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FinalCall.com News
Sister Space
Feminism by another name: The Independent Woman
By Laila Muhammad
Updated Jul 19, 2013 - 11:16:12 AM
“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” ~Gloria Steinman
Burn your bras ladies, take off your aprons, replace those one inch pumps with stilettos, step out of Pleasantville and into the New Millennium. The age of being barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen is over and done with. We make our own money, our own decisions, can pay our own bills and pay for dinner at the same time. We act as if we don’t even need men, and unfortunately this fraud is being perpetuated to our daughters.
I was a teenager when Destiny’s Child “Independent Women” song was released, and even then there weren’t any subtleties urging us to throw our hands up for being independent, and clocking dollars. It was a bold, audacious, blatant and head on statement.
Granted that was over a decade ago, yet it still reigns true in 2013.
But who can blame us for having the desire to be independent of a seemingly male favored, women oppressive society? Then artists like Ne-Yo, whose song “She got her own,” which featured Jamie Foxx and Fabolous, sent a very clear and precise message: The more you aren’t in need of a man, as a provider and maintainer, the more valuable you are to men.
“I love her cause she got her own, she don’t need mines, she said leave mines alone, there ain’t nothing in this world sexy than a girl that want but don’t need me, young, independent yeah she work hard … she don’t expect nothing from no guy she plays aggressive, but she still shy ... she take pride in saying that she paid for it,” Ne-Yo croons.
But the airways have been hijacked by disrespectful rappers spouting double entendres and we have to wake up and see the writing on the wall. We are allowing the “music industry” to define us by having us believe the hype: The status to attain comes out as an overly masculine, workaholic, single woman, and this message is on auto-pilot. At one time, this would be called feminism. What exactly is feminism? If you Google the word feminist, you get as many disparate definitions as if you Googled the color gray. There is at least 50 shades right? (Wink.) In a nutshell feminism is defined as the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men, or an organized movement for the attainment of such rights for women. This seems to be an oxymoron. As women, we are not the same as men, not physically, or genetically. We think differently and reason differently. We are the feminine side of Allah (God). We are nurturers and comforters by nature. The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan said in a lecture titled “The Divine Nature and Value of Women,” “You have never looked at yourself as belonging to God; you only see yourself in the light of what The Enemy has made you to see yourself as ex-slaves or Black people of no worth or value or purpose in life. The Enemy never taught you the true knowledge of who you are. And, I don’t blame him because he was given power to rule. But his time is up, and your time has come! And now God has come to bring you back to yourself! You must be introduced to your intrinsic nature; the essence that determines your character, which is God Himself.”
When feminism started its goal was to speak the language of liberation, self-fulfillment, options, and the removal of barriers for women in the work place and politics. “Unfortunately, it was doomed for failure because it was based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.” God was nowhere in this equation. God is supposed to be the head of man, man the head of woman, and woman the head of child. I’m no expert on women’s studies, but I do believe that feminism destroyed the family unit. And now it seems that the Independent Women movement is just a fancy name for Feminism. I’m not talking about the feminist movement that dealt mainly with suffrage (the right to vote), and the right to own property in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Nor am I talking about equal pay for equal work act, I fully support the aforementioned.
I am talking about the side of feminism which pushed women to reject their natural selves in favor of something different—and even unnatural. It pushed work over family life and proper human development. In the name of freeing us, it opened the door to more exploitation and erosion of our home life. That doesn’t mean we were to be barefoot and pregnant, but we should know who we are and be our true, divine selves.
“God never intended for a woman to be ignorant! He never intended for a woman to be unlearned, uneducated because if you are unlearned and uneducated, you cannot fulfill your destiny. The Enemy wanted you dumb! The Enemy wants you to think nothing of yourself, so The Enemy strips you of your real nature. He has denatured the female—and the male! And anytime somebody denatures you, they have devalued you! So right now as a Black woman or as a Black man, you are not valued. And the worst part of that is you don’t value yourself because The Enemy has made us to think so little of who we are,” Min. Farrakhan observed.
I’m just asking us to rethink our roles as women. To let the man accept his role. To forgo going Dutch, or financially supporting men. Let’s live up to the role Almighty God has defined for us. Let’s let God define us, lest we be misled by misdefinitions. As writer Ralph Ellison said, “All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself.”
Laila Muhammad is a Chicago-based writer, videographer and Final Call production assistant.
