Motherhood. Housekeeping. Emotion. In a matter of minutes, I had been reduced to three words because I’m a woman, and these descriptions came from none other than two college women, not much older or younger than me.
Had I missed something? Were we not all attending a four-year liberal arts college and pursuing careers? Had I stumbled into a class on burping babies, etiquette and table setting by mistake? Could I, as a woman, possibly be thought of initially and always in terms of those three words?
I was in women’s history, a class that’s the size of four, and Monday night when we first met, the fourth girl didn’t show up. So there I sat, across from my professor, with one girl on my left and one on my right. I was surrounded by three pairs of eyes hidden behind thick-framed glasses.
After brief introductions, the professor got up and wrote “women” on the white board and asked us to think of some words we associate with women.
The other two girls started throwing out ideas, starting with motherhood, housekeeping and emotion. Had I been transported back to 1955?
I brought up women’s rights and career women.
“We won’t spend much time talking about career women, but some. Not a lot, but some,” my professor said.
I thought we’d spend a lot of time talking about women as activists, like the suffragettes and feminists, so I was a little disappointed, to say the least.
At the end of class, our professor gave us a chance to say which topics we’d like to discuss and look at in depth throughout the semester. I brought up my big three: career women, women’s rights and feminism.
But I was still bothered by the words so commonly and quickly associated with women, and now, I want to know – what words would you use to describe today’s modern woman? Or rather, what words would you use to describe yourself? What is your top three?