IMOW - Defining Ourselves

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Defining Ourselves - for Ourselves
Tracy Watson

United States

GALLERY

CONVERSATION

“If I don't have and keep him, something's wrong with me. If I don't have a We, I depreciate in value by the second.”

But each year, instead of adding to her list of desirable qualities, she began to subtract. She celebrated my beauty, but diminished her own in the same breath. When I questioned her strange arithmetic, when I pondered how her value had become negative instead of positive with each additional year of living and loving and evolving as a human being, she contradicted herself and said that she knew her worth.

My generation watched these women, our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers; married, divorced, single, lesbian, straight, assimilated, militant, who all shared in some way an imperceptible hollowness, a collective fear of being “less than.” There were the traditionalists who feared, “If I don't have and keep him, something's wrong with me. If I don't have a We, I depreciate in value by the second.

We watched, and shared their fear, but with a twist. My generation turned critical eyes to feminism and found that it existed only in words and ideals that were bandied about, such as “empowerment” and “matriarchy”, but in daily life it was no where to be found. To be honest, we didn’t feel it.
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