The Female Elephant and Her Ladders

(Approach this with the mindset of a first world country, with financial aid readily available, not a rural poverty-struck dustbowl)

Rhodes, UCT, Comp Sci – NO, MEDICINE! UKZN, ID Numbers, Faculties… it’s around this point in time that lots of matrics begin thinking about what they’re going to do with the rest of their natural life. University? Technikon? Point Road….err Mahatma Ghandi Road?

What I’m about to put forward isn’t necessarily my personal life plan, but it’s something I realized we need to think about as a society. Let’s cast our mind’s back to the bra burning feminists of the roaring 60s : demanding women be valued for their entire persona and not just their physical beauty. This tangent isn’t about beauty though (listen to that Christina Aguileira song if you wanted that kinda stuff) – this is about the place of women in society.

Over the past, there have been countless demonstrations regarding women and education. Equality and all that jazz. Fast forward to the present and we’re left with a society acceptant of highly educated women. There are even female presidents (but, than again, we don’t need to run a country to let men know we RULE hahahaha). In 2009, women made up almost 50% of the American workforce. That’s pretty sweet right? But let’s probe a little deeper.

Look, from the society I come from (middle class Durbanite) – education is a prerequisite for life. You get educated, you go places. You have a dream job (whether it’s your own dream or your parents’ fantasies of having a Phd kid). We’re from a society where a woman is EXPECTED to be fully educated within the capacity of her family and be out on the field, doubling as a wife should she get married.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Amidst this rush for work and high profile jobs for women, we’ve created a stigma around women who chose not to climb the corporate ladder, but chose to climb ladders to reach the sugar on the top shelf at home. We’ve begun to shun house wives within society, raising an eyebrow should we hear a lady would rather be a mother first than a corporate vixen. And that is the offensive truth.

I read an article recently about women and their hormonal clock – power suit clad canaries flying high in their fields, yet wanting to have babies after they’ve reached their peak…which tends to be after the childbearing age. What’s wrong with not wanting to pursue a job? What’s the inherent crime in wanting to rear the offspring, should there be a stable income source within the family?

In society, we are too quick to judge. As women, we’re taking on the role of nurturer and matriarch. We want to lead the herd and rear the calf. Elephants, however, don’t have a judgemental society. They’re quite chill, flapping their huge ears. Until a lion attacks. Then they’re all *finger snapping…. / tusk snapping* hell to the no!!! Trampling the dust out of the carnivore to SAVE THE BABIES.

Moral of the story, career women or not, we should accept that women should be able to have a choice between having a job and a family, or just a family. The woman that chooses to make her family her job is no less an awesome elephant than the woman that chooses to work. We shouldn’t expect a woman to get a job.

Than again, who said men can’t stay at home, instead? Hmmm.