South African insurer, 1st For Women, in collaboration with digital media platform, Vice, have put together a short documentary/film that provides South African women the opportunity to speak about their experiences as women from their various points of view.
“Womanhood” features multiple South African women, from different and diverse backgrounds speaking about what womanhood means to them. It focuses on five important themes; freedom, body, pain, motherhood and future.
Beginning with the theme of freedom, it sees ordinary women describing what freedom is and how it looks like to them.
While some women speak about having the freedom to express themselves, others want resources to be able to design how they spend their time.
A shared desire, however, is the freedom to be safe—safe enough to not be harassed when walking on the street and safe enough to wear anything they want without fear.
In a country where femicide and alarming gender-based violence continue to rise, this desire is one shared by women across the board.
A young Indian woman explains how being 32 and unmarried with kids gives her family the feeling that they have failed despite having three university degrees. “It doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers them but what does bother me is that it bothers them so much,” she says.
An older woman shares her experience of being gang-raped when she was younger. “We teach our daughters to be safe but we don’t teach our sons not to rape,” she says.
As brilliantly shown in this documentary, the diversity in the spectrum of womanhood doesn’t limit it to archetypes or dominant and mainstream narratives.
Every woman has an opportunity to tell her own story in her own way – from the professional soccer player who’s struggling to make ends meet in a sport where male players are held in higher esteem, the young Muslim woman trying to navigate her religion and sexuality, to the woman who has to fight off stereotypes about what a mechanic ought to look like.
Watch “Womanhood” below:
By: The Arubayi Keme