Strong Women can say NO!

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.

A strong woman is a woman standing

on tiptoe and lifting a barbell

while trying to sing Boris Godunov.

A strong woman is a woman at work

cleaning the cesspool of the ages,

and while she shovels, she talks about

how much she doesn’t mind crying, it opens

the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up

develops the stomach muscles, and

she goes on shoveling with tears

in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head

a voice is repeating, I told you so,

ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

ball buster,  nobody will ever love you back,

why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t

you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why

aren’t you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined

to do something others are determined

not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom

of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise

a manhole cover with her head, she is trying

to butt her way through a steel wall.

Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole

to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding

inside. A strong woman is a woman making

herself strong every morning while her teeth

loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,

a tooth, midwives used to say, and now

every battle a scar. A strong woman

is a mass of scar tissue that aches

when it rains and wounds the bleed

when you bump them and memories that get up

in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love

like oxygen or she turns blue choking.

A strong woman is a woman who loves

strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly

terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong

in words, in action, in connection, in feeling,

she is not strong as stone but as a wolf

suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she

enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is other loving

her equally for the strength and for the weakness

from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.

lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.

only water of connection remains,

flowing through us. Strong is what we make

each other. Until we are all strong together,

a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

Marge Piercy, "For Strong Women"

I want to dedicate this poem to those women who believe that they are different parts of a whole. Women who do not conform to the stereotypes. Women who want to be. Women who simply want more. Out of their lives, out of themselves, out of the men they choose to love. Or leave. The children they decide to bear. The career options they choose to exercise. The relationships they decide to discard, because they have outgrown the comfortable garments. The pigeonholes are long disappearing. So also the notion that women should be X or Y, and not a combination of A B C, because that would make her too complex to be understood. And what is not understood is often looked upon with suspicion.

Somebody asked me a strange question as soon as when I stepped off the ramp at a recent fashion show. He wanted to know that since I had `discovered’ modeling now, was I going to give up writing? For a split second, I was struck by the absurdity of the idea. Why in heaven’s name did I have to make a choice? There was no question of a choice. I could be all, and still be me. Life didn’t always have to be black or white to suit somebody else’s convenience. Pigeonholes exist in the stereotypes. Minds are meant to flow like the currents of a swollen river. These are mindsets women have to break out from. And break them from within. These are the women we should reach out to. I long told myself that pigeonholes were meant for cutlery. .

Ethel Da Costa
August 28, 2002

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