What's it mean to be a "modern" woman? "Modern" means to come from something, and so a modern woman is a woman steeped in physical, cultural, and psychological ancestors—and that is all women. To be a modern woman is to share a common history with all the women that have preceded her. It is to share and be made by the hopes, fears, abuse, and victories of previous cultures’ relationships with women. I like this woman’s death mask because, even though she and I are separated by 1800 years, she emotes confidence and calm like the women in my life that I admire.
This song is about a daughter who wants to change and grow but feels trapped by the same struggles her mother faced. Being modern is to come from a historical context, but it also to be different from that past. Modern women come from the same struggles and past as their female ancestors, but they have the ability to make a new future for women. In my own family, for the last four or so generations the women have faced similar problems in their marriages, families, and mental health. But each generation it gets a little better and it comes from pulling strength from the previous generation and moving forward.
Over the last century women have gained incredible access to their rights. Being a modern woman makes one a benefactor of these gains. With benefaction comes the responsibility to ensure that current rights stay rights and that new rights are given so that, one day, all women will enjoy full access to life. Some ways to help future women are through political demonstrations and volunteering with at-risk populations. Not all women or men share my opinion. Many people in the United States feel that because women are better off than they were 50 or 100 years ago then feminists need to stop complaining. People in this anti-feminism camp argue omen should be grateful for what they have achieved, stop acting like victims, and just get over continued sexism (if continued sexism is even still a thing). That sort of thinking boils my blood.
Today, with 82.7% of the world's women literate, it is fair to say that a hallmark of the modern woman is education. Women's education is one of the surest ways to increase individual women's and communities' health. Educated women tend to have fewer children, so the children they do have have more resources and grow up healthier and more successful. Educated women also make more money and better healthcare choices for themselves and their families. Female education is great! Despite its greatness, fewer women than men are literate or graduate from school. So, despite the modern woman typically being an educated woman, she is also typically less educated than her male counterpart. This is one example of the modern woman's continued fight for equality.
Although globally women have more equality than ever before, the same sexist evils that have imprisoned women for thousands of years are still present all over the world. What makes us different today is that, at least in some countries, we have the legal, technological, and structural force to fight back and save abused women. Media like this video increase awareness about abuse and slavery; jobs like Tika’s are relatively new and make helping survivors more possible. Despite increased legal rights for abuse and trafficking victims and the educational programs on abuse and trafficking, many women (and men) continue to be victims of gender based violence and exploitation. I volunteered for six months at Utah County's Center for Women and Children in Crisis, a shelter home for domestic abuse victims (mostly women) and their children. I loved volunteering there, but the stories women told made me physically sick; several times I came home and sobbed to God wondering how men could treat women the way they did. In movies, TV, celebrities' and political leaders' lives, and everyday life, the physical, sexual, and intellectual control of women by men is still encouraged. Media acceptance and promotion of gender based violence is part of why evils like those against Tika and the women at the Center persist.
My favorite picture of my mom, about 2004.
Motherhood affects all women. Regardless of whether a woman is, or physically can be, a mother, the potential to be a mother shapes all women’s lives in some way. To not be a mother—to not fulfill the role that society has conflated with women for thousands of years—is a conscious choice, and society will treat her differently for making that choice. The inability to have children often brings severe emotional challenges. Once a woman becomes a mother, she is always a mother; even if her all her children die, she will never not be a mother. For many women simply having sex must involve choices about motherhood (to take birth control, to not take birth control, what type of birth control?). Motherhood is a part of all women’s lives.
To be a woman is to work and create opportunities. Whether that is as a mother, teacher, farmer, politician, janitor, business owner, or seamstress, women work. Women in different parts of the world have different work opportunities available to them, but regardless of the work they promote change and create a foundation for others. Unfortunately much of women's work is decided by gender roles and regared as less than men's work because society thinks women are inferior to men.
I despise gender roles--they are destructive to families, individuals, and societies. Gender roles prevent women and men from discovering and developing all of their talents. Because people are denied their full range of talents, gender roles have the potential to prevent people from blessing their families, friends, and communities to their greatest extent. I developed my loathing of gender norms when the boys in my ward (who were typically the only kids my age for three years in either direction) got to spend their Wednesday nights, weekends, and summers scaling mountains, swimming in lakes, and learning how to be a public citizens while I was stuck making crafts and learning how to be a homemaker and private citizen. This is one way my opinions differ from at least LDS popular opinion. I think general LDS opinion is that gender roles are biologically and divinely natural and healthy. (Also, I chose this picture because I hate it. In it is much of what is awful about gender roles. The envious little girl in the center is the focal point of the painting. Clearly she is supposed to be envious of her brother who, as a Boy Scout, represents all that is good about masculinity. She, a female who can never reach his enlightened male state, watches on both envious and proud of his superiority.)
quote from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
People are a mix. No man is the perfect stereotype of male and no woman is the perfect stereotype of female. Every person has some “maleness” in them and some “femaleness” in them. At our cores, before we are men or women, we are human. The breaking down of traditional gender roles allows people to be authentic and be humans first. Society, however, tends to think of men as human being first and as men second, while women are women first and human beings (though a lesser version than the male variety) second.
comic by Kate Beaton, Canadian cartoonist and feminist supreme https://eloriane.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/kate-beaton-and-clever-clever-comics/ Being a woman is sometimes having to remind people that her femaleness doesn’t make her incompetent; nor does she lack the ability to make things that are relevant to both men and women. Growing up around many very conservative people I often had to remind them that I could do the same things the boys were doing and no one needed to freak out or give me extra help simply because I was a girl. This comic also critiques the entertainment industry which, when marketing to women, plays on tropes of being a woman without just letting women in entertainment be normal people.
"Touch Me Not," Minerva Teichert; the resurrected Christ appearing to Mary
As an LDS woman, a major part of being a modern woman is that I have the ability to participate fully participate in Jesus Christ's gospel. At no other time in history, other than for Eve and her near descendants, has this been true. Women, and men, can take part in all the covenants and ordinances needed to be exalted. With the restoration of Christ’s gospel, God has also revealed that women are men’s equals and must be treated as such.
Me with my friends the Barnetts
Being a woman, being human, is to have relationships with other people. Our relationships with society, friends, family, and others allow us to fill our lives with meaning. Relationships are the mirror in which we view and understand ourselves. They are how we find joy, and being a woman certainly involves joy.
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