How Planning My Wedding Made Me Rethink Feminism
The story of rediscovering feminism
I have always thought of myself as a feminist, even when not using the same words, I believed in fighting for women’s equal rights and liberation. I believed women are capable of doing everything a man can do, and maybe even more.
Growing up in Mongolia and being the fourth of a family of 5 daughters and an incredibly strong mother, I truly believed this and watching my sisters’ life journeys throughout the years has shown me that while being a woman is AMAZING in some ways, it is also horribly disconcerting in others.
I worked throughout my adolescent years to make sure that I was challenging the stereotypes about women consistently. Girls are emotional — I show no emotion. Girls are irrational — I was so logical, to a fault. Girls are gold-diggers — I was committed to building a career and providing for myself. Girls do housework — through arguments with my mother, I reluctantly did this. Girls cook — I hated cooking.
I essentially distanced myself from everything traditionally feminine, because I wanted to live outside of gender expectations.
A New Challenge
Recently, I started to connect with my family back home to plan my wedding in August. What I didn’t expect was that I would have to face my family’s values that come with the prospects of becoming a wife, and in the future, a mother, which made me rethink feminism, as I knew it.
What I didn’t realize is that while I knew my family was full of strong independent women, my parents are still very traditionally inclined. They believe in a man being the head of the household, and that a man has to provide for the family, while a woman is a care-giver, which are all principles that I had vowed to disobey earlier in my life. Although my father was the reason why our family was able to thrive, I did not want to be constricted in a care-giver role, and depend on my husband’s earnings to make my life.
This confused me, because the way I saw strong independent women were women who didn’t give in to those stereotypes and said NO to society’s expectations of them.
Is it possible for a woman to be a feminist AND live a traditional life as a care-giver?
In the same way that I like to solve all my problems, I needed to do some research. I remembered that I had a book called “A World Full of Women” by Martha C. Ward on my shelf, which I hadn’t read.
From Martha’s book, I realized three things:
I. My deepest misogyny — I saw traditional women’s work as trivial to traditional men’s work.
I preferred working outside the home, the more socially glamorous and “important work”, rather than working within the household.
I realized that we have been taught primarily from a male-centric perspective without even realizing it. Martha highlights in her book that when we tell the story of pre-historic humans, the narrative revolves around hunting, a form of man’s work and gathering was only added later as a secondary function. However, way before man had the tools to hunt, women still had the responsibility to gather food and feed their children. We name human time periods according to tools that man hunted with such as “Stone Age”, but what about the tools that women made with wood, cloth and animal skin for their children prior to that? I began to understand how women’s care work is quite often discredited and invisible throughout the narrative of our society.
This made me realize that while trying to not give in to society’s expectations, I contributed to the very reason why women’s care work is so “invisible”. I saw women’s work as unworthy of my time and didn’t give stay-at-home moms the acknowledgement that they deserved.
II. We need less “leaning in” and more systemic change
Society continuously tells women to lean in, to change the way we behave, so that we are better respected through male standards — be more assertive, be louder, be selfish. This changed me to actually dismiss everything feminine in order to fortify my position for a successful career and a well- respected life.
I realize, now, that we need to change the way society sees femininity and all things feminine. It’s about valuing both femininity and masculinity equally in a fluid manner. So that men are not shamed for being feminine, and women are not patronized for being stay-at home mothers.
III. A New Hope
There has been a pattern of increasing number of men going in to traditionally feminine jobs, once the jobs become socially more important and economically viable. For example, the work of assisting birth and supporting women’s health was always traditionally a woman’s work, but once it became an official profession, and starts getting salaried, men became so dominant that in 1970, 93% of gynecologists in the U.S. were men. Now, with the increasing number of female graduates, this field is becoming female-dominant again.
Through this example, you can see that the problem is not men. Men are willing to get into traditionally-feminine jobs if given the opportunity and the conditions to. It is, instead, a systemic problem. If we are able to shift the mindset and put more resources behind care work, we can change unpaid care work from, a “trivial” job that no one wants to do, to an important asset in the community’s development. Because at the end of the day, the future is in the care-givers hands, quite literally.
Conclusion
After all this pondering, I realized that feminism is not about women doing everything men do, it is about acknowledging and giving genuine importance to women’s choices, regardless of if they choose a traditional, or a non-traditional lifestyle. Its about embracing femininity and acknowledging its societal value to the same level as traditionally masculine traits. Its about glorifying femininity to the same extent we glorify masculinity, so that men are not afraid of being care-givers as well. Its about re-configuring the traditional distribution of labor to suit our lives. Its about blurring the hard lines and accepting all the scales on the wide spectrum of choices men and women can make about their lives.
I am no longer afraid of being a stay-at-home parent and being the care-giver of the family. ’Tis my honor and I am blessed that my future husband feels the same.
Peace and serenity to you.
