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Women's Secrets: Its Time to Stop Suffering In Silence

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Jessica Houston

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“Women can invest a tremendous amount of care and devotion into others, but by becoming sometimes dependent on being needed, they simultaneously become self-destructive. By their self-imposed dependence on being considered necessary, they deny their own freedom and agency, sacrificing their individuality and autonomy. (" Sweet Smell of Submission")”

“Maybe it all began now, my life as a wife comfortable in her own home, a real wife. I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father's life; I hadn't done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.”

“The one area in which some women can claim a degree of parity is in literature. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are making their biggest impression through translations, for noble and gentry families choose to educate their daughters in languages and music above all other things. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke are foremost among these. The formidable Anne, who marries Sir Nicholas Bacon, publishes a translation from the Latin of no less a work than John Jewel’s Apologie of the Church of England in 1564. Her sister, Mildred, the wife of Sir William Cecil, can speak Greek as fluently as English and translates several works. Another of Sir Anthony’s daughters, Elizabeth, Lady Russell, publishes her translation from the French of A Way of Reconciliation touching the true nature and substance of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament; and a fourth daughter, Katherine, is renowned for her ability to translate from the Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Other families also produce female scholars. Mary Bassett, granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, is well-versed in the classics and translates works by Eusebius, Socrates and several other ancient writers, not to mention a book by her grandfather. Jane, Lady Lumley, publishes a translation of Euripides. Margaret Tyler publishes The Mirror of Princely deeds and Knighthood (1578), translated from the Spanish. And so on. The educated ladies of Elizabethan England are far freer to reveal the fruits of their intellect than their mothers and grandmothers.”