Being a woman business owner who tries to advocate for women and for microbusinesses at the same time is often a bit of a Jekyll-and-Hyde experience.

As an advocate for women business owners, I will fight for the right of women to have equal access to growth capital and to markets and to all the opportunities from which they have been barred for generations because of their gender.

But, as an advocate for microbusinesses, I will defend to the death those women’s right to choose the microbusiness way of growth, if that is what they want.

And I find that often puts me on the opposite side of the fence from my sister advocates.

I have spent far too much time at far too many meetings and conferences, chewing on my tongue and listening to women either overstating how large women-owned firms are as a group or listening to them push and exhort women to get with the growth program!

And, as I listen, I wonder why I never seem to hear any of those fellow advocates express any interest at all in what their fellow women business owners might actually want to do, why they seem inclined to dismiss any woman who doesn’t want to grow hers to a million.

In many ways, it was the same experience I had when I decided to leave my job and head for home to give full-time parenting a try. It was a very rewarding experience but I found myself shunned and belittled by a lot of so-called “feminists” who accused me of betraying “the cause” — as if my life was only there in order to prove a point.

If we are going to advocate for anything for women, I would think we’d advocate for our own freedom. Freedom from societal sex role scripts, yes, but also freedom from being required to fulfill anybody’s expectations — even those of our female peers.

Freedom means having options. If you don’t like my options, you don’t have to live them. But don’t tell me that I shouldn’t live them, either.

That’s when you’re trying to take my freedom away from me, in the name of fighting for my freedom.

I believe in women. I believe in microbusiness, too.

But even more than all that, I believe in freedom.

Do you?