I Am A Woman: Guest post by Jenny Smucker

Our daughter Jenny is a first-year grad student studying mathematics at Virginia Tech. She wrote this essay for Women's History Month, and I thought it merited sharing.

Jenny proves that women can be both/and rather than either/or. Recently she bought a bed sheet for $2 at a thrift store, drafted her own pattern, and sewed a jumper.

The next week she got the best grade of the class on a Real Analysis exam.

She also baked tomato basil bread for a dinner with friends.

     I attended a luncheon last Tuesday in honor of Women’s History Month. Eight women from different countries and cultures discussed what it means to be a woman in their home country and what it means to them here. Some of what they said rang true with the experiences I have had, and some of what they spoke of did not, exposing me to new ideas and ways to see womanhood. 

    So, I will speak as if I know, because I am a woman, and I have lived the life of a woman, though I have not yet lived it for very long. I recognize that my experience is not everyone’s, and I may read this again in 40 years and think of my 22-year-old self as extraordinarily naive, but here it is anyway with as much and as little nuance as I feel fit to give it. There is no concrete answer as to what it means to be a woman, and what I’ve discovered is that to be a woman in one place is not the same as being a woman in another.

    To be a woman in a male-dominated field, such as my field of Mathematics, is to constantly need to prove that you are worthy to exist in a space. It is to be seen and not heard, to be looked at and judged but not listened to. I cannot count the number of times I have had to fight to prove myself worthy of being taken seriously to men around me. In my math classes, it is not until I have scored better than everyone else on an exam that I am taken seriously by my male classmates. Not until I have shown that I know more than them are they willing to take the time to hear my ideas. I can think of one classmate in particular who shot down everything I brought up in group work until the first exam result came back and he saw that I had done better than he did. After that, he would ask me what I thought about problems and seek out my ideas.

    One result of being a woman in a male-dominated area is that this idea that I’m not worth hearing permeates into my own way of thinking. I don’t want to speak up in class unless I’m certain I know the answer. I don’t want to present ideas unless I am a hundred percent sure they are worth sharing. Otherwise, I don’t see my voice as worth being heard. I see my male counterparts present terrible ideas with utter confidence, and I envy them for it. To be a woman in a male-dominated field is to have cousins respond, “But you’re a girl!” when they hear what you want to do with your life. Among people that I am close to, it is to have questions in my areas of expertise deferred to a man who knows less about math than I do because he has the confidence to blaze ahead to an answer and I do not. To be a woman is to lack the confidence to speak because sometimes it isn’t worth it when you know you’ll get talked over.

    To be a woman in a woman’s space, however, is something totally different. “A woman’s place is in the kitchen” is a phrase loathed by women everywhere, and I entirely agree that to sequester a woman only to the kitchen is to deny the incredible things she can do outside that space. Women ought to belong in all places. However, to me, the kitchen seems a sacred space for women. Here, we are the bosses. Here, we belong. Here, our voices are heard. It is in the kitchen that my brothers defer their questions to me. It is in the kitchen that women gather to tell stories in hushed tones while washing vegetables and chopping them into tiny even pieces. I have seen women who didn’t know each other from Eve become fast friends for a fleeting hour as they conversed cheerily in the kitchen of a mutual acquaintance, gathering dishes by rummaging through unfamiliar cupboards and waving knives around as they told a story with animation. It is incredible the way women come alive in a space deemed to be their own. 

    In the same vein, to be a woman is to bake bread. I have only recently been exploring the wonders of taking out my feelings on a lump of bread dough, and kneading has proven to be an incredibly therapeutic and nearly spiritual experience. My arms begin to grow tired as I work the dough back and forth and back and forth. Inevitably, I think of my mother, the woman who taught me about breadmaking. I think about how she used to bake bread: spanking it down and kneading it back and forth, and how in the end I got a slice of Warm Fresh Bread, thickly coated in butter. As my arms ache, I think about the strength my mother carried in hers throughout her life as she fed her family with practically pennies, raised small children in the wilderness of Northern Ontario, and worked ceaselessly to prevent the destructive cycles that permeated her childhood from being passed on to her children. My mind continues on its journey, then, to my mother’s mother, and I think of a woman who did this same action as me: pushing bread dough back and forth. She strove to keep her family fed as her husband struggled to make ends meet; she baked bread. She taught my mother to bake bread. My mother taught me to bake bread. I can trace my family history through generations and generations of bread-makers. Women who performed this arm-strengthening act, not for the purpose of becoming strong--rather, they became strong to provide for those they loved.

    To be a woman, then, is to persevere. To prevail. They say that women, built for building new bodies and caring for children, can survive a starvation situation for much longer than men can. Women grit their teeth through pain as their body rejects pieces of itself each month and live their lives as if nothing hurts. Women cry in the bathroom for 20 minutes and then walk out like nothing happened. Women take in all the ugly things in the world around them, and then, despite the brokenness, women keep on with life, caring for the world around them and striving to make it better through acts both simple and bold.

    In my younger days, I saw femininity the way the world fed it to me. Femininity was weakness, but the traditional view of womanhood was bad. Women had to be womanly and pretty, but women must also be strong like Katniss Everdeen. Women had to be feminine, but in the way the men in the world dictated. I was a mass of confusion, stuck between the ideas of rejecting traditional womanhood and blazing into territories uncharted by the women before me, versus embracing the traditional view of womanhood and staying home, providing, creating life. I’ve come to determine that for me, to be a woman is not to choose one; to be a woman is to choose both. I persevere into a world that was not built for me, proving myself over and over again. Likewise I bake bread, I sew, I create, I attach myself to my maternal line, using the skills that my mother taught me, that her mother taught her, and that I will teach my future daughters. And I decide, to be a woman is to be me, wholly and entirely.