This March is Women's History Month, and, because of this, I've recently had some great conversations about what it means to be a woman and how growing up a girl is so different from growing up a boy. From talking to my fellow females, as well as receiving input from my male friends, I have heard that there is a specific moment in every girl's life when she realizes that she is a girl. I use the term girl and not the term woman because these moments usually happen at a rather young age.
So, what are some examples of these moments where gender is made explicitly clear?
No honey, you can't run around without your shirt off like the boys.
No sweetie, those are the boy's pants, you have to wear this.
You throw like a girl.
Shouldn't you be playing with your barbies or something?
Young girls are often accused of growing up too fast, but young men are never accused of something like this. No one ever says to a young boy, "You'll wear that when you're older," but young girls hear that about makeup, heels, bras and many other things. If we as a society are telling girls that they need to be one thing, but they can't be too much of it, it's no wonder young girls are struggling to find themselves.
Growing up is different for every girl. We were taught to walk in the middle of the street, in the light. To hold our keys between our fingers, just in case. To tell our other girlfriends if we're going out. To be careful what we wear. To watch our drinks. To stay with a group. To ask him to walk us to our car. The list goes on. Part of growing up a girl is growing up in fear. From a young age, you're taught to be careful because you can't handle it by yourself. Girls are taught that they are weaker and that they need to be protected... by a male, of course.
But where's the line? I want my daughter to be safe, but I want her to feel confident and comfortable with the fact that she is a girl. Being a girl is never something anyone should have to hide, yet from a young age, we are taught to mask the fact that we are girls. You have to be tough to play baseball with the boys. You have to be smart to build legos with the boys. You have to throw away pink, glitter and the barbies to play with the boys. How do we decide what qualifies as an appropriate amount of self-expression for a young child? We can't just let them do it on their own, can we?
Ideally, we could. Why can't boys wear pink? Why can't girls play baseball? Why are we insisting that young children agree to a specific gender role before they can even comprehend what that means? Maybe it's societal norms or maybe it's tradition, but I think that the fact that every woman I talked to knows a specific moment where they knew they were a girl is a problem. As we grow older we find ourselves more. We discover who we really are and what life is really all about. Why can't we do that with gender?
There are a myriad of things that are different about growing up as a girl (thanks, puberty). But most of them revolve around the concept of unfairness. Why can't I run around with my shirt off? Because you're a girl. Women are taught that the world is against them and that we must have our claws out at all times, ready to fight. There's something fundamentally wrong about that idea, yet I feel like I'm fending off the world from my womanhood every. damn. day.
