There is a great deal of content worthy of discussion in 12 Years a Slave, the newest film from director Steve McQueen. The cinematography is haunting and incredible. The casting and acting are inspired. The direction is controlled and relentless; all the best parts of McQueen’s previous successes Hunger and Shame. But after reading Noah Berlatsky’s wonderful article about the film’s portrayal of masculinity, I want to continue that dialogue and write about the perspectives of the women in 12 Years a Slave, who are essential to the film.

We follow Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Eijiofor) through his devastating loss of freedom, but it’s the women who temper his expectations with their reality. They are not there to mother him or to act as his proxy wife, but to show him, kindly and as equals, the true evils of the world he has been thrust into.

There are three women who most prominently guide Solomon through his journey, and three scenes that best highlight their importance. Solomon is a black man born free in New York, a professional fiddle player and a married father of two. While his wife and children are away, Solomon meets two men who work for a traveling circus and are in need of a fiddle player for two weeks (if you’re asking yourself if one of those men is Taran Killam of “Saturday Night Live,” the answer is, strangely enough, yes).

These two men drug and imprison Solomon at the end of his fiddle-playing stint. Upon learning that he is destined for Georgia and held under suspicion of being a runaway slave, Solomon protests, and is severely beaten until he stops insisting that he is a free man.

Despite this, Solomon holds firm to his convictions for as long as he can. He and a woman named Eliza (Adepero Oduye) are soon purchased to work the estate of Mr. Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). Ford is a slave owner who displays more humanity than expected; he tries to buy Eliza and her children, but when the slave seller insists on separating them, he purchases only Eliza and Solomon. He alone seems to recognize that slaves deserve empathy as fellow humans; he strives to save them pain and rewards them for excellent work.

Eliza is the first woman to teach Solomon about his new situation, and it starts with an argument. Solomon chides Eliza for weeping for her children for so long, she accuses him of not missing his children if he does not show it. He scolds her for believing their circumstances are totally without hope and argues that Mr. Ford is a good man. Insisting that Ford is a good man is less to help Eliza than to convince himself; he hopes that Ford will set him free when he learns that Solomon used to be a free man. Eliza argues — quite rightly — that despite his demeanor, Ford is a slaver, and therefore cannot be a “good man.” She explains the horrors she has already experienced that Solomon could only imagine.

While slavers beat him, slavery has not broken him; his experience with slavery has been unpleasant but not devastating. He is separated from his children, but they are not in perpetual danger. He has received a taste of punishment from slavers, but unlike Eliza, he does not experience the dehumanizing and perpetual threat of rape (not to mention the rape itself, which happens often to female slaves like Eliza). Her physical body, and the fruits of her body, are taken from her repeatedly (one of her children, she reveals in a previous scene, was fathered by her former master). Solomon learns humility in the face of true human suffering.

Though Solomon believes he can trust Ford to save him in his time of need, Eliza’s take on Ford is correct, and Ford sells Solomon to another master, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). Epps and his wife (Sarah Paulson) manage a plantation of slaves with an unspeakable harshness, as the Bible dictates (so they believe, or at least that’s the justification they gives the slaves). Under Epps, Solomon learns how much dignity he may still lose. His determination to pursue freedom when opportunity arises puts him in the dangerous place of toeing the line of Epps’s wrath and punishment, which he doles out without hesitation and at whim.

On the Epps plantation, Solomon meets Patsey (the beautiful, brilliant, desperate Lupita Nyong’o), the slave who consistently picks the most cotton and attracts the most lascivious attention from Epps. Though Patsey has no desire to reciprocate any of Epps’s attention, Mistress Epps retaliates against her with different but no less harsh methods. Like Eliza, Patsey has no escape available to her; there will never be an opportunity for her to run away or even be sold to a kinder master. Her only escape from the depths of human desperation is death. Solomon protests this mindset, but similar to his interactions with Eliza, he learns he is new to such cruelty, whereas Patsey has been dealt nothing but misery since she was born. While Solomon has the memory of his family and freedom to keep him going, Patsey has never known comfort or happiness, and likely never will. The awful construct of slavery has reduced her to a shell of a human, the silhouette of a person. She is barely there anymore.

Before Patsey is brought to be raped by Epps again, Patsey and Solomon chat with Mrs. Shaw (Alfre Woodard), the slave married to the plantation overseer. In her only appearance in the movie, she talks to Solomon about a different kind of survival: adaptation. She doesn’t protect her dignity by protesting and accepting the consequences, but by leaping at the opportunity to save herself from suffering. In this case, she agrees to marry the overseer and saves herself from field labor and beatings. She makes it clear that this is no less noble than Solomon’s straight-spined bucking of authority. It is just how they all get by.

Other influential women, like Solomon’s wife and the harsh Mistress Epps, have other realities to communicate, but the female slaves give Solomon the context in which to set his own suffering. He has had a life taken away from him, but these women barely ever had a life to begin with. He is in pain from a beating he receives, but these women suffer from the pain of a thousand beatings before that. His attempts at escape bring him hope, but these women cannot conceptualize the possibility without remembering the consequences of their own failed attempts to protect themselves.

While working in the fields, a slave on the Epps plantation collapses from exhaustion. The slaves bury him in the yard with so many other ramshackle gravestones of fallen slaves and gather to sing in remembrance. Solomon observes, bows his head in respect. Slowly, the song overtakes him, and he lends his deep baritone to the chorus of mourning yet hopeful voices. He participates in the humanity of the people he is trapped with. He no longer sees himself as other, as someone more deserving of freedom. He is one of them.