With International Women’s Day already a month behind us I’d like to reflect a bit on a currently taboo or off-limit subject: womanhood. It is taboo because, in the current climate of hyper-political correctness, we are not even supposed to acknowledge notions such as womanhood and manhood for fear of excluding or offending someone, somewhere, somehow. One definition of womanhood is the state or condition of being a woman. And one reason the topic may be taboo is that it is currently widely accepted that words like woman/womanhood and man/manhood are social constructs. While they are indeed social constructs, the notions of male and female are biological realities that cannot be escaped. So in order to not offend anyone, though I suspect that parts of this post may still offend some pc people, I will speak about “femalehood.”

For me, and I suspect for many other women, my physical and biological femaleness has largely shaped the state and condition of being a woman. What this means is that my biological sex, and the organs, body parts, hormones and functions that go along with it, have very much affected my state and condition of being a woman. While these are not the only things that have shaped that condition, they have been and remain very instrumental, and at times foundational, to my experience of being a woman. Continue reading →