We can all agree that the way women were being treated in the old days was terrible. A woman was nothing more than a tool. She wasn’t allowed to have an opinion, she wasn’t allowed to talk back or to have any skills outside of the kitchen. I mean yuk. As a woman who hates cooking, I can definitely say I was born in the right century. But no one seems to be talking about the great burden that is being placed in women these days, the “superwoman” burden.
Most women are eager to show what they can do, they want to prove that they can get the job done, that they deserve a place in the world, rightfully so and to be honest they have proved it. But since the world has been so harsh, a woman feels the need to go an extra mile, to do the job twice as hard just to prove to her male counterparts that she can, Taylor Swift’s “The man” gives us a great picture of the things women go through to prove themselves worthy. This has helped a lot over the centuries. However, we are now simply exhausted and to be honest I feel like we’re all a little paranoid too. Think about it, a man is and has been doing what he has always been doing, but a woman is doing all that she was doing and more. She still has to carry a child for nine months, she still has to breastfeed, she still has to care for her little ones. Now the superwoman will do it all, she will pump that milk early in the morning for her kid, workout, get her hair and make up done perfectly, go to work, deliver that superb presentation, or conduct a life saving surgery and still come back home to give her kid a bath. Her husband is proud of her, and she is proud of herself and let’s be honest, we’re all proud of this woman. However, can you imagine how exhausting her life is? Now this is not the only thing that’s tiring about the whole thing. Her husband or significant other, though proud of her is not aiming to be super anything, he likes what she’s doing. To be fair, he’s just supporting her in pursuing what she wants or needs to do to make herself happy. But, when the man can’t find the pan that he is supposed to use for the pancake, he’s still calling his wife to ask where it is, when she sends him to do the groceries and he doesn’t know which brand to get, he’s calling her, when his kid’s fever is running at 40 degrees and he is freaking about what to do, he’s still calling his wife and ask her what he’s supposed to do. I am not saying this is bad, this is actually really good. But now let’s look at the woman, in the old days, when the bulb in the kitchen burned out, a wife would tell her husband to change it, she would tell him to screw the cabinet back into place and pump the toilet when it’s clogged and so on. Now she doesn’t, now she already knows she doesn’t necessarily need the man to do the job, this isn’t a muscle’s job after all so she does everything. Let’s think about that for a second. Let’s just really think about how much work women are actually doing and how much they don’t have to do some of them.
I have the utmost respect for women who do it all, for all the superwomen out there, more power to you. But I also think it’s high time that we gave ourselves a little break and put the pressure off of ourselves. We’ve already proven ourselves, comprehensively. I mean, we have women ranging from Angela Merkel to Oprah Winfrey to Malala Yousafzai to Simone Biles to every women who has come before them and every woman in between. Women have made their presence known in this world and anyone who needs anymore convincing is just not worth proving anything to. It’s time we relax the reigns a little bit, to ask for a little help, to be a little vulnerable and be a little lazy and just enjoy life.
