Re-Defining Womenhood

Exciting things are going to happen on the blog this summer. I will make a list of my ideas:

• Guest posts from people who are living exciting lives and don’t usually blog
• Random interviews from celebrities…that is, my friends pretending they are of celebrity status (this is already in the works)
• Fashion? Maybe. Or I might resurrect I Don’t Buy Clothes and add more diverse posts there
• Video blogs
• Book related posts, such as “what classics you should read and what classics are too boring to bother with,” and “what to read if you hate reading.”
• Fiction stories

Please leave a comment telling me if you would like to see any of those things. I’m not going to be very busy this summer, so its a perfect time to get some blogging done.

However, right now I am very busy, working on two finals, and so I only have time for one quick rant.

This little girl is named Sophie. This weekend, at church camp, she ran around in a silky leopard-print skirt, barefoot, picking caterpillars out of the sandbox.

She brought one to me and I said, “would you like to hear the story of the Prince and the Caterpillar?”

She nodded eagerly. I wove a fairy-tale heavily plagiarized from “the Frog Prince,” and she ate it up.

Sometimes I would pass her in the woods. I was on the paths, she was venturing off into the muddies areas. I called her “Princess Elana.” She grinned, a happy mud-covered princess.

Some people would label her a girly-girl. Some would call her a tomboy. Some would call her a strange mixture of the two. I would say she represents everything wonderful about girlhood.

I am a firm believer that men and women are different. I think that the world works best, and people are happiest, when men embrace their manhood and women embrace their womanhood. Some women rebel against the idea of “being womanly,” and I think the reason for that is that the definition of “womanly” is all screwed up.

Being a woman is about a lot of different things. Motherhood. The love of pretty things. Creativity. Longing for adventure. Bravery. A keen understanding of emotions. Hard work. Some of these things, like motherhood, women hold exclusively, while others, like bravery, are present in both a strong man and a strong woman.

Sometimes things like “bravery” get cut from the list of “womanly attributes,” since men possess the same attribute. Then, if some woman wants to go bravely swing her sword and save a life, she is seen as rebelling against womanhood, and caring little about more “womanly” things such as fashion. Characters are either painted as “girly-girls” or “tomboys.”

Where are the real girls? Where are the Sophie-like girls who climb trees and pretend they are castles?

I don’t like the term “tomboy.” I don’t like it, because it presents the idea that boys get to do all the fun things, and a girl can’t do fun things and still be girl-like.

Girlhood, as well as womenhood, needs to be re-defined. If girls and women want to be men and boys because males have all the fun, the world misses out on the amazing things real women have to offer.

End of rant.

P.S. Be sure to comment on my future blog post ideas, and feel free to add ideas of your own!