Real Woman Do Cry

Speaker of the House John Boehner cries. He cries at work, on TV and probably at home. He was made fun of by the late night circuit, but eventually we all accepted it. He is not considered weak. He was nearly unanimously elected speaker of the house. He is just a man in touch with his emotions.

But what if this were Nancy Pelosi? Would she have gotten the same respect as Mr. Boehner? Would she have been considered strong? I doubt it. Somehow in our push to be treated as equals to men, women have traded our female strengths for male traits. Independence is good, but not when it has cost us our ability to deal with our emotions.

In a few years there will be more hispanics in America than whites. With this will come a group of women that is perceived to have missed the feminist movement. Many hispanic women still enable the macho culture they came from, and I worried about what this will do for the feminist movement. Would it set us back. But now, I see these women also have a strong female culture. A culture that is in touch with the innate strengths of women, and perhaps that is a positive influence us emotionally cut-off women need.

The reality is that we are all the same. Hispanic cultures have women in power just as Americans do, and those women got there using whatever is in them individually that they possessed. But I hope that as a gender in America, women can embrace what makes us female and make that part of our culture.