“But I can’t support her or even tell her what she wants to hear. It goes against everything I believe in! She’s a feminist and I want a husband and babies and everything.” I didn’t mean to do it, it was so rude of me but before I could stop myself, I felt my forehead slam firmly in my own hand.
“What are you doing here?!” I wanted to scream at my friend, but I restrained and calmly finished the conversation trying to help my friend find out how she could write her true opinions while still winning her professor’s approval.
Later I had to wonder, does she know what she is saying? Does she even know what feminism is? If she did would she ever say that? How could she say that to me? She knew that I wasn’t planning on getting married right out of college and I had a year and a half worth of backpacking planned with no plan to return home yet. After that I wanted a career, I had no interest, in college, of getting married and having children. Sure I want it someday, but I also want to retire someplace warm and sunny to live the rest of my life out in peace… Just not tomorrow…
I have three other girl friends living in three different situations. The first, was huge into community service, she met her husband in bible study, and they got married just after graduating and she continues to do her community service whenever she can. The second, is a bit more like me, she dreamed of traveling, but she was lucky enough to have found the perfect guy while she was in college and she is doing it with him. The last is my roommate, who is getting her Phd in politics and is still unmarried and like me currently has no real plans for any sort of marriage and babies. Do you know what they all have in common? All three of them are feminists!
“What?! How is that possible? The first girl is not only married, but also completely into the god thing she is as feminist as a nun.” Your probably saying. The funny thing about the nun is that years of catholic school has taught me that most nuns I know are actually feminist! So you got one part right! Of course she is a feminist though because unlike what most people believe, being a feminist has nothing to do with burning bras and forcing ourselves to do the manliest task society has deemed inappropriate for us to do. Feminism doesn’t mean you never have to get married or have children or bake cakes or do anything society has deemed “womanly.”
In fact feminism only means that you believe that a woman should have just as much power over her own life as a man does. It’s about equality not about being exactly the same. It’s about having the opportunity to take any job we want and have the skills for without being judge because we were born with two X-chromosomes.
When we tend to picture a feminist woman, we picture a woman working madly over some scientific research who will go home in her flannel jacket to build her own log fire and use her bras as kindling to heat her house all alone, because she doesn’t need a man, she can do it herself. That is one image of feminism, but I’d rather look at my mom. My mom has lived out so many of her own dreams in life (except becoming a doctor because it turns out she faints at the sight of blood). She backpacked across Europe, she worked as an engineer, she was a teacher, she is currently a manager for engineers, AND she had a husband and three thriving babies. She really did it all, and just as my grandmother, who was a mother of four and a judge and worked on several boards for the school system and a few larger charities, did it before her. These women are the true essence of feminism. They had the ability to look at their life and decide for themselves what they wanted to do and go out and do it!
A man never questions whether if giving up children means he has to give up his life, unless his life is pivoting on the fact that he doesn’t have children and women shouldn’t have to either. Feminism doesn’t exist to limit us it is to open the doors to opportunities wherever we dream them to be.
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