What we miss when we label women

Sometimes, when scrolling through my feed, I come across “trad wife” content — women making bread from scratch, neatly packing their husbands’ lunches and offering other curated glimpses into domestic life.

In the comments, women are sorted into different categories: “traditional,” “girlboss,” “independent” and more.

While there’s nothing wrong with being placed in any of these categories, something more fundamental is overlooked when categorizing women. We forget what made these identities possible in the first place — the ability to choose at all.

Not long ago, women’s life courses were predetermined by early marriage, limited educational opportunities, no right to vote and identities tied to someone else. Women didn’t have the chance to choose a life for themselves.

Today, we can vote, have a career, go to college, choose who to marry and live our lives however we want to.

Yet, that reality still isn’t true for everyone.

I’ve been thinking about the plight of girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule. Because they’re not allowed to continue studying beyond the sixth grade, some girls are failing their exams so they don’t have to stop going to school.

Growing up, I had that same desire to learn. Whether it was flipping through my father’s Oxford Dictionary, watching TED talks on YouTube or striving for straight A’s, I loved learning. 

While I still have that same thirst for knowledge, I’m struck by how rarely I reflect on the privilege I have.

I dread going to the library to study the visual circuitry of the eye — the same place I was once enamored with and couldn’t wait to spend hours in.

I also dread the assignments, the classes I have to wake up for at eight in the morning and the reading that piles up throughout the week, even when it’s a book I was excited to read.

But sometimes, I think about my grandmother, who grew up in a rural village in Bangladesh with no access to education, or my father’s sister who got married young and started a family early. I wonder how their lives might’ve been different if they had the educational opportunities that I do. 

I imagine Afghan girls would cherish every second of my 8 a.m. research lab.

When so many women in the world are still fighting for the right to choose their own life, why are we so focused on categorizing women and subtly glorifying one path over another? 

Modern debates around feminism often criticize the choices that women make and their consequences. Instead, I wish we focused more on the fact that the point of feminism isn’t to define those choices, but to protect the freedom behind them and work to extend that freedom to everyone.

I grew up with a mother who could be called a career woman or traditional, depending on the day. Yet, I never felt the need to label her as one identity over the other. All I saw was that my mother chose how to lead her life and never had to fit a label.

Women can be all the things they want to be and do all the things they want to, as long as they have the ability to make a choice. Like Jo March from Little Women would say, we are far too multifaceted to be fit into a binary category.

I hope we spend more time, as a world, ensuring that every girl gets to make her own decisions in life instead of judging those choices and placing them on a moral hierarchy.

Because for most of history, freedom of choice hasn’t been guaranteed. And still, in many places, there are girls dreaming of studying in a library, reading Shakespeare, learning about stars that are a billion years old or drawing the intricacies of the human eye. Yet, those dreams might always remain dreams.