Women: Species of Mothers

(Months have passed by since my mind was in a state-of-pencils-down. Words would flutter by my mind and I would get scared to write them because they would make no sense to me and I wondered if they would to any. BUT luckily, the pencil in my mind has started scribbling words again. Today, I attended a part of a conference on Leadership, Civic Management and Media organized by CLAP at our university. One of the speakers in the ceremony said “women are the species of mothers” and the phrase still rings in my ears with big question marks following it. Thanks to the man that I got a topic to write and here I write again.)

Well, He was a he and he wanted women, the shes, to lead the world, the reason being women are the symbol o f love and care and tenderness. He had a dream of a utopian society under women’s rule. And being said that, it raised a big question mark on my mind, such big that I could not stop from writing this down.

My thoughts could not even put together a society ruled by women. No offense to those who favor it and do not take me for an anti-feminist. It is also not that I don’t want women to get empowered and be independent. But the way I pictured women empowerment and women’s right has always been to bring equality, a sense of fairness between genders.

I believed the fights for women rights always aim to gain equal opportunities and rights but not for more power to rule over men. How different our society would be than it is now if women would rule it instead of men? It would simply be an exchange of gender or sex in the hands of power, and then the sense of unjust and inequality would then grow into men’s minds. Is that what we want? Is that why women fight for their rights?

Going back to the comment, “species of mothers”, I felt it just makes women sound like a different species of animal, different from human race, different from everything, isolated yet bounded. From ages, in poems, in essays, in paintings, in articles, in songs, in movies, women are portrayed as mothers, loving mothers, caring mothers, affectionate mothers, protecting mothers, strong mothers…

These are all true but I believe women are not just mothers. They have their different sides and roles in their life. The predisposition of the character “mother” from the very start of the drama of their life does not allow them to know themselves and to freely play the characters they want. Belief that a woman becomes fully a woman until she is a mother, prejudices against women resisting marriage and abandoning sex easily rules out the fact the women are not only mothers but also humans. They belong to the same species, Homo sapiens, as men do. Rather than labelling them as a separate species, Species of mother, I believe a true honor would be to respect a woman for what she is.The remark “Women: Species of Mothers” gave me a sensation of seclusion and isolation than the word gender discrimination does. Is that how people look at me, as a species of mother?