Women In Community
I had a conversation with my neighbor last night who told me about growing up as a Tejano woman in the 1960’s in Austin. Her husband was abusive and on the night he told her to step outside so he could kill her in front of their two children, she ran.
If it had not been for a house of strangers - women - in her neighborhood, she might not have survived.
But before I share the end of her story, let’s talk about “fight” or “flight”.
In the 1930’s physiologist, Walter Cannon proposed that stress triggers two innate reactions: lashing out or running away. Commonly referred to as the “fight or flight” response, Cannon’s research has dominated the scientific approach to stress inquiry. Cannon’s studies primarily focused on males, including few, at times zero, female subjects.
More recently, Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her research team have found that stress can elicit another paradigm, more often found in studying women’s behavioral response: “tend and befriend”.
The idea here is that women historically have been unable to fight or flee because, throughout our history, our safety and security came from the community around us. So our adaptive response to stress became to nurture our problems instead of fighting them or run away. We didn’t really have other options.
Many women have dependent children, and often risk more in terms of what researchers call “reproductive success” if injured or dislocated from their homes. Throughout numerous species, we see this paradigm. Females form tight, stable alliances to try to protect themselves and others. Researchers theorize there is an adaptive tendency to seek out friends in times of stress because historically groups of women were safer than the individual.
So what does this have to do with my neighbor?
On the night her husband told her he was going to kill her in front of her two children - she ran. He had knocked all of her teeth out so her face was unrecognizable. She was about to jump a fence as he was chasing her but she heard women laughing in a house nearby. Something instinctively told her to go to that house. And those women let her in.
When she called the police on her husband to try to free her children, she was told that in Texas, a father has first rights to his children. The police told her he was threatening to kill her two boys so maybe “you should just wait it out”. For two weeks, she recovered in this stranger’s house, waiting for her husband to give her boys back.
When I asked her how it was possible that he wasn’t arrested she simply said, “That’s just not how it was back then.”
I raise this story for two reasons: 1) as a wonderful display of women opening community and safe spaces to each other, even as strangers; and recognizing that 2) my neighbor might not have survived that night had it not been for an instinct calling her to knock on a group of women’s door.
We still have a way to go but now more than ever before in our history, women have the freedom to access other communities, leave negative or toxic environments, and safely relocate. We don’t have to befriend the worst situation imaginable and wait, tending our wounds until circumstances become more favorable.
Our community of women is one of the most powerful forces I know, but as individuals, we are also stronger as a result of the progress achieved as a community.
Further research indicated that in many mammals, and cross-culturally in humans, females’ tendency to affiliate with other familiar people increases during times of stress. Rather than fight or flight, we bond, we befriend.
There is so much power in this instinct.
Yet over time, we have seen a cultural shift that tells women to compete, to tear each other down. Somehow, we have been sold that success, beauty, and power is a zero-sum game. If a woman has more accolades, if she is more beautiful, if she has more children, she’s better than me and therefore my competition, not my friend -- and sadly sometimes, my enemy.
My point is this isn’t natural, it’s manufactured by social forces outside our instincts.
So how do we stop it?
By building community with each other. By lifting each other up. We have seen throughout our evolution and countless other species, we got to where we are, to this powerful individual position, by joining together. By tending to each other, befriending each other, and creating a safe space for all of us to be who we are.