A friend and I recently had a conversation about what we would like to accomplish in our futures. I stated law school and a successful career, complete with business trips and positions of power. She stated a much simpler dream of living in a small town with children and a loving husband. At first I was put off by this idea. Why would she want to give up everything she has been working for in college? Why would she want to revert back to the idea of women running the home and men working? Then I realized the answer was quite simple: because she can.

Many people have the idea that women who choose to stay home and raise kids are not living up to the opportunities women have fought for in the past. People have this idea that the feminist movement was only about creating equal work place environments for women, but the feminist movement was also about creating choices.

The idea of the movement was to allow women to have choices in everything they wanted to do with their lives. It was about women having opportunities to be engineers or consumer science teachers. It was about women being able to be passionate about whatever they chose to do with their lives.

Many ideas about the feminist movement have been misconstrued over time. The original idea was to create choices, but wild antics of the past have replaced the ideas of the movement with ideas of women running loose and civil disobedience. When we start the process of uncovering the true ideas of the movement, we find that it was really meant to create opportunities for young girls to grow up in a world full of possibilities available to them, just like their brothers. As Gloria Steinem, an original feminist activist, stated the idea of the movement was “to free everyone from the prisms of gender.”

Being a stay at home mom is a choice. Being a teacher is a choice. Being a financial investment analyst is a choice. All of these choices are available to women because of this movement. Neither one is greater than the other nor is any one choice setting the movement back. Rather, the choices are promoting forward movement. The choices women make today show they feel comfortable with their identity and have confidence in their ability to make a choice that allows them to live out their vision of who they are.

To be a woman and admit that you want the picture perfect family and to be the cookie-baking mom is not a shameful aspiration. The women that propelled this movement would not be ashamed of someone knowing that women now can do anything they want but choose to stay home and raise a family. Nor would these women be ashamed at the woman who says she does not want the family and the cookies but would rather have the career. The foremothers of the movement would be filled with joy to see the legacy of their efforts being carried out in such admirable ways. As anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.”

The feminist movement has made huge strides in allowing these choices to be made confidently. It is when women feel they are stuck in specific roles that the movement is at risk of moving backwards. As long as women feel empowered and know they have choices, the movement will continue.

Women should never be ashamed of what they want, for it is when we feel ashamed that we are reversing our foremother’s work. Women should not begin to look down on one another for wanting a family or not wanting a family, for wanting a career or not wanting a career, because each choice is as honorable as the next. The women who started this movement would be proud of the women of today and would be proud of the choices we are making and the way we are moving forward.