Learning to Respect Female Boundaries, Whether Someone Else’s Your Own

For people who want to better value the women in their lives

Amy Locklin

Toward the end of her well-known lecture, “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf writes that “though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom . . . I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.”

While some men may still react with this kind of inappropriate harshness when women speak freely or advocate on their own behalf, I think that today it is at least as common for women and other genders to restrict female freedom in themselves and each other. 

For example, in a recent committee, when I raised a concern of gender inequality, two men immediately expressed a desire to reach fairness, one woman remained silent and another woman went in for the attack, violating my personal boundaries, which thereafter became a pattern she didn’t seem able to control or possibly even recognize.

Perhaps men feel pressured to avoid the appearance of sexism, and this is why they can seem to be more open to reflecting about and making necessary changes in their behavior.

Women, on the other hand, may unconsciously assume they cannot be sexist because they are women. They may erroneously feel that because they are women with their own self-interests, they are respectful of other women’s self-interests. They may feel they support other women’s equal freedom of speech and right to self-advocacy, w.hen their speech and actions don’t

Woolf describes the traditional, socially acceptable female psyche as being “so constituted that she never [has] a mind or a wish of her own but prefer[s] to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.”

Many people still instinctively feel that women should subordinate themselves to the needs of others. Persistently at the gut level, they can react with negative impulses of aggression when women express their own minds and wishes.

Any time you find yourself wanting to correct, silence and put a female in her place, pause and ask yourself if it’s more important to preserve your relationship with her, whether personal or professional, as well as her psychological safety within your presence.

And any time women correct, silence and put themselves in their place in their imaginations, they must learn to silence this negative and potentially abusive inner voice.

Women who have their own freedom of speech and equal right to self-advocacy are more likely to respect it in other women when they get in the habit of bringing this goal into conscious view every day.