Growing up in a traditional African family, the importance of family and having a strong, close community around you was something that had been ingrained in me since childhood.

Although I didn’t have a huge immediate family, I grew up having hundreds of members of my extended family – cousins, half-cousins, second cousins, aunts and uncles – always popping in and out of our house. I was used to being around a lot of children and from a young age, I knew that I wanted to have a traditional family.

For my generation and the generations before us, womxn particularly have been socially conditioned to make family the most important part of our lives. We’re told to stay away from boys growing up, yet then deal with almost being hounded about marriage and babies as soon as we turn 21 – in my experience, this is especially the case within certain ethnic backgrounds.

Some of us were taught ‘home training’ by our parents at a young age: being taught how to cook, clean and take care of the house. I was told to always serve the men in the house their food first – something that, to this day I still subconsciously do.

But we’re now in 2019, and with the help of the feminist movement and general ‘wokedom’, we are now being conditioned to not see family as the pinnacle of success. Womxn are putting their careers ahead of settling down and are having children later in life. We have the freedom to travel, casually date, work, self care and just… live, without having the pressure to get a ring on it and get knocked up. Not only is it a freeing feeling, but honestly, it’s about damn time.

However, I still dream of getting married and having children.

Not because I’ve been conditioned by family or society to have kids by a certain age (my parents cut all that nagging out a very long time ago) and not because I feel peer pressure to settle down before a certain age, but because I love the prospect of having children, and having them with a partner.

Whenever I’ve shared this with some feminist friends of mine, I’m always greeted with the same responses: ‘But you don’t HAVE to have a family Steph! We’re in 2019 and we can do things on our own,’ ‘You don’t have to wait for a man in order to have a family, do it yourself!’ or ‘It’s a bit traditional and anti-feminist, no? Motherhood and marriage are oppressive!’

Grrrr.

I thought the whole point of being a feminist was to acknowledge that womxm can have a choice to do whatever they want, however they want? Isn’t that the whole point?

I get that the conventions of heterosexual marriage can be problematic at best, and yes I am part of the whole ‘MEN ARE TRASH!’ crew from time to time, but a womxn wanting to be in a secure relationship and start a family shouldn’t mean that they are all of a sudden, anti-feminist.

You can be a feminist and still hold on to some traditional values; the beauty of it being that it’s not because we feel we have to, but because we want to. Isn’t that the whole point?

When I hop into social media and see fellow womxn being shamed for changing their last name to their husbands’ upon getting married, it makes me feel incredibly sad. I’m not down with the concept of putting others down to feel superior in your feminism.

Yes, marriage may historically be a sign of ownership, losing your surname could be interpreted as an erasure of one’s identity, and the whole concept of having the ‘virginal’ white dress may be considered problematic but equally, it doesn’t give anyone a right to feel morally superior to someone else because of the decisions they’ve made about their own lives. That includes having children, or having the traditional fairytale wedding.

These days, I would like to think that people are getting married for love and long-term companionship; choosing to share your life with someone has absolutely nothing to do with your ability to be a feminist or empower women.

Yes, the archaic definition of marriage was problematic, but I’d like to think that we’ve come a long way from that now – I see it as something quite subjective and personal to the individual. It’s more of a partnership, as opposed to someone belonging to someone else.

Being a feminist isn’t necessarily about being a strong, independent woman who can do everything by herself. Granted, we can, and we’ve been awesome at doing it for years, but one can be a feminist and still want to fall in love, want companionship and settle down. It shouldn’t have to be a case of picking one or the other.

At the end of the day, the way in which we as millennials and Gen-Zers approach relationships and the prospect of settling down has changed drastically.

We are no longer bound by archaic norms, and we have the choice to create our own traditions and rulebooks as to how we think these ceremonies and family units should fall in place.

As feminists, we actually have the choice to decide what we want to do, and surely, shouldn’t that be the most important thing?

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