The other day, after hearing yet another news story about legislation that would have the effect of lessening women’s choices, I turned to someone and said, only half-joking, “Women are so scary.”
Beneath my sarcasm was something real: Some people – usually men, but not exclusively – fear women who don’t fit into a neat societal narrative. Oh, they wouldn’t say they were scared; they’d use language pointing out deficiencies in those women who didn’t tow the line. “They’re bossy. They’re too loud. They’re aggressive.”
This isn’t new. In fact, it’s very old.
I recently read the book The Woman They Could Not Silence, the true story of Elizabeth Packard, a brilliant, strong-willed woman whose husband had her committed to an asylum in 1860. Not because she was unstable. Because she disagreed with his religious views.
I was shocked as I read how easy it was for husbands to commit their wives, at least in Illinois, but other states had similar legislation. All a discontented husband needed was two doctors to agree that the wife was mentally ill. That was an easy diagnosis for them to assign to women. All it took was describing intemperance, religious excitement, overexertion, or hard study. And my favorite symptom of mental illness in women – novel reading.
So these women were merely inconvenient to the men in their lives, having the audacity to think their own thoughts, which somehow led to their being locked away for years.
We like to think we’ve evolved, but the locks haven’t disappeared. They’ve just become more subtle, under more socially acceptable labels. They show up in healthcare restrictions. In who gets to speak and who gets silenced. In who is allowed to be assertive without being labeled “too much.”
Even in something as ordinary as small talk, the old scripts show up.
“Do you have kids?”
It’s a question people ask without thinking. But for many women – including me – it lands like a quiet judgment. As if our worth depends on our answer. I didn’t have children, partly by circumstance, partly by choice. But that question still presses on something tender, as if there’s only one path to fulfillment.
I know parenthood can be one of the most life-changing, soul-stretching experiences someone can have. But so can illness. Or caregiving. Or surviving loss. Or starting over. My life has been shaped by those kinds of experiences.
And I believe that every life, no matter the path, holds wisdom worth listening to.
But fear – shaped by culture, tradition, and the stories we’ve been handed – has a way of narrowing the field. It teaches us whose voices are credible, whose stories are respectable, and whose truths can safely be ignored.
The deeper issue isn’t just about gender or politics. When people say, “stay in your lane,” they’re not just defending a system. They’re avoiding disruption. They’re afraid of what might change if we allow more voices, more stories, and more complexity to shape our shared reality.
Honestly, they’re right to be afraid … because when we listen to voices long silenced, things do change. The center shifts. The old rules stop working. The curtain gets pulled back and we see who is really pulling the strings.
That’s the power of a woman’s voice. Or a trans person’s voice. Or a disabled child’s voice. Or anyone whose experience disrupts the dominant narrative.
When we unlock those voices – when we really let them speak, in their fullness and complexity – the world gets noisier. But it also gets wiser.
Yet when power is afraid of wisdom it doesn’t control, it rarely responds with curiosity.
Power tightens its grip. Sometimes that looks like locking someone out.
And sometimes, it looks like destroying what they might need to choose their own path.
Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. government confirmed plans to incinerate nearly ten million dollars’ worth of contraceptives – resources intended for women in low-income countries.
These supplies weren’t expired or damaged; they were in pristine condition. They just didn’t fit the current political narrative. While no one is publicly defending the decision to burn them, no one stopped it, either.
Perhaps not surprisingly, no condoms were destroyed – only the contraceptives used by women. It wasn’t just a loss of supplies. It was a message. When we fear what women might choose, we don’t simply close the door, we try to erase the very tools that open it.
That fear doesn’t just hurt women. It hurts all of us.
Fear only knows how to protect power, guarding the status quo, safeguarding the established.
Love knows how to protect possibility, walking into the unknown future with solutions we haven’t yet imagined.
When we keep those voices out – not just women, but anyone whose experience sits at the margins – we don’t just harm them. We harm all of us.
Because we lose insight. We lose solutions. We lose the possibility of doing things differently.
In a world as complex and fragile as ours, that loss isn’t just sad. It’s dangerous. We need more minds, not fewer. We need different kinds of knowing.
And when we make space for that kind of knowing, beautiful things happen.
Like a teenage girl in India, Remya Jose, who built a pedal-powered washing machine out of scrap parts to help her sick mother. That simple machine now helps families in off-grid communities across the globe.
Or women in rural Kenya, using clay, charcoal, and sand to create water filters, cutting disease without needing outside “experts.” Just local wisdom and care.
In Los Angeles, a group of Latina teenagers designed a solar-powered tent for unhoused people to survive the winter.
And Indigenous engineers are blending traditional ecological knowledge with modern technology to more adequately respond to fire dangers.
Then there are the women in Bangladesh who received tiny microloans – barely enough to matter in a Western bank – but who turned them into businesses, stability, and hope for their families and communities.
These aren’t fairy tales.
They’re blueprints.
They show us what becomes possible when we stop asking, “Is this person qualified enough?”
And start asking, “What does she know? What does she see that I don’t?”
We’ve already locked away too much wisdom.
Fear has told us to silence women. Fear has told us to mistrust children, to ignore those who don’t have power. But love—love tells us there’s light in places we’ve never thought to look.
Love says: open the door.
So no, it’s not women who are scary.
What’s scary is what we’re losing by keeping them quiet.
And what’s hopeful and thrilling is what we might build together when every voice gets heard.
Let’s be brave enough to open the doors.
To let the light in.
Brave enough to grow more love.
Joni Miller, Ph.D., is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help spiritual wanderers find a place they can call home, navigating by the light of Love. www.SpiritualGeography.net
Photo by Luis Quintero: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-lot-sitting-grey-scale-photography-2774572/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56132724-the-woman-they-could-not-silence
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/26/contraceptives-belgium-usaid-destroyed-trump/ (Free access to article here https://wapo.st/45cA6Qk )
https://www.goodnet.org/articles/this-14yearold-invented-pedal-powered-washing-machine
https://global.nazava.com/empowering-rural-kenyan-women-with-safe-drinking-water/
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/02/11/solar-powered-tent-homelessness
https://today.usc.edu/what-can-native-american-knowledge-and-now-ai-teach-us-about-fire/
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/84d5e159-5a09-5a54-9cab-19be59683621
