YOU ARE NOT A HALF

It's time to stop looking for your better half

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Women – they have minds and they have souls, as well as just hearts. They’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it.” Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868, but this piece of literature has packed a punch in every one of its six adaptations. You feel for Jo March when she blurts out these lines, because you’ve been in her shoes. Every woman has. Despite having come a long way up the equality ladder in the last two centuries, many of us continue to be pulled back and pinned down on our personal lives.

AN UNSETTLING REALITY

“When are you settling down?” was the question posed to India’s ace tennis player Sania Mirza on national television at the peak of her career. Her response spoke for all of us: “You don’t think I’m settled?” It seems no matter how many Wimbledons we win, as women, we are not considered ‘settled’ until marriage and motherhood happen.

After winning the Miss World crown and having a successful run in Bollywood, Priyanka Chopra Jonas made a bold crossover to Hollywood. She was the first South Asian actor to lead a television show in that part of the world. Still, the best introduction a recent news report saw fit for her was ‘wife of Nick Jonas’. “Please explain how this still happens to women…” she wrote in an Instagram story, expressing her disappointment.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?