The Fight for Female: Why Women Are Still the Battleground — And How We Take Ourselves Back

There’s a growing conversation happening across wellness, politics, media, and everyday life — and it’s not subtle. Women feel it in their bodies, their careers, their healthcare, and their relationships: the culture war on womanhood is still alive, still mutating, and still demanding we shrink.

In a recent conversation with author and longtime women’s advocate Lisa Bevere, we explored why this moment feels so fraught for women, why identity has become a battleground, and what it actually looks like to reclaim our power in a culture that profits from keeping women confused about who they are.

This isn’t a religious debate or a political indictment.
It’s a cultural health issue — and like all things affecting women’s health, we believe it deserves clarity, honesty, and support.

Identity Is the New Pressure Point

One of the most striking ideas from our conversation was this:
Women are being asked to define themselves faster and more publicly than ever before — without time, space, or support to actually know who they are.

We’re told to:

Be ambitious, but not too ambitious
Be nurturing, but not too nurturing
Be sexy, but not too sexy
Be soft, but not fragile
Be strong, but not threatening

If this sounds impossible, that’s because it is.

Women aren’t failing at identity — the culture is failing at giving women room to evolve. The pressure to perform a version of womanhood that pleases everyone else leads to the same burnout we see across sexual wellness, motherhood, career, and even health outcomes. You can’t build a healthy life on an identity shaped entirely by external expectations.

Your identity cannot be something that can be taken from you. It has to come from your core.

The wellness industry tells women to “optimize.”
The workplace tells women to “balance.”
Society tells women to “behave.”

But your body, your intuition, and your lived experience tell you something far more radical:
You’re allowed to build your life around who you are — not who you’re told to be.

Why This Feels Like a Cultural War

When we talk about the “war on women,” we’re not talking about one institution. It’s the accumulation of:

Healthcare bias that dismisses women’s pain
A wellness industry built on insecurity
Policies that restrict bodily autonomy
Digital spaces that reward misogyny
Unrealistic narratives about motherhood, aging, and beauty
The constant tug-of-war between “girlboss” and “tradwife” aesthetics

These aren’t fringe issues — they shape how women see themselves, how we show up in our relationships, and how we take (or don’t take) care of our bodies.

We often internalize these conflicts as personal failures, when in reality, they’re symptoms of a culture that still hasn’t figured out how to let women be whole.

This isn’t a political problem. It’s a cultural one.
And cultural problems require collective truth-telling, not silent endurance.

Girlboss vs. Tradwife Is a False Choice

There’s a modern fixation on categorizing women into “types”:
The career woman. The stay-at-home mother. The entrepreneur. The homemaker.

But life is seasonal, and identity is not a brand aesthetic.

Women can do many things — but not always at the same time.
And that isn’t weakness, it’s wisdom.

A woman building a company at 25 and a woman raising toddlers at 35 are not in competition — they’re in different chapters. Both require intelligence, grit, emotional labor, and resilience. Both deserve respect. Both count as ambition.

The real flex is choosing the season you're in, instead of being shamed for the one you're not.

How Women Actually Fight Back

Not with arguments.
Not with perfectly curated content.
Not with the pressure to represent every woman everywhere.

We fight back through:

Clear, courageous conversations
Community over comparison
Boundaries that protect our energy and wellbeing
Supportive networks of women (the grown-up sisterhood is real)
Refusing to contort ourselves into palatable versions of womanhood

Women don’t need more pressure.
We need more connection.
And more truth.
And more space to evolve without surveillance.

How to Hear Your Own Voice Again

How do you know what’s right for you when the noise around womanhood is this loud?

You pause.
You breathe.
You look inward instead of outward.

You stop measuring your life against someone else’s timeline, body, marriage, fertility journey, or career arc. So many women feel directionless not because they lack purpose, but because they’re trying to follow a map that was drawn for someone else entirely.

Women are being called to create things that have never existed before.
There is no blueprint.
There is only self-trust.

You don’t discover who you are by copying someone else’s life — you discover it by listening to your own.

And you have permission — full permission — to flourish.

Women Were Never the Afterthought

This might be the most powerful truth of all:

Women weren’t created as an addition to humanity.
Women are humanity — essential, intentional, necessary.

The world has always needed what women bring: creativity, intuition, emotional intelligence, leadership, sensuality, innovation, connection, resilience. These aren’t “soft skills.” They’re societal infrastructure.

The cultural war on women exists because women are powerful — not fragile.
And power is always what culture tries to contain.

If You Loved This Conversation

Follow along with Lisa’s work here:

The Fight for Female (book)
The Fight for Female Podcast

And stay tuned — we’ll continue dropping conversations and editorials exploring modern womanhood, emotional wellness, sexual health, and the systems shaping our bodies and our lives.

Because at Good Kitty, we believe in:

Science-backed truth.
Shame-free support.
Radical female agency.
And women who take up space — unapologetically.

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