The dreams of children

The coming of March always reminds me of an activist-classmate’s habit of giving the females in class gifts on International Women’s Day. I loved the way she exerted effort to put candies in a bag and to tie each bag with a lavender ribbon. Since the date usually fell towards the end of the semester, when we were all feeling stressed from the demands of law school, getting a nicely-wrapped present was a welcome break.

I don’t know when I started to adopt a less prickly attitude about what it meant to be a woman and to stop thinking that the only way I could honor all the sacrifices that all the women who came before me had made was to be as good as a man—at everything. I still have days when I question the choices I made and wonder if I have betrayed the feminist cause by not pursuing a career in a male-dominated field—like making partner in the country’s biggest law firms. Thankfully, those days don’t come often.

Most times, my female friends and I laugh at what we imagined our life would be after we left high school. We were certain that we would become empowered and successful women. One of them reminded me that we once planned to set up a mining company and get rich off the hard work of miners. She also reminded me that we were going to set up a travel agency called “Lakwatsa, Inc.” because as the owners, we would all be out traveling. At no point did it occur to us to get married or have children. We must have been twelve when we talked about how we wanted our lives to turn out.

Those dreams must have fueled the choices we made in college. Some of my friends became activists and even became models for feminist posters. I immersed myself in courses on creative writing and women’s and gay literature. Apart from the readings assigned in class (Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ “Women Who Run with the Wolves” was one of them), I read up on feminist tracts from different decades. My poetry was filled with teenage feminist angst and it annoyed me when males opened doors for me or offered to carry my things.

My friends and I all got married and had children, with most of us marrying in our early twenties. We still have not set up our mining company (not happening until there is a way for the Earth’s underground wealth to regenerate without accompanying catastrophes). None of us are in the travel business (though we hope to travel together to someplace exotic soon). We continue to talk about what it means to be a successful woman and to ponder if we’re making full use of the freedom that women worked so hard for. Our answers have changed over the years, reflecting perhaps the lives we had at those points.

8 March 2011 marks the centenary of International Women’s Day, with this year’s theme being “Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women.” My female friends and I are lucky to be working in fields where it doesn’t matter what our sex is so long as we get the job done. For that, we count ourselves blessed and hope that in a not-too-distant future, everyone could say the same about their careers.

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