Women Like You . . .

Our first featured image is titled “Red” by Kenta Sakura.   How does her photo speak to the lives of girls; of “women like you . . . ?”

All of the women and girls that we will study throughout the year are “women like you . . . .”  They are women who are trying to make sense of the society that they were born into.  They are working out what it means to be an individual, and what it means to be part of a community.  They are sometimes unsure what it means to be a girl, or a boy. They are often “breaking the rules” without malice to rules. Would the rules be better if women were making them?   For whom are the rules made?

The newspapers provide a daily report on how women and children are faring, here in the US and in other parts of the globe.  What would we learn of laws, of rules governing domestic spaces and public spaces, if we kept a log of international back page headlines?  How do reports of  ‘public opinion’ and “polls” build the boxes within which we cram our lives?  But, if memory serves (and it can), some women have consistently resisted the rules and their makers.  What happens to them?  What is respect?  What is love?

This writer likes the image by Sakura–it’s as if the forest has been turned inside out.