Measure of a Woman
By Marni Myers

What does it mean to be a woman?  Do I have to imitate my mother?  Read on for answers to these and other burning questions about the modern female.

remember my mom always had long fingernails, which she filed carefully and sometimes glazed with clear polish.  My Aunt Nancy, her sister, also had long nails, always painted bright red, the same shade as the stripes on the American flag.  Later, my sister and I would refer to that particular shade as “Nancy red,” and we each knew just what the other meant when she spoke of it. Although I had a tendency to bite and tear at my nails as a child, I always assumed that when I grew up, they’d be long and elegant-looking, like my mother’s and my aunt’s.  My observation of them and other women had led me to conclude that women had long fingernails.  Their inevitable growth would come about with little or no effort on my part in the same way that breasts or wisdom teeth simply appeared as girls got older.  Clearly being a grown woman involved having long fingernails. 

My mother used to sew a lot when her children were young, mostly because we didn’t have much money.  She made clothes for my brother and me when we were very small, and later she spent hours at her sewing machine in the laundry room making stuffed bears and bunnies, Father Christmas dolls and puffy felt letters that spelled “JOY” and “BOO,” which she sold at local craft fairs.  Other women in our neighborhood sewed as well, though perhaps none so vigorously as my mom, and because of that I assumed that being a woman meant knowing how to sew, at least a little bit. 

My mom made homemade jam, bottled peaches and pears, made grape juice from grapes we grew in our garden.  My siblings and I helped her, peeling the skins off steaming peaches, cutting and pushing the pits out of apricots, squeezing the scissor-like apparatus on the little hose hooked onto the juicer on the stove to unleash the dark purple liquid and fill up wide-mouthed mason jars.  We stored it all in the storage space under the stairs, which we called the fruit room, where my dad had framed in shelves just for that purpose.

Although nowadays these activities are completely foreign to most American women, at the time and in the suburbia where I grew up, they were common-place.  To me, that was what women did, part of their work to take care of the family and ensure that they had enough to eat.

Watching my mother, her several sisters, and the other mothers in my neighborhood, I also assumed that being a woman meant being a mother.  I never even asked myself whether I wanted to have children.  It wasn’t a question of desire, it was simply the natural progression of life to get married and have children, sometime in one’s 20s.  I took it as a given that I would have kids, that I would be a stay-at-home-mom, that I would drive them to activities and take them to the park and swap child-rearing stories with the other moms while our kids played.  Whether I sewed or preserved fruit was ultimately immaterial (though I would definitely have the long fingernails), but my identity as a woman unquestionably involved being a mother.

My life has not taken me down the paths I intended to walk when I was younger.  In spite of several lessons, I never did learn how to sew well beyond attaching buttons, nor develop a true interest in it.  I made some ill-fitting shorts, a flowing skirt, a misshapen nightgown that I never wore.  I crave my mom’s homemade jam, but I’ve never made any myself, nor bottled fruit nor made any type of grape juice.  And at the age of mid-30, I don’t have children.  With a little care, I do have long fingernails but aside from that, I’m not doing anything now that I assumed I would do when I became a woman.

And yet, my identity as a woman is no less intact.  To describe the essence of women is an endless task, one that has occupied thousands of philosophizing hours and been the topic of innumerable essays and discussions through the ages.  Although I do not do all the tasks or take on all the roles that my mother did—those domestic and parenting duties that have traditionally been associated with women the world over—I am nonetheless a woman.  No matter what their roles in life, the greatest examples of womanhood that I have known and observed have exhibited an inner yearning for beauty, a desire to nurture and create, a sense of community, of compassion for others, and a resounding emotional fortitude that transcends circumstances.  However those traits manifest themselves—be it in a love of fabulous handbags, an affinity for scrapbooking, the drive to succeed in athletics, or the caring and business savvy to start a non-profit, to name a few—they are all undeniably the heart of women.  With my long fingernails and minimal domestic skills, I am all woman too.