Daniella M. Aponte

There’s a kind of knowledge girls carry before they have words for it.

I knew which version of myself to bring into which space. I knew when to tighten my grammar and which topics to leave at the door. I knew how to take up less space unless I was directly invited to take up more — while still carrying myself with just enough confidence that my presence wouldn’t be questioned.

In a pretty teenage body, in a very white New England town, moving between Latina and American like changing clothes.

I was good at it. Skilled, even. I knew that much.

I just didn’t have language for it yet.

What I had instead was the knowledge itself — held in the body, practiced daily, refined without ever being named. The ability to scan a room before entering it. To feel the temperature of someone’s attention. To understand, without being told, what was expected and what was dangerous — and how often those were the same thing.

Girls learn this early. Not because anyone explains it to them. Because the cost of getting it wrong is immediate.

What took me longer to understand is that the gap between knowing something in your body and being allowed to name it isn’t accidental.

It’s part of how girls are managed.

I used to think the language would arrive eventually. That the knowing would catch up to itself. That this was just part of growing up.

I don’t think that anymore.

The information girls are missing about their own bodies, their own experiences, their own interior lives — it exists. It has always existed. What gets controlled is whether it reaches them, and when, and through whom.

That’s part of what Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls understands so well.

The girls in the book are fed. Supervised. Kept on a schedule someone else has decided is appropriate for their condition. The home presents itself as protection — a buffer between these girls and a world that has already judged them.

Nothing about it looks especially cruel at first glance. It looks orderly. Responsible. Safe.

Which is part of the problem.

What it withholds is knowledge.

Not dramatically. Just… quietly. Through decisions about what is “necessary,” what is “appropriate,” what the girls “need to know right now.”

They are told enough not to panic.

Not enough to understand.

That kind of withholding creates a strange state. Not exactly ignorance. More like living at the edge of your own comprehension. You can feel the shape of something. You just can’t quite see it.

Then the book shifts.

The birth chapter is clinical. Precise. Unflinching. The kind of information you’d expect in a doctor’s office, or a health class, or a conversation that assumes you deserve to know what’s happening to your own body.

Placed here, it lands differently.

Not because it’s graphic — but because of the timing.

The reader gets, all at once, what the girls were never given. And the point is hard to miss: the information existed. It was always available. It just wasn’t given to them.

That’s what makes the chapter land so hard. Not only what happens, but how it’s structured. Knowledge isn’t denied forever.

It’s delayed.

Delayed long enough to become consequence instead of choice.

When Fern comes back from the hospital, everything shifts. She finds the other girls who have returned, and she understands now, with her body, why they are kept separate from the pregnant girls.

That separation isn’t administrative.

It’s an information barrier.

The girls who know are kept away from the girls who don’t.

The walls are doing policy work.

What passes between the recovered girls is quiet and heavy. They are sad, and maybe angry too, but the sadness is what lingers. It’s the sadness of realizing you were inside something before you had the tools to see it clearly.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

That, to me, is one of the book’s sharpest ideas: withholding doesn’t always look like denial. Sometimes it looks like sequencing. Sometimes it looks like deciding you can know — just not yet.

And “not yet” can do a lot of damage.

Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches works on a softer register, but it’s circling something related.

Its central rule sounds reasonable at first. Witches must live alone. Keep their magic hidden. Stay separate from each other and from the world around them. The reasoning is almost noble: their power is dangerous, and isolation protects everyone else.

I’ve heard some version of that logic my whole life.

A locked door is one thing. A rule you’ve been taught to enforce on yourself is another. When you’re told your full self is a problem for the people around you, resistance starts to feel selfish. Staying small starts to feel responsible.

You don’t need a cage. You carry it.

That logic isn’t confined to fictional witches. It runs straight through the good girl curriculum. Through the expectation that women manage their own needs quietly so as not to burden the room. Through the way women’s smallness is reframed as generosity.

And you see this pattern again later, just in a different room.

A woman sits in a doctor’s office knowing something is wrong. She has been living inside that body, after all. But she has also been trained, for years, to second-guess what she feels. To soften it. To make it easier to hear.

So when she’s told it’s stress. Anxiety. Something to monitor.

Part of her believes that too.

Not because she doesn’t know.

Because she’s been taught not to trust what she knows without confirmation.

She leaves having to shrink her certainty to fit what the room will hold.

She already knows.

The institution decides when — and whether — that knowing counts.

Because that first kind of knowing doesn’t disappear.

It just… finds other ways to move.

You hear it in conversations that don’t feel official. In the way women talk to each other when no one else is listening. In the specific, unpolished details that don’t make it into textbooks or appointments or anything that gets stamped as reliable.

And honestly, you see it online too. In comment sections. In replies under someone finally saying the quiet part out loud. Women adding what worked, what didn’t, what no one told them until it was already happening.

None of it looks authoritative.

But it’s often the most useful information you’ll get.

The first time someone tells you what labor actually feels like. Not the version you learned in school. The real version. The part no one thought to explain.

Or when someone older says, almost offhand, no one told me this either.

And something in you clicks.

Not because it’s new information.

Because it confirms something you already suspected.

That’s how this kind of knowledge moves.

Not through institutions. Through recognition.

Through someone else naming the thing you’ve been living inside without language.

Some of the most useful information about women’s bodies has always lived there. Passed between people who have nothing to gain from softening it. What it feels like from the inside. What helps. What doesn’t. What you’ll wish someone had told you sooner.

It’s specific. Hard-won. Careful.

And because it travels this way, it gets dismissed. Reduced to anecdote. Something less serious.

Which, if you think about it, tells you exactly who gets to decide what counts.

In The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, magic grows stronger when shared. It becomes more stable, more itself in community. Isolation doesn’t just make the witches lonely.

It keeps their power smaller than it could be.

Which makes you wonder if that was the point all along.

A woman cut off from other women has to start from scratch every time. She has to figure things out alone that others have already lived through. She has to carry the full weight of her own experience without the context that would make it make sense.

But when women find each other, something shifts.

What felt confusing starts to click into place. The thing you thought was just you starts to look like a pattern. The knowledge you’ve been carrying quietly finally has somewhere to land.

That is exactly the kind of recognition systems are built to delay.

Not forever. Just long enough.

Long enough that the choices are made before the language arrives. Long enough that the isolation feels normal. Long enough that withholding can pass for care.

That’s the design.

Not a side effect. Not an oversight.

The knowledge was always there.

It was always ours.

We just weren’t supposed to trust it yet.