It’s about women. Political science senior Lisa Munger, left, was the happy winner of the first Nokia Research Award for undergraduate research. Presenting Munger her award is Vannessa Nickson, director of community relations at Nokia.

The slip of paper at each place during the TCU Women’s Resource Center’s Seventh Annual Women’s Symposium dinner said only Define Womanhood.

The answers were as varied as the faces in the room:

Vision, strength, gentleness, laughter, beauty, ambition, passion and dedication . . . Coming of age as an individual, family member and part of the community. Learning to be a whole self, both as an individual and as part of a larger group . . . The “fraternity” of humans who are daughters, mothers and sisters, wives, aunts, grandmothers and granddaughters. For we truly define ourselves in terms of relationships to others . . . I’m a man and reluctant to “define” womanhood. Men have been doing that for too long.

It was a true two-day “celebration of womanhood”: Speaker Toni Craven from Brite Divinity School lectured on prominent women in Scripture; Candace O’Keefe, executive director of the Woman’s Museum in Dallas shared the birth of the dramatic and powerful museum; Holly Near, a world-acclaimed singer and activist, brought her message of world peace and human dignity; and new this year, three research grants sponsored by Nokia were awarded to an undergraduate student, graduate student and faculty member to support study on women-centered issues.

But ultimately, the symposium’s goal was to help women recognize their worth. To discover, as one attendee succinctly put it: It is not flowers or perfumes, bows or ribbons, making lunches, raising children. Womanhood is living as a human participant in a world that is only beginning to recognize the importance of what we can contribute, whom we can be and how we can act.