When women don’t fit

I am writing this at the beginning of Women’s History Month. Marking history is important, but so is asking what continues quietly beneath it. As a therapist and as a woman, I am interested not only in who we applaud, but in how we name women when they do not fit.

There is a particular kind of woman many of us were taught to admire. She is strong, capable, endlessly reliable. She works hard and gives more than she keeps. She holds families together without asking to be held herself. In my own family, women were formidable in this way. They endured. They managed. They absorbed. Caring for brothers, partners or fathers was not framed as sacrifice; it was simply what women did. Choosing yourself could look selfish. Leaving early from anything, a job, a relationship, a duty, could look wasteful. Strength was praised, but it was strength in service.

That model produces impressive women. It also produces pressure.

So, I find myself wondering what happens when a woman does not fit that shape. When she is ambitious rather than accommodating. When she is angry, rather than patient. When she is tired and says so. When she speaks in a way that does not reassure.

History suggests that women who deviate from expectations often acquire a name. In the nineteenth century, that name was frequently hysteria. It became a container broad enough to gather grief, anger, desire, ambition, refusal and exhaustion. The diagnosis has since disappeared from formal manuals, and psychiatric language has rightly evolved. Yet diagnoses do not arise outside culture. They reflect what we understand at a particular moment and what we feel compelled to organise.

The categories shift. The tension between conformity and consequence does not always disappear as quickly.

Across time, women who exceeded the permitted emotional range were described as unstable. Women who resisted expected roles were difficult. Women who felt deeply were dramatic. The words change, but the pattern is recognisable. Language does not simply describe; it shapes what is considered tolerable.

This is part of why sociolinguistics has been so interesting to me recently. Research consistently shows that speech patterns more commonly associated with women — collaborative phrasing, tentativeness, softening statements with “perhaps” or “I wonder if”, even the much-criticised “like” — are often judged as less competent or less authoritative. Vocal qualities such as rising intonation or vocal fry are evaluated more harshly in women than in men. Yet these same features can signal relational awareness and an invitation to shared thinking. What is framed as weakness in one context may in fact be a different model of authority.

The acceptable band for women’s expression remains narrow. Speak cautiously and you risk being seen as unsure. Speak plainly and you risk being seen as aggressive. When distress appears within that narrow space, it can quickly be framed as disorder rather than as a response to strain.

In recent years, another question has become harder to ignore, particularly among women in their thirties and forties. Many who are later diagnosed as autistic or ADHD describe a history of earlier labels: anxiety, depression, and sometimes personality disorder. This is not to dismiss those diagnoses or the reality of suffering. It is to ask whether, in some cases, what was being treated as instability was in fact overwhelm. Emotional dysregulation in autistic women can be read as volatility rather than sensory overload. Chronic masking can resemble fragility rather than exhaustion. A nervous system working at full stretch can look pathological when context is removed.

Diagnosis reflects knowledge, and knowledge evolves. We do not medicate dyslexia in order to remove differences; we recognise a different way of processing and adjust accordingly. It may be that some of what has historically been named as illness has also been misattunement between person and environment.

Family therapy was not immune to gender blindness, and in the 1970s, a group of feminist systemic therapists began to say so. The Women’s Project in Family Therapy argued that no formulation is neutral and that gendered expectations shape relational patterns and symptoms. What I find compelling about their work is that they did not abandon relational thinking in order to be taken seriously. They retained a systemic lens and asked harder questions about how care is distributed and how meaning is constructed.

It is also not lost on me that rigid gender roles constrain boys and men. I have sons, and I can see how quickly softness becomes suspect. Emotional expression narrows. Fear is swallowed. Creativity becomes something to outgrow. Patriarchy does not produce simple winners and losers; it produces limits. The losses are not identical, but they are real.

So perhaps Women’s History Month invites a quieter task than celebration alone. It invites us to notice who has been misnamed. Which girls were described as emotional when they were perceptive? Which women were labelled unstable when they were exhausted? Which collaborative voices were trained out in the name of authority? And which differences we are still misunderstanding.

That feels worth writing about.