When I was fifteen, the girls in my class of 600 students had a presentation we had to sit through in order to empower us and inspire us to be classy, well-rounded, and educated women. They used examples of good role models and bad ones, which was entirely problematic in the first place (especially since Nikki Minaj was a bad role model, and let's be honest, she is a multi-millionaire working in a widely male dominated field, who writes her own music).
We as women should be building each other up, not comparing each other on a power point in a high school cafeteria (This is why I need feminism, but that's another article for another day).
They told us that day that if we work hard enough and present ourselves in the best way possible, we could be a Michelle Obama, or a Barbara Bush - a First Lady, perhaps the most classy title a girl can have here in America.
What? Are you kidding me? You're telling 300 girls in high school that they should aspire to be someone's wife? Is this not the 21st century?
Someone once told me I would make an amazing First Lady, and quite frankly, I was appalled. Firsts Ladies, historically, are very graceful, powerful, and focus efforts on a single area of American domestic policy, and I applaud each and every single one in the way that they have handled living in the White House and the public eye for basically, well, the rest of their lives, thanks to their spouses. To love someone means to make sacrifices, and I know that there are so many we plebeians do not even realize.
But anyone who knows me knows that I am not First Lady material. I am a political science major, and will almost always be outnumbered in my classes, debates, and in elected offices. I am strong-willed, determined, and nothing short of able to make any dream I want come true. This is not because my teachers in high school, and isn't even necessarily because of the political icons I look up to (Ruth Bader Ginsbug, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden to name a few), but because some people are gifted with a will to get things done, and I think one of those people is me.
What we choose to tell young girls can make or break the way she makes decisions for the rest of her life, and I pray that none of my classmates in high school listened to that Powerpoint and changed course. I hope one day I will marry a man who makes me a proud wife, someone who is going places in life, but that's not all of my hopes and dreams.
I'm not going to school, paying thousands and thousands of dollars to get an MRS degree, and anyone who pictures me there has clearly never met me. Women who choose to be wives, moms, and homemakers are amazing, and the work they do constantly goes unnoticed, but that is a choice, not a requirement. To stifle the dreams of a woman based on her biology is a shame to that woman, and to our society, because we need women.
If I could say one thing to the administrators who ran that presentation years ago, all I would say is this:
Challenge accepted; Watch and learn.
