Thank god for the gothic writers. Thank god for Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier, who knew what I also know: that women are stuck in the horror, performing subservience and subordination in order to survive.

If, like 10-15 per cent of the global population, you have been diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), you are likely female and young. If your symptoms remain unresolved despite your best dietary restriction efforts, immediately request referral for non-routine testing. You may have an undiagnosed illness – because your pain has been sold to you as a product of ‘stress’. In other words, you have just been diagnosed with hysteria.

In recent years United Voice, the Australian Education Union, and the Independent Education Union have run equal pay campaigns, fighting for wage increases for qualified early childhood workers – 97 per cent of whom are women – who earn as little as twenty-one dollars an hour. On 6 February, the Equal Remuneration Order application was rejected. Five years of bureaucracy has us back at square one.

On the night of his wedding to Effie Gray in 1848, Ruskin, who was also a noted writer, artist and philosopher, stood in front of his wife’s naked body, and was so disgusted by what he saw that he was unable to consummate the marriage. Six years later, the still-sexless marriage was annulled.

This ‘certain temperamental similarity – a restlessness’, is not exclusive to women, yet it seems to be driven in some ways by the weight of society’s expectations and restrictions on women’s lives. For some women, marriage and motherhood are the last things we want to dedicate our lives to, but the inevitability of this path looms all around us.