Nearly a century and a decade ago on March 8, women suffragists in Russia began a strike for “Peace and Bread”. I’m writing this while sitting with a cup of coffee and butter slathered on two thick slices of sourdough—a privilege I get to enjoy every day. But sometimes I don’t know peace as a contemporary woman. Despite the massive progress we have seen towards gender equality, frequent setbacks from the reigning administration and deep-seated patriarchal hostility continues to breed ignominy towards women and our bodies and identities. The progress from hard-fought battles and critical moments of history in the name of Justice (she is a woman after all) unravel before my eyes, so I find solace by burying them in books.

In particular, I have been reading Sylvia Plath’s journals since January (in addendum to bell hook’s “All About Love: New Visions”) and as a huge fan of her works, her uncensored musings and reflections about life as an ambitious writer, an intellectual, a lover, a free spirit, and most importantly a woman, provide a comfort and striking empowerment to me, living 75 years later. She poetically writes of her burgeoning sexuality and famously, for not knowing “…what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when [she] feel[s] nothing, [she] feel[s] it completely”.

Some nights I lay awake wondering what it’s like for people who have no sympathy for the plight of girls and women—abused, trafficked, coerced, manipulated, trapped, and made small and submissive.

“I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material. I made them propose and then showed them they hadn’t a chance. I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fun while a woman had birth pangs. They could gamble while a woman skimped on the butter on the bread. Men, nasty lousy men.”

Plath wrote on December 12, 1958 during her marriage to poet Ted Hughes, who was having an affair while she gave birth to their child. But she also loved many men because she desired their freedoms:

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”

She envied their privileges, to roar with laughter at a dirty joke amongst themselves, throw back beers and fill their ash trays, “dispel sexual hunger freely”, while she was left feeling sick with longing or in some cases fearing her safety. Plath often wrote about her romantic interests and expressed this creatively:

“…to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman’s agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment…”

And this is why I read and write, and love wholly:

“God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. There is history to read… centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. Yet I know that back at the house there is my room, full of my presence. There is my date this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity. I’m lost.”

An unfortunate pattern in Plath’s haunting biography is that she cannot escape the ties to her self-worth in her ability to attract and captivate males, up until her death. While so much of her writing reverberates in every bone that we took from Adam, I escape the comfort of the Garden by seeking more than complacent devotion to these ideas.

Plath writes during the throes of America during WWII,

“…I don’t believe in God as a kind father in the sky. I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the old, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the might in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.”

So it ought to be that women (and allies) must continue to fight for their basic rights under the ongoing crusade against mothers and caregivers, sisters, colleagues, wives, girlfriends, best friends. Denying someone of opportunities and their own autonomy because of their sex is defunct of all rational sense and nurtures a negligent and wicked society. We cannot allow these oligarchs to undermine our worth as women and take away our voices. Women’s rights are human rights. But “I’m just a girl”? Beautiful, powerful, capable, intelligent girls, who deserve to be celebrated every day.

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For more ways to honor Women’s History, read my article from 2023 on finding a female role model.