Who am I?
As we plod through life, we define many roles as women.....as daughters, sisters, friends, girlfriends, wives, mothers, aunts, grandmothers.............all rounded and carefully molded to fit our cultures and the communities that we grown up in....
But at some point in every woman's life........and perhaps several times in a woman's life.........she reaches a point where she tried to define herself as an individual..........And usually society is not kind to these kind of thoughts.
For me personally....that question.......Who am I?...led me down the spiritual path of Islam, in which I found peace, balance and a place for myself within society......That was my identity....And I could be ultra 'feministic', and yes still be a good person......I am still me, and I am a Muslim woman, and in the midst of all that, I still play all the roles I have to play in connection with my fellow human beings....without losing myself in the mix.
Sometimes this struggle however, leaves many ladies confused and tormented...And they may not be able to identify what is the root of all the conflict.........
The words of BETTY FRIEDAN fifty years ago had immense power, and I think up to now, will still resonate with many women.
So despite this being a tad bit long.........this blog is dedicated to her..............and to all those girls who have always been told, that there is a glass ceiling.
"It is not easy to put into words a feeling and a problem that women find harder to talk about than almost anything - including sex. it is in fact such a complex and elusive problem that - as prevalent as it is - there is not yet a psychological term to describe it. Essentially, this feeling or problem is a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning, a search that is going on in the minds of women. This is not easy to put into words because those women who struggle with it struggle alone, afraid to admit that they are asking themselves the silent question, "Is this all?", as they make the beds, shop for groceries and new curtains, eat peanut-butter sandwiches with the children, chauffeur Cub Scouts and Brownies to and from meetings, or lie beside their husbands at night.
There are no words for this search in the millions of words written for women about women these past 20 years in columns, articles, and books by experts that tell us that our roles as women is to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. The voices of tradition and the voices of Freudian sophistication tell us that we can desire no greater destiny than to glory in our role as women, in our own femininity. They tell us how to catch a man and keep him; how to breast-feed children and handle toilet training; sibling rivalry, adolescent rebellion, how to buy a dishwasher, cook Grandmother's bread and gourmet snails, build a swimming pool with our own hands; how to dress, look and act more feminine, and make marriage more exciting; how to keep our husbands from dying young and our sons from growing into delinquents.
They tell us - the psychologists and psychoanalysts and sociologists who keep tracing the neuroses of child and man back to mother - that all our frustrations were caused by education and emancipation, the striving for independence and equality with men, which made women unfeminine. They tell us that the truly feminine woman turns her back on the careers, the higher education, the political rights the opportunity to shape the major decisions of society for which the old-fashioned feminist fought.
Now a thousand expert voices pay tribute to our devotion from earliest girlhood to finding the husband and bearing the children who will give us happiness. They tell us to pity the "neurotic", "unfeminine", "unhappy" women who once wanted to be poets and physicists of presidents, or whatever they had it in them to be. For a women to have such aspirations, interests, goals of her own, the experts keep telling us, impairs not only her ability to love her husband and children but her ability to achieve her own sexual fulfillment.
How can a woman shut her ears to all the voices of the experts and listen instead to the inner voice within her that tells her something else? Sometimes a woman says, "I feel empty, somehow", or "useless", or "incomplete", or she says it is, "as if I don't exist".
Sometimes she goes to a doctor with symptoms she cannot describe: "I have a tired feeling"..."I get so angry with the children it scares me"..."I feel like crying without any reason". She may spend years on the analyst's couch, working out her adjustment to the "feminine role". And an inner voice may say "that's not it".
A woman may live half her lifetime before she has the courage to listen to that voice and know that it is not enough to be a wife and mother, because she is also a human being herself. She cant live through her husband and children. She has to find her own fulfillment, whatever it may be.
It is such a simple truth.
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| Betty Friedan Co founder of the Organization for Women (NOW). She died in 2006. |
No woman knows where her search for self fulfillment will take her.
No woman starts that search today without struggle, conflict, and taking her courage in her hands.
Maybe growth does not come without conflict.
When every woman learns to listen without fear to the voice inside her, instead of smothering it, it may lead - perhaps even more surely than rockets into space - to the next step in human evolution.
Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves???
Who knows what women's intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?
Who knows what sons and daughters will become when their mother's fulfillment makes girls so sure they want to be feminine that they no longer have to look like Marilyn Monroe to prove it, and makes boys so unafraid of women they don't have to worry about their masculinity??
Who knows the possibilities of love, when men and women share not only children, home and garden, not only fulfillment of their biological role, but the separate human knowledge of separate human beings??"
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