It’s March – and that means Women’s History Month

In all honesty, this month always felt like the consolation prize we’re given every year. The message is “Your history matters – but only for one month. It’s not like you made meaningful contributions that should be talked about all the time.” It’s being told women are important, but not as important as men who get the entire year. It really fit that whole stereotype of what women should be – secondary. They should be hidden in the shadows, quiet, demure, and only present when someone gives them permission.

This year feels different. It’s an exclamation point on the amazing last few months, when women have said #TimesUp and #MeToo. The message that we should be supporting, rather than competing with, each other is being shouted from social media platforms everywhere. Women are saying that being a woman doesn’t look like what we’ve been told it needs to for all these years. Women are all different, and those differences should be celebrated.

This message is extremely personal to me as someone who grew up fighting gender norms.

I was raised by a single mother, who has never fit any ideas of “girly” herself. She’s a natural born leader. She is loud and powerful. She has strong opinions and shares them with others. You know when my mother is in the room. She always told me that I could be anything I wanted, and more often than not, what I wanted to be was her.

From an early age, I knew exactly who I was and what I wanted.

At age four, I demanded everyone around me call me Ernie (from Sesame Street, obviously). I’d strongly inform anyone who said hello to me that my name was NOT Rachel, it was in fact, Ernie. I insisted on playing on the playground in my patent leather shoes and fancy dresses – and by playing in the playground, I mean in the mud. Eventually I learned that leggings are a much better choice (for basically everything in life), but not until I was good and ready to learn that lesson.

I never wanted to play house or practice taking care of dolls. I wante

d to play office, and I made rocks into computer screens for my office where I worked as the CEO. As I got older, I didn’t spend hours staring at posters of boy bands. I plastered my walls with pictures of hockey players, and got shocked looks from adults as I informed them (loudly) when they weren’t wearing the appropriate team’s jersey at the games.

I earned my black belt in karate, mostly surrounded by boys. I spoke my mind. My mother, there for everything from my toddler identity crisis to karate tournaments, beamed with pride. When I was home, with her, I truly believed that I was the best version of myself.

But the world told me differently.

Everyday, I was inundated with messages that who I was wasn’t who I should be. Why didn’t I want to spend hours shopping for make-up? Why didn’t I like the same music, movies, and TV shows as all of the other girls at school? Why wasn’t my biggest concern whether a boy was going to call me? Why was I so loud?

Looking back, my favorite criticism I ever received was from the mother of my boyfriend senior year of high school. She was the opposite of the woman who raised me in every sense of the word, and once commented “She’s just so… MUCH”.

At the time, though, it was devastating. I wasn’t good enough. There was something wrong with me. That was the message women received if they didn’t fit into the mold of what society said a woman should be. It’s hard to hear as an adult, and it was much harder to take in as a teenager.

 

It’s different now.

Strong women who have stood up and spoken out, despite criticism, have paved the way for other young girls to embrace who they are – even if it isn’t “girly”. Elizabeth Warren persisted. Hillary Clinton endured years of comments on her attire and body. The media debated whether or not she was a good wife, which was of course more important than anything she was trying to accomplish in her career.

Feminine is being re-defined to mean strong, independent, and intelligent rather than describing someone who sits on their opinions and isn’t in charge of anything. The world is being told there’s nothing wrong with strong women, or women who break the mold. The world is being told that there’s actually something incredibly right with them. This movement has recently come in like a tidal wave, and because of this, I feel like 2018 is the perfect time to honor women’s history month,.

The leader of the Parkland student’s movement is a 17 year old girl named Emma Gonzalez. She’s loud. She’s outspoken. She says what she means, and she knows exactly what she wants. She’s making things happen, and she doesn’t fit the stereotype of what a young woman “should” look like. I don’t know that you would have seen that when I was in high school.

She’s entirely too much, and I hope she never changes.