The Woman You Are Supposed to Be

Over the past few days, there has been considerable turmoil in Portuguese society. All of a sudden, a strangely well-organized group of conservative women has appeared in the headlines of several media outlets. Among other things, they propose to “free women” from feminism and to “empower” them through traditional roles of motherhood and domesticity, while also advocating an end to abortion.

However, that wasn’t what caught my attention.

Because of my religious upbringing, I am well aware of evangelicalism’s desire to reshape and influence Portuguese society. I am also familiar with its aspirations to gain influence by placing its members in positions of power — in the media, law, education, healthcare and politics. None of this came as a surprise to me.

What really made me stop and think was the response from some feminists.

On social media, some people argued that these conservative women should not be allowed to speak publicly and should instead stay at home serving their husbands. Others claimed that they had no right to enjoy the fruits of women’s struggles for equality while advocating ideas that contradict those very achievements. One feminist even proposed a “swap”: conservative women should trade places with Afghan women, thereby giving them the opportunity to pursue their conservative ideology in Afghanistan.

This succession of events made me realize that feminism in Portugal still has a long way to go.

I believe there is a collective trauma in Portuguese society, partly shaped by the country’s long dictatorship. During those decades, both women and men suffered immensely. After the 1974 Revolution, many women understandably came to see domestic work and motherhood as incompatible with feminism. Their liberation, however, remained incomplete if it meant replacing one prescribed role with another: if women were now expected to reject motherhood, domesticity, or traditionally feminine interests in order to prove that they were free.

The contempt for everything deemed traditionally feminine grew stronger, and many women felt its consequences. In fighting misogyny, we sometimes fell into another trap: women policing other women.

To me, being a feminist means fighting for human rights and human dignity. It means believing that women are complete human beings, capable of choosing the paths they genuinely want to pursue.

But it also means making room for men to shed the false cloaks of a masculinity built upon generations of the belief that being a man means being the opposite of a woman. Men, like women, should be free to become who they actually are: human beings with deep longings for connection, tenderness and love.

Feminism can be distorted when it becomes another system of rules telling women what liberation is supposed to look like. Meanwhile, political forces are increasingly invoking “traditional values” and calling for the sacrifice of men in the name of patriotic duty and masculine defence of the pátria.

There is only one winner in this equation: those who hold power.

Men and women are encouraged to believe that they must fight one another and themselves.

Men police one another, enforcing ever-narrower definitions of what it means to be a “real man”. They are discouraged from being vulnerable, from experiencing the world freely, and from stepping outside the rigid expectations imposed by their peers.

Women can do the same to one another, perpetuating the cycle.

Misogyny and misandry are not opposites that need to defeat one another. They are two manifestations of the same failure to recognize the humanity of the other.

There is, of course, a real danger in groups advocating a return to rigid traditional gender roles. But their existence also exposes something that feminism has not yet fully resolved: how do we empower every woman, from the stay-at-home mother to the CEO, without telling either of them what kind of woman they are supposed to be?

There is a need to bridge this gap between expectations.

And perhaps the only way to win this fight is to look at the person standing next to us and recognize in them the same humanity and dignity that we demand for ourselves.