Misbehave

Women Who MisBehave As a professional woman who had spent many years in the corporate workplace, I'd heard all the cautionary tales: how women would never be able to genuinely take a seat at the table with men; how strong women who wouldn't display proper subservience to their male superiors-or peers-would eventually find themselves locked out of meaningful opportunities; how women-especially black women-almost always faced the choice of "playing nice" and being seen as unimaginative drones or standing up for their principles and being labeled uncooperative bitches. I had apparently landed in the latter category, and that was the reason I was now out of a job. Was I the first woman in history who had found herself in this situation? As these new stories began to find their way to me, I learned that I most definitely was not alone in my predicament. In fact, I stood in a long line of women who "acted out": who refused to be defined by the stereotypes assembled by their patriarchal societies; who decided that their own dreams were better and more worthwhile than the dreams the rest of the world told them to have; who broke the rules and violated expectations in order to shout to a world that refused to listen, "I matter more than you think I do, and nothing you can do to me can change that!"