You can get a master’s degree. You can travel through 40 countries. You can confront governors and oil companies. You can edit the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper. You can start a news agency in Afghanistan. You can teach writing and reporting, editing and photography in 20 other countries.
But you’re still a woman.
You can lose your religion. You can use birth control. You can have a miscarriage. You can reject makeup and fashion and high heels. You can conceal your body in baggy clothes.
But you’re still a woman.
You pay all your bills on time no matter how little money you have and you find ways to save money at every turn so that your credit rating is always in the high 700s and you can get a mortgage and have plenty of lines of credit. You can maintain a house and a cabin by yourself because your spouse is too busy with his highly paid job. You can take big chunks of time away from your art and your reading and anything else you’d like to do to make sure this maintenance is done properly so that your investment doesn’t lose its value.
But you’re still a woman.
When you are picking up his sports car at the repair shop, you drive because he had a stroke. The owner of the shop who just got paid $2,100 will still say, “Well you know, women drivers, no survivors.”
You are supposed to laugh and go along with this. Because you’re still a woman.
A trashy rich man who brags about sexual assaulting women is elected president of the United States: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
You are supposed to excuse what he said as “locker room talk”. Because you’re still a woman.
Madonna makes headlines for using a four-letter word in the direction of the new White House and saying she’s thought about blowing it up.
You are supposed to be outraged. But you laugh.
Because you’re still a woman.
Today’s penny is a 2013, the 100th anniversary of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade: “On the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, 5,000 women marched to protest the exclusion of women from the “political organization of society.”