Hi!
I am Raquel, the first Voice! The founder, writer and photographer of Voices of Women! Here is what you should know about this project!
The Before
Up until a certain point, I had it all. Or so they told me. A degree my parents were proud of, a corporate job I was supposed to be proud of, a boyfriend, a house and a promise of a “happily ever after”. But I was not the woman of my dreams. The Cinderella shoe didn’t fit on my foot and so I had to rewrite my own fairy tale.
The Wake Up Call
Back in 2016 I set out on a solo trip to Asia on an attempt to deal with my own crap and found mysel (hahaha the cliché, I know!). The point is that Asia showed me that my existential crisis was just a small piece of this bigger puzzle. Here is what I found out:
- For most women, this gender label – being a woman – can be a heavy burden to carry as our cultural inheritance tends to perceive us as inferior.
- As a western woman, I belong to a small minority who take some rights and freedoms for granted whereas the large majority of women, don’t even dream about it.
- Maybe as a Western woman, I am not as free as I thought…
- For gender equality to happen, women must actively join forces and help each other.
The million dollar question is: HOW come it took me 28 years and a solo trip to realize all of this?
The Project
Voices of Women is a storytelling project where I tell real women stories and my own thoughts on everything that concerns women and our journey to empowerment. It is written for all women, especially those who, like me, somehow feel uneasy with our stereotypes and our lack of inner freedom.
If you embark on this trip with me, you will find out that, no matter where we come from, we have more in common than we think. You will also come to the conclusion that, if we struggle with the same problems and challenges, perhaps it would be smart to work together to overcome it. Working together means that we start looking at each other as allies and stop judging or competing.
Finally, the last stop of this journey would be that you will understand that it doesn’t make sense to change this gender inequality legacy in our neighborhood, when in the rest of the world, women are still dying JUST because they are women. So in this website, you will be able to find ways to support other women’s empowerment across the globe either by sharing with them a bit of your skills, time or money.