State of the Woman, Part II: Freedom to Choose Our Futures

  As a girl growing up in the 21st century, I grew up in a very different world from my older female relatives. I was raised in the era of girl power, where opportunities for women were cropping up everywhere, and people had really begun to realize that women could do a lot of good in the world without devoting themselves to being mothers and wives. My peers and I were encouraged to dream big and make it happen, to not let our sex ever hold us back. We were taught, generally, to value ourselves as women, to know that we were wonderful and powerful all on our own. No man should ever make or break us, and we should never have to depend on a man. We could make our own way in the world and our own choices. Gone were the days when a woman's only real option in the eyes of society was to get married and have a family. We women could now do whatever we wanted.

Or at least, that's what we were told.

In recent years, I've come to question how much freedom modern American women actually have to choose their own path. I would like to think we've come a long way from our grandparents' generation, where women usually married early and then had children, entering domestic life instead of building a career. The women who came before today's generation worked hard to ensure that building our lives around a husband and children wasn't our only option. In doing so, did they really win the fight for women's autonomy, for our freedom to choose what we do? Or did society just change what it expected from us, without giving us any more real options?

I find myself more and more inclined to believe the latter - that women now having the right to choose what their lives will be like is mostly a bunch of BS. Maybe I'm just naive, but at twenty-three, I don't feel like I have real options. I feel like my peers and I must obtain at least a college degree or technical training. Sure, we can technically still choose to get marry young and have children while doing all of this, but how many of us actually feel like that's a viable option? How many of us are actually comfortable attempting to maintain a marriage and a family at the age our grandparents were able to? As women today, it feels like we have so much more to do before we can "settle down," and the definition of settling down has changed. Settling down used to mean our family became our sole focus, with very few distractions or other things, like a career, to focus on. Women devoted themselves to their husbands and children. Now, settling down is more about committing - to a person, a career, and a more moderate, responsible lifestyle. We're expected to keep a steady head while doing it all: maintaining a marriage, raising kids, and managing a career.

As a society, we have gone from nearly forcing women to sit tight as full-time housewives to nearly forcing women to divide their time and energy between work and family life. Without one or the other, women are so often objects of scorn and ridicule. If a woman wants to be a full-time mother and wife, at the expense of her career, others accuse her of setting women's rights back, because she isn't taking advantage of everything her fellow females fought for over generations. Many will judge her as weak. If a woman wants to focus solely on her career and doesn't care to be a wife or a mother, people will judge her as frigid and odd.

It seems like since America now allows women to be mothers and wives in addition to having a career, American women must do it all, and they are judged harshly by many if they do not. Is that really freedom to choose?