Invisible Women

Hidden Women 2

The woman down the hall is anonymous. She could be any woman. She looks like every other woman. There is nothing particularly noticeable or unique about her. The woman down the hall is a faceless woman among so many others, another person wandering in a crowd.

We have never seen a woman so plain, so utterly unremarkable. Perhaps this is why we are so interested in her. We try to speak with this woman, but she is so plain that she slips away without us even noticing, and another woman, equally uninteresting, has taken her place. This is not something we notice at first, but there is some small glimmer of difference between the two or three or however many of them there are. We notice only because we watch. We observe her and her other anonymous friends. We are certain we can unlock the truths behind every woman if only we can know one of them.

But they are not really every woman, and they are not truly anonymous. We have learned that they too have names and homes and some of them live right down the hall. Imagine that! These women that we’re only now learning to recognize have lived right down the hall all these years if only we’d bothered to notice.