Patriarchy wrings young women dry. It tells girls who were raised in households where men were not present that their mother’s ability to thrive in a man’s absence was not a testament to her strength but evidence of his rejection. When a mother internalizes this, her daughters are raised under a specter of spurning. Every action and word they witness is instructive: this is how to act when you are a woman and mother on your own: decisive, assertive, impatient, frustrated and curt, entirely confident and selectively cooperative. This is how to own yourself: be unapologetic; accept that it may mean remaining alone.
(But what of our dignity? What of our own humiliation?)
In marriage, my mother was bossed, her husband a man not given to ceding the final say. Over time, she learned to be meek. If peacekeeping meant to defer — or, as our churches taught wives, to submit — she would. But she had to contort herself to do so, had to twist like wet laundry to be left out in the wind and pretend that being limply pinned, absorbing her husband’s hot air, was a welcome aspiration.And sometimes when we were alone, in the quiet of a house for which he paid, she would tell me to throw the fight. Accept the charge. Nod at the accusation. You know who you are. It does not matter what he calls you. It’s his house. Let him win.
Bossy. Boss. Bossed. None held much appeal. None were winnable.
I was not raised in the manner of girls whose anthems and aspirations instruct them to run things. I would not know where to begin, if I were told I should govern myself as though the world were a corporation and I, its CEO.
I was raised to know who I am but to keep quiet about it.
I am an opter out of many discussions. Whether to embrace or repudiate the term “bossy” is one of them. But I know well the damage that is done when young women and girls are not taught to speak on their own behalf. I know what fighting to own oneself looks like and how terrifying it is to watch a woman go slack under the guise of submission. I have contorted myself for men who’ve seen no need to do the same. And I’ve worked for and with difficult, yet enviably self-possessed, folks of many genders.
It is always the better lot to own yourself, to carry your voice across the current, to insist that you should and will be heard. And it is often the better lot to be gentle — not only with others, but also with yourself. Label this however you will; it is an ideal way to live.
Let every man and woman who wants power pursue it, but not at your expense. Power isn’t the ability to make others bend to your will; it is possessing sole guardianship of your will. If you would be “bossy” about anything, let it be about how you will be addressed and defined. Let it be about who cannot enter your space with the intent to tamp you down. Let it be in the stead of those who have gone limp or shrugged off their wills and thrown them at the feet of someone they love. Let it be for those who have been treated as though they are incapable of governing themselves at all.
Some of us are best off calling ourselves unbossed. Like Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, we want history to remember us, not for the professional goals we accomplished or for ascending through ranks often dominated by men, but for the larger feat of holding onto ourselves in the process.
Stacia L. Brown 
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