The Gender Roles In My Family...

My family is composed by five daughters, so in the house the dominant gender is us, the girls. Of course since little girls we were always taught that since we were girls we had to be more quiet, but my dad always said that just because we are girls that doesn’t mean that we cannot express our minds. In fact, he always encouraged us to speak up our minds and to not be looked down by anyone just because we’re girls. Of course I was always hearing things like “get down of that tree, you’re not  a boy”  or “only boys do that, girls don’t” or “if you were a boy, it would be a different thing”. All this things that I would hear from the elders, sometimes made me wish to be a boy. One time my dad told me that when my mom was pregnant of me everyone wish for me to be a boy, since my parents had had two little girls now they wanted a boy, a boy to take over my dad in the future when he grow older. When I was little I always wondered: what can guys do that we girls can’t? As I grew up, I saw that we were treated in some way different that guys. Even if in my family always were trying to educate my cousins and all of us the same, they could not help making some exceptions. When my cousins, the guys, wanted to go somewhere they would always give them permission to go, but when us the girls ask for permission to go, they were always denied permission. They would say that we cannot go alone, that we needed someone else to go with us. To me that was really unfair, that was one of the reasons why I didn’t like family reunions or vacations with my mom’s or dad’s family. Since my parents only had girls, they always treated us equally and they would always tell us to do what we wanted to do, that gender did not had to be a barrier for us, that we always had to follow our dreams. All this differences on gender helped on shaping my identity. Now I know there is some differences, guys can be a little stronger and therefore can do some things that girls can’t, but us girls, can also do thighs that guys can’t and that is where we complement. We all need from everyone, so there is no reason why we have to be treated differently. I believe that we can all do whatever we want only if we try. We just have to believe in ourselves and go for whatever we want to go for and we will get it with faith and support from the ones that are always there by our side, like our parents.