I have never once wished to be anything other than a woman, not in this life, and not in whichever others might exist beyond it.
I would return as a woman in every lifetime, in every universe, and I have never once needed to justify this to myself, though I am often asked to justify it to others. There is a peculiar exhaustion in having to defend a joy that should be self-evident, in explaining, again, that womanhood was never merely a biological coincidence—it was powerful and intentional, akin to an unbroken chain, a vast and largely unrecorded history that both predates and will outlast any single one of us. Mother Earth was never a metaphor invented for the convenience of a greeting card; it is an ancient and remarkably persistent instinct, the recognition that creation and womanhood have always occupied the same sentence, each leaning on one another to find strength. I was raised inside a family built almost entirely of women: from my sister to mothers who mothered each other as much as their children, aunts who functioned as second and third mothers without anyone formally assigning them the role and grandmothers whose authority needed no raised voice to be felt across a room. I watched them do everything: dance, laugh and cry, all while simultaneously holding entire households together in a kind of quiet, unglamorous competence that nobody thought to call heroic because it simply happened every day. It is from them that I inherited the understanding of womanhood I now carry, though I suspect ‘inherited’ undersells it—it was less something I was given, more something I absorbed, the way a child absorbs a language before any conscious memory of learning it. This article is written for them and for all the women who came before them whose names I will never know, but whose choices I live inside of daily. The ones who could not vote, could not study and who nonetheless made it possible for someone like me to sit here, uninterrupted, and think aloud about what womanhood means rather than simply enduring it. It is also, in some quieter register, written for the woman I have not yet become: the one who inherits this thread next and who will have to decide, as every woman before her has, what to keep of it and what to finally set down.
There is a bond between mothers and daughters that behaves strangely across time, skipping generations entirely and somehow still arriving intact, connecting women who were never introduced to each other and never will be. I think of my own grandmother, who was already an adult woman with a home and a life she was building in the years when she still could not have opened a bank account in her own name or secured a mortgage without a man’s signature vouching for her existence. It was not until 1975 that British law finally conceded that a woman’s income was her own, that her name alone was sufficient guarantee and that she did not require translation through a husband or a father to be considered creditworthy. This is not, to me, distant history. It is one generation removed from my own, close enough that I could have asked her about it directly, had I thought, as a child, to ask the right questions of the women around me and the injustices they suffered. We have understood this bond from the beginning, which is perhaps why so much of the best media circles the same relationship—the one that simultaneously portrays both holding on and the importance of letting go. Perhaps this is why the relationship between mothers and daughters feels so deeply moving: we are never just one woman; we carry both the women we are becoming and the daughters we were in the same breath. This nostalgia drives us—the warm feeling of recognising yourself in your mother’s eyes, an inheritance bound by no book, becoming ourselves through those who came before.
Each time a woman stands up for herself, she stands up for all women.
This is the point at which inheritance stops being a concept and mirrors something closer to debt, because if I carry a little of every woman who came before me, then I owe it to whoever comes after to be worth carrying. Which raises the harder question, one I am less prepared to answer honestly: who was I before any of this?
Many of us hold onto a picture, whether it is displayed on a windowsill or tucked away in an old shoebox filled with photographs: a young girl, shining in a dress, precariously balancing in shoes several sizes too large, caught mid-scream in what can only be described as pure joy, dancing with carefree delight. At this moment, she knows no shyness but will eventually learn, as she matures, that shyness is a performance expected of her. I suspect that nearly every woman reading this possesses her own version of that photograph tucked away, a small, radiant memory of who she was before she realised the need to diminish herself. I often find myself revisiting mine, viewing it through a lens of nostalgia and uncertainty, attempting to pinpoint the exact moment when my voice began to quiet; its absence of a beginning is almost more disturbing than the loss itself. It happens, I think, without a single dramatic event—one day, you are standing in the middle of womanhood without having noticed the transition. You discover that somewhere along the way you have begun accumulating debts: a smile owed to a stranger’s comment, a laugh to smooth over a silence that was making you uncomfortable or a conversation continuing because ending it felt somehow like a provocation. I suspect this is the real reason girlhood is clung to so fiercely once it has vanished—grieving for a version of freedom, back before your body and your voice belonged to an economy of other people’s comfort. We gradually give away parts of ourselves, so gradually you barely notice. Only later, looking at a photo of a girl who never thought about shrinking herself, do we see just how much we’ve given up.
What unsettles me most is how closely this debt resembles the inheritance passed down through generations, but in reverse. My grandmother handed me down a strength I did not fully understand until I needed it. It seems womanhood asks for a price, as if the world only lets us inherit power if we give up part of ourselves first. I think of her, and of my mother, and I wonder how much of their own girlhood they lost, whether they too have a photograph of a version of themselves and whether they ever found their way back to her, even a little. I am not certain any of it can be reclaimed. I am no longer sure that is not the most frightening sentence I have written so far—not because I doubt the strength I was given, but because I am beginning to understand it may have always come at a cost. One every woman before me paid without complaint, and now I am beginning to reset it for them as much as for myself.
Perhaps that is the real inheritance in the end—not the debt itself, but the astonishing fact of how many of us survive paying it.
It seems I should take some logical steps in this discovery if I am to find a way through. Namely, to detangle the propaganda we are sold—what is now offered as a substitute for real freedom and real change. Through the escalation of social media, we are now able to access other people’s thoughts, feelings and expressions constantly; through pursuing research, there has been a resurgence in the ‘dumbing down’ of certain issues to make them more accessible. Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with that—I mean, learning is for everyone—looking at the target audience and the bigger picture, we see a familiar pattern emerge. We are seeing a continued rhetoric from primarily younger women of ‘girl math’, ‘girl therapy’ or ‘I’m literally just a girl…’, using videos of cute cats, Starbucks and overconsumption to attempt to ‘teach’ women about what are considered ‘complex things’—from finance to stocks and shares and savings—because that is obviously nothing we could ever comprehend. This to me reads: ‘I’m just a girl, I’m stupid, but that’s fine’. This trend may seem harmless on the surface. Simplifying complex concepts for understanding is cute and fun—until it becomes indicative of something that could become incredibly regressive. You are not reclaiming a patriarchal society’s stereotype of women; rather, you’re playing into it. If this is rebellion against corporate greed and misogyny, by saying ‘I’m just a girl’, we are not fixing the structure, only cementing it, further highlighting the narrative that women should not be expected to succeed within it. It is not empowering us; it is setting us back. It circles back to 1975 when women couldn’t own property but fought fiercely to gain that right, proving that financial and monetary independence was important, not to be belittled and ignored. Creating the link that girlhood is synonymous with being inept, only being able to live a soft, easy life, means buying into the consumption you try so hard not to understand. I am by no means saying you have to commit to climbing the corporate ladder or feel cemented into a complex career to achieve—it is okay to not want those paths, but to know they still exist as choices is important. Minimising yourself and your abilities and jokingly attributing it to gender is disgraceful. We must be careful to not allow the ‘girlification’ of topics to make us seem less than! This fake and packaged version of girlhood is being marketed as empowerment when it is just benevolent sexism, patriarchy and oppression with a bow on it.
My perception of womanhood is flawed, looking inward at myself to acknowledge why this seems to be a natural continuing point. It means to serve, to sacrifice your dreams and aspirations until you are a shell of yourself adapting to the male gaze. But it does not have to be this way, and I do not wish for it to be so. In 2022, as Roe v. Wade was overturned and the question of “What is a woman?” became impossible to ignore, I found myself asking something more introspective: “What does it mean to me to be a woman?” Who comes to mind when you conjure that feeling of strength? Perhaps it is not one thing at all, but the duality of power and softness, intuition and ambition, identity and joy. But perhaps the clearest measure of what womanhood is permitted to be lies in what happens when a woman refuses to shrink to remain agreeable, speaking with conviction and anger on principle of her own accord. In parts of the world, a woman uttering an opinion is treated as though her voice carries potential harm; it must be softened or silenced, not to incur wrath from those around her. The fear of the female voice is now ferociously factual all across the world; in Afghanistan, under Taliban rule, women are confronted with this grotesque reality daily. Education is often one of the first freedoms to disappear; since then, work, movement, speech and public presence have been steadily stripped. No longer can they exist loudly and visibly. ‘A female cat in Kabul has more freedom than a woman—to wander, to feel the sun on her back.’ This painfully ordinary image of freedom, to feel the warmth of the rays, only makes the deprivation of these rights feel more inhumane. This cannot be simplified as merely an attitude towards women, but rather a systematic controlling of them and their actions, deciding whether their voices are worth valuing. We are not free until we all are. The distance between a woman playing dress-up and a woman silenced in Kabul is immeasurable. But connecting them is the same thread of inheritance of womanhood, unevenly distributed, determining what each is told she may become. Believing you are meant for something bigger is not naïve but fundamentally important. I wish for you to hold onto this idea firmly; she decided she could, so she did, and in doing so stood up for all.
Dedicated to the women who have always known that their lives could be larger than the limits placed upon them, and for every woman still fighting: may you always feel the warmth of the sun.
