Opsss I Miss Out This... :P

                                                      THE JOURNEY OF WOMENHOOD

Hilary Tham's "Becoming A Woman" highlights the acceptance of maternal wisdom that only women goes through it. This poem presents various portraits of the transition of a female from childhood to adulthood. This clearly stated in stanza 3:

“You will bleed

at a special time of the moon.”

she told me. “Use these

to preserve modesty and the secret

of your femalesness.”

Becoming a woman is a rite of passage that starts with the changes of early puberty and ends with a woman's first periods. A girl grows and changes in ways that prepares her to be able to have a baby. These changes occur in certain stages. Gender representations on female clearly take places in this poem. The poet perhaps telling the story within her own experiences on becoming a woman. For the poet she is a female and have undergo all this stages in her life and through this poem is one way for her to share the experience. In stanza 4, the poet told :

Her mother’s way she passed to me

with the few words she had received

at her initiation.

After all, it become necessary for a little girl going through this phase; becoming a woman and it is someone called mother to teach her little child about becoming a woman through her own experienced and from what her late mother told her. Then, it becomes a woman responsible; the great responsibilities carry out from generation that men can’t do is to give birth. It’s an honour for a woman to give birth and it becomes mother’s responsibilities to carry out their jobs to tell their child especially girl on becoming a woman.