The Woman Project, Woman Fact 1: What, and Who, Is a Woman?

THE WOMAN PROJECT — Woman Fact 1

What, Who and Why is a woman a Woman?

READ IT

Someone once asked me, half-joking, "What exactly is a woman?" I opened my mouth to give a quick answer, and nothing quick came out.

Because a woman isn't one thing. She's a daughter before she's anything else, and often a sister not long after. She becomes, at different points, a friend, a partner, a mother, an aunt, a colleague, a leader, a caretaker, sometimes all in the same single day, without ever changing out of her pyjamas.

She is soft in one room and immovable in the next. She can carry a household on one shoulder and a career on the other, and still show up for a friend at midnight because someone needed her to. She has been underestimated, spoken over, and asked to shrink, and she has, more often than not, quietly refused.

A woman is not a single word in a dictionary. She is every single thing she has ever had to be, and everything she has chosen to be anyway, on top of all of that.

That's the real answer I wish I'd had ready that day.

THINK IT

List every role you've had to play in just the last week, daughter, mother, employee, friend, caretaker, whatever applies to you. Which one of those roles feels most like the real you, underneath all the others?