From preschool to 2nd grade, I only wore dresses and skirts. You see, I wanted so badly to be a princess, and the first step was obviously attire. So dresses it was. But in 3rd grade, there was a shift – no more dresses. I wore pants and shorts every day, and my mother had to force me into my church clothes every Sunday. Why the sudden change? Because dresses and skirts and princesses and the color pink were all “too girly” for me. This was my first brush with internalized misogyny, when women project society’s higher value of masculinity onto other women, making them look down on traditionally feminine activities.
This internalized misogyny colored my interactions with the other girls in my grade; my disdain for the girlier side of life led to a disdain for the girls who lived in it. I called them the Pinks, the girls who wore makeup and skirts and didn’t seem to have an intelligent thought in their heads. Of course I, the book nerd who couldn’t care less about her appearance, was superior to them. I was enlightened enough to know that feminine things, such as beauty and fashion, were simply mindless frivolities that only entertained the dull and insipid. I, with my rejection of all things girly, had reached a new level of womanhood, and all these idiots were left behind to choke on the perfume cloud of girlish fancies.
Of course, looking back, I can see the internalized misogyny of my thoughts. It’s all there: the assumption that feminine hobbies are lesser than more masculine pastimes, the belief that “girly girls” are vapid and dumb, the notion that it was my very rejection of femininity that made me a superior woman. Unbeknownst to me, I was embracing our culture’s lie that in order for a woman to be powerful and accomplished, she had to be like a man. You couldn’t like fashion and makeup and still be smart. You couldn’t love the color pink and simultaneously run the student council. Those things didn’t fit.
Since then, I have changed my way of thinking. I understand that feminism isn’t about the rejection of feminine activities and stereotypes, but rather allowing every girl and woman to choose who she wants to be and giving her the opportunity to pursue her goals. So if she wants to wear pink and fix cars, let her. If she wants to spend an hour on her makeup every morning before going off to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, let her. Don’t punish femininity because it is seen as less than masculinity.
To be honest, this lesson is something most feminists learn early on, and you can tell. You’ll rarely see a feminist today criticizing another woman for her appearance or for being “too feminine.” In fact, many women are embracing makeup and fashion as vehicles for empowerment rather than oppression. It almost seems like internalized misogyny has been wiped from the modern feminist movement. As long as every woman is happy with her choice, she can be as traditionally feminine or traditionally masculine as she wants, right? It would seem so.
And yet… sometimes we feminists have a hard time getting rid of our idealized version of a woman – one who is powerful and accomplished in the workplace. We admire the women who have broken the glass ceiling and climbed into positions of power. We admire them so much that we tend to look down on those who have no desire to climb at all.
It’s easy to let a woman choose what she wants to do when the choices are superficial and fit easily into our ideal of a woman – wear a pantsuit or a dress, have a career as a social worker or an engineer. But as soon as she expresses a desire to get married and have seven kids right out of high school, or embraces a “Biblical womanhood” that includes submission to her husband, or wants to waitress until she finds a man who can take of her, feminists can be up in arms, telling her that her choice is wrong because it doesn’t fit into our beliefs about what a woman should do. Does that sound familiar? It’s the same argument used to keep women in the role of homemakers for so many generations.
We must be careful that in our desire to free women from the oppression of men, we as feminists do not become the new oppressors. We have realized that feminism is not the rejection of feminine activities, but we have yet to embrace the women who have chosen a traditional role as a mother and homemaker. We may think that we have moved past our immature rejection of “girly girls” and the color pink, but our internalized misogyny creeps in again when we reject the “girly girls” of today: the wives and mothers who adhere to traditional ideas of womanhood. If we devalue women who choose to be homemakers, all we have done is replicate society’s false belief that the traditionally masculine workplace is more important, more noble, than the traditionally feminine home.
I will admit, I have struggled with this in the past. I have many friends whose greatest desire is to be homemakers, tending to large families while their husbands earn the family’s income. A year or two ago, I would have dismissed their choices as unfeminist and idiotic, the same way I dismissed the Pinks in 3rd grade. But I’m learning to be more accepting of other women’s worldviews, desires, and goals, even if they differ from what I would choose for myself.
If the goal of feminism is for women to choose who they want to be and be given the opportunity to pursue their goals, then we must graciously accept that free women will not always choose the newest path. Although many women have taken advantage of the opportunity to have a career, many other women have chosen to taken on a more traditional homemaking role. As feminists, we must value and protect these choices equally. True freedom exists only if we have both the freedom to break tradition and the freedom to conform to it.
Note: This article assumes that the women making the choice to be homemakers are actually making the choice themselves, and are not being forced to marry or denied education by their parents and/or community.
A post by Rebecca
Rebecca is a student and poet from Central Virginia, beginning her studies as an English major this fall. She loves musical theatre, over-analyzing fiction, and tending to her plants.