ANGUISH AND CHOICE
🖊 Batoul Khalifeh 🕓 2022-06-06 🗀 Motherhood, 15 minutes
It should not be shocking to hear that rights regarding gender have significantly improved over the past 50 years. Yet, we find ourselves, still, amidst an ongoing battle for women’s rights and equality. The voices of great women like Susan B. Anthony and Emmeline Pankhurst seeded this imperative movement that has forever changed the scope of womanhood.
In defining womanhood, it is imperative to indicate that “womanhood [is] not only dependent on women’s ability, choice, or skills but also on rules of behavior” (Santana, 2016).
Women changed with the power of choice with time
Throughout history, women have been coerced into caretaking and marriage to become homemakers, as their behavior was and still is judged by society with the utmost harshness. All the while, patiently following a traditional gender role provided by a patriarchal society spreading thousands of years into history. The major change from a patriarchal society to a more liberal one came post World War I. Many women in the West had to fill the role of men and work while most of the males were off at war. This was the pivoting period of femininity and the seed that birthed rights from suffrage to economic equality. Yet, it was just the beginning, as Constance Grady (2018) states, that feminism as a movement has evolved into waves of feminism. This metaphor claims that feminism within itself is unsure of its desires and goals and so has branched off into different forms. Therefore, today, many women are anguished, depraved, and yearning for something; the next thing.
The modern woman is entangled in a web of decisions, debates, and beliefs causing drainage and undoubtedly bringing mental and physical instability. A proper woman must be a university graduate, independent, strong, still, vulnerable, and nurturing, and nothing less! Ridiculous standards. She must give all of herself and keep all of herself simultaneously, paradoxically, she should do this while fighting to be heard. So, again women are anguished, but by whom? Is it society that brings this anguish or is it familial expectations? Maybe it’s both! maybe it’s the overloaded burden that women today try to carry? or could it be a combination of all these things?
It doesn’t actually matter what causes the anguish rousing from the burdened backs of women, because if you think about it, it is women themselves that are to blame for their own anguish.
Many have fallen for the social politics of beauty, Hollywood expectations, and various falsities. Many invigorated females choose to conform to whatever shape feminism or righteousness was defined by extreme liberalists’ needs. Then, one must ask, do women need to be empowered when they already have the power of choice? Rather than assimilate into all of today’s social standards, anguish disappears through her own contemplation, her own choice, and her own path, whether that path is to become a housewife or a lawyer, in the end, she must be the one consciously choosing.