When you were a child , what did you think it meant to be a woman?

[BVP246]

everyone has their own view point on this

mine was to be loyal

I can't remember, but I've just asked my kids and they both said 'big boobies'. Ffs!

A grown up version of what I was as a child. I was a girl, I would become a woman. Nothing beyond that.

Same here.

'To be loyal' seems a strangely specific idea of womanhood, OP. I'm wondering if you thought loyalty was a specifically womanly trait not expected of men, and/or whether you got this idea from being brought up to think men could do what they liked and women just had to be the loyal, long-suffering wife and support team. Maybe not, but that's what woman=loyal suggests to me tbh.

I didn't think about being a woman as separate from being a grown up. I knew what I wasn't going to do - I was determined not to have children and I was not going to become a teacher. Life doesn't turn out as you expect.

Great question.

For me it changed at different stages of childhood and awareness.

Strong, hard-working, fierce, take no shit - those were pretty much always there

Then later on when I saw sexism and recognised, add in fighty as hell, stubborn and unbreakable.

But my upbringing was not the norm for those times at all. Main earner was mother, kids treated equally regardless of boy/girl.

EvilEdna, you’ve taken me right back with the cagney and Lacey!

I totally wanted to be them. Both of them.

That growing up meant the most important thing about you became your appearance and whether men liked you. Makeup and high heels and dieting. That you'd get married and have children, and stay home looking after them unless you were unlucky and your husband didn't make enough money, in which case you'd work part time in childcare or in a shop. None of this was told to me explicitly, it was the example set by the women I knew. I was aware that women did other things, but they seemed irrelevant to my life. This was in a working class community in the 1990s.

I was a bookish and plain-looking little girl. I remember being told by my mother to pretend not to know things because boys don't like it when a girl is smarter than them. I tried very hard to fit into this mould of womanhood! Part of it was my strong dislike of being 'a child' and the way that meant I was treated. Children's thoughts and feelings didn't matter, and they were the objects of their mother's frustration and anger. Clothes and makeup meant that I could make myself look older than I was, and I mistook male attention for the interest and respect I longed for. I left school at 16 and ended up working in a nursery. It was actually my dad who eventually told me to look beyond caring or admin jobs, because 'women can do other things now'. He was lovely.

Marriage never happened and I'm now a spinster feminist with multiple degrees. My teenage self would be horrified, but the little girl I was before all the 'womanhood' expectations crept in might be pleased.

For me it meant not being equal. Meaning less, taking up less space, being quiet. All this I realised in my mid-late teens, before that I could be anything I wanted to be.

To perform for others -- I'm not entirely sure what, but I got the steady message from an early age that femininity = performing in a way that provides something for others and as I got older, I got the message that I was shite at it and people only encouraged me when they pitied me and/or cared about who my family was or that I was just in a little pond and once elsewhere no one would care.

I had the very conflicting messages from my mother that marriage was miserable and so was having kids, but also a kind of looked down attitude from her than 'girls like [me]' aren't loveable and don't date -- anyone who tries is just trying to use me for something but they'd 'get more pleasure in leaving', and girls like I was definitely don't get married, don't have kids, don't do much. I remember when I stopped dancing, I was 13 with overtraining injuries and her words to me were "Well, at least you have enough training to be a stripper" - apparently that's what ten years of dance training plus all the rest meant to her.

I used to envy my brother a lot, though as I got older I could see how he was pushed to perform too and sometimes - with sports and similar - it was in a way that was meant to be attached to his masculinity, but when that didn't work, there seemed to be other options for him - the tech option, the martial arts option over team sports - whereas anything I did outside of performing was a joke, like I got into wrestling and my uncle asked if I knew wrestling on TV wasn't real.

Honestly, I never thought I'd make it to being a woman, I thought I'd die before then in part because of my violent mother, but also the only thing I could picture for my adult self was leaving - I had no dream job or dream life, it was all just not being there. I had to do future projections in therapy when I was 11-12 - it involves trying to plan out different futures and they helped to see options (and I use some of the techniques today), but I didn't see them then as realistic. Like we were asked if we could see ourselves having kids, and I put down 6, I've no idea why other than impulse to take the exercise to an extreme. I still feel befuddled by the idea I've been a woman longer than I was that girl who didn't expect to see 18 and still get that feeling at times that I'm meant to be performing something but I'm failing at it.

I grew up with Mrs Thatcher as PM. I just assumed that we were in charge, really. And we also had babies and wore skirts, but mainly we were in charge. Because my mum certainly was. And Mrs Thatcher. And The Queen. And our headmistress. And the GP.

My dad was the main breadwinner and my mum worked as a secretary once we were at secondary school, but she was easily as bright as him, and I always felt indignant on her behalf that she hadn't continued at school. Neither of them went to university but they were always both ambitious for me and dsis academically. There was no feeling at all that being girls made any difference to that. I'm 50, so was a teen in the 80s.

Chief "having a jacket with an inside pocket (like my dad)."

My school blazer had this. I was so annoyed when I realised it wasn't a norm for women's jackets!

I remember basing my earliest ideas of being a girl/woman on cartoons. So that meant mainly being beautiful and being kidnapped and rescued a lot.
I think my self esteem was quite damaged when I grew into a teen and was universally treated with scorn and disgust by boys.
So I do get annoyed with modern cartoons when I see one pink and pretty girl in the line up. It's not good to have that being held up as aspirational womanhood.

Yes yes @BiBabbles! Femininity as a weird and impossible performance that sometimes, unfortunately, would be 'required'. So sorry you felt that way. I didn't at home or school but it hit me at university and work.

@LemonJuiceFromConcentrate

I genuinely don’t think I thought it meant any specific thing. Not trying to be arsey, though. But I can’t recall ever thinking of womanhood in those terms.

Yes, me too.

When I was a teenager I had (stupid) opinions. Mostly around thinking my mother was lame for not working for pay.

But as a child it was not really conceptualised in a conscious way. I was as a young child convinced for some time that I was actually a boy, and part of my feeling was that girls and girly things were not tough and rugged. I was tough and had boy hands (?) so I must be a boy.

But that was not an organised opinion and for whatever reason I thought of it more in relation to girls than women.

@lazylinguist

My dad was the main breadwinner and my mum worked as a secretary once we were at secondary school, but she was easily as bright as him, and I always felt indignant on her behalf that she hadn't continued at school. Neither of them went to university but they were always both ambitious for me and dsis academically. There was no feeling at all that being girls made any difference to that. I'm 50, so was a teen in the 80s.

Yes, this was the same for me.

And while my mum didn't work when I was a teen, d=she did when I was a child, as did most of my aunts, my grandmother, my friend's mums, and the idea that women couldn't/shouldn't work wasn't really part of my awareness. To some extent I saw women who had to work but wanted to be home more.

@BVP246

everyone has their own view point on this

mine was to be loyal

Not one thing.

I grew up in a household that was largely neglectful and abusive, but yet I was ever defiant enough to pretty much ignore what a woman was supposed to be. And I owe that to both my parents, strangely enough.

At 2 or 3, I wanted to be a dad when I grew up, but then again, I also wanted to be a windmill. Growing up in a continental European culture where nudity doesn't carry the same level of stigma as in British/North American culture, I saw both of my parents nude from quite an early age, and I knew from as early as I can remember that some people have penises (there was never a silly word for those, that I can recall), and others don't, and I was aware that I was one of the latter category of people. I didn't really hold any gendered expectations of what jobs I would do later on, with both parents working in STEM areas, but with a great respect for arts and humanities. Early career goals (after "windmill") included farmer, train driver, palaeontologist, and opera singer. I went through a princess phase, but it was the sort of princess that rides on her horse to defeat the baddies, and THEN wears an amazing dress to the ball.

Doing everything ie. the thinking and the doing . Not much has changed!

@JorisBohnson2

I do remember from bond films, benny Hill etc that a woman had to be pretty and young and slim to be valuable to men though. A fat, ugly woman would be rejected and derided.

What I got from Benny hill, Kenny Everett etc was that loads of people and especially men liked laughing at/ taking the piss out of women.

I always disliked it from when I was a kid. I would sit there thinking I don't like this, but I didn't know why, and everyone else found it hilarious.

Well I say everyone else. It was my dad sitting there laughing but I don't remember my mum laughing much if at all.

I just knew I didn't want to be like my mum, but I didn't really have any role models (of either sex) so I didn't really think in terms of me being a woman when I grew up, I would just be me, older.

I did know I was going to have a glamourised career and a loft apartment (I have neither 😁)

Never thought about it. If you’d asked I’d probably have said ‘a grown up girl’ or thought you were weird for asking. But like several pps I grew up with Margaret Thatcher, and the queen in charge! I went to a girls school with an awesome headmistress and lots of academic no-nonsense women teachers. The few male teachers we had were quivering wrecks! So as far as i knew women were in charge. We all just assumed we’d go to uni and the have a (successful) career. Every speech day an eminent woman - scientist, politician would come and tell us we could do anything. I didn’t actually enjoy school much - but I’m increasingly grateful for it and saddened that our girls aren’t getting these messages now.

A girl grown up.

I was raised from an early age being told all the things I shouldn't do as a girl and called a tomboy. I learned all about how men were stronger than women, the freedom men and teenage boys had to be absolute shits and the futility of reporting harassment in my early teens. I remember that I used to look at my female teachers and wonder how they'd made peace with living in what was clearly such a shit world for women. Their mere existence was actually fairly important for me, as it showed some thought life worth it. I didn't really grasp, or it wasn't so true back then, that they were from the relatively privileged classes.