Defining Womanhood on One’s Own Terms
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants. — Coco Chanel
Chanel’s Rebellion in a Single Sentence
Coco Chanel’s remark, “A girl should be two things: who and what she wants,” condenses a quiet rebellion into a single line. Rather than accepting identities assigned by family, tradition, or fashion, she insists that a woman’s core duty is to herself: to become the person she chooses, living the life she desires. This shift from obedience to self-direction challenges the early 20th‑century norms in which Chanel lived, but it also continues to speak to ongoing debates about autonomy and gender roles.
Who She Wants: The Question of Identity
The first half of the quote—“who she wants”—addresses inner identity. It suggests that character, values, and personality should emerge from a woman’s own reflections, not from external pressure. Just as Simone de Beauvoir argued in *The Second Sex* (1949) that women are often made rather than self-made, Chanel turns the focus back to self-creation. By choosing who to be—curious or cautious, ambitious or content—a woman claims authorship over her story, transforming identity from a label into a living choice.
What She Wants: Ambition and Direction
The second half—“what she wants”—shifts from inner being to outward direction. Here, Chanel legitimizes a woman’s right to desire: careers, adventures, relationships, or quiet stability. In an era when many women’s paths were restricted to marriage and domesticity, her words implied that wanting more was neither selfish nor unfeminine. Much like Virginia Woolf’s call for “a room of one’s own” (1929), Chanel’s vision frames goals and ambitions as necessary extensions of selfhood, not as deviations from it.
From Decorative Object to Deciding Subject
Chanel’s fashion revolution offers a practical counterpart to her philosophy. By popularizing simpler silhouettes, trousers, and jersey fabrics, she helped shift women’s clothing from ornamental to functional, subtly declaring that women were not just to be looked at, but to move, work, and decide. This evolution from decorative object to deciding subject mirrors the quote’s demand: a woman must not only exist within a social script but actively edit, rewrite, or discard it in favor of her own design.
Tension Between Choice and Constraint
Yet, the ideal of freely choosing who and what one wants exists amid real constraints—economic, cultural, and political. Feminist scholars like bell hooks in *Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center* (1984) remind us that race, class, and geography deeply affect which choices are truly available. Chanel’s line, then, functions both as aspiration and critique: it highlights the dignity of individual will while exposing how unjust structures limit that will. The quote becomes a standard against which societies can be measured.
A Continuing Call to Self-Definition
In contemporary culture, where social media and advertising still prescribe how a woman “should” look, act, or age, Chanel’s words remain pointed. They urge continual self-questioning: Is this path mine, or merely expected of me? As conversations about gender fluidity and intersectional feminism expand, the quote’s core principle—self-definition over imposed definition—extends beyond “girls” to anyone resisting narrow roles. Ultimately, it offers a concise manifesto: the most important things a person can be are deliberately chosen, not dutifully inherited.