This blog is for all the fierce girls in the world.  All the girls who resist being compliant when faced with pressure from a male-dominated system.  This blog is for the fierce girls who stand up for what they believe in and don’t back down when threatened…those who when told they will do something that is counter to what they believe is right will issue a self-assured, “I don’t think so!” – like my dear and ferocious friend Barbara Johnson.  Yes, this blog is for the fierce girls.

I often write about how much I appreciate and value the fierce girls in my life.  And while I acknowledge that I am a fan of girl power, fierceness is about more than that.  Fierceness is about integrity  that overrides the pressure society places on females to be compliant and polite…sweet and demure.

I like Storm Large’s  song Ladylike because it challenges the notion of what is ladylike.  It used to be that being fierce wasn’t always embraced as being “ladylike”, but I think Storm Large’s song (especially in the way that she performs it) really challenges that.  There are some that seek to equate the quality of fierceness with the label “bitch” (which is a label I don’t personally find offensive – bring it on…but, I really do prefer Ms. Bitch).  Attaching the label “bitch” to being fierce is an attempt to minimize or stifle the power of fierce girls’ voices.  We’ll have no part of that…we get that ploy.  Also, let me note that one can be a bitch (or Ms. Bitch in this case) and it can have nothing do with being fierce.  In appropriate derogatory use, being a bitch is more appropriately a statement about behavior and is not appropriately used as a tool to try and stifle the voice of a person who speaks out based on a sense of integrity or in contrast with archaic stereotypes.

So for all the fierce girls out there I share a handful of my favorite quotations that speak about the value and potentiality of fierceness.

Women are not the weak, frail little flowers that they are advertised.  There has never been anything invented yet, including war, that a man would enter into, that a woman wouldn’t, too. ~Will Rogers

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. ~Alice Walker

My advice to the women’s clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. ~James McNeill Whistler

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it’s very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do. ~Ani DiFranco

Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use. ~Ruth Gordon

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent. ~Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Rock on fierce girls…I am so proud to live amongst you. 😉

Day five hundred and fifty-one of the new forty – obla di obla da

Ms. C