According to McGoldrick (2005), Women’s lives have always required amazing improvisation, but never more than today. Women and their uniqueness were never about following a single thread of the evolution of the hero into the undaunted, courageous and goal-oriented achiever, as seemed to be the life plan for Western men.
Likewise, women’s selfhood is the right to her own story and it demands an ability to act on power as in the ability to support one’s place in the world and the right to have one’s part matter. Women being highly connected individual hold greater emotional involvement in the lives of those around them. Thus women are more responsive to a wider network of people for whom they feel responsible (McGoldrick, 2005).
Moreover, according to McGoldrick (2005), the social context constricts girls from earliest childhood, and gender segregation is pervasive. Women are supposed to be strong and not weak like a girl with soft feelings. Yet, Women are not supposed to lose their identity as a woman. This is an impossible tightrope to attempt to straddle. Women are taught to be subservient, willing, subordinate, and unquestioning to male authority. However, at the same time are left feeling a sense of innate wrongness in whatever she does.
Furthermore, according to McGoldrick (2005), women feel guilty when they do not do what they have grown up expecting to do. Women also moved from a work horse to a sex object. Women who enjoy sex are then chastised for not doing what good girls do. Such women are both prized by males and further shunned by family especially by her mother. Women ARE given a mixed message to stand up for whom she is and surrender at the same time. And still wrong or less than no matter if she even can do it all.