Feminism: Why I think women are tired of it…and how I think that’s reflected in Disney’s “Frozen”.

I first went to see “Frozen” a week after it came out and mainly because my daughter wanted me to. Okay, I love Disney, but the main draw was the opportunity to share those couple of hours of girl time with my six-year-old. We don’t agree on much, but we do love princess movies! What I didn’t expect was to spend most of the movie in tears. Not because it’s a tearjerker of a movie in the classic sense but because it really spoke to me. Somewhere in that movie, I found a grain of truth that since then, I think, has blossomed into a little pearl of wisdom.

I relate to Elsa. And I’m not the only woman out there that does.

You have to understand that Elsa is not the focus of the movie. Although the movie is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, the focus of it is Elsa’s little sister Anna, a typical teenage girl held captive by her sister’s fear of her own power. Anna doesn’t know about Elsa’s power and when she finds out, she tries to help. And yet, it’s Elsa who women everywhere fell in love with. It’s her dolls that are being snatched up by collectors so fast it’s hard to find any of them on the shelf in the store. I’m not the only one who got a chill when Elsa faced the camera and sang in Idina Menzel’s lovely and perfectly rebellious voice, “The cold never bothered me anyway.”

So how does this kids’ movie relate to feminism? I’ve puzzled about it for a while. Why did I relate so much to Elsa standing on an icy mountain and declaring she’d never go back and “that perfect girl is gone”? I think I’ve figured it out.

Women are pigeonholed and it’s women who are doing the pigeonholing. We’re sticking ourselves into molds and expecting each one of us to fit exactly right and it’s not working. And what do we do when one of us doesn’t fit exactly into the mold of mother or career woman or wife? We frown and shake our heads and gossip. Recently a blogger published an article called I Look Down on Young Women with Husbands and Kids and I’m Not Sorry. Have a look if you want, although the article says pretty much the same thing as the title.

I’ve been wondering why on earth a woman would write such a thing. Why would you try to invalidate the choices of other women? If all women were forced to live the same lives as all other women, well, you’d eventually end up with an Elsa. A woman who breaks out of her mold and declares herself free of society’s bonds and dares that same society to try to stick her back into that mold. Although, to my disappointment, Disney only gave us a glimpse of what Elsa was like when she fancied herself perfectly free, I think I have an idea how to fill in the blanks. I think she had a lot of fun expressing herself the way she wanted to and not the way her family and her society had always expected her to do.

Women will never be perfectly free as long as we have people we care about to live up to. Whether it’s our children, our husbands, our friends or our role models, we’ll continue to fit into society in some way. I’m not saying we shouldn’t. But I am saying we should stop worrying so much about what other women’s choices are and support them in their chosen roles. Mothers, doctors, lawyers, sisters, aunts, daughters…I support you all in your quest to be yourselves and contribute something positive to society. But I do believe that we can’t allow that society to mold us into the image it wants out of us. I’m not a feminist and I know now I never was. I’m just a woman.