I recently read a Refinery 29 article that supports the notion that we should stop telling girls that they can be anything they want when they grow up. The article goes into detail about a woman who was discouraged to pursue her dream of becoming a writer because her mother had told her about her own failures to obtain her MFA in fiction. The writer’s mother told her things like, “No one read Emily Dickinson’s poetry until after she died” and “Most writers never get a book deal.” The author throws out facts about how women make less than men in the workplace and how there aren’t enough fortune 500 CEOs who are women. While these facts are true, if we tell young girls and young women that they shouldn’t aspire to be anything they want to be simply because they might fail, isn’t that already setting them up for failure?
The article does touch upon how we can tell girls that they are powerful and can take on any challenge, but we also need to humble them and remind them that failure is a possibility. I completely agree with this, but what I don’t agree with is that we should instill fear into young girls’ minds that no matter what they do in life, they will face failure and rejection. Of course, obstacles will always be present and failure is always a possibility, but the same goes for young boys and men. Telling girls they shouldn’t shoot for the stars simply because men make more money or because our nation has a history of oppressing women only holds them back from who they truly can become. It is important to make young girls aware of the world we live in, but also aware of how many steps forward women have taken in this country over the years. All of those steps forward will be for nothing if we tell girls they can’t become the next President of the United States or the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court because they will be told no or because a woman has never done it before.
People may not have read Emily Dickinson’s poetry until after she died, but people also didn’t recognize male figures until after they passed such as Henry David Thoreau, Alfred Wegener and Vincent van Gogh. That has nothing to do with gender. We should be encouraging young girls AND young boys to go after their dreams because they are our nation’s future. Yes, we should let them know that the journey to their dreams will not always be a cakewalk, but nothing in life is. Hard work and determination gets you to where you are whether you’re a man or a woman. Oppressing a young girl's dream simply because of her gender isn’t protecting her from the obstacles she will face; It’s showing her that no matter how hard she works, men will always come out on top. So instead of telling young girls what they can’t do, start telling them what they can do to surpass the people who think women are inferior and how they can prove them wrong.
