So, I'm looking for some comments from other women on when, why and how they discovered womanhood.

I thought that would be with someone I started dating at 17. But after being with him for 5 years, living with him for 2 or 3 of those years, I reached the stage of love where you start getting comfortable and everything isn't brand new and ultra-exciting anymore. So I thought, uh oh, I guess this isn't "it". So I dumped him. But I didn't give up the dream. I still felt like the only way I could live a full and complete life is if I got a boyfriend or husband that would love me more than life itself.

Then I met my husband, and he said he loved me more than life itself. And I thought, this is what will complete me, make me whole. This is what I've been waiting for my whole life. Then, when our marriage started to go bad, I got thinking, my god, even being alone would be better than this. I started to fantasize about a life where my bank account and my time was mine. Where I wouldn't have to consult someone every time I wanted to breathe (and I realize that most marriages aren't like that, but mine was).

And that's when I realized - I would actually be HAPPY living by myself. I would actually be able to pursue MY life choices and my dreams, and not have to alter them to fit someone else's. That's when I finally got up the gumption to leave him. And for the most part, I have really, really enjoyed being single again.

What if I lost both my breasts to cancer and had my ovaries removed and had short hair and did not shave my legs (even in the summer) - would I still be a woman?
Am I a woman only when I am me and know what I want or am I still a woman when I am trying to be the way I am "supposed" to be and still entrapped by my Cinderella Complex?

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

Perhaps responsibility is the answer, as I said I've had a fun life pretty much free of that stuff. And yet I've always been responsible for myself... or tried to be. Nonesuch, are you saying your image of a woman is someone who cares for others?

The neo-pagan religions use the image of the moon to symbolize femeninity. The three (waxing, full, and waning) phases being maiden, mother and crone. I suppose that sense of shifting roles and stages is what I'm trying to get at.

Probably the first time I thought of myself as a woman was December 6 1989, watching the news reports about the massacre in Montreal and feeling a sense of connection with the young women who were killed. They were following the path that I expected to be taking...it was the first time that I really understood what misogyny meant and how it pertained to me.

When I was growing up, my mother always gave me grief about my weight, about how pretty I'd be if I were thin. My first tattoo, that I got at the age of twenty, put an end to that lecturing. I had taken possession of my body, marked it indelibly as my own, no longer an extension of my mother. Tattooing, and later piercing, my adult body made me feel like a woman.

Responsiblity too...not for someone else, in my case, but to society, in a sense. I knew that I was a woman the day that I first put the key into the front door of the house that I had bought with my best friend and thought, "To hell with some mythic wedding day - today is the happiest day of my life".

The contractions that I felt in my own womb as I held my friend's hand while she gave birth to her first child floored me. That sense of what a woman's body is capable of has never left me.

Though I think of myself as a woman now, things still happen to refresh that sense, to surprise me with the pleasure of it. It can be as small as the hand of someone who loves me intertwined with mine or as big as presenting myself as a homeowner at Toronto City Hall.

Ceremonies mark and celebrate important steps in life: a rite of passage, a wedding, a housewarming are nice. But, really, the change inside the person has already happened: the ceremony is only a way of sharing it with others. You've already made a committment.

I agree that taking responsibility as a member of society - whether in political participation or in serious job or charitable organization or some other effort - is just as valid as marriage, having a child or taking care of aged relatives. It's all really the same thing. You become aware of, concerned about, and personally involved in, the welfare of others. That's what an adult does.

Whether you identify with other women specifically (as distinct from humankind or all life in general) is not as important as identifying yourself as a responsible adult. When you voluntarily take on a nurturing, constructive, healing, caring role, that automatically puts you in the company of all the women who ever lived and did those things.

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Whether you identify with other women specifically (as distinct from humankind or all life in general) is not as important as identifying yourself as a responsible adult

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So what about the role of other women in our lives?

How do you think the lack of good role models has affected a girls transition into womanhood? Moms are often out of the home and struggling with their roles as much as their daughters are, it seems. My mother, while a great lady, was way too busy to offer the secrets of becoming a woman to her daughters. I for one wish I'd had more than television and magazines to guide my maturation.

It wasn't until I was nearing 30 and met my partner and his family that I learned it really was okay for women to be assertive, strong and independent. As a mother I've worked very hard to be a role model for my kids, not by being non-traditional, not by running in the rat-race, not by being supermom, but simply by being comfortable in who and what I am. And given the increasingly and excessively stupid world we live in, that's not an easy task. But now that I'm almost 40, it's a tad easier.

Am i a role model? Only marginally.
My daughter didn't imitate many of the choices i made in life; she's not interested in my philosophy or politics and she's certainly no tree-hugger! But she did learn the things i consider most important in personal relationships: she's faithful, loyal and honest. Probably, she would be that way without me, but i did give her the words and reasons.
A couple of my students have turned out pretty well, and i like to take some of the credit. A friend once told me i was her role-model... but she's mostly done things i wouldn't.
I honestly don't know.

*This just made me think of a question. Do we take ourselves seriously, and do other people take us seriously, in proportion to how much we act like men? (I do miss earthmother!)

[ May 10, 2002: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

I remember my mom talking about how she had to wear a skirt to go out because that's what nice ladies did, how nice ladies didnt smoke on the street, you had to go into a restaurant and order coffee.

To me it seemed that being a woman was about being controlled by outside forces of "they" and by family forces.

That kind of screwed up my first ideas of womanhood.

I know having my first child changed me from being a child, having responsibility for another humans life, having that life inside and nursing was an amazing experience.

I felt another time of growth when I decided that I did indeed deserve better than the abusive relationship I was in and I took almost three years without dating just for myself to find out who I was then I met my husband and was ready for marriage. Ready to accept comprimise, ready to see that sometimes it's about understanding that you arent always such a picnic to live with either.

Now in my forties I feel very comfortable in my womanhood, I don't feel I have to apologize for my choices and I don't feel the need to critize others for theirs.

We do have a wonderful benefit as women to have the choice to stay home and raise our children or obtain employment and raise our children whereas men are still in the main expected to work.

I do still feel there is a lot of outside pressure on women but I don't care to listen to it.

It is true that the more we act "like men" the more seriously we are taken and I think we have helped make that happen by walking away from the percieved "womanly" things in order to make it in the workplace.

I think the day I emerged into "womanhood" was the day my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My main support and cheering section was going to die, and I would have to prop up the family and keep them functioning alone. I've never been so overwhelmed in my life.

What finished the job was having my first child, a year and a half later. When you have children, it is more than the responsibility, although that's part of it... It's the desire to pass on what has given your life meaning, abandoning the frivolous lessons and focusing what you have in you to give.

I really don't know if that makes sense to anyone except myself...

Acting like a man gets you respect? I patterned after my grandfather and father, so some have said I behave like a man in some respects.... I don't know that it's true, I am behaving in the only way that makes any sense to me. Perhaps the absence of uptalk and subservient fluttering of eyelashes? I don't know.

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Many girls get the idea that family is secondary; only career is really important

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I did not mean that acting like a woman is getting married and having babies. There is a lot more to what women do and how women treat the world that is different from the way men have usually done. Men's competitive, egocentric, reward-oriented, unmindful attitudes have done a good deal of harm. I don't think we need more of that; i think we need more of the feminine approach to life, our environment, our children and other people.
I particularly admire women march to different drummer; are confident in their identities, act on strong convictions, persevere, and yet remain totally un-man-like.

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

Being the daughter, granddaughter & great-granddaughter of wonderful women who made a differnce in their world made me a woman.

Bearing my three children made me a woman.

Going to law school when women were a minority made me a woman.

Discovering the Divine Feminine made me a woman.

Loving made me a woman.

The company & sisterhood of other women made me a woman.

In 1991, watching Anita Hill tell the truth about Clarence Thomas--a truth that every woman in the United States, be she black, white, red, brown, or tan, knows--made me a woman.

* falling in love and maintaining a relationship with someone i care for deeply

* going to college, because it's forced me to be more responsible and independent

* getting a job

* showing my mom that i'm my own person

* finding courage i didn't know i had

* realizing that i don't have to answer to anyone but me and that i can be who i am

I guess for me it would be my first two weeks in Korea. That moment when the plane touched ground here and I realized that I'd signed away a year of my life to live in a country where I didn't know anyone, or speak the language, and the food smelled funny, was the first time that I really felt responsible for myself.

[ 15 February 2005: Message edited by: shaolin ]

Truly enlightening.

[ 16 February 2005: Message edited by: Jumble ]