Women’s Day means many different things to many different women, and those meanings shift even more when explored across different regions. But the story usually starts in the same place: being denied something, then being allowed something.
In sports, in work, in family, in life – every aspect of a woman’s existence has held something back from her, and each woman must choose her battle right out of the womb. You don’t just inherit the struggle for existential freedom; you are also raised by a woman who will never have the freedom you are reaching for, and who, in turn, imposes a control she herself has not yet escaped. So before we even encounter a world of discrimination and objectification, we confront it at home – and we learn to accept it as a form of love.
The first examination
It starts with the body. Her skin tone and features are the first to be examined, offering the family a glimpse of whether the world might be in her favour. In a multicultural society like Malaysia, every girl inherits a different, expansive list of instructions on how to be the perfect girl. It felt like it took only a moment to go from fun and play to useful and behaved. At eleven, my best friend and I went from sliding down hills on cardboard to explaining ourselves – she why she didn’t want to wear a headscarf, and I why I didn’t want to grow my hair. We each had the freedom the other one didn’t, and we felt exactly the same in the disapproval we received, which never ceased. Rather than abiding, we stopped playing and embarked on a journey of reclaiming our power. The journey, I think, of every woman.
What that meant as a teenager looked like rebellion. For a long time, it felt like squeezing myself out of a tight space. But now, when I look back, I see a small-town girl roaring in freedom with only smirks for her haters. As the years passed, the only enemy I kept finding was myself – the one who continued taking permission away. With women from all over the world sharing their experiences, I now understand that our struggle was an unfair world internalised. I can see the freedom of a covered Muslim woman who gets dismissed but has learned to build merit beyond her looks, and I can see the unwanted attention faced by a woman who fought to express herself as she pleased.
What remains
The approval system presents a constant confrontation between liberty and safety, and each time a woman chooses one, she endures yet another battle. And no matter how pretty, clever or talented, she has never been deemed worthy of equality. But it feels like we might be achieving something far greater than equality. Just the sheer variety of women’s clothing compared to men’s is a demonstration of her aversion to conformity. And despite the endless nagging of the world, they manage to reclaim or maintain their sovereignty – a quality that is so inspiring in women and so lacking in men.
This Women’s Day should always be a reminder that perfection is just marketing, and that every woman can define her own womanhood through a journey of grace, mistakes, and the discovery of her true joys. An excerpt from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings embodied the struggle of all women when she said: “The fact that the adult Black female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”
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