The Hunt For Female Agency

How your mental health can benefit from the post-Weinstein zeitgeist with four words: ‘your life is yours’

- Aoife Stuart - Madge

In a now-viral speech at Glamour's 2017 Women of the Year Summit, Blackish actress Tracee Ellis Ross powerfully evoked the phrase when she described taking ownership of her own life with four little words. "My life is mine. Those words stopped me in my tracks," Ross said. "Because, yes, I’ve been living my life—but not to my own expectations. Not for me."

Ross said that the words propelled her to stop looking at her life and accomplishments through the lens of society’s expectations and instead to acknowledge her own dreams, ambitions and even flaws in a celebratory way; to be proud of who she is and not to apologise for it. As Ross put it “I am going to own my experiences. I'm going to pay attention to the reality of my life and the audacity of my dreams instead of the expectation I was raised with. I'm going to make space for the good and the bad of it, even the yucky, scary, fear-inducing parts, and embrace all the bits and all the questions.”

The good girl paradox

It sounds simple, right? But when you start to examine the societal constraints placed on women by what we are expected to be (polite, proper, modest, pretty, selfless, delicate…), it’s not hard to see why women have been struggling to take back control of their own life and agency.