Have you ever been told to be a lady?
When I was a little more than seven years old, my family had just moved to South Carolina from New York, and I was dealing with a lot of change. After waving goodbye to the trees out of the back passenger window, I was headed toward the land of sweet tea, "bless your heart" and genteel charm. I was on my way to becoming a southern lady, y'all.
I soon found myself in traditional cotillion classes. After carefully putting on a sweet dress and white elbow-length gloves, I would stand before the ballroom doors of the church and wait for a boy to take my arm and escort me inside. Once there, I would learn anything from how to foxtrot to the proper way to cross my knees or eat a slice of cake. After a few classes, I wore a sapphire blue velvet dress for the father daughter dance, marking my completion of southern manner school. It was strange but I didn't put up much of a fuss.
More than ballroom dance, cotillion also taught me that there are different ways of being a lady. Physically, you can identify as a woman and be classically feminine, and emotionally you can strive to be kind and compassionate towards others. But you can also challenge the status quo and create your own definition, which is something each of us has an inner yearning to do but we don't know how to go about it. Can we be kind, but also daring? Can we be compassionate, but also defiant? Can we go home from cotillion, take off our gloves and play Pokemon until our eyes begin to cross?
At this point of the feminist cause, there is no black or white. We don't need to burn our bras, but there are still issues that cause that funny part of our stomachs to turn over and make us feel sick. We aren't paid equally to our male counterparts, we don't have a guaranteed paid maternity leave and we still struggle to climb the ranks of our respective professions and break the glass ceilings that are almost too dusty to see through.
We are also instructed to lean in. We must work twice as much for a third as much, but smile and wear heels and hopefully find someone to babysit when the meetings run late. We have to find a work-life balance, because if we don't we're working against the feminist agenda and turning back the hands of the clock. We are to the point where we sneer at stay-at-home moms and consider their choice "cute." We are told to go in so many different directions that we begin to lose sight of ourselves and what we're passionate about.
So what do we do? We throw it all out, and become bad women because there is no way for us to simultaneously prove everyone wrong and make everyone happy. There is no instruction manual on how to be a lady. Rather, we can attend cotillion classes and still be confident in our defiance of societal norms, because why not have a little fun while we're at it?
