Embracing my Femininity
By Kaelyn Brown
For several years, I did not know what it felt like to truly have gratitude for being a woman. If anything, I thought being a woman meant that we had more negative obstacles than a man does, such as, having more expectations/social pressures, less freedom, a lesser feeling of safety, etc. While women have had extremely rough obstacles to push through and still do, I have finally found peace and gratitude in my social matrix… being a woman.
As a young girl, I loved ballet, dressing up, nurturing my dolls as my own, and baking. Thankfully, I never second guessed my feminine energy at all– it came naturally to me. When I began junior high, we started learning about certain points in history when women were not treated as their own person, they were under incredible amounts of control by their husbands, the government, and the entire society at the time. This type of society didn’t truly dawn upon me until I learned about it in school, which invited countless questions and feelings in my head during the time. I didn’t begin to receive answers to those questions until my last two years of high school. I remember so clearly learning about the Triangle Shirt Factory women in my senior year of high school, which we also touched on again in this class. I remember how upset it made me to see the control and illusion that these women were under… I remember it then and found myself feeling the same disgust while discussing it in this class last week. These women were under an illusion of freedom– by this, I mean they were given what they thought was freedom to work, freedom to earn money for the work they completed, and this made them think they could potentially pay for things they desired. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, as these women got paid close to nothing and had to use the little money they made to help support their families.
This leads me to think about how women are treated in modern times. How far we have come from that time… how much progress we have made since, while still much more to go. Overtime, women have generated such a reputation for being crazy or emotional. To our society, we are less than a male, we are simply meant to stay at home, nurture, and cook. Why do you think this is? Is it because we truly are less than a man? Are we better cooks? I don’t think either of those are correct.
Through all of the frustration and anger I have felt towards men and this society for treating women the way that we have been, I have somehow found my peace and way to escape this social matrix. I see the effort that has been put in, I see the way that women have earned more freedom, I see the voice that more women have now. I have personally found my escape through truly embracing my femininity and what that means to ME. For the past two years, I have been learning greatly about women’s health, women’s ancestral traditions and rituals, women’s history, and women’s biology, because I find this to be a huge passion of mine. It has offered me such a new and beautiful perspective on women and what we have to offer. Most importantly, it has allowed me to see that men and women cannot be compared, for we are so different… We have different instincts than each other, for example, women are naturally nurturing and emotional creatures, while men have more of an instinct to “hunt,” or “work,” as I’ve learned in my psychology classes. Another aspect of a woman that we cannot compare to men is the fact that women are capable of bearing a child, but women are not expected to support, provide for, and protect her entire family. Throughout all of this research I have done, I have realized one major aspect of the social matrix we are living in… we are always being divided, whether it be by wealth, the clothes we wear, our ethnicity, or what gender we identify as, we are constantly divided. I have come to realize that men and women have spent so much time trying to compare themselves, saying women are superior, or men are more powerful when the two can’t genuinely be compared. We are different, but that is such a beautiful thing! We both have such amazing qualities that were meant to bring us all together, but instead our society has continued to push us apart. Maybe people have a drastically different social matrix than I do, but for myself, finally learning how to embrace the aspects of being a woman has awakened me from my social matrix.