Standing on the Shoulders of Women

This morning I listened to Ann Reed’s beautiful song Heroes, and I found myself deeply moved.

In the song, Reed names woman after woman who came before us—women who changed the world, challenged what was considered possible, and cleared paths that generations of women would eventually walk.

As I listened, I kept thinking about something we can easily forget from where we stand today:

These women did not accomplish what they did on a level playing field.

They lived in times when women were routinely denied education, professions, political power, financial independence, recognition for their work, and sometimes even basic authority over the direction of their own lives. Their male counterparts faced challenges, certainly—but these women often had to overcome an additional wall simply because they were women.

And still, they persisted.

Some of the names in Reed’s song were very familiar to me. Others made me stop and look them up.

Lucy Stone was one of the earliest American advocates for women’s rights and abolition and became one of the first American women to earn a college degree while continuing to publicly challenge laws and customs that subordinated women.

Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree in 1849. She faced hostility from students, teachers and the public, and even after earning her degree, prejudice made it difficult for her to establish a medical practice. She went on to establish a hospital staffed by women and later a medical college dedicated to educating women. (NewYork-Presbyterian)

Agnes de Mille transformed American dance and musical theater, helping establish dance as an integral way of telling a story on Broadway. Her groundbreaking choreography included Rodeo, Oklahoma!, Carousel and Brigadoon. Early in her career, unable to find employment in the theater, she created her own dances, arranged her own music, designed her own costumes and produced her own concerts. (Agnes de Mille’s Dances)

Juliette Gordon Low created what became the Girl Scouts of the USA, building an organization around the radical-for-its-time idea that girls should have opportunities to develop courage, confidence, independence, leadership and practical skills. (Girl Scouts of the USA)

And these are only a few.

Sojourner Truth. Harriet Tubman. Amelia Earhart. Coretta Scott King. Ella Fitzgerald. Billie Jean King. Rachel Carson. Rosa Parks. Eleanor Roosevelt. Sally Ride. Barbara Jordan. Helen Keller. Anne Frank. Simone de Beauvoir—and so many more.

I find myself wondering about all the parts of their stories we don’t know.

How many times were they told no?

How many rooms did they walk into where no one believed they belonged?

How often were their ideas dismissed, their intelligence underestimated, their accomplishments credited to someone else, or their ambition treated as something inappropriate for a woman?

How many times did they have to gather themselves and keep going?

That is the part that moves me most.

Their accomplishments tell us something about what they did. But the obstacles they faced tell us something about who they had to become inside themselves in order to do it.

There had to be courage. Persistence. An inner knowing strong enough to withstand a culture telling them otherwise. A willingness to walk into territory where there was no path yet—sometimes knowing that they themselves might never fully benefit from the path they were creating.

Women today have opportunities many of these women could scarcely have imagined. And while gender bias and inequality have certainly not disappeared, so many doors are open to us because other women pushed against them when they were firmly closed.

We are standing on their shoulders.

Today I am simply feeling gratitude.

Gratitude for the women whose names we know.

Gratitude for the women whose names history barely remembers.

And gratitude for the millions of women whose names were never recorded at all—women who quietly challenged expectations, educated daughters, protected other women, spoke when they were expected to be silent, created, discovered, organized, resisted, endured, and made the world a little wider for those who would come after them.

May we remember them.

May we learn their stories.

And may we recognize that every time a woman lives more freely, speaks more fully, trusts her own wisdom, or steps into a place women were once told they could not belong, she carries something of these women forward.

Thank you to the women who cleared the path.

We are walking it. And we are still widening it for the women and girls who will come after us.

To watch her live, see below.