In an English class last week, my professor asked a question — tangential to the works of Emerson and Thoreau which we had previously been discussing — that’s weighed on me throughout the past two weeks since it was first brought up.
It started when someone in the class casually mentioned that she lived with “three other girls.”
The professor cut her off —
“I don’t mean to change the subject,” he began. “But allow me to briefly change the subject. Why do you say ‘three other girls’? What makes one a girl as opposed to a woman? What makes one a boy instead of a man?”
The professor asked that the class indulge him and had everyone go around stating whether they considered themselves to be a girl or woman, boy or man.
The question was one I had thought about a surprising amount before — when traveling through southwestern India via buses last March, I had the empowering realization that this was me becoming a woman, that I was on my way — I was slowly but surely moving towards becoming an older, wiser, stronger version of myself. I had the notion that I was becoming someone who I and others could and would be proud of. So, when the question was posed to me in class, I answered similarly and swore to all I wasn’t trying to avoid the question by being annoyingly lawyer-y.
“I think I’m in between,” I said, “I’m becoming a woman. That’s not to say that I’m not one now, but it’s also not to say that I am entirely one yet. I’m working on it.”
I became utterly fascinated with the ways in which people approached and eventually answered this question. Only one female — myself and my own ambiguity not included — out of 20 in the class said she felt herself to be more woman than girl. Meanwhile, four out of the five males said that they believed themselves to be more a man than a boy. The females tended to cite financial dependency on their parents as a key reason for them not feeling entirely womanly — the males typically said that they erred towards calling themselves “men” if only because they felt it to be a more accurate descriptor than calling themselves “boys.”
After the class, I brought the question home to my seven housemates. Each time the question was asked, it unintentionally served as a springboard for a larger discussion about our individual images of what it means to be a woman-capital-W or to be a man-capital-M. As opposed to my classmates, my housemates seemed to value maturity rather than financial independence as a key component of full-fledged womanhood.
But what makes a person mature? And what is it about maturity that marks someone as having finally fulfilled some idealistic version of being a Woman or a Man as opposed to just being a regular, run-of-the-mill adult?
I’m starting to think that the answer has something to do with self-respect — with a visible-yet-unassuming confidence in oneself and one’s intrinsic value. My absolute favorite writer, Joan Didion, writes about this in her 1961 essay, “On Self-Respect: Its Source, Its Power.”
She says that “people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes,” “know the price of things,” “exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve” and embody “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.”
I love this idea. It’s something I strive for and struggle with, something I want to have but still feel far away from — and it’s something that is not essential to my image of adulthood per se, but is inherently tied to my more idealistic images of womanhood and of manhood. In other words — self-respect is vital not necessarily to my idea of growing up, but rather of growing into that person whom I want to one day become.
But, how to get there? I think that perhaps the key to self-respect lies in striking some kind of balance between being caring and being cautious — in opening oneself up to both risk and reward — but also knowing how to walk away. Where to draw the line and when to say no.
Didion touches on the strength of this sentiment at the end of her essay. “To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.”
It’s not so easy as her emboldening words make it sound. But perhaps therein lies the beauty, and power, of self-respect — it’s something earned, not handed. The same, I would say, goes for the reaching of womanhood, of manhood or of anything else in between. In any and every case, it’s the fact that one fought and worked and aimed to become something greater than they once were — something more self-respecting and kind-hearted and knowing than what they started out as — that makes “the becoming” such a worthy achievement.
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