woman and blogging role

Lately, I've been thinking about women's roles--as wives, mothers, workers, and so on. All of the recent discussion here has me thinking. And when I think, I start to write things down, which I'm doing here without much forethought or planning. I've said I'm not a feminist. I don't believe in generalized pro-woman speak. But still...

I'm thinking about women and blogging, especially thanks to the discussions we've been having here. We got flack in the beginning of this excursion called blog sisters from some not wishing to be 'defined' by gender, which is not what I think we are doing here. Still, women bloggers are different, aren't we? I think we are, in some very important ways, ways that I see connected specifically to voice and the release of voice.

As women, the historically the more repressed sex (at least in American history), blogging offers us something special. A chance to experiment with voice, to define voice, and finally to release voice.

Repression undone.

Having come from a family where chatty girl children were reminded they should be seen and not heard, where male children were cherished, given free rein, given the benefit of the doubt, "believed" above all else, I'm coming to grips with the meaning behind the evolution of my own personal voice during my first four decades on this earth. What is happening--has happened--to me through blogging is very significant in my personal journey to find and release my own voice. In fact, I don't think I had my own voice until I started blogging.

Is it different for men? I think so. I think, on the net, until now at least, men have been the default. They have an inherent credibility here, their voices found an immediate home here. I don't think we as women had it so easy. We had to work a little harder, speak a little louder, yell some, maybe stamp our feet, take risks, and say to our online neighbors: We're here. And we're not just talking about weight loss, and we're not just chatting about parenting, and we're not just here to shop. We are thinking, we are shaping, we are creating, we are catalysts.

We are changing and we are change.

Repression comes in many forms, steming from the universal, the global, the local, even the familial.

Voice repressed is at the root, I think, of much unhealth. Much distress. And I think women, and with them other minorities, stand to risk and gain more from blogging--from the discovery and release of voice--than we have even yet imagined. We've only just scratched the surface.

Such is my journey anyway. You?