Women, I have to tell you something, and I need you to come a little closer because the internet is talking about us again, except this time I don’t think we should roll our eyes, send the ridiculous post to the group chat and return to whatever we were doing. There is a conversation growing in corners of the American right about whether women should have the political authority we have, including whether women should vote at all, and underneath it is an argument women have heard for centuries: we are simply too emotional to be trusted with that much power.

Now I can already feel some of you preparing your defense of women, and before you get emotional about being called emotional, which, ladies, would be spectacularly unhelpful, I need you to wait. Put the phone down, walk away from the comments section and make some tea, because I recently made a mistake that taught me something about women, including myself, and unfortunately helped me understand what some of these men think they are seeing.

I was helping plan an event with a group of women. We had planned it months earlier, moved the date once, and when I finally looked at everything again we had only a handful of RSVPs. My MBA brain immediately did what MBA brains do when absolutely nobody asked them to: I performed a little cost-benefit analysis, found an alternative that preserved the purpose while reducing the labor and suggested what I believed was a perfectly lovely win-win.

I had forgotten to calculate the emotional cost.

Every woman received my suggestion differently. Feelings were hurt, intentions were interpreted and suddenly I wasn’t managing an event anymore; I was managing relationships. I knew immediately that even if everyone eventually said, “It’s fine,” there was an excellent chance it was not, in fact, fine, because a woman can accept your apology today and quietly restructure your friendship access by Thursday. There is no notification and apparently no appeals process; eventually you simply discover that you have been moved from Friend to Acquaintance and should govern yourself accordingly.

I told my husband the entire saga, expecting him to understand why I was so bothered, and he looked at me with the bewilderment of a man who had just received a 47-page employee handbook for a company he did not realize he worked for and asked, “Why do you care?” Because they’re my friends, I explained. Because their feelings were hurt, because I never intended to hurt anyone and now I can’t undo it and why do women have to be so emotional….

Oh.

There are few things more irritating than mounting a passionate defense of women and realizing halfway through your opening statement that you and several of your girlfriends have accidentally submitted yourselves as exhibits for the prosecution.

I laughed about it because, of course, women are emotional. So are men. We are human beings wandering around with childhood insecurities, hormones, egos and occasionally insufficient breakfast trying to make sensible decisions. But shortly afterward I was listening to a conversation about Lindsay Clancy, postpartum psychosis, medication, childbirth and criminal responsibility when I heard the conclusion that genuinely scared me: this is exactly why some people are saying women shouldn’t vote; women keep telling us themselves that their emotions and biology can impair their judgment.

Wait.

We did what to ourselves?

So I did what any emotionally stable modern woman should absolutely know better than to do: I sat down and spent entirely too much time on social media.

That is where the joke stopped being funny. I found the men saying it, certainly, but I also began noticing something else on my own feed: women, particularly white women, essentially saying shush. Stop quote-posting it. Stop giving it oxygen. Stop handing people more material. I cannot tell you this is some coordinated movement among women; I can tell you I kept seeing the instinct, and suddenly I understood it. This conversation is no longer confined to anonymous men in obscure corners of the internet. After the Clancy mistrial, Fox News itself reported Republican women warning about conservative accounts calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment.

And I understood the urge to become quiet because we have spent years finally talking honestly about ourselves. We talk about postpartum psychosis because it is real. We talk about pregnancy, hormones and perimenopause because, dear God, those are very real. We talk about marriage and motherhood and friendship and the ways our bodies and emotions affect us because women fought very hard to stop suffering these things silently. Women hear those conversations and think, Finally, somebody understands me.

But some people are hearing evidence.

And that scared me enough to wonder whether perhaps the women saying “shush” were right, until I realized that women becoming silent cannot possibly be the lesson we take from this. We cannot spend generations demanding that medicine take women’s bodies seriously and then whisper about hormones because somebody may weaponize biology against us. Nor can equality require us to pretend women are perfectly rational creatures floating serenely above our emotions because, frankly, I have met women and I have neither the time nor the evidence for that undertaking.

Maybe the question isn’t whether women should stop talking publicly.

Maybe we need to think more carefully about where we talk, and whether we still have enough rooms where women can talk honestly to other women.

Because women need affirmation, certainly, but I am beginning to think we desperately need calibration. I need somewhere I can tell the story about my event and another woman can say, “I completely understand why you did that, Kalie, and you were absolutely wrong.” I need women who can tell me when my feelings are revealing something important and when my feelings have simply taken the wheel and should perhaps be asked to return to the passenger seat. We need somewhere to talk about perimenopause without simultaneously defending the intellectual capacity of the female sex, somewhere to disagree without destroying the relationship, and somewhere another woman can love us enough to correct us, that somewhere is not online.

The funny thing is that women have done this before.

The suffrage movement wasn’t simply a handful of famous women making speeches while wearing magnificent hats. Women built organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association, the American Woman Suffrage Association, eventually the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman’s Party, and beneath those national organizations were local clubs, church groups and associations where women learned, debated and organized. Black women, frequently excluded from white women’s organizations, built institutions of their own, including the National Association of Colored Women. The infrastructure mattered. Women gathered before they changed the law.

And suddenly I am looking at the women’s organizations around me very differently.

Here in Orange County, the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, Orange County Chapter has been here since 2000, advocating for women and girls through leadership, education, health, economic empowerment and public policy. Maybe you have a sorority chapter you haven’t attended in years. Maybe yours is the women’s ministry at church, a professional organization, a mothers’ group, a book club or six women who meet for brunch calling it a book club and somehow by 12:15 are discussing absolutely everything except the book. Find your room. And if the room you need does not exist, build it.

I am not suggesting we stop talking to men. Talk to your husband. Talk to your father. Talk to your brothers. Raise sons who understand the full humanity of women. I am simply saying also have rooms where the men aren’t there, where everything we say does not immediately become content, where a vulnerable conversation isn’t performed for an algorithm and where women can disagree, correct, repair, learn and leave better than we arrived.

That is part of the instinct behind Held & Rooted. We are not a room for every woman; we are intentionally a particular room for mothers raising Black children. And writing this has made me realize how much I want women to find their particular rooms again, or return to the ones they quietly abandoned because someone annoyed them, the meetings became inconvenient, there was drama or life simply got busy.

Yes, there will be drama. There are women there. We established this several paragraphs ago.

Go anyway.

Because somewhere between hurting my friends’ feelings, explaining female friendship to my bewildered husband, falling into an internet rabbit hole I absolutely should have avoided and discovering that American women are once again discussing a political question I thought our great-grandmother’s generation had handled, I came away believing something I didn’t expect:

Women’s circles aren’t frivolous. They are part of the infrastructure women have always used to prepare one another for the world outside the room.

So when you see women online saying shush, I don’t think our answer should be silence.

I think our answer should be: come inside.

Close the door. Pull up another chair. Bring the tea or something considerably better.

We need to talk.

Always Have, Always Will ~ Kalie