And so it was that with the melting of snow and budding green I sought definition. Like an abstract that turns over in the mind again and again I pondered and waited.
Websters, the place whose function it is to define, said: woman: 1. an adult female person 2. womankind 3. feminine nature: womanliness 4. a female servant or attendant.
In narrowing the definitation: womanly: having qualities characteristic of a woman. Female: of, relating to, or being the sex that bears young; also: pistillate syn feminine, womanly, womanlike, womanish, effecinate - female. Feminine: 1. of the female sex; also: characteristic of or appropriate or peculiar to women 2. of, relating to, or constituting the gender that includes most words or grammatical forms referring to females.
Understanding fully that woman is the half of the human species on the physcial plane that bears young and that she has a set of un-named characteristics that are peculiar to her gender I was ready to move beyond the formal labeling.
Since I love to read and write and since I had not had the opportunity to go to college, I took my first Community Based College course: Women And Literature. I read poetry, short stories and two novels by women aurthors. The small concealed world of my soul opened up and for the first time I heard the voices of women defining themselves.
Voices from the ink wells spelling out their lives, their fears, their longings, spelling out the truth of their female souls. Speaking in quiet lonely strength the joys and the prison bars that make up their roles. Then beyond their reality of roles, somewhere, somehow I recogonized more.
I saw colors and lights, shadows and darkness. I felt fullness and void. Saw courage overcome fear and fear overcome recklessness. I heard stories within stories and stories from further away. Stories of beginnings and stories of endings.
And somewhere in the connections, in the sights and smells and joys and longings of my sisters I felt the first glimmers of what it might mean to be woman.
-Betsy-
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