A Letter to My Daughters, a Little After International Women’s Day
A Letter to My Daughters, A Little After International Womens Day
My darlings.
I hope you are well.
It’s a good thing this is a narrative device as, at the moment, you are rarely well, and I send you to nursery with running noses and hacking coughs, or keep you off and juggle childcare between me, your dad, and your grandparents, attending Teams meetings with Bluey playing in the background and apologising for the child cuddled up on my lap. And anyway, with our current digital archival systems as they are you will likely never read this so my well-wishes for your fictional selves are . . .
Let me start again.
To my daughters, a little after International Women’s Day
I did not get this done in time for International Women’s Day. And we didn’t do anything particularly to celebrate. We also missed World Book Week, and you told me that your friends brought books to nursery, and you didn’t. I forgot, of course. Saw the nursery app notification in a meeting and it immediately fell out of my head. I haven’t sorted the reading list for my students yet either, if that makes you feel better. What hasn’t fallen out of my head is your nursery friend who has finished their first chapter book, and I guiltily grabbed ‘Little House on the Prairie’ that night, but you were tired, and I was struggling to adapt the language on the hoof, and then I realised that I haven’t taken you skiing yet even though your other friend went skiing, and in fact I’ve never actually been skiing myself, and that brings us back to the fact that we spent International Women’s Day mainly watching an appallingly unfeminist cartoon on TV . . .
Let’s start again
My girls.
I wanted girls. It’s not polite to say in good company, because we should aim for gender neutrality. And it is not important what gender you are, until you come out that gender, at which point we must be positive about it, while maintaining the option for you to change, to recognise the biases given to you on the basis of your assigned sex while not limiting you.
But with all this in mind, I wanted girls. I’m not sure why I wanted girls, because I am sad that I won’t raise a little boy to be a strong, feminist man, but I wanted you.
As people who were identified female at birth, as people being raised as girls, you are going to face more challenges than that son might have. You will be less likely to be promoted, to receive markers of prestige and respect, your health will not be considered as worthy of research, your choices will be doubted, your stories marginalised, your interests infantalised.
When we play ‘Doctors’, I try to prepare you. I am rude and force treatments on you. And you find it hilarious. When you try to puzzle out who’s the girl and who’s the boy in your stories, I try to show you that girls can be strong and independent, and I can see you’re already bumping up against these contradictions. At the age of 4, you already see that there is some difference that you don’t fully understand, but recognise none the less.
I can see that you are already beautiful, and will probably be beautiful adults. I wonder if this will be a source of happiness for you, or if you will argue with each other about this natural gift you have received. I see that you already know there is some value in beauty, which crushes me. Still, I think you are both unbelievably gorgeous. Sometimes it makes me cry. I have an unwilling affinity with that mother who grieved her son’s tattoo, because I think you are perfect too. And maybe you won’t see that perfection because we seem to train young women to not see it. Another contradiction. Be beautiful, but don’t recognise it.
As a millennial parent, I simultaneously spend more time with you than previous generations, and yet I am apparently failing you in a myriad of ways. Right now, you are still young enough, just, that you think your mum is someone to idolise. You tell me you’re scientists, and that you know things about animals, and you don’t yet see me as an embarrassment. I often resemble Emma Thompson in a Richard Curtis romcom, except with none of the aesthetic parts. I feel scattered and torn and like I’m doing none of it very well.
And despite this being such a common experience, it is not reflected in the stories around us. I have yet to see another piece of mainstream media that has the conversation between Meredith and Cristina that so starkly highlights the conflict in being a mother and a professional. I think I was once a great lecturer, but I’m not right now, and we don’t yet value the pause in production that comes from raising the next generation.
These anxieties don’t follow your dad in the same way. He doesn’t think the way I do. He hasn’t gone through postnatal depression, or the hormonal and societal process of matresence, but he is also just different from me, not because he’s your dad and I’m you’re mum, but because we are just different people. And maybe you’ll be more like him than me, despite this ever-present category that grabs us, holds us, defines us, limits us, promotes us.
Wait.
Let me try one more time.
My babies,
It is a little bit after International Women’s Day, and I don’t know how to make the world a better place for you. I think you will likely become adult women in a world that will present you with many barriers and obstacles. I think you will grow up a set of systems that will force hypervigilance on you, make you anxious, and make your life challenging. I think a lot of this will be because you are part of a category that is biologically pretty meaningless, and yet we somehow created a society that is obsessively interested in it.
As women in this world, you will not have it all. In fact, statistically, morally, realistically, you should expect to have less and consume less, because we consume too much right now.
Expect the responsibility and the consequence of consumption to fall on you.
But you are ‘it all’. You contain within you every contradiction that I cannot reconcile in my life, or in this hastily written blog post. You might go on to do anything. I hope you continue to love maths and numbers and puzzles. I hope you continue to love stories and dressing up and talking about your big, big feelings. I hope I can equip you with some of the skills you will need to navigate this world. And I hope that by continuing to hold up this mirror to society, by talking about these constant structural inequities, we can say, clearly:
That we are failing girls and women. We need to do more. And the current systems of power benefit from having these divides in society.
As women, you are disadvantaged. But you belong to many categories that also offer you privileges too. The very same systems that benefit from making you less as a woman, benefit from making other categories lesser too.
And what I’m really trying to say with this tortured metaphor of a letter is that I love you. You are mine by cosmic design and grand accident, and you should have all the same opportunities as every other child. We have a long way to go, but there is no one I will fight for more, and the surest way to help you, is to make sure everyone has equal opportunities.