A woman. To speak this word is to speak a story older than time yet unfinished. It is to summon the shape of a body and the shape of an idea — flesh, bone, blood, but also myth, ritual, law, rebellion, possibility. To say woman is to touch something both delicate and defiant — something that has survived centuries of being named by others yet keeps naming itself anew.
What is a woman? The dictionary, ever so tidy, will offer: an adult human female. Biology lessons might chart the chromosomes, the hormones, the organs that distinguish her from man or child. But the marrow of the matter lies far beyond this anatomical sketch. The question What is a woman? is not so much a question of science as it is a question of power — who has held it, who has withheld it, and who dares to reclaim it.
Look across the centuries and see how the word has been drafted into service by kings, clerics, husbands, lawmakers. Roman fathers once held the power of life and death over daughters. Medieval Europe bound women in marriages arranged as alliances, their dowries traded like currency. In the shrines and marketplaces of precolonial Africa, Yoruba and Igbo women commanded spiritual and commercial realms — only to have these powers bent or erased under colonial rule, the same rule that recast African womanhood in the domestic, docile image of Victorian Britain.
Yet for every attempt to narrow her, history brims with the ways women refused to be small. The Aba Women’s War of 1929, where Igbo women sang defiance at colonial officers. The suffragists who marched with bloodied feet so a woman’s voice could weigh as much as a man’s at the ballot box. The mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who dared dictatorship by demanding the return of their disappeared sons — and in doing so, forced the world to reckon with the unspeakable.
Still, law remains a double-edged blade. Across the globe, constitutions and statutes hold both chains and keys. South Africa, reborn from apartheid’s ashes, inscribes gender equality in the bedrock of its democratic promise. Sweden boasts some of the strongest policies for women’s economic and political participation. And yet the map is stained with paradox: over 150 countries still keep at least one law that makes a woman less than a man — her testimony worth less, her marriage a potential prison, her body a terrain where her consent may be voided by custom or kin.
Consider Iran, where a woman’s hair — a single strand visible — can be cause for beating or death. Or Afghanistan, where girls who once sat in classrooms now stand behind locked doors. Or America, where the battle over Roe v. Wade revealed how fragile the line is between bodily autonomy and state decree. The ink of the law is not neutral; it is the handwriting of power, ancient and new.
Yet the miracle — the living testament — is that womanhood does not yield so easily to decree. Women have stormed courtrooms with petitions scrawled in kitchen light. They have forged networks across borders, built shelters where the law fell silent, published manifestos in secret, sung songs that carried coded rebellions. They have stood at barricades in Tehran, Nairobi, Warsaw, Delhi — chanting the same untranslatable truth: I am not your possession. I am not your battlefield. I am not your silence.
In this century, womanhood is also a conversation with itself. Trans women remind the world that gender is not the final stamp of birth but a selfhood claimed, a truth lived. Movements like #MeToo, Ni Una Menos, and EndSARS Women’s Marches break taboos and push the conversation further: beyond equality on paper to dignity in practice.
So what is a woman? She is the body that births nations and buries kings. She is the mouth that blesses and curses, the back that bears markets and revolutions. She is the girl who learns to keep her head high when they say lower it. She is the grandmother whose stories rewrite the law when the law fails her. She is every clause in a dusty constitution and every word that constitution forgot to write. She is the shape of survival, the witness of unspeakable things, the author of the next sentence.
She is not what the world told her she must be. She is what she dares to become.
So let the word woman remain open, unfinished — a living document, drafted by every breath she takes, every law she bends, every silence she breaks. Let it carry her contradictions — mother, warrior, lover, priestess, leader, outcast, prophet. Let it stand taller than any court’s decree, any culture’s mold. Let it be what it has always been: the oldest revolution still unfolding.
Visual Addendum:
Courage – July — Jide can brighten your day with his smile. He lives, he laughs, and he cries too. But he never gives up because he believes that life is beautiful and there is always hope. He is fire: exciting to watch, but dangerous to mess with. He can’t be tamed, but he has unconditional love in his heart that makes him fight fearlessly for his loved ones.
Pictured: Jide Adesina, whose words remind us that courage and hope are not abstract virtues but living flames that ignite freedom, equality, and human dignity — for women, for families, for all.
By Jide Adesina | 1st Afrika Media
