From Stormy Daniels to E. Jean Carroll to Amanda Zurawski, women are finding a way past a very old trope of needing protection from the predations of men. These women are, rather, pissed off, living their lives, and defying the public imperative to open a vein in public as a testament to their loss and brokenness.
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf argued that, historically, successful women writers have not been mothers. Of Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot, she noted, “not one of them had a child.” And yet, data reveals that, across history, at least in Woolf’s Britain, roughly half of women writers have in fact had children.
The immediate backlash to Dr. Biden's outfit echoes past critiques, especially from conservatives, about what type of clothing is "appropriate" for the first lady of the United States. It's an exercise that often speaks to a certain societal discomfort with reconciling cultural understandings of what femininity and power look like, and has since extended to criticism of how other women politicians dress.