Glossary

To emancipate yourself is to step out of a guardianship: a father's, a husband's, a role you were handed before you could even speak. It is not about rejecting others, it is about taking back the decision. The gesture is rarely spectacular: it often fits into a spoken "no", a bank account in your name, a door you walk through without asking whether you are allowed.

Independence is the material side of emancipation: an income, a roof, choices no one can take back because they pay for them. Women were long kept at arm's length from this autonomy, denied a wage, an account, a signature. To win it is to make sure that leaving always stays possible.

Speaking up is not just talking: it is not apologising for doing so. Many girls were taught to wrap their ideas in hedges, "sorry", "this might be silly", "I'm probably wrong", that warn the room not to take them too seriously. Removing that guard phrase does not change the idea; it changes how much the idea is allowed to weigh. Making your place at a table is sometimes just that one gesture: saying the thing, and stopping there.

Setting off alone was long judged reckless for a woman, as if the world only belonged to her when she was accompanied. Travel then becomes a political act: taking up space, hitting the road, shaking off the watching gaze. You are not always running from something; sometimes you simply go to find yourself.

For a long time women's bodies were everyone's business but their own: judged, commented on, regulated. Making the body your own territory again means deciding what you show of it, what you do with it, who has access. Reclamation does not run through perfection, but through the right to inhabit your skin without apology.

This is the invisible share of domestic work: not doing the washing, but remembering to; not buying, but holding the list, the date, the size in mind. That thread running constantly falls most often on women, even when the tasks look shared. Making it visible is the first condition for sharing it out.

These are the instructions no one ever says out loud but everyone hears: be beautiful without effort, kind without faltering, available without keeping count. They lodge in offhand remarks, in silences, in poisoned compliments. Naming them already loosens their grip: what seemed "natural" turns back into a demand you are allowed to refuse.

Family is often the first place where you learn your place: the one you are given, the one you are denied. You receive love there and, in the same gesture, expectations that weigh: stay, keep quiet, do us proud. Untangling the two is what lets you love your own without obeying them.

You rarely inherit all at once: transmission happens in small touches, a dish, a fear, a repeated sentence. Roles pass down too, along with the renunciations and silences of the women before you. Looking that inheritance in the face means choosing what you keep and what you let go, rather than carrying it on without a thought.

To consent is not to give in or to resign yourself: it is to say yes freely, knowing to what, and to be able to change your mind at any moment. A yes wrung out by fear, pressure or habit is not one. Putting consent at the centre makes the other person's desire a condition, never a detail.

Feminism is not a war against men: it is the conviction, and the fight, that the genders are worth as much and must have the same rights, the same freedom, the same safety. It comes in many currents, sometimes at odds with one another. What ties them together fits in one sentence: no one should see their life shrunk because they were born one gender rather than another.

Patriarchy is not a plot by particular men: it is a social order, old and diffuse, that places the masculine by default in the position of power, authority and norm. It works through laws, wages, chores, stories. Naming it does not point at culprits, but at a system that can be described, and therefore transformed.

It is brotherhood in the feminine: a solidarity between women that refuses the rivalry we were taught. Sisterhood heals (we believe one another, we take over for one another, we protect one another) and it acts (we band together, we make numbers). It does not erase the differences between women, it turns them into a strength rather than a fault line.