• HOME
• ADVERTISE
• ABOUT
• CONNECT
  • Contact
  • Newsletter
  • Editor's Note
  • Meet Team
• MAGAZINE
  • Subscribe!
• INITIATIVES
  • Obaasema Village
  • Partnerships
    • Real African Women (R.A.W)
• MEDIA
• PHOTOS

• wellness
  • HEALTH
• culture
  • ENT'MENT
  • EVENTS
  • BOOKS
• features
  • NEWS
    • Be Informed
  • MONEY
  • DECOR
  • LIFE &♥
    • Relationships
    • Advice Column
  • WOMEN
    • Be Empowered
  • MEN
  • BLOG
    • CampusVoice
• style
  • FASHION
  • BEAUTY
    • AromaSense
• profiles
• spirituality
• powerhouse
• searchSite

The Ideal Woman Beyond the Kitchen and Feminism
By Linda A. Annan
                                                                                                                    

As a young African woman who spent most of her life on the other side of the continent in Ghana, West Africa, I have been exposed to many interpretations of who and what an ideal woman is. At age thirteen, I was getting into cooking for the family, participating in the “womanly” duties of the house. This was an exciting yet frightening “position.” All the women in my life up until that moment did not fail to pass on to me what they had learned from their mothers: that an ideal woman or a woman of worth was one who could cook. I am sure there were more attributes to this woman, but the kitchen-woman was emphasized so much that an ideal woman to me became one who did and could cook for her family, cleaned dishes, did the laundry, swept or vacuumed the entire house. The ideal woman had been boxed and limited to the house, specifically the kitchen.

Years later, after being exposed to a woman different from what I knew—the kitchen- ideal-woman, I began to assess my personal views regarding this ideology. How do you take the best from both cultures and merge into one? I toyed with this thought up until recently when I realized how much of a box both cultures had compressed the ideal woman into. Each, in my opinion, was at an extreme.

Here's why: Take a place like Ghana for instance (I choose this country because it is my place of origin and where most of my experiences occurred) where there is great emphasis on the kitchen-ideal-woman to the extent of neglecting other necessary or I should say important attributes. And then there is Western culture in which the kitchen- ideal-woman is mentioned but not to the same degree as the latter. More emphasis however, is placed on the woman being able to stand on her feet or fight for her rights, which usually gravitates towards a feministic mindset; a place that, some argue, has robbed us of our natural beauties: the pluckiness of vulnerability, the tenderness of affection, sensitivity, and most importantly, our femininity. I realized that I had been exposed to two cultures that were unable to concretely define who an ideal woman was.

Neither of these women is an ideal woman in my eyes. Not the feminist who spends so much time screaming about her rights, (which I myself, I must confess, have fallen short of) or the woman who spends twenty hours in the kitchen every day because it makes her a better woman than the one who doesn't. Shouldn't the definition of an ideal woman be much deeper, stretching beyond household duties and feministic views we clutch so tightly to? Why can't an ideal woman be someone who takes the gifts she is blessed with (not only those to do with cooking and nurturing), and uses it to help others, planting lights in their hearts and smiles on their faces? This, I believe, deserves a much bigger space in our world's definition of who an ideal woman is. No, she doesn't neglect her gifts but utilizes them in the household, and she does not allow her rights as a human being to be trampled upon. Instead, she taps into the humanitarian in her, cultivates that quality the same way she cultivates the kitchen-woman qualities, and then allow these two women to merge together.

Sometimes I wonder how such a humane act like that of the humanitarian be ignored simply because it does not fit the traditional woman taught or I should say, created by some of our cultures.

This only convinces me that there cannot be a concrete universal definition of an ideal woman, because someone else's ideal woman may end up being another's worst.