From the moment a female is conceived, she is already at a disadvantage. She is already labelled in pink: on the cards people buy to congratulate her parents, the clothes that she wears and the gifts that she’s given. From conception a fighter is born.
Women are born fighters. In fact, it’s so inbuilt that we don’t even notice we are fighting. Growing-up we take a lot on the chin. It takes a big hit to knock us down.
We call these knocks ‘life’ and we live our lives to the full. Perhaps to our detriment we put up with a lot. With harassment and discrimination, with being made to feel less worthy.
We fight on. We are emotional warriors. We wear our hearts on our sleeve. We feel compassion and anger. We feel empathy and pain.
Women are always fighting something. Even each other. Contrary to the weak, mild-mannered stereotype, we were born to fight. The irony of the label ‘the weaker sex’! We were not born weak.
Weakness is learnt. Weakness is a societal demand. Weakness is thrust upon us to make others feel strong and in control.
But we were born to fight. Women are fighters with their hearts and with their voices. This is what we want our girls to be.
It’s in our blood.
#InternationalWomensDay
Hi Alison
How are you?
I learned a bit of advice a while back that may/may not be helpful. It is that we have no right to anyone else’s opinion of us. In fairness, i would offer the addendum that this is true except in the case of legal constraints.
In this context, I would flavour it with the connotation ‘despite what anyone may say’, we need to bring all our children up with a deep core of self belief regardless of what society throws at them.
Expectations of children can be unfair for both genders and its for us as parents to strengthen them and teach them to know their own worth.
This doesnt stop with the children though as we need to remind adults of their own beauty and wonder. We are all a little bit divine and we would all do better if we looked to our similarities as opposed to our differences.
Adam x