This is not a story about the oppression of Caucasian women, nor is it about the oppression of one particular female constituency. It is the story of how one person, a foreigner, attempted and failed to assimilate to a culture that was not her own. It is not about the drudgery of washing dishes, serving meals, being silent during supras, and nodding your head obediently while men laugh at you. As isolated incidents, none of these is in itself a tragedy (for it is no great privilege to speak at a supra), and while a modern feminist may hope for all of these “traditions” to be abolished, that labor may be left to another person. My story is about the unseen side of being a Georgian woman (in my case for two years rather than a lifetime). The dimension of female experience described here is rarely refl ected in public writing. It has no presence in contemporary Georgian literature or in scholarship concerned to uncover the textures of contemporary Georgian life. The entire Georgian population is nonetheless affected on a daily—or, more precisely, nightly—basis by what I am about to describe. They are touched by this condition of Georgian life, in some cases without knowing it, in their deepest, most intimate, moments, in the nonpublic junctures that make possible the public realm. For just as the public has no existence without the private, in precisely the same way does patriarchy, a discursive and institutional phenomenon, depend on patterns of private, cross-gender intimacy. I am concerned here with one particular pattern that emerged during two years of life, fi eldwork, and research in Tbilisi and its environs and that pertained not only to the goal of exposing patriarchy in the abstract but to my own physical body and to the bodies of those closely related to me. Georgians often claim that theirs is a “Christian” country, by which they mean a society kinder to women and indeed to all human beings than the societies of their Muslim neighbors: Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. My experience of becoming a Georgian woman (to employ the phrase fi guratively) suggests that the line dividing Christianity from Islam is far less signifi cant