For How Long Should a Woman be a Reflection of Her Past?
From single mothers to baby mamas, the label lingers on
It seems absurd to me that women have to be subtly labelled by their choices, their past, and not by their identity.
I never hear the word ‘baby daddy’ half as much as I hear words like ‘baby mama’ and ‘single mother’. When it’s a man, then he is just a father, but as soon as it’s a woman, all of a sudden the need for a label arises.
Truth is, most women wear the boots when it comes to raising a child. So, why does the term ‘single’ have to come in when it comes to a mother? Was she ever lacking in her capacity to be a mother? Why does the identity of a woman have to beg for acceptance and echo in explanation?
It’s all about who’s the baby mama, but no one ever says ‘baby papa’. The man is allowed to move on and keep his full identity, but the woman has to “lose” something.
One thing we have to understand here is that a patriarchal society thrives on labels. The more you make things seem dependent through the attachment of labels, the more dependent those things and people eventually become.
Take a look at the world of professionalism, where women always have their gender attached to their individual greatness. She is the greatest ‘female’ rapper of all time. She is the greatest ‘woman scientist’ ever.
Why is it so difficult for a woman to be seen as a singular person? Must every woman always be put in a class, or matched into a group she never opted into? Must there always be some kind of aesthetic to the feminine name?
It’s always never a big deal when a woman is concerned with her identity, but this is never the case when just punctuation is being stripped from the identity of a man. In marriage, there still has to be a collaboration between last names for the woman’s name to live on (the feminine name is always co-dependent on something else).
The time when a woman's voice has to be vetted before it carries the necessary weight is over. The time when women have to stick to moral guidelines to be seen as worthy of emulation is over. Definitely, the time when a woman’s identity is hers is here to stay.
Women’s identity isn’t a ripple effect of the people in their lives. They are products of their decisions and can bear that responsibility alone without needing a ‘damage control’ label from a clueless society.
Women and Erasure
There is something about ‘women and erasure’ that never sits right with me. You can’t erase someone from history, you can only blur them out with someone else.
Over the years, decades, and centuries, women have had to watch their names be blurred, just so they can still retain their identities. The idea of isolating a woman’s name until a blur is found for it is what we seem to refer to today as ‘erasure’.
What this should teach us is how much we are obliged to amplify the voices of women in every facet of our society, without asking for an explanation first. If a woman is harassed, then extend a megaphone to her, she needs a voice and not your sympathy.
It’s not in our place to determine whether a woman’s story is potent enough, let who wants to debate, do so after she has dropped the mic.
The Matilda Effect
In 1993, science historian Margaret W. Rossiter coined the name ‘Matilda Effect’ referencing suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage’s essay Woman as Inventor, which was published 100 years before. Joslyn Gage in her essay described the prejudice in failing to acknowledge the achievements of female scientists but rather attributing their work to male colleagues.
Although woman’s scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet some of the most important inventions of the world are due to her. A very slight investigation proves that patents taken out in some man’s name are, in many instances, due to women — Matilda Joslyn Gage.
The Matilda Effect — though applying to the erasure of women within science — is still acknowledged far beyond that, from writing to the arts.
It gives us an insight into how much the identity of women is tagged as dependent on another entity. Sometimes it almost feels like the identity of a woman is a decimal point, in desperate need of some masculine approximation.
The actions we need to take collectively isn’t rocket science. Wherever you have the capacity to recruit workers, make sure you give equal opportunity to everyone, in both expression and representation. During elections, the voices of each contender should be ‘vocal blind’.
As a human resource worker, decisions should be carried out in the team by both women and men, that way no voice in the organization would be blurred or face the Matilda Effect. Women are in a better position to understand their voices than Men, and a society that understands this is no longer a slave to Patriarchy.
Let’s all get woke and continue shielding the feminine identity from misrepresentation, blurred lines, dependency, and unsolicited labels.
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