Be a Woman

A reader told me she has a friend who writes beautiful poetry, about what it means to be a girl growing up and a woman living in Mexico. I met a young woman Friday whose name is Anaïs. I asked her if she was named for Anaïs Nin, one of my favorite authors. Her mother had named her after Nin, a woman who wrote about some uniquely female experiences. My ten-year-old granddaughter writes poetry. A while back, I put some poetry in Hero In Your Soul. It enabled me to express some very powerful emotions about my older sister in such a cathartic way.

Across the world, the girls and women of Mirman Baheer bravely compose poetry in Afghanistan. Eliza Griswold wrote a compelling piece about them in the April 27, 2012 issue of New York Times Magazine. How different my life would be if I would have been born in Afghanistan instead of here in America. It's likely my date of birth would not even be recorded because girls are just not that important, and that I would not have been allowed to go to school. I can't even imagine how awful that would have been, for school was my saving grace, as I have written in a previous post here. If I did learn to read or write, it would have been in secret. Doing something as brazen as composing poetry could get me at the least, beaten, or at the worst, killed. What I have taken for granted, the privilege of expressing myself freely and openly, is something that is denied many of my sisters around the world. I believe I need to do something about this, but I haven't figured out what to do yet. It just isn't right that I should have this privilege and they should not.

We women in America have finally arrived. We are now afforded all the privileges that men have enjoyed. The struggle here is over, thanks to our sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. But we haven't come this far to become complacent. We should not rest until every little girl in the world is allowed to go to school, until we have created such a place where every woman can be a poet.

When I was a little girl, the older girls had good-smelling cedar chests called "hope chests." They would collect things to be used later in their homes, when they married. A silver teapot. A beautiful tablecloth. A baby's rattle. In England, a hope chest is called a "glory box." Hope chests as furniture have sort of fallen out of fashion, but hopes and dreams in the hearts of little girls have not.

I challenge myself as I challenge my female readers. What can we do to give these women hope? What can we do so that they can experience all the glory of being a woman?

Susan

"Glory Box" by Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley and Isaac Hayes