A prince had to kiss Snow White to bring her back to life. Cinderella’s prince called her the love of his life but forgot what she looked like, and had to put the shoe on every girl in the kingdom. Fairy tales are great, but they tend to show that women need to be saved.
When I was in sixth grade and talking in the library, my teacher told me, “Women are to be seen and admired, not heard.” It made me feel that it was wrong to have a voice, that as a woman, I should not have an opinion.
As girls, we get programmed from a very young age about what we can and cannot do. Family, society and culture tell us who we are and how we need to be. We get treated differently based on our gender, our talents and our looks.
Girls are born with a life map of how to be and expected to follow a trajectory of tradition and convention without questioning why they have to do so. Most women follow it without thinking. Shouldn’t more women explore and find their own ways in life?
Most of us don’t take the time to find out what our authentic self is but choose (with a heavy heart) to stick to the stereotype society has plastered all over us where we need to be rescued.
We don’t think about questioning or filtering through the irrational beliefs that are tattooed in our brains, being told, for example, not to touch any books during periods. But no one has a rational explanation. Why not? It is not easy and usually painful to disagree with norms that have been practiced for generations, but at one time slavery was acceptable but that changed.