Although Mary Wollstonecraft published her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, it wasn’t until 170 years later that women demanded equality in large numbers. For thousands of years, women were kept quiet and in the home, not allowed to speak for themselves and considered important only if attached to an important man. As Mary Wollstonecraft said so well, women “condescend[ed] to receive a degree of attention and respect from strangers different from that reciprocation of civility which the dictates of humanity and the politeness of civilization authorize between man and man.” Halting steps toward equality were made over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but when women finally took it upon themselves to liberate themselves from passivity in the 1960s, more deeply ingrained forms of misogyny were not easily altered. The status quo had been set for so long, men and women alike scoffed. They continued to believe that man was biologically created to be the provider and woman biologically determined to be the nurturer. Western society had been built and maintained for thousands of years on this assumption, but it is no longer useful in our industrialized society. Now that the most obvious targets of social revolution have been transformed, the battle must be waged on individual fronts and individual women must begin to demand equality ourselves in order to close the gap. We must examine the extremes of femininity imposed on us in childhood and turn our backs on the misogynist demons within ourselves.

It is declared often that equality has been achieved and feminism is obsolete, but society cannot change thousands of years of tradition so quickly. The remnants of it cling to those parts of ourselves that we are least willing to examine, our innermost thoughts and their effect on how we treat ourselves. The individual woman must struggle against the outdated feminine ideal ingrained in her since childhood. We must demand of those around us the same respect that most men demand. We must speak up where we have been taught to be quiet and fight where we have been taught to be passive. In short, women must recognize the last few outdated gender rules which still build such walls around our lives and break them down without fear or hesitation. “ ‘You got these blinders on about women.’” says Rat Kiley in Tim O’Brien’s “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”. “ ‘How gentle and peaceful they are. All that crap about how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn’t be no more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitude.’” (344).

This sexist attitude is impressed in childhood on both boys and girls by learning from the example of the adults around them. My own childhood gave me a foundation that not many women have. When I was three, my parents were divorced. My dad got custody, while my mother only received occasional visitation rights, so I grew up with my father as my role model. I helped my brothers build a tree house rather than play Barbies with my sister. When most girls were applying makeup, and playing dress-up and shopping games, I was busy soaking up information like a sponge. My father encouraged me to do whatever I wanted and never told me to act like a lady or treated me like I was different from my brothers because of my sex. He was always proudest of me when I achieved a difficult success or was among the best at what I was doing; his art emphasized to me that beauty was something to create, not achieve. As I grew into a young woman, I started to wear skirts and became more discreet about expressing anger, but I clung tightly to many of the other supposedly masculine traits I had developed.

So it came as quite a shock to me when I first encountered the differences in treatment that I’ve sometimes received because I am female. For instance, I needed a new bank account. The first time I went alone, but I had only one valid picture identification. The teller said I needed two and they wouldn’t accept my social security card, my student identification, or anything else I offered. “Do you have a major credit card or a passport?” he asked me, but I had never needed either. Several weeks later, my boyfriend and I were walking by when I decided on a hunch to try again. This time the teller looked at my only identification, then at my frowning boyfriend, and said he’d open an account for me with a hold on the first check I deposited. I was silent as we left, trying to think of any difference between this time and the last other than being escorted by my boyfriend. I couldn’t help but think, if I had said something to the teller about my previous visit, would he have had a valid reason for it? As much as I strove to understand and to give him the benefit of the doubt, I concluded I was unimportant on my own in the teller’s eyes, but a person of consequence if accompanied by a man.

It is a strange feeling. I was half a person, stripped of importance because of my gender. However, every woman I’ve spoken to about it knows what it feels like. She will have stories of things that wouldn’t have happened if she were a man herself or if a man had been with her. Being accompanied by a man affords a woman an amount of security and luxury that she would not have without, since we are trained from childhood to think of ourselves as helpless on our own.

But women must demand respect in both their public and private relationships. For instance, the absurd ideal that women should love unconditionally and ask for nothing in return has infected even the strongest women I’ve known. I can count on one hand how many men I know who’ve continued in bad relationships that they should have abandoned; I can’t begin to count how many women I’ve known who have. Their lovers cheat, lie, steal, beat them, or even just treat them with contemptuous condescension. Women still take them back. We learned when we were young that we had no independent worth and only mattered if we were attached to someone with true importance. We offer our love and in return feel like a complete human being, even though we were already complete. They attach themself to an anchor and try to swim; if they simply cut themself loose, they could easily swim. Most women have never been taught that they can do this, and so we sink into the abyss.
It is not just in relationships that we allow ourselves to be abused. Our most tragic relationship is often with ourselves. Expressing anger is considered unladylike, so we blame ourselves and take out our frustrations on ourselves. Eating disorders are a perfect example of this.

My closest friend in high school was a chubby girl named Heidi. She spent an hour in the morning on her hair and makeup, and was very sweet and thoughtful. She could always cheer me up when I needed it. She was friendly with anyone and cared deeply about her family. Yet she was willing to endanger her own life in order to try to change her weight and confided in me that she would often make herself throw up after she ate because she thought she was too fat. It didn’t matter that she was not genetically designed to be thin or that she was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. It didn’t matter that her weight did not ruin the sparkle in her eyes, the brightness of her smile, nor the careful construction of her clothes and hair. She was haunted by the elusive ideal of being a woman “…thin, all profile/ and effortless gestures, the sort of blond/ elegant girl whose/ body is the image of her soul.” (Frank Bidart, lines 5-8). Society treated these ideals of beauty with more deference than she and she was further undermined by the lesson girls learn that a woman is judged by her looks, rather than her actions. The only way that she could break this cycle would be to take it upon herself to love herself as she was, thereby fighting against the images of thin women that surrounded her and probably gaining real respect and beauty for being strong.

Of course, it’s not that simple but that is the first step, for Heidi and for every woman. We have to realize we rule ourselves, and if we don’t value ourselves highly, others won’t either. We must be strong in ourselves, without someone else’s help, in order to break the stereotype.

It is not necessarily feminine traits that are at fault, either. Fights would occur constantly and with the slightest provocation if expression of anger weren’t regulated in each person by their individual conscience. Interdependence requires a certain amount of passivity and it holds societies together. And I would be the last person to suggest that aesthetics are not important in some way, since I cannot stand to be surrounded by ugly things. But an excess of anything creates distortion. Women must learn when love isn’t going to help and cast away those who would abuse it. We express our frustrations with the outside world there, rather than on ourselves. And we must discover that beauty, which we had been taught to make the ultimate achievement in our lives, is fleeting and rarely, if ever, indicative of quality.

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” (Martin Luther King, Jr. 322. 13) It is time for us to stand up for ourselves and treat ourselves as humans instead of as women, as people instead of objects. The tremendous strides that have been taken by feminist groups over the last two centuries have been revolutionary, their importance irrefutable, but now the fight has come down to each individual woman, and we must not back down. If women are ever to gain respect, we must gain that respect individually, by our own actions. We must speak up when we are angry or upset and stop taking our anger out on ourselves. We must start seeing ourselves as the unique, autonomous people we are and fight back. We must stop seeing ourselves as enemies to be vanquished.