Phenomenal Woman

“I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s me.”

These words sang from my lips as I performed "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou for my talent for Miss Brookings 2015. I believed every word I said that night, that I was indeed a woman, Phenomenally, but as the past two years have worn on I have come to question what it means to be a woman in 2017, especially in agriculture.

There have been days where I have picked up the 95-pound calf and put him in the trailer because I was told that the 50-pound calf was too heavy for me. There have been days were my unqualified, uneducated, less passionate, underperforming male counterparts have been offered the job instead of myself. There have been days where my thoughts were occupied by sexual harassment comments by farm co-workers instead of on the cow I was breeding. There have been days where I have wanted to throw in the towel.

But then I remember the days where I outperformed every man around me, the days where I saved the calf, the days when the entire cow herd follows me because they trust me, the days when my heart sings with joy because my sick cow is no longer knocking on deaths door, the days that I know I am doing what God has put me on this earth to do.

So yes, “I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that’s me.” And you can bet that we will still face challenges as we fight for equality and not every man will see us as equal, but we cannot let someone else’s opinion of us stop us from achieving our dreams. Like Ayn Rand said “the question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who’s going to stop me.”