The Woman’s Path to Liberation

I have long wondered if we have come to know regulation more intimately than liberation.
That our lives have been so meticulously policed that our very capacity for freedom has been obscured. In the everyday language 
of our modern existence, women have been taught to measure ourselves in the currency of restriction rather than aspiration.

The language of victimhood and of male oppression has become a shorthand for identity, as if our worth were measured solely by the magnitude of our subjugation.

Yet, in the soft spaces between these imposed narratives, I believe there lies another possibility: one in which we are not defined by the echo of men’s voices, but by the resonance of our own inner truth.

The orthodox line insists that women do not need men—that we are inherently designed for liberation through separation from dependency. And in many ways, this is true: Independence and autonomy are founded on the assumption of personal responsibility, the sine qua non of a free society.

But what does it mean to assume responsibility when our culture has, for decades, taught us that our power lies in resistance, in resentment? We are taught to embrace anger, dressed up as liberation, while in truth that anger can narrow our vision and constrain our potential. It is far easier to identify with victimhood than with agency, because victimhood comes with a prescribed narrative, one in which the antagonist
is always the oppressive man.

Yet, I propose that we reclaim the narrative by standing as free, self-determined, and joyful individuals. A feminism that defines itself not by an enemy to be defeated but by the strength and brilliance that already exists within us.

Read the Purple Manifesto here.