Embracing My Humanity

This was written as an entry into a contest for International Women's Day. The prompt was:

How I embrace womanhood / What it means to me to be a woman

A woman working on a horizontal stabilizer, 1943. Image was taken by a U. S. government employee and is in the public domain. Uploaded from Wikimedia Commons.

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For me, to embrace my womanhood, is to embrace my humanity.

I remember being startled as a child to discover I was expected to play a distinct role because of my gender. I didn't think of myself as female. I thought of myself as a person. Maybe this came from living in a household where my survival was dependent, completely, on a woman. It was my mother who rose in the morning and stoked the fire. It was my mother who warmed our clothes in the oven and dressed us under the covers because the house was cold.

My mother never would have called herself a feminist, and yet she had no one to turn to but herself.

We lived in a rural area. My father was long gone, except for the occasional appearance when he would stop by and bully us. My mother was afraid of him. We were all afraid of him. He was pretty large and always angry. But that didn't make him look strong. It made him look weak. In a short time, he would be gone, with his bluster, and my mother would remain. She would find food somehow, cook dinner, help us with homework, make clothes from scratch for our school assemblies.

I remember once our dog, Rex, was choking on a bone. My mother stuck her hand down the dog's throat, past his sharp teeth, and pulled the bone out. Rex didn't bite her, and she didn't blink. I remember another dog episode. There was a stray, a German Shepherd, who used to come around. We'd been given a Chihuahua, Chico. We didn't need another dog, but there Chico was.

One day, Chico and the stray got into a spat. My mother ran toward the dogs and threw water on them to break up the fight. She didn't stop to think the Shepherd might attack her. She had to help Chico. It was too late for that poor dog. She carried him into the house and laid him on the couch, where he expired.

If there was danger, my mother was the one who protected us. Once there was a lookout for an escaped prisoner in the area. At night, our own backyard seemed a threatening place in the absolute darkness. It was my mother we looked to for protection. There was no one else. She made us feel safe.

When I reached adolescence we moved to Brooklyn. Then I suffered a rude awakening. I was beginning to show early signs of womanhood, and this did not go unnoticed. Men would stare. They'd make comments in the street. To me, a girl from the country, it was like an assault. I wanted my privacy back. I didn't reject my womanhood. I rejected the fact that men were making a prison out of it for me.

This perspective often set me apart from other women of my time. They thought unsolicited comments were compliments. They thought compliments gave them power. What they didn't see, was that the comments and compliments set them apart, made them separate. And, as the Supreme Court famously ruled in another context, separate can never be equal.

I love being a woman, but please see me as a human being--no more, no less. I don't want to get a job because I'm female. I want to get it because I'm good. Don't disparage me because I'm female. And don't admire me for my gender. See me as a person without gender. Or, for that matter, without race or religion. See me for what I do, for what I am. See me for my humanity. That's what I embrace, in myself and everyone else.