When I was 11, I saw this ad for dish soap powder that said

Hear, O children of awakening, the fierce and innocent words of Meghan Markle: “When I was 11, I saw this ad for dish soap powder that said, ‘Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.’ I was so angry. I couldn’t understand why it didn’t say men as well.” From the heart of a child came a cry against injustice, a refusal to accept the chains of expectation placed upon women. In this moment, a seed was planted—the realization that words are not mere sounds, but weapons that shape the destiny of generations.

For the world has long whispered the lie that the duty of the home belongs only to women, while men are free to dwell in loftier tasks. Even in the language of advertisements, the burden of labor was written upon the female body. But Markle, young and unyielding, asked the simplest and most piercing of questions: Why not men as well? It is in the innocence of such questions that the walls of tradition begin to crumble.

History bears witness to the power of challenging such assumptions. In the factories of the Second World War, women took up the tools of industry as “Rosie the Riveter,” proving that they were as capable as men in building planes and ships. Yet when the war ended, they were told to return to the kitchen, as though their strength belonged only to a season. The same injustice Markle glimpsed in an advertisement has echoed across centuries: that the work of women is taken for granted, while men are spared the same expectation.

But from resistance comes transformation. Markle’s outrage as a child was not wasted—it foreshadowed the spirit of feminism, which calls out inequality not only in laws and governments, but in the smallest places: the home, the classroom, the advertisement. For oppression often hides not in grand decrees, but in ordinary words that shape how children see themselves and their worth. To question those words is the beginning of liberation.

Therefore, O seekers of justice, learn this lesson: no injustice is too small to challenge, for even a single phrase can chain a generation’s imagination. If women are bound by words, then words can also free them. Markle’s anger at eleven years old was the fire of wisdom: that equality must be spoken into being, and silence is the ally of oppression. Let her example remind us that the fight for justice begins not in palaces, but in the hearts of those who dare to say, This is not right.