Changing HerStory (part 1)

For months, I have been frozen, perhaps for my own protection, my sanity. Fear has kept me from speaking up, and I still feel the need for restraint speaking to you now. It is the way of women, I guess, keeping our voices in check.

A recent article here on Substack reminded me of my one absolute. The unabideable thing that unhinges the most dangerous side of my character. Injustice. I can’t abide injustice or cruelty for any person, or animal, for that matter. In this case, specifically today, I am speaking up for women and girls. I am talking about the dismissal, diminishment, and disregard for the equal treatment of voice, respect, and importance of women and girls in society.

The article by the ‘Good Men Project’, knocked loose a hinge on a door with many locks in my mind. It's been this way for about a year, partly to keep what I have witnessed and experienced over my lifetime as a female contained. A couple of days ago, an extended phone conversation with my daughter splayed the door from the second hinge.

Memories rushed in like flood waters overwhelming me, but I was not drowning. I am reminded of my sense of helplessness when it comes to knowing how to help affect change for women in my life now and for future generations. What I have experienced and what I have seen my daughters and female friends fall victim to in how we exist, navigate, and are treated in a world that speaks of working toward and fighting for progress and rights for all falls flat.

Maybe because I have never understood the reason for a fight at all.

In high school, I took a multi-ethnics class, led by a male Hispanic teacher who made me begin to question the world around me. I suddenly had thoughts like:

Why isn’t everyone treated with equality right now?

Why is there a need for a fight to be seen, heard, recognized, and considered valuable based on gender, skin color, or religion?

Who is making the rules and how do we change them?

What I’ve noticed on an immediate level is that most women are living the lives of the men in their lives. Don’t get me wrong. I adore men. Good men. My father was a perfect example of a good man. I don’t have daddy issues, get that straight. And women don’t always know they need good men. We think we want the excitement found in novels. I recently noticed a trend: women saying they don’t want a boring man, and an ordinary marriage. Why, because the movies and romance books we love tell us wildly erratic relationships, with brooding narcissists, is a turn on? No that’s normalizing abuse and telling us we should believe that attacks on our nervous system is a sexy adventure.

We also continue to glorify the concept of marriage. We seek, secure, and marry as if it is our calling in life. Create bridal vision boards as if this one moment in life will transform us into someone new and worthy of starting to live. And of course, the ritual isn’t real or effective for less than $20k.

From that expensive memorial day forward, women get busy building a life that revolves around what, where, and how our man wants the ship to move forward. Women are great architects and will build their desired world to specifications. We’ll even go the extra mile by adding a bonus, personally designed pedestal, topped with a handcrafted swivel throne upholstered in blue velvet, for our king to lounge upon.

And someday, the inevitable occurs, they become bored with having everything handed to them on a platter. But we won’t know because we’ve been busy proving ourselves on the job, and wrangling kids, and sweating in the laundry room. Putting everyone else ahead of our needs while they are longing for something more, new, younger, fresh, and flirty.

We may have careers of our choosing but even the workplace requires our overperformance to get the same credit as our male colleagues. In most cases we are not doing better for it. What women’s liberation seems to have given us is more work, and not more equality, voice, or recognition – as was intended.

My point is that women now, compared to a hundred years ago, have changed in that we take on more responsibility running from morning until night with jobs, errands, kids, husband, and household responsibilities. Do women feel freer when they also need to keep up with their social media side hustle – and once again dive into a sea of competition to be noticed, liked, and paid. And please don’t forget to turn on the face filter and accidentally show cleavage because at 45, 50, 60 you have to work it harder than ever because your up against stiff competition these days.

What happens is what happened to me. I woke up one day and realized I was 60. My youth, beauty, desires, and needs dried up in a forgotten pot on the backburner of a life dedicated to someone else who no longer saw me as worthwhile. A disposable and irrelevant woman in the lives of people I had dedicated myself to for decades.

You know what shocks me most? The treatment I accepted and sacrifices I made to feed upon morsels in my life. And by my example, I accidentally taught my daughters how to behave like good girls, no matter how big or wild or ambitious they felt inside. Many, many women I’ve known have done the very same thing. And we are wrong to think their fate will look any different at sixty if they follow our blueprint.

It doesn’t create anything good. It creates girls and women smothering who they are and keeps them quiet when they suffer abuse. I know from experience that it is poison and it creates deeply irregulated internal systems that cause addiction, mental illness, and can lead to suicide.

If we mean what we say and want a better world for our daughters then we need to set the example.

We need to show up every day with our voice and identity intact.

We show them what we say we mean.

We stand up for ourselves, we speak up for what we want and need.

We don’t shrink or accept less for our effort.

We don’t doubt our value or look for it in an approving gaze, nod, smile from someone else before we believe it for ourselves.

Our value is already one hundred percent because we built it ourselves from the inside.

We carry it with us every place – home, job, or gym – and never need permission or approval to behave as who we truly are.

This isn’t just for our daughters either. The knowledge of how our sons go into the world and treat women is learned from us. We raise our boys to be the men we keep saying our daughters deserve in their lives.

Thank you reading,

Anne