Obviously, I can’t speak from experience about any reasons it’s great to be a man…

I’m going to qualify this list, based on my book club’s recent discussion of A Thousand Splendid Suns, and make it “Ten Reasons It’s Great to Be a Woman in 21st-Century America.” We may still have a long way to go, but we’ve truly come far…

• We have choices and control over our lives that our foremothers probably could never have imagined.
• We can explore and develop ourselves according to our own rules and not rigid social roles.
• We have the opportunity and access to the education that lets us learn how the world works and figure out our place in it.
• We can decide when, where, and how we want to grow our families.
• We can work if we have to.
• We can work if we want to.
• If we don’t have to work, or don’t want to work, we can do that too.
• If we do work, we can work at pretty much anything we want to do – “women’s work” covers a lot more territory than it used to.
• We have the right and the freedom to express ourselves, which lets us fight for our other rights.
• We can vote if we want to – and even if we don’t particularly want to or don’t like the options we have to choose from, we should do it anyway!

I think this is a terrific prompt for Thanksgiving week, since it’s based on appreciation of who we are and what we have. Why do you think it’s great to be a woman (or man, assuming that any of you besides my husband actually read this)?

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