One day last week on the playground after school, I heard—not for the first time—one of my five-year-old daughter's male buddies tell her she couldn't do something because she was a girl.
"Anything you can do, I can do better" One day last week on the playground after school, I heard—not for the first time—one of my five-year-old daughter's male buddies tell her she couldn't do something because she was a girl. Check out this story on greenvilleonline.com: http://grnol.co/1bHZBfO
Greenville Published 12:04 a.m. ET March 30, 2015
Wylie Dodson, age 4.(Photo: Katherine Crawford / Contributor)Buy Photo
I know and love this little boy, and I know and love his parents—both of whom I'm sure have not once in his short life told him that girls couldn't do certain things just because they were girls. (In fact, if his mama had been standing close enough to hear him she'd probably have taken him out to the metaphorical woodshed.) Being fascinated by, and attempting to sort, categorize and make sense of their differences are developmental norms for kindergartners.
But let's all take a deep breath before we nod and think, "That's right. It's just kids being kids." Because although processing those differences is normal for young children, the idea that girls are "less" because they are, in fact, female, is not. Neither is it natural.
It is learned.
This sort of ignorant gender talk isn't anything new. If you're a woman anywhere in the world, there's much more than a good chance that some male of some age has told you—at some point in your life—that you couldn't do something because you are female. Boys don't just say it on the playground, of course, and they've been saying something like it to girls for centuries upon centuries.
In fact, I'm willing to bet that some Stone Age man dropped a wild boar carcass beside some nearby Stone Age woman and grunted something along the lines of, "You: Woman. You cook the meat."
All kidding aside: Women have been putting up with this sort of bunk and balderdash for a very long time.
There are all kinds of interesting places where this topic could lead—lots of good, important conversations that could come from it, once we all get clear of the fuss and nonsense. Part of that nonsense being that treating girls and boys, women and men with equal respect and equal rights means that girls and boys, women and men are the SAME inside and out. Haven't we figured out by now that no two people on this spinning planet of ours are the same, no matter their gender?
Haven't we figured out by now that we are all worthy, all valuable? Haven't we, in the year 2015, finally realized that not a one of us is more important than the other—that we are all precious and essential pieces of the mysterious whole?
But it's just been two days since National Women's History Month—only officially established in 1987—so for now, let's focus on the ladies.
"Nature never repeats herself," said women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, before members of the United States Congress, "and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another."
Stanton was arguing that—among other things—as citizens of this country, women should enjoy a citizen's full rights. That women should have a voice "in the religion that she is asked to believe"; that she have a place in the working world and the right to earn a fair wage. That she be the "captain, pilot, engineer" of her own life.
It was 1892. Women would be denied the right to vote in the United States for almost thirty more years.
I am a female child of the '80s and '90s, and so while I'm certainly not untouched by gender inequality, a good chunk of the good work got done long before me. I feel a lucky kinship with the writer Willa Cather, who said, "The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor."
I am also the great-granddaughter of a suffragette. I know there's a lot of work yet to be done—work for all of us, men and women.
It doesn't matter that she said it 127 years ago: I'm inclined to agree with Stanton, who at age 72, standing before the International Council of Women, declared that, "The true woman is but a dream of the future."
I see her—that true woman, all that bright-edged, steel-strong possibility—when I look at my five-year-old daughter.
Want to know how my daughter responded to her buddy? She shouted, entirely without malice, "Girls can do ANYTHING boys can do!" Then, without skipping a beat, zipped off down a different slide. About a millisecond later, they were playing together again.
Attagirl.
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