienced some type of gender-based violence during the war. Most of them — a whopping 89.7 percent — never received any medical or psychological support afterward.

Survivors have reported that foreign objects were inserted in their bodies, that their children were murdered in front of them, that they were forced into sexual slavery , starved and intentionally infected with H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted pathogens. One victim recalled being told that she was being raped because “ a Tigrayan womb should never give birth .” Some survivors are now taking care of children fathered by their rapists . Others are likely becoming new survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, with little hope of recourse from the government.

Unfortunately, the women of Tigray are not alone. Conflict-related sexual violence remains a persistent issue across the Horn of Africa. United Nations experts have expressed alarm about the reported widespread use of rape by the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan’s ongoing war, a horror eerily reminiscent of the genocide in Darfur, where women experienced sexual violence en masse. In Eritrea, Tigray’s neighbor to the north, women conscripted into the federal army have reportedly been subjected to sexual violence during compulsory national service. In Somalia, to the east, women living in refugee camps and centers for internally displaced people face gender-based violence in high numbers and are often targeted by predatory clan militias and soldiers. Outside the Horn, the Democratic Republic of Congo has witnessed alarming levels of sexual violence during its continuing conflict, with especially high numbers of child victims.

It’s a practice that continues to be used with impunity, despite international pledges to eliminate it. In 2022, President Biden released a memorandum on conflict-related sexual violence, pledging to strengthen the U.S. government’s commitment to combat and hold accountable those responsible for such violence. The European Union continues to release statements on the need to end conflict-related sexual violence worldwide. And U.N. Resolution 1325, passed nearly 25 years ago, calls on “all parties to armed conflict” to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence in that context, particularly sexual abuse. Yet the violence and impunity continue.

To put an end to conflict-related sexual violence, women’s voices must be included at every level of decision making. Research shows that when women participate in a peace process, it lasts longer ; maintaining peace is one way to ensure that conflict-related atrocities do not continue. In Tigray, this will require the active engagement and participation of women in designing and carrying out protective measures, shaping legal and judicial actions and contributing to sustainable peace-building initiatives. One good example to follow would be Liberia, where women, including survivors , spearheaded movements that played a critical role in ending a brutal civil war characterized by extensive rape .

Outside Tigray, the United States and other powers must put pressure on the Ethiopian government to follow the terms of the 2022 cease-fire, which includes a clause about condemning “any act of sexual and gender-based violence,” to allow unfettered humanitarian access and to refrain from restricting or shuttering internet access. International aid organizations must prioritize setting up health care infrastructure for the countless survivors in Tigray today, and local organizations that are committed to this work should be better funded.

The relative Western disregard for the Tigrayan war and the horrific acts of violence against Tigrayan women presents a lesson to learn from; Tigray stands as one of many stark examples of what happens when conflict-related sexual violence goes unchecked. It is time the world speaks up for African women and holds governments, armies and all other perpetrators accountable for the crimes they are committing. If not, they may continue to suspect that when it comes to them, accountability and justice are only buzzwords.

During my trip last summer, I spoke to women in every town I visited, asking about their lives, experiences, hopes and dreams. I asked them if they saw a future for themselves in Tigray or anywhere at all. Overwhelmingly, they said their goal was to leave Ethiopia or to help their children leave if they could not. They wanted their daughters to experience a different life, to have a chance at something else.

Maebel Gebremedhin is a co-founder and the president of Tigray Action Committee and United Women of the Horn and is the mother of three boys.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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The Trojan Women

By euripides, the trojan women essay questions.

Can Helen be trusted? Why or why not?

Helen's loyalty is to Helen; Hecuba is correct when she tells Menelaus that Helen will betray him again. Although it is true that initially Helen is kidnapped by Paris and taken to Troy, she succumbs to his charms and willingly has an affair with him, never trying to escape. She convinces Paris that she is trustworthy and proceeds to betray him too, having already betrayed Menelaus by entering into a sexual relationship with Paris.

Helen tells Menelaus that she was prevented from thinking about escaping by a curse that had been put on her, and she was not released from this until the Spartans overcame the Trojans. This is untrue, but it is a very good example of Helen's gift for manipulation. She not only creates a viable excuse for her willingness to stay with Paris, but she also casts the Trojan women in a bad light, implying that they will set curses on the Spartans if they are able to. In a play that demonstrates loyalty and courage in the face of danger, she is one of the few characters that has no loyalty to a country or a family. In stark contrast to Helen, Hecuba is still thinking about how to rebuild Troy even when she is in imminent danger.

How do the Greeks use Hecuba's children and grandchildren to control and subdue her?

It seems that every time Hecuba comes up with a plan to reinforce Trojan positions or to save her family from the Greeks, her plans backfire because the Greeks have already predicted what she might be planning to do and have a plan to combat every eventuality. Despite having killed almost all of her direct descendants, they still use Cassandra and Hecuba's grandson as bargaining chips. They threaten her family and her family's honor, and they even prevent her from avenging the murder of her grandson by threatening to deprive him of a proper burial if Andromache sets a curse on the Greek ships returning home, thereby destroying his passage into the next life after removing him violently from this one.

They also realize that any compliance by the Trojan women will be a ploy and so Hecuba's plan to have her daughter-in-law obey her new master entirely in the hope of being allowed to raise her son herself is scuppered. It seems that everything she comes up with to rebuild Troy is prevented in this way, which is why Poseidon and Athena are so angry, ultimately setting curses on the Greek ships themselves.

What was the literary impact of this play? What was its historical impact?

Although critics debate the success of the play's structure, The Trojan Women is considered to be one of the most historically important Athenian dramas. As a piece of literature, it lacks plot development, focus, unity, and variation in language and tone. However, as a piece of cultural history, it is one of the most important works of its time. This is because it depicts the barbarism of the Greeks towards both their enemies in general and towards women and children in particular. The Greeks killed children, enslaved women, and exonerated those who raped them. This is an interesting challenge to the way in which the Greeks saw themselves: as the bastions of gentility, art, and nobility.

It also shows that, in general, the women of the time were strong and determined but also noble in their dealings with their opponents and with those whom they captured—a stark contrast to the play's male characters, which are quick to murder and enslave the women they bring back from Troy with them.

What was the role of the audience in the original staging of the play?

With regard to the Athenians who saw the drama when it was first staged, Euripides may be trying to convict them for their behavior at Melos the preceding year. The slavery, the rape, the excess, and the extensive slaughter of The Trojan Women is mirroring Melos. Thus, as C.A.E. Luschnig suggests, "Euripides is forcing his audience to join in the drama, not as the sufferer, but as the tormentor. He is forcing them to look at their own behavior."

Why does Euripides invoke the Muse closer to the middle of the play rather than at the beginning?

Normally the Muse is invoked at the beginning of a Greek drama, but here it comes near the middle when Hecuba and the chorus are mourning Troy after hearing from Kassandra. First, this Muse isn't singing of glorious exploits and heroes; rather, she is, as Hecuba requests, to "Sing a tearful hymn / of lamentation for the dead; / sing in a new strain" (59). The placement later in the text is "striking" and consists of a "new programmatic statement," as Dana Munteanu writes. This Muse isn't answering questions or illuminating mysteries; rather, she is dealing with suffering and sorrow. The chorus of women who invoke her do so for "tragic themes and for the abandonment of epic." The placement of the invocation thus shows how this play contrasts with other epics, specifically in its focus on the victims.

GradeSaver will pay $15 for your literature essays

The Trojan Women Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Trojan Women is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Discuss how Euripides highlights the plight of women taken as slaves in war .?

Women are parceled off as concubines and slaves. Hecuba would rather die than be enslaved, and she attempts to burn herself to death by jumping into the fire as Troy burns. She is dragged back, however, and sent to Odysseus.

Hecuba convinces her...

Describe the impact of humanism upon the development of Greek theater?

Greek theatre, predominantly composed of tragedy, swtiched gears in The Trojan Women. The geopolitical unrest, which is focused upon in the play, protests the irrationality, violence and horrors of war, and in turn, demands peace, solidarity and...

How does "The Women of Troy" utilise the myth of the Trojan war to convey Euripides and his society's views on war and Athenian society.”

Author, please?

Study Guide for The Trojan Women

The Trojan Women study guide contains a biography of Euripides, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About The Trojan Women
The Trojan Women Summary
Character List

Essays for The Trojan Women

The Trojan Women essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Trojan Women by Euripides.

Anti-War Sentiments in Trojan Women
'The Women of Troy' as a Warning: The Downfall of Even the Greatest Individuals

Wikipedia Entries for The Trojan Women

Introduction
Modern treatments and adaptations
Translations

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Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control

The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist..

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For the past three years, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet has told a story to millions of listeners across half a dozen shows: There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy, until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found science, he found exercise. And he became strong.

Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His podcast is revelatory largely because it does not condescend, which has not been the way of public-health information in our time. He does not give the impression of someone diluting science to universally applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses. “Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s released volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube.

In This Issue

Falling for dr. huberman.

Millions of people feel compelled to hear him draw distinctions between neuromodulators and classical neurotransmitters. Many of those people will then adopt an associated “protocol.” They will follow his elaborate morning routine. They will model the most basic functions of human life — sleeping, eating, seeing — on his sober advice. They will tell their friends to do the same. “He’s not like other bro podcasters,” they will say, and they will be correct; he is a tenured Stanford professor associated with a Stanford lab; he knows the difference between a neuromodulator and a neurotransmitter. He is just back from a sold-out tour in Australia, where he filled the Sydney Opera House. Stanford, at one point, hung signs (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY) apparently to deter fans in search of the lab.

With this power comes the power to lift other scientists out of their narrow silos and turn them, too, into celebrities, but these scientists will not be Huberman, whose personal appeal is distinct. Here we have a broad-minded professor puppyishly enamored with the wonders of biological function, generous to interviewees (“I love to be wrong”), engaged in endearing attempts to sound like a normal person (“Now, we all have to eat, and it’s nice to eat foods that we enjoy. I certainly do that. I love food, in fact”).

This is a world in which the soft art of self-care is made concrete, in which Goop-adjacent platitudes find solidity in peer review. “People go, ‘Oh, that feels kind of like weenie stuff,’” Huberman tells Joe Rogan. “The data show that gratitude, and avoiding toxic people and focusing on good-quality social interactions … huge increases in serotonin.” “Hmmm,” Rogan says. There is a kindness to the way Huberman reminds his audience always of the possibilities of neuroplasticity: They can change. He has changed. As an adolescent, he says, he endured the difficult divorce of his parents, a Stanford professor who worked in the tech industry and a children’s-book author. The period after the separation was, he says, one of “pure neglect.” His father was gone, his mother “totally checked out.” He was forced, around age 14, to endure a month of “youth detention,” a situation that was “not a jail,” but harrowing in its own right.

“The thing that really saved me,” Huberman tells Peter Attia, “was this therapy thing … I was like, Oh, shit … I do have to choke back a little bit here. It’s a crazy thing to have somebody say, ‘Listen,’ like, to give you the confidence, like, ‘We’re gonna figure this out. We’re gonna figure this out. ’ There’s something very powerful about that. It wasn’t like, you know, ‘Everything will be okay.’ It was like, We’re gonna figure this out. ”

The wayward son would devote himself to therapy and also to science. He would turn Rancid all the way up and study all night long. He would be tenured at Stanford with his own lab, severing optic nerves in mice and noting what grew back.

Huberman has been in therapy, he says, since high school. He has, in fact, several therapists, and psychiatrist Paul Conti appears on his podcast frequently to discuss mental health. Therapy is “hard work … like going to the gym and doing an effective workout.” The brain is a machine that needs tending. Our cells will benefit from the careful management of stress. “I love mechanism, ” says Huberman; our feelings are integral to the apparatus. There are Huberman Husbands (men who optimize), a phenomenon not to be confused with #DaddyHuberman (used by women on TikTok in the man’s thrall).

A prophet must constrain his self-revelation. He must give his story a shape that ultimately tends toward inner strength, weakness overcome. For Andrew Huberman to become your teacher and mine, as he very much was for a period this fall — a period in which I diligently absorbed sun upon waking, drank no more than once a week, practiced physiological sighs in traffic, and said to myself, out loud in my living room, “I also love mechanism”; a period during which I began to think seriously, for the first time in my life, about reducing stress, and during which both my husband and my young child saw tangible benefit from repeatedly immersing themselves in frigid water; a period in which I realized that I not only liked this podcast but liked other women who liked this podcast — he must be, in some way, better than the rest of us.

Huberman sells a dream of control down to the cellular level. But something has gone wrong. In the midst of immense fame, a chasm has opened between the podcaster preaching dopaminergic restraint and a man, with newfound wealth, with access to a world unseen by most professors. The problem with a man always working on himself is that he may also be working on you.

Some of Andrew’s earliest Instagram posts are of his lab. We see smiling undergraduates “slicing, staining, and prepping brains” and a wall of framed science publications in which Huberman-authored papers appear: Nature, Cell Reports, The Journal of Neuroscience. In 2019, under the handle @hubermanlab, Andrew began posting straightforward educational videos in which he talks directly into the camera about subjects such as the organizational logic of the brain stem. Sometimes he would talk over a simple anatomical sketch on lined paper; the impression was, as it is now, of a fast-talking teacher in conversation with an intelligent student. The videos amassed a fan base, and Andrew was, in 2020, invited on some of the biggest podcasts in the world. On Lex Fridman Podcast, he talked about experiments his lab was conducting by inducing fear in people. On The Rich Roll Podcast, the relationship between breathing and motivation. On The Joe Rogan Experience, experiments his lab was conducting on mice.

He was a fluid, engaging conversationalist, rich with insight and informed advice. In a year of death and disease, when many felt a sense of agency slipping away, Huberman had a gentle plan. The subtext was always the same: We may live in chaos, but there are mechanisms of control.

By then he had a partner, Sarah, which is not her real name. Sarah was someone who could talk to anyone about anything. She was dewy and strong and in her mid-40s, though she looked a decade younger, with two small kids from a previous relationship. She had old friends who adored her and no trouble making new ones. She came across as scattered in the way she jumped readily from topic to topic in conversation, losing the thread before returning to it, but she was in fact extremely organized. She was a woman who kept track of things. She was an entrepreneur who could organize a meeting, a skill she would need later for reasons she could not possibly have predicted. When I asked her a question in her home recently, she said the answer would be on an old phone; she stood up, left for only a moment, and returned with a box labeled OLD PHONES.

Sarah’s relationship with Andrew began in February 2018 in the Bay Area, where they both lived. He messaged her on Instagram and said he owned a home in Piedmont, a wealthy city separate from Oakland. That turned out not to be precisely true; he lived off Piedmont Avenue, which was in Oakland. He was courtly and a bit formal, as he would later be on the podcast. In July, in her garden, Sarah says she asked to clarify the depth of their relationship. They decided, she says, to be exclusive.

Both had devoted their lives to healthy living: exercise, good food, good information. They cared immoderately about what went into their bodies. Andrew could command a room and clearly took pleasure in doing so. He was busy and handsome, healthy and extremely ambitious. He gave the impression of working on himself; throughout their relationship, he would talk about “repair” and “healthy merging.” He was devoted to his bullmastiff, Costello, whom he worried over constantly: Was Costello comfortable? Sleeping properly? Andrew liked to dote on the dog, she says, and he liked to be doted on by Sarah. “I was never sitting around him,” she says. She cooked for him and felt glad when he relished what she had made. Sarah was willing to have unprotected sex because she believed they were monogamous.

On Thanksgiving in 2018, Sarah planned to introduce Andrew to her parents and close friends. She was cooking. Andrew texted repeatedly to say he would be late, then later. According to a friend, “he was just, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be there. Oh, I’m going to be running hours late.’ And then of course, all of these things were planned around his arrival and he just kept going, ‘Oh, I’m going to be late.’ And then it’s the end of the night and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry this and this happened.’”

Huberman disappearing was something of a pattern. Friends, girlfriends, and colleagues describe him as hard to reach. The list of reasons for not showing up included a book, time-stamping the podcast, Costello, wildfires, and a “meetings tunnel.” “He is flaky and doesn’t respond to things,” says his friend Brian MacKenzie, a health influencer who has collaborated with him on breathing protocols. “And if you can’t handle that, Andrew definitely is not somebody you want to be close to.” “He in some ways disappeared,” says David Spiegel, a Stanford psychiatrist who calls Andrew “prodigiously smart” and “intensely engaging.” “I mean, I recently got a really nice email from him. Which I was touched by. I really was.”

In 2018, before he was famous, Huberman invited a Colorado-based investigative journalist and anthropologist, Scott Carney, to his home in Oakland for a few days; the two would go camping and discuss their mutual interest in actionable science. It had been Huberman, a fan of Carney’s book What Doesn’t Kill Us, who initially reached out, and the two became friendly over phone and email. Huberman confirmed Carney’s list of camping gear: sleeping bag, bug spray, boots.

When Carney got there, the two did not go camping. Huberman simply disappeared for most of a day and a half while Carney stayed home with Costello. He puttered around Huberman’s place, buying a juice, walking through the neighborhood, waiting for him to return. “It was extremely weird,” says Carney. Huberman texted from elsewhere saying he was busy working on a grant. (A spokesperson for Huberman says he clearly communicated to Carney that he went to work.) Eventually, instead of camping, the two went on a few short hikes.

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back. ”

Andrew Huberman declined to be interviewed for this story. Through a spokesman, Huberman says he did not become exclusive with Sarah until late 2021, that he was not doted on, that tasks between him and Sarah were shared “based on mutual agreement and proficiency,” that their Thanksgiving plans were tentative, and that he “maintains a very busy schedule and shows up to the vast majority of his commitments.”

In the fall of 2020, Huberman sold his home in Oakland and rented one in Topanga, a wooded canyon enclave contiguous with Los Angeles. When he came back to Stanford, he stayed with Sarah, and when he was in Topanga, Sarah was often with him.

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man. “I experienced his rage,” Sarah recalls, “as two to three days of yelling in a row. When he was in this state, he would go on until 11 or 12 at night and sometimes start again at two or three in the morning.”

The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that? ” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

Sarah was not the only person who experienced the extent of Andrew’s anger. In 2019, Carney sent Huberman materials from his then-forthcoming book, The Wedge, in which Huberman appears. He asked Huberman to confirm the parts in which he was mentioned. For months, Huberman did not respond. Carney sent a follow-up email; if Huberman did not respond, he would assume everything was accurate. In 2020, after months of saying he was too busy to review the materials, Huberman called him and, Carney says, came at him in a rage. “I’ve never had a source I thought was friendly go bananas,” says Carney. Screaming, Huberman threatened to sue and accused Carney of “violating Navy OpSec.”

It had become, by then, one of the most perplexing relationships of Carney’s life. That year, Carney agreed to Huberman’s invitation to swim with sharks on an island off Mexico. First, Carney would have to spend a month of his summer getting certified in Denver. He did, at considerable expense. Huberman then canceled the trip a day before they were set to leave. “I think Andrew likes building up people’s expectations,” says Carney, “and then he actually enjoys the opportunity to pull the rug out from under you.”

In January 2021, Huberman launched his own podcast. Its reputation would be directly tied to his role as teacher and scientist. “I’d like to emphasize that this podcast,” he would say every episode, with his particular combination of formality and discursiveness, “is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.”

“I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that,” Huberman would say on an episode in 2024. “Loneliness,” his interviewee said, “is a need state.” In 2021, the country was in the later stages of a need state: bored, alone, powerless. Huberman offered not only hours of educative listening but a plan to structure your day. A plan for waking. For eating. For exercising. For sleep. At a time when life had shifted to screens, he brought people back to their corporeal selves. He advised a “physiological sigh” — two short breaths in and a long one out — to reduce stress. He pulled countless people from their laptops and put them in rhythm with the sun. “Thank you for all you do to better humanity,” read comments on YouTube. “You may have just saved my life man.” “If Andrew were science teacher for everyone in the world,” someone wrote, “no one would have missed even a single class.”

Asked by Time last year for his definition of fun, Huberman said, “I learn and I like to exercise.” Among his most famous episodes is one in which he declares moderate drinking decidedly unhealthy. As MacKenzie puts it, “I don’t think anybody or anything, including Prohibition, has ever made more people think about alcohol than Andrew Huberman.” While he claims repeatedly that he doesn’t want to “demonize alcohol,” he fails to mask his obvious disapproval of anyone who consumes alcohol in any quantity. He follows a time-restricted eating schedule. He discusses constraint even in joy, because a dopamine spike is invariably followed by a drop below baseline; he explains how even a small pleasure like a cup of coffee before every workout reduces the capacity to release dopamine. Huberman frequently refers to the importance of “social contact” and “peace, contentment, and delight,” always mentioned as a triad; these are ultimately leveraged for the one value consistently espoused: physiological health.

In August 2021, Sarah says she read Andrew’s journal and discovered a reference to cheating. She was, she says, “gutted.” “I hear you are saying you are angry and hurt,” he texted her the same day. “I will hear you as much as long as needed for us.”

Andrew and Sarah wanted children together. Optimizers sometimes prefer not to conceive naturally; one can exert more control when procreation involves a lab. Sarah began the first of several rounds of IVF. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies that he and Sarah had decided to have children together, clarifying that they “decided to create embryos by IVF.”)

In 2021, she tested positive for a high-risk form of HPV, one of the variants linked to cervical cancer. “I had never tested positive,” she says, “and had been tested regularly for ten years.” (A spokesperson for Huberman says he has never tested positive for HPV. According to the CDC, there is currently no approved test for HPV in men.) When she brought it up, she says, he told her you could contract HPV from many things.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about truth-telling and deception,” Andrew told evolutionary psychologist David Buss on a November 2021 episode of Huberman Lab called “How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term.” They were talking about regularities across cultures in mate preferences.

“Could you tell us,” Andrew asked, “about how men and women leverage deception versus truth-telling and communicating some of the things around mate choice selection?”

“Effective tactics for men,” said a gravel-voiced, 68-year-old Buss, “are often displaying cues to long-term interest … men tend to exaggerate the depths of their feelings for a woman.”

“Let’s talk about infidelity in committed relationships,” Andrew said, laughing. “I’m guessing it does happen.”

“Men who have affairs tend to have affairs with a larger number of affair partners,” said Buss. “And so which then by definition can’t be long-lasting. You can’t,” added Buss wryly, “have the long-term affairs with six different partners.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew, “unless he’s, um,” and here Andrew looked into the distance. “Juggling multiple, uh, phone accounts or something of that sort.”

“Right, right, right, and some men try to do that, but I think it could be very taxing,” said Buss.

By 2022, Andrew was legitimately famous. Typical headlines read “I tried a Stanford professor’s top productivity routine” and “Google CEO Uses ‘Nonsleep Deep Rest’ to Relax.” Reese Witherspoon told the world that she was sure to get ten minutes of sunlight in the morning and tagged Andrew. When he was not on his own podcast, Andrew was on someone else’s. He kept the place in Topanga, but he and Sarah began splitting rent in Berkeley. In June 2022, they fully combined lives; Sarah relocated her family to Malibu to be with him.

According to Sarah, Andrew’s rage intensified with cohabitation. He fixated on her decision to have children with another man. She says he told her that being with her was like “bobbing for apples in feces.” “The pattern of your 11 years, while rooted in subconscious drives,” he told her in December 2021, “creates a nearly impossible set of hurdles for us … You have to change.”

Sarah was, in fact, changing. She felt herself getting smaller, constantly appeasing. She apologized, again and again and again. “I have been selfish, childish, and confused,” she said. “As a result, I need your protection.” A spokesperson for Huberman denies Sarah’s accounts of their fights, denies that his rage intensified with cohabitation, denies that he fixated on Sarah’s decision to have children with another man, and denies that he said being with her was like bobbing for apples in feces. A spokesperson said, “Dr. Huberman is very much in control of his emotions.”

The first three rounds of IVF did not produce healthy embryos. In the spring of 2022, enraged again about her past, Andrew asked Sarah to explain in detail what he called her bad choices, most especially having her second child. She wrote it out and read it aloud to him. A spokesperson for Huberman denies this incident and says he does not regard her having a second child as a bad choice.

I think it’s important to recognize that we might have a model of who someone is,” says Dossett, “or a model of how someone should conduct themselves. And if they do something that is out of sync with that model, it’s like, well, that might not necessarily be on that person. Maybe it’s on us. Our model was just off.”

Huberman’s specialty lies in a narrow field: visual-system wiring. How comfortable one feels with the science propagated on Huberman Lab depends entirely on how much leeway one is willing to give a man who expounds for multiple hours a week on subjects well outside his area of expertise. His detractors note that Huberman extrapolates wildly from limited animal studies, posits certainty where there is ambiguity, and stumbles when he veers too far from his narrow realm of study, but even they will tend to admit that the podcast is an expansive, free (or, as he puts it, “zero-cost”) compendium of human knowledge. There are quack guests, but these are greatly outnumbered by profound, complex, patient, and often moving descriptions of biological process.

Huberman Lab is premised on the image of a working scientist. One imagines clean white counters, rodents in cages, postdocs peering into microscopes. “As scientists,” Huberman says frequently. He speaks often, too, of the importance of mentorship. He “loves” reading teacher evaluations. On the web, one can visit the lab and even donate. I have never met a Huberman listener who doubted the existence of such a place, and this appears to be by design. In a glowing 2023 profile in Stanford magazine, we learn “Everything he does is inspired by this love,” but do not learn that Huberman lives 350 miles and a six-hour drive from Stanford University, making it difficult to drop into the lab. Compounding the issue is the fact that the lab, according to knowledgeable sources, barely exists.

“Is a postdoc working on her own funding, alone, a ‘lab?’” asks a researcher at Stanford. There had been a lab — four rooms on the second floor of the Sherman Fairchild Science Building. Some of them smelled of mice. It was here that researchers anesthetized rodents, injected them with fluorescence, damaged their optic nerves, and watched for the newly bright nerves to grow back.

The lab, says the researcher, was already scaling down before COVID. It was emptying out, postdocs apparently unsupervised, a quarter-million-dollar laser-scanning microscope gathering dust. Once the researcher saw someone come in and reclaim a $3,500 rocker, a machine for mixing solutions.

Shortly before publication, a spokesperson for Stanford said, “Dr. Huberman’s lab at Stanford is operational and is in the process of moving from the Department of Neurobiology to the Department of Ophthalmology,” and a spokesperson for Huberman says the equipment in Dr. Huberman’s lab remained in use until the last postdoc moved to a faculty position.

On every episode of his “zero-cost” podcast, Huberman gives a lengthy endorsement of a powder formerly known as Athletic Greens and now as AG1. It is one thing to hear Athletic Greens promoted by Joe Rogan; it is perhaps another to hear someone who sells himself as a Stanford University scientist just back from the lab proclaim that this $79-a-month powder “covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.” In an industry not noted for its integrity, AG1 is, according to writer and professional debunker Derek Beres, “one of the most egregious players in the space.” Here we have a powder that contains, according to its own marketing, 75 active ingredients, far more than the typical supplement, which would seem a selling point but for the inconveniences of mass. As performance nutritionist Adam McDonald points out, the vast number of ingredients indicates that each ingredient, which may or may not promote good health in a certain dose, is likely included in minuscule amounts, though consumers are left to do the math themselves; the company keeps many of the numbers proprietary. “We can be almost guaranteed that literally every supplement or ingredient within this proprietary blend is underdosed,” explains McDonald; the numbers, he says, don’t appear to add up to anything research has shown to be meaningful in terms of human health outcomes. And indeed, “the problem with most of the probiotics is they’re typically not concentrated enough to actually colonize,” one learns from Dr. Layne Norton in a November 2022 episode of Huberman Lab. (AG1 argues that probiotics are effective and that the 75 ingredients are “included not only for their individual benefit, but for the synergy between them — how ingredients interact in complex ways, and how combinations can lead to additive effects.”) “That’s the good news about podcasts,” Huberman said when Wendy Zukerman of Science Vs pointed out that her podcast would never make recommendations based on such tenuous research. “People can choose which podcast they want to listen to.”

Whenever Sarah had suspicions about Andrew’s interactions with another woman, he had a particular way of talking about the woman in question. She says he said the women were stalkers, alcoholics, and compulsive liars. He told her that one woman tore out her hair with chunks of flesh attached to it. He told her a story about a woman who fabricated a story about a dead baby to “entrap” him. (A spokesperson for Huberman denies the account of the denigration of women and the dead-baby story and says the hair story was taken out of context.) Most of the time, Sarah believed him; the women probably were crazy. He was a celebrity. He had to be careful.

It was in August 2022 that Sarah noticed she and Andrew could not go out without being thronged by people. On a camping trip in Washington State that same month, Sarah brought syringes and a cooler with ice packs. Every day of the trip, he injected the drugs meant to stimulate fertility into her stomach. This was round four.

Later that month, Sarah says she grabbed Andrew’s phone when he had left it in the bathroom, checked his texts, and found conversations with someone we will call Eve. Some of them took place during the camping trip they had just taken.

“Your feelings matter,” he told Eve on a day when he had injected his girlfriend with hCG. “I’m actually very much a caretaker.” And later: “I’m back on grid tomorrow and would love to see you this weekend.”

Caught having an affair, Andrew was apologetic. “The landscape has been incredibly hard,” he said. “I let the stress get to me … I defaulted to self safety … I’ve also sat with the hardest of feelings.” “I hear your insights,” he said, “and honestly I appreciate them.”

Sarah noticed how courteous he was with Eve. “So many offers,” she pointed out, “to process and work through things.”

Eve is an ethereally beautiful actress, the kind of woman from whom it is hard to look away. Where Sarah exudes a winsome chaotic energy, Eve is intimidatingly collected. Eve saw Andrew on Raya in 2020 and messaged him on Instagram. They went for a swim in Venice, and he complimented her form. “You’re definitely,” he said, “on the faster side of the distribution.” She found him to be an extraordinary listener, and she liked the way he appeared to be interested in her internal life. He was busy all the time: with his book, and eventually the podcast; his dog; responsibilities at Stanford. “I’m willing to do the repair work on this,” he said when she called him out for standing her up, or, “This sucks, but doesn’t deter my desire and commitment to see you, and establish clear lines of communication and trust.” Despite his endless excuses for not showing up, he seemed, to Eve, to be serious about deepening their relationship, which lasted on and off for two years. Eve had the impression that he was not seeing anyone else: She was willing to have unprotected sex.

As their relationship intensified over the years, he talked often about the family he one day wanted. “Our children would be amazing,” he said. She asked for book recommendations and he suggested, jokingly, Huberman: Why We Made Babies. “I’m at the stage of life where I truly want to build a family,” he told her. “That’s a resounding theme for me.” “How to mesh lives,” he said in a voice memo. “A fundamental question.” One time she heard him say, on Joe Rogan, that he had a girlfriend. She texted him to ask about it, and he responded immediately. He had a stalker, he said, and so his team had decided to invent a partner for the listening public. (“I later learned,” Eve tells me with characteristic equanimity, “that this was not true.”)

In September 2022, Eve noticed that Sarah was looking at her Instagram stories; not commenting or liking, just looking. Impulsively, Eve messaged her. “Is there anything you’d rather ask me directly?” she said. They set up a call. “Fuck you Andrew,” she messaged him.

Sarah moved out in August 2023 but says she remained in a committed relationship with Huberman. (A spokesperson for Huberman says they were separated.) At Thanksgiving that year, she noticed he was “wiggly” every time a cell phone came out at the table — trying to avoid, she suspected, being photographed. She says she did not leave him until December. According to Sarah, the relationship ended, as it had started, with a lie. He had been at her place for a couple of days and left for his place to prepare for a Zoom call; they planned to go Christmas shopping the next day. Sarah showed up at his house and found him on the couch with another woman. She could see them through the window. “If you’re going to be a cheater,” she advises me later, “do not live in a glass house.”

On January 11, a woman we’ll call Alex began liking all of Sarah’s Instagram posts, seven of them in a minute. Sarah messaged her: “I think you’re friends with my ex, Andrew Huberman. Are you one of the woman he cheated on me with?” Alex is an intense, direct, highly educated woman who lives in New York; she was sleeping with Andrew; and she had no idea there had been a girlfriend. “Fuck,” she said. “I think we should talk.” Over the following weeks, Sarah and Alex never stopped texting. “She helped me hold my boundary against him,” says Sarah, “keep him blocked. She said, ‘You need to let go of the idea of him.’” Instead of texting Andrew, Sarah texted Alex. Sometimes they just talked about their days and not about Andrew at all. Sarah still thought beautiful Eve, on the other hand, “might be crazy,” but they talked some more and brought her into the group chat. Soon there were others. There was Mary: a dreamy, charismatic Texan he had been seeing for years. Her friends called Andrew “bread crumbs,” given his tendency to disappear. There was a fifth woman in L.A., funny and fast-talking. Alex had been apprehensive; she felt foolish for believing Andrew’s lies and worried that the other women would seem foolish, therefore compounding her shame. Foolish women were not, however, what she found. Each of the five was assertive and successful and educated and sharp-witted; there had been a type, and they were diverse expressions of that type. “I can’t believe how crazy I thought you were,” Mary told Sarah. No one struck anyone else as a stalker. No one had made up a story about a dead baby or torn out hair with chunks in it. “I haven’t slept with anyone but him for six years,” Sarah told the group. “If it makes you feel any better,” Alex joked, “according to the CDC,” they had all slept with one another.

The women compared time-stamped screenshots of texts and assembled therein an extraordinary record of deception.

There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.

They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he met Eve. They had a serious talk about their relationship. They thought they were in a good place. He wanted to make it work.

“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you … For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”

“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.

“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely schedule three Zooms in a day.”

In the aggregate, Andrew’s therapeutic language took on a sinister edge. It was communicating a commitment that was not real, a profound interest in the internality of women that was then used to manipulate them.

“Does Huberman have vices?” asks an anonymous Reddit poster.

“I remember him saying,” reads the first comment, “that he loves croissants.”

While Huberman has been criticized for having too few women guests on his podcast, he is solicitous and deferential toward those he interviews. In a January 2023 episode, Dr. Sara Gottfried argues that “patriarchal messaging” and white supremacy contribute to the deterioration of women’s health, and Andrew responds with a story about how his beloved trans mentor, Ben Barres, had experienced “intense suppression/oppression” at MIT before transitioning. “Psychology is influencing biology,” he says with concern. “And you’re saying these power dynamics … are impacting it.”

In private, he could sometimes seem less concerned about patriarchy. Multiple women recall him saying he preferred the kind of relationship in which the woman was monogamous but the man was not. “He told me,” says Mary, “that what he wanted was a woman who was submissive, who he could slap in the ass in public, and who would be crawling on the floor for him when he got home.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.) The women continued to compare notes. He had his little ways of checking in: “Good morning beautiful.” There was a particular way he would respond to a sexy picture: “Mmmmm hi there.”

A spokesperson for Huberman insisted that he had not been monogamous with Sarah until late 2021, but a recorded conversation he had with Alex suggested that in May of that year he had led Sarah to believe otherwise. “Well, she was under the impression that we were exclusive at that time,” he said. “Women are not dumb like that, dude,” Alex responded. “She was under that impression? Then you were giving her that impression.” Andrew agreed: “That’s what I meant. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to put it on her.”

The kind of women to whom Andrew Huberman was attracted; the kind of women who were attracted to him — these were women who paid attention to what went into their bodies, women who made avoiding toxicity a central focus of their lives. They researched non-hormone-disrupting products, avoided sugar, ate organic. They were disgusted by the knowledge that they had had sex with someone who had an untold number of partners. All of them wondered how many others there were. When Sarah found Andrew with the other woman, there had been a black pickup truck in the driveway, and she had taken a picture. The women traced the plates, but they hit a dead end and never found her.

Tell us about the dark triad,” he had said to Buss in November on the trip in which he slept with Mary.

“The dark triad consists of three personality characteristics,” said Buss. “So narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” Such people “feign cooperation but then cheat on subsequent moves. They view other people as pawns to be manipulated for their own instrumental gains.” Those “who are high on dark-triad traits,” he said, “tend to be good at the art of seduction.” The vast majority of them were men.

Andrew told one of the women that he wasn’t a sex addict; he was a love addict. Addiction, Huberman says, “is a progressing narrowing of things that bring you joy.” In August 2021, the same month Sarah first learned of Andrew’s cheating, he released an episode with Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. Lembke, the author of a book called Dopamine Nation, gave a clear explanation of the dopaminergic roots of addiction.

“What happens right after I do something that is really pleasurable,” she says, “and releases a lot of dopamine is, again, my brain is going to immediately compensate by downregulating my own dopamine receptors … And that’s that comedown, or the hangover or that aftereffect, that moment of wanting to do it more.” Someone who waits for the feeling to pass, she explained, will reregulate, go back to baseline. “If I keep indulging again and again and again,” she said, “ultimately I have so much on the pain side that I’ve essentially reset my brain to what we call anhedonic or lacking-in-joy type of state, which is a dopamine deficit state.” This is a state in which nothing is enjoyable: “Everything sort of pales in comparison to this one drug that I want to keep doing.”

“Just for the record,” Andrew said, smiling, “Dr. Lembke has … diagnosed me outside the clinic, in a playful way, of being work addicted. You’re probably right!”

Lembke laughed. “You just happen to be addicted,” she said gently, “to something that is really socially rewarded.”

What he failed to understand, he said, was people who ruined their lives with their disease. “I like to think I have the compassion,” he said, “but I don’t have that empathy for taking a really good situation and what from the outside looks to be throwing it in the trash.”

At least three ex-girlfriends remain friendly with Huberman. He “goes deep very quickly,” says Keegan Amit, who dated Andrew from 2010 to 2017 and continues to admire him. “He has incredible emotional capacity.” A high-school girlfriend says both she and he were “troubled” during their time together, that he was complicated and jealous but “a good person” whom she parted with on good terms. “He really wants to get involved emotionally but then can’t quite follow through,” says someone he dated on and off between 2006 and 2010. “But yeah. I don’t think it’s …” She hesitates. “I think he has such a good heart.”

Andrew grew up in Palo Alto just before the dawn of the internet, a lost city. He gives some version of his origin story on The Rich Roll Podcast ; he repeats it for Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. He tells Time magazine and Stanford magazine. “Take the list of all the things a parent shouldn’t do in a divorce,” he recently told Christian bowhunter Cameron Hanes. “They did them all.” “You had,” says Wendy Zukerman in her bright Aussie accent, “a wayward childhood.” “I think it’s very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours,” says Tim Ferriss, “to sort of assume a certain trajectory, right? To assume that it has always come easy.” His father and mother agree that “after our divorce was an incredibly hard time for Andrew,” though they “do not agree” with some of his characterization of his past; few parents want to be accused of “pure neglect.”

Huberman would not provide the name of the detention center in which he says he was held for a month in high school. In a version of the story Huberman tells on Peter Attia’s podcast, he says, “We lost a couple of kids, a couple of kids killed themselves while we were there.” ( New York was unable to find an account of this event.)

Andrew attended Gunn, a high-performing, high-pressure high school. Classmates describe him as always with a skateboard; they remember him as pleasant, “sweet,” and not particularly academic. He would, says one former classmate, “drop in on the half-pipe,” where he was “encouraging” to other skaters. “I mean, he was a cool, individual kid,” says another classmate. “There was one year he, like, bleached his hair and everyone was like, ‘Oh, that guy’s cool.’” It was a wealthy place, the kind of setting where the word au pair comes up frequently, and Andrew did not stand out to his classmates as out of control or unpredictable. They do not recall him getting into street fights, as Andrew claims he did. He was, says Andrew’s father, “a little bit troubled, yes, but it was not something super-serious.”

What does seem certain is that in his adolescence, Andrew became a regular consumer of talk therapy. In therapy, one learns to tell stories about one’s experience. A story one could tell is: I overcame immense odds to be where I am. Another is: The son of a Stanford professor, born at Stanford Hospital, grows up to be a Stanford professor.

I have never,” says Amit, “met a man more interested in personal growth.” Andrew’s relationship to therapy remains intriguing. “We were at dinner once,” says Eve, “and he told me something personal, and I suggested he talk to his therapist. He laughed it off like that wasn’t ever going to happen, so I asked him if he lied to his therapist. He told me he did all the time.” (A spokesperson for Huberman denies this.)

“People high on psychopathy are good at deception,” says Buss. “I don’t know if they’re good at self-deception.” With repeated listening to the podcast, one discerns a man undergoing, in public, an effort to understand himself. There are hours of talking about addiction, trauma, dopamine, and fear. Narcissism comes up consistently. One can see attempts to understand and also places where those attempts swerve into self-indulgence. On a recent episode with the Stanford-trained psychiatrist Paul Conti, Andrew and Conti were describing the psychological phenomenon of “aggressive drive.” Andrew had an example to share: He once canceled an appointment with a Stanford colleague. There was no response. Eventually, he received a reply that said, in Andrew’s telling, “Well, it’s clear that you don’t want to pursue this collaboration.”

Andrew was, he said to Conti, “shocked.”

“I remember feeling like that was pretty aggressive,” Andrew told Conti. “It stands out to me as a pretty salient example of aggression.”

“So to me,” said Huberman, “that seems like an example of somebody who has a, well, strong aggressive drive … and when disappointed, you know, lashes back or is passive.”

“There’s some way in which the person doesn’t feel good enough no matter what this person has achieved. So then there is a sense of the need and the right to overcontrol.”

“Sure,” said Huberman.

“And now we’re going to work together, right, so I’m exerting significant control over you, right? And it may be that he’s not aware of it.”

“In this case,” said Andrew, “it was a she.”

This woman, explained Conti, based entirely on Andrew’s description of two emails, had allowed her unhealthy “excess aggression” to be “eclipsing the generative drive.” She required that Andrew “bowed down before” her “in the service of the ego” because she did not feel good about herself.

This conversation extends for an extraordinary nine minutes, both men egging each other on, diagnosis after diagnosis, salient, perhaps, for reasons other than those the two identify. We learn that this person lacks gratitude, generative drive, and happiness; she suffers from envy, low “pleasure drive,” and general unhappiness. It would appear, at a distance, to be an elaborate fantasy of an insane woman built on a single behavior: At some point in time, a woman decided she did not want to work with a man who didn’t show up.

There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others. Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh, employed by this writer many times in the writing of this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the man he continues to be may not even matter to those who buy questionable products he has recommended and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo Alto. The people who definitively find the space between fantasy and reality to be a problem are women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep, sustained concern for their personal growth, and who, in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration, that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to more.

“There’s so much pain,” says Sarah, her voice breaking. “Feeling we had made mistakes. We hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t been communicating. By making these other women into the other, I hadn’t really given space for their hurt. And let it sink in with me that it was so similar to my own hurt.”

Three of the women on the group text met up in New York in February, and the group has only grown closer. On any given day, one of the five can go into an appointment and come back to 100 texts. Someone shared a Reddit thread in which a commenter claimed Huberman had a “stable full a hoes,” and another responded, “I hope he thinks of us more like Care Bears,” at which point they assigned themselves Care Bear names. “Him: You’re the only girl I let come to my apartment,” read a meme someone shared; under it was a yellow lab looking extremely skeptical. They regularly use Andrew’s usual response to explicit photos (“Mmmmm”) to comment on pictures of one another’s pets. They are holding space for other women who might join.

“This group has radicalized me,” Sarah tells me. “There has been so much processing.” They are planning a weekend together this summer.

“It could have been sad or bitter,” says Eve. “We didn’t jump in as besties, but real friendships have been built. It has been, in a strange and unlikely way, quite a beautiful experience.”

Additional reporting by Amelia Schonbek and Laura Thompson.

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LSU coach Kim Mulkey responds to questions about Washington Post profile by saying she hasn’t read it

Head coach Kim Mulkey of the LSU Lady Tigers

Kim Mulkey, the legendary Louisiana State University women's basketball coach, said twice Saturday she hadn't yet read The Washington Post's profile on her everlasting athletic career .

“Are you really surprised by the timing of it?” she rhetorically asked a reporter ahead of the Tigers' Sweet 16 appearance against UCLA, which LSU won 78-69, paving their way to the Elite Eight and a possible second straight national title .

The highly anticipated article by reporter Kent Babb was published hours before the game.

“I haven’t read it,” Mulkey said of the article, adding that she doesn't “know that I will read it” and that it will be left up to her attorneys whether she does.

Mulkey lashed out at the Post at a news conference on March 23.

She said the reporter, whom she did not name, had been trying for two years to get her to sit for an interview for the piece, and then contacted LSU on March 19 “as we were getting ready for the first-round game of this tournament with more than a dozen questions, demanding a response by Thursday, right before we’re scheduled to tip off.”

She called the deadline “ridiculous” and said she “could not possibly meet it.”

“It was just an attempt to prevent me from commenting and an attempt to distract us from this tournament. It ain’t going to work, buddy,” Mulkey continued.

She threatened to “sue The Washington Post if they publish a false story about me.”

“Not many people are in a position to hold these kind of journalists accountable, but I am, and I’ll do it,” Mulkey said during the news conference.

The article, published a week after those comments as LSU cruises through the women’s March Madness bracket, delves into Mulkey’s history as both a basketball player and coach.

It touches on personal stories about her family and upbringing — including her strained relationship with her father and sister — details her legendary career as a player at Louisiana Tech, and lays out her history with some of her former players, including Brittney Griner , Kelli Griffin and Emily Niemann, who have questioned whether Mulkey supported their sexuality.

The story paints a picture of a highly skilled player who won two national championships while at Louisiana Tech and an Olympic gold medal for Team USA in 1984, and of a complex and driven coach who has had many highs — including four national titles, three while she led the Baylor Lady Bears.

She has also been mired in controversy, the article lays out, with one former teammate of Mulkey's saying she wished Mulkey had made more of a statement in support of Griner while she was detained in a Russian prison , save for one comment on a radio show.

Speaking Saturday at a postgame conference following LSU's win, Mulkey again said she hadn't read the Post's article and acted surprised to learn it was published just hours before her team hit the court.

“Imagine that. Must have thought y'all would look at it, right, get some clicks or be a distraction. I haven't read it and I probably won't read it. I probably will have my attorneys communicate with me to see if there's anything there that we need to be concerned about," Mulkey told reporters.

Asked for comment about the Post article, a representative for LSU pointed NBC News to Mulkey's postgame conference.

LSU plays the Iowa Hawkeyes on Monday for a spot in the Final Four.

Rebecca Cohen is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.

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That Viral Essay Wasn’t About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

But both tactics are flawed if you want to have any hope of becoming yourself..

Women are wisest, a viral essay in New York magazine’s the Cut argues , to maximize their most valuable cultural assets— youth and beauty—and marry older men when they’re still very young. Doing so, 27-year-old writer Grazie Sophia Christie writes, opens up a life of ease, and gets women off of a male-defined timeline that has our professional and reproductive lives crashing irreconcilably into each other. Sure, she says, there are concessions, like one’s freedom and entire independent identity. But those are small gives in comparison to a life in which a person has no adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to become oneself.

This is all framed as rational, perhaps even feminist advice, a way for women to quit playing by men’s rules and to reject exploitative capitalist demands—a choice the writer argues is the most obviously intelligent one. That other Harvard undergraduates did not busy themselves trying to attract wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy men seems to flummox her (taking her “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out” to the Harvard Business School library, “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”). But it’s nothing more than a recycling of some of the oldest advice around: For women to mold themselves around more-powerful men, to never grow into independent adults, and to find happiness in a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, submission, and dependence. These are odd choices for an aspiring writer (one wonders what, exactly, a girl who never wants to grow up and has no idea who she is beyond what a man has made her into could possibly have to write about). And it’s bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.

But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

These, by the way, are the things she says are benefits of marrying older.

The downsides are many, including a basic inability to express a full range of human emotion (“I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that constrains the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”) and an understanding that she owes back, in some other form, what he materially provides (the most revealing line in the essay may be when she claims that “when someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them”). It is clear that part of what she has paid in exchange for a paid-for life is a total lack of any sense of self, and a tacit agreement not to pursue one. “If he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive,” she writes, “but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.”

Reading Christie’s essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion’s on self-respect , in which Didion argues that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” Self-respect may not make life effortless and easy. But it means that whenever “we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” at least we can fall asleep.

It can feel catty to publicly criticize another woman’s romantic choices, and doing so inevitably opens one up to accusations of jealousy or pettiness. But the stories we tell about marriage, love, partnership, and gender matter, especially when they’re told in major culture-shaping magazines. And it’s equally as condescending to say that women’s choices are off-limits for critique, especially when those choices are shared as universal advice, and especially when they neatly dovetail with resurgent conservative efforts to make women’s lives smaller and less independent. “Marry rich” is, as labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards put it in Bloomberg, essentially the Republican plan for mothers. The model of marriage as a hierarchy with a breadwinning man on top and a younger, dependent, submissive woman meeting his needs and those of their children is not exactly a fresh or groundbreaking ideal. It’s a model that kept women trapped and miserable for centuries.

It’s also one that profoundly stunted women’s intellectual and personal growth. In her essay for the Cut, Christie seems to believe that a life of ease will abet a life freed up for creative endeavors, and happiness. But there’s little evidence that having material abundance and little adversity actually makes people happy, let alone more creatively generativ e . Having one’s basic material needs met does seem to be a prerequisite for happiness. But a meaningful life requires some sense of self, an ability to look outward rather than inward, and the intellectual and experiential layers that come with facing hardship and surmounting it.

A good and happy life is not a life in which all is easy. A good and happy life (and here I am borrowing from centuries of philosophers and scholars) is one characterized by the pursuit of meaning and knowledge, by deep connections with and service to other people (and not just to your husband and children), and by the kind of rich self-knowledge and satisfaction that comes from owning one’s choices, taking responsibility for one’s life, and doing the difficult and endless work of growing into a fully-formed person—and then evolving again. Handing everything about one’s life over to an authority figure, from the big decisions to the minute details, may seem like a path to ease for those who cannot stomach the obligations and opportunities of their own freedom. It’s really an intellectual and emotional dead end.

And what kind of man seeks out a marriage like this, in which his only job is to provide, but very much is owed? What kind of man desires, as the writer cast herself, a raw lump of clay to be molded to simply fill in whatever cracks in his life needed filling? And if the transaction is money and guidance in exchange for youth, beauty, and pliability, what happens when the young, beautiful, and pliable party inevitably ages and perhaps feels her backbone begin to harden? What happens if she has children?

The thing about using youth and beauty as a currency is that those assets depreciate pretty rapidly. There is a nearly endless supply of young and beautiful women, with more added each year. There are smaller numbers of wealthy older men, and the pool winnows down even further if one presumes, as Christie does, that many of these men want to date and marry compliant twentysomethings. If youth and beauty are what you’re exchanging for a man’s resources, you’d better make sure there’s something else there—like the basic ability to provide for yourself, or at the very least a sense of self—to back that exchange up.

It is hard to be an adult woman; it’s hard to be an adult, period. And many women in our era of unfinished feminism no doubt find plenty to envy about a life in which they don’t have to work tirelessly to barely make ends meet, don’t have to manage the needs of both children and man-children, could simply be taken care of for once. This may also explain some of the social media fascination with Trad Wives and stay-at-home girlfriends (some of that fascination is also, I suspect, simply a sexual submission fetish , but that’s another column). Fantasies of leisure reflect a real need for it, and American women would be far better off—happier, freer—if time and resources were not so often so constrained, and doled out so inequitably.

But the way out is not actually found in submission, and certainly not in electing to be carried by a man who could choose to drop you at any time. That’s not a life of ease. It’s a life of perpetual insecurity, knowing your spouse believes your value is decreasing by the day while his—an actual dollar figure—rises. A life in which one simply allows another adult to do all the deciding for them is a stunted life, one of profound smallness—even if the vacations are nice.

Voters will face two referendum questions regarding outside funding of election administration. How to understand these questions

MADISON — Wisconsin voters will see two referendum questions related to election administration on their April 2 ballots — and in the days leading up to the election, they may also see messaging seeking to steer their vote.

Republicans and conservative groups are encouraging voters to support the measures with a "yes" vote, while Democrats and liberal groups are advocating for "no." The two questions, which all Wisconsin voters will see on their ballots, are written as follows:

QUESTION 1: "Use of private funds in election administration. Shall section 7 (1) of article III of the constitution be created to provide that private donations and grants may not be applied for, accepted, expended, or used in connection with the conduct of any primary, election, or referendum?"

QUESTION 2: "Election officials. Shall section 7 (2) of article III of the constitution be created to provide that only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums?"

Voting "yes" on the first question means private grants and donations would be banned in election administration going forward, while a "no" vote would continue to allow them. A "yes" vote on the second question would add to the state Constitution that only election officials can perform tasks, while a "no" vote would not add that.

The proposals are rooted in Republicans' longstanding scrutiny of millions of dollars in private grants, which they often call "Zuckerbucks." The bulk of the money provided by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which at the time received funding from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, went to the state's five largest cities to help them run elections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Clerks who received grants during the 2020 election said it helped them meet the unexpected costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as extra supplies to meet an influx of absentee voting, and have said accepting grants due to inadequate state, federal or local funding would not jeopardize their ability to administer elections fairly.

More: Wisconsin spring election live updates today: Presidential primary, referendums, polling places, ballot, registration info and more

More: Wisconsin's April 2 referendum questions and the 'Zuckerbucks' debate, explained

Here's a look at the messaging surrounding the referendum.

Conservatives encourage 'yes' votes

Republicans and conservative groups have supported voting "yes" on the questions based on concerns that outside groups could influence how elections are run. In one case, the Republican Party of Wisconsin brought in an Ohio congressman to make that point.

"Secure elections require proper election administration. That's why I'm encouraging everyone in Wisconsin to vote 'yes' on constitutional amendments 1 and 2," U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan said in a video Wednesday. He appeared alongside U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, who represents southeastern Wisconsin.

Republican former President Donald Trump's campaign is also backing the proposals with social media posts urging Wisconsin voters to "ban Zuckerbucks."

One conservative group is taking a slightly different tack. MacIver Impact, Inc. — the newly-created 501(c)4 arm of the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy — launched a digital advertising campaign in support of the ballot measures earlier this month. Although MacIver itself is a conservative organization, several ads prompt voters to "stop the NRA from buying elections" and "stop right-wing billionaires like Elon Musk from buying elections." Others, however, urge Wisconsinites to "keep Obama & Soros out of Wisconsin elections" and "ban Zuckerbucks." The ads are running on Facebook and Instagram.

"What happened during the 2020 election should never be allowed to happen again in Wisconsin. That means permanently ending organizations with outside interests from having a role in the administration of our elections,” said MacIver Impact CEO Annette Olson in a statement. “These common sense amendments would ban dark money from playing a role in administering elections, and MacIver Impact is proud to lead statewide efforts to encourage citizens to vote ‘yes.'"

Liberals advocate against proposals

Democrats and liberal groups have pushed for a "no" vote, arguing the proposed amendments are confusing and could impede the administration of elections barring the allocation of additional state funding.

An analysis from the Legislature's nonpartisan attorneys said the impact of adding the language to the state Constitution is unclear. State law already says that only appointed election officials can conduct elections, but doesn't say what activities count as conducting an election. The referendum doesn't specify that, either.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin weighed in on the amendments on March 19, endorsing a "no" vote on both questions. In a statement , party chairman Ben Wikler said Republicans were pushing the amendment to "satisfy Donald Trump."

Other liberal-leaning groups have also encouraged voters to reject the questions. The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin said the language is too vague and could prevent clerks from using non-public locations or equipment for polls, such as a church or chairs and tables owned by the church. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin also opposes the measures, arguing local clerks don't receive sufficient funding from the state and federal governments.

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign has also supported voting "no" and told voters not to get "duped." The group noted Republicans are putting forward the constitutional amendments — which do not need Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' approval — during a primary election with typically lower turnout.

Wisconsin voters generally vote in favor of referendum questions

While political and advocacy groups are messaging on the initiatives, Rob Yablon, University of Wisconsin Law School professor and co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative , said there doesn't appear to be a significant organized effort on either side of the issue.

"I am not aware of any huge expenditures of funds on either side," Yablon said. "That's not atypical, compared to other recent proposed amendments in Wisconsin — if you look back at the ones that we've had in recent years, most of them have been a little bit below the radar."

Wisconsin voters typically approve referendums. Out of the 200 times lawmakers have proposed changes to the state Constitution since 1854, voters have only rejected the changes about 50 times, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau .

Since 2000, nine of 10 proposed constitutional amendments have succeeded — the exception being an effort to eliminate the state treasurer's office .

The most recent constitutional amendments approved by Wisconsin voters include two questions last year that expanded the criteria for setting cash bail . Another amendment approved in 2020, often called Marsy's Law, brought a flood of television, radio and social media ads .

That high success rate is likely attributable in part to the fact that the Legislature has broad authority to select the wording of ballot initiatives, as well as when they appear on the ballot, Yablon said.

The questions on the April 2 ballot are two of five scheduled to go before voters this year. That's the most Wisconsin voters have seen in one year since 1982, Yablon said.

"It seems to be a function in part of divided government," he said, noting that Evers had previously vetoed legislative efforts to accomplish the same results.

"There does seem to be a little bit of a trend on the part of the Legislature to seek change through constitutional amendments, maybe in part because they can't get it through legislation right now."

More: Wisconsin statewide election results

More: Local election results

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