In our latest installment of featured nonfiction—also curated by our own Carolyn Quimby—we present an excerpt from Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today by Rachel Vorona Cote.

Cote looks at how the “unspoken rules” that govern the expression of women’s emotional and physical desires date back to the 19th century, in a book Publishers Weekly called “vigorous” and “wide-ranging.”

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Feminine youth, as it is conventionally understood—blushing adolescence through one’s early twenties—is a potent and tenacious fetish. I am happier now than I’ve ever been, and yet, when I am confronted with various incarnations of early adulthood, whether in a film, or in the image of a musician, or in a television show’s rosily stilted manifestation of it, my reaction is a fickle one, a mélange of relief and covetousness. I’m grateful to have dispensed with years of agitated uncertainty and the eager willingness to rearrange myself according to others’ predilections. Ultimately, I have benefited from the