I grew up in a non-traditional Mexican family across the Rio Grande.
My dad would cook dinner, go to my school’s meetings and help me with homework while my mom would work all day.
When reaching puberty, I lost many friends because their moms thought I was a “bad influence” and had the mind of an older girl. Now that I have grown up with confidence in my beliefs and in the person I am, I can’t help but wonder: Was I being too much of a woman for traditional families?
I learned to read at age 4. My parents never limited my reading taste. I remember going to my dad’s bookshelf and picking up any book that caught my interest. By the time I reached adolescence, I had read so many things that most girls my age did not know about.
My dad, who has always been my biggest hero, along with my mom, of course, taught me to be whoever I want to be in life.
And my mom taught me that education was the most important thing I could ever get. When girls my age had to do laundry and dishes to go out, all I had to do was to be in the top five of my class.
When my parents got divorced, they told me I had to focus on my education so I would never ever need a man to support me.
To me, that was and still is the best advice a girl could ever get from her parents. And I grew up like that. Growing up with that mentality was never an issue, until I started dating.
A few years ago, I moved out of my dad’s house. I wanted to become “independent.” I started working and going to school full time. I would buy myself most of the things I wanted to buy and go to concerts and on trips with my friends.
A few months later, I met a guy who was raised by a “traditional” family. And by traditional I mean the type of family that expects girls to be dependent on a man.
He did not work and still lived with his parents. Everything was going great until one day he said: “I can’t do this anymore. You are never going to be the girl that needs me to buy her something she wants. You work too much, you study too much.”
And then, in that precise moment, I knew there was something wrong with the way we are raising our daughters and sons.
How much happier would the world be if boys and girls were raised to not link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was not “the boy has to pay,” but rather, “whoever has more should pay?”
In her book, “We Should All Be Feminists,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.”
So what does feminism really mean?
When the Women’s March on Washington took place Jan. 21, I thought all the women of the country, and the world for that matter, would be happy to see so many women raising their voices on things that matter.
Until I saw several women on social media asking questions like: “What kind of rights do women want now? We do not need more rights,” or “If you really want to be equal to men, then start learning how to change your car’s oil,”or “I love my life, I love being at home all day with my kids while my husband works to provide for us.”
If you are a woman who loves to stay at home all day, good for you! But not all women are the same.
Let’s not limit the rights of other women because you do not need them.
Feminism is all about equality, gender equality. Some people have this misconception that feminism means that women are better than men, but no. Feminism is about women and men being equal.
Let’s give the opportunity to have an equal-gender family to future generations. Let’s raise our kids to be truer to themselves. Let’s stop teaching girls to worry about their weight and what boys think of them.
So many magazines and books tell women how they should look, how they should behave and how they should be in bed in order to attract or please men. But there are few guides telling men how to behave to keep a woman.
If you are a woman, or if you love a woman, you should be a feminist.
We should all be feminists.
