Empowering Women, Uplifting the World
- Marilyn Yaquinto, PhD
- Mar 6
- 12 min read
Updated: Mar 9
The month of March is dedicated to celebrating women. March 8, in particular, is recognized globally as International Women's Day., which acknowledges the achievements of women worldwide. Thousands of events will take place and, according to UN Women, more than a million women around the globe will be participating.
As the IWD website notes, this annual event has its roots in the 19th century, first to honor female textile workers who marched in protest about unfair working conditions and unequal rights for women in New York City factories. Since then its come to honor "the achievements of women across all aspects of life - social, economic, cultural and political - while also advocating for gender equality."
This year's theme is to "accelerate action," with "a worldwide call to acknowledge strategies, resources, and activity that positively impact women's advancement, and to support and elevate their implementation."
Most of us have known impressive women who've greatly impacted our lives and whom we'd like to honor on this day. But most of them will probably never be asked to give a speech or become a famous face on a poster or a postage stamp. Some we admired growing up, while others we met along our life's journey.
Hopefully, some of these role models will remain in our lives to continue to provide guidance and inspiration. What it means to be a woman changes with each new generation as well as by race, religion, cultural heritage, hometown, or home country.
Mothers, daughters and magnificent matriarchs
I have a few examples of stellar women in my own family. None of them flew to the moon or cured cancer, but they kept their families together during some rough patches in the 20th century and are no less worth celebrating. In fact, most women on the planet are charged with such responsibilities, and in some cases, are working under dire conditions. They deserve the spotlight on such a honor-packed day. Maybe some of my family's stories will sound familiar even if the details are unique.
Let's start with my mother, Frances (aka Fran, Francie, or Franny), who will turn 97 this year. She remains full of life and love and shows no signs of losing her wicked sense of humor any time soon. She's also still giving me advice on how to be a grown-up woman, to which I mumble something sarcastic in return, much like I did as a teenager, except I'm not.
Our exchanges go something like this:
Mom: Aren't you going to make your bed?
Me: No, if I wait long enough, Mom, it'll be time to go to bed and I won't have to.
Mom: When I make a recipe out of that book, I like to keep it over there so I don't spill food all over the pages.
Me: I like it right here, Mom. Those messy pages tell me I tried those recipes before.
Mom: I don't think those shoes look very comfortable. Maybe you should carry some flats in your bag, just in case.
Me: These shoes cost me $175, Motheeeeeer. I'm wearing them!
Seriously, I'm sure this sparring between mother and daughter isn't out of the ordinary. Some of it lies in my assumption that I'm somehow further evolved than her, and so much more independent. In some respects, that's true. I have more legal protections than she had and tons more choices to flex my agency.
Whereas I can be direct in my communication with my husband about what I need and want, and. likewise, he with me. But my mother was restricted about what she could say and do in her own house. Often times, like many other women of her generation, she had to engineer what she wanted through passive aggressive behavior or staged subterfuge, designed to preserve my father's ego and leave their gendered assumptions undisturbed.
It reminds me of the scene in the film, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, in which the patriarch Kostas must be convinced that a clever solution was his idea, otherwise he won't go for it. It was like watching an episode out of my childhood, without the Greek accents.
My mother still struggles to say directly what she means, perhaps a lingering effect from a lifetime of softening any assertive ideas before uttering them out loud. On the other hand, like my parents, Kostas and Maria Portokalos loved and respected each other, and trusted each other to take turns being both strong and vulnerable when it counted most (and mostly in private).
Another issue between generations of women is that we often speak different languages, although to anybody within earshot, my mother and I are using only English words. I describe what she does as practicing "mindfulness," which she thinks sounds made up. I boast about keeping a gratitude journal by my bedside, while she says she prays before going to sleep. I'm a big fan of yoga nidra to calm my nervous system, she thinks it sounds "foreign" and goes outdoors to sit and study clouds.
Who knew cloud watching could accomplish the same goals as my yoga class or those countless meditation apps on my phone? After looking it up, I found researchers claiming that watching clouds can help quiet the mind, increase creativity, improve emotional intelligence, manage energy, and focus thoughts.
I've been rolling my eyes at my mother's suggestions since I was 13. Maybe it's time I started paying attention to some of her words, even if they don't all come through the front door, so to speak. Maybe Mom knows best after all.
Women of a certain age
Before I discovered my mother as a source of wisdom, there was my grandmother. She was my first superhero or shero, although any such term would have her waving her ever-ready spatula in the air to bat away such crazy talk.
Like many of her generation, she worked hard without waiting for compliments, affirmations, or a pay packet with her name on it. She had few modern tools to work with and did the family's laundry on a washboard, then hung it on clotheslines before having to iron most of it, one item at a time. A load of wash takes me (or my husband) a few minutes to push some buttons. Hers took up most of a workday, perhaps two, before she had to start the process all over again.
She sewed most of her kids' clothes and created medicines from her own pantry and garden. She was the only doctor her children ever knew unless they came down with something extraordinary, including my mother's case of rubella. It caused her deep blue eyes to fade to a more translucent but-no-less-striking cornflower blue.
Otile Meyer was from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where walking the streets meant going up and down steep inclines, which were no doubt responsible for her pair of meaty calves. Later in life, they still looked pretty sturdy, if not a bit strange, covered in sheer stockings rolled down and knotted just below her knees.
My grandmother was a spitfire to the end. Feisty and quick-tempered, but also someone who laughed as hard as she worked. When she and her sisters got together and something struck them funny, which was often enough, they'd laugh so hard their stomachs bounced up and down. They did so in unison, like a precision chorus line of animated bellies. To witness their sense of joy, though, was life-affirming and quite contagious.
To grandmother's house we go
Researchers have long touted the benefits of having close relationships with grandparents. "Children find unique acceptance in their relationships with grandparents," notes Stephen F. Duncan of Brigham Young University. "Grandparents can be a major support during family disruptions ... role models and mentors ... [and] historians - teaching values, instilling ethnic heritage and passing on family traditions."
My love of cooking was inspired by what I witnessed in her kitchen. It was her sanctuary, her "she shed," her creative space for crafting fabulous food on a daily basis - not just for special occasions. If she heard me talk like this, she'd wave that spatula at me and remind me what a vivid imagination I had, even as a child. Sure enough, but I was also precocious enough to know I'd better study her ever so intently so I'd have those memories to savor for the rest of my life.
Her meals often had a German flair, given her background, and a father born in northern Germany who never lost his accent. I only wish I could recreate her spaetzle, one of my favorite dishes. Yet I can't replicate her rapid-fire flicking of bits of dough off a hot spoon into bubbling liquid, which instantly turned them into bouncy, squigglier versions of the more familiar egg noodles.
Her meals often came with incredible pastries. Her pies were sublime, made from scratch, with lard in the crust that explained its dense but flaky texture. Even into her late 70s, she was happiest in her kitchen, humming and fussing and lifting lids like a master chemist hard at work.
When she did take a break, it was to sit and read. She was a voracious reader, devouring any subject that piqued her interest. I'd get an armful of books from the library for her every few weeks and remember the puzzled looks from staffers who wanted to know who was reading a book about famous shipwrecks followed by one about modern zoology.
I may not be able to replicate her skills in the kitchen, but I certainly inherited her obsession with books and the love of learning something about everything. I wonder if today she'd be puttering away in the kitchen and shouting constant queries at Siri or Alexa, or stopping to Google something just because a thought suddenly entered her head space. Okay, maybe that's just me.
For some of those afternoon sit-downs, she'd tell me her stories. Most were fascinating, and a few were downright scintillating.
She had left home at age 14 when her father, suddenly a widower, remarried and his new wife was less than kind to his existing children. As much as she would say, she moved to Detroit by herself and worked as a domestic. Not sure about many other details because if I asked too many questions, she'd offer a sly smile and clam up. I did find out that my mother, Frances, was named after an old boyfriend named Frank. Who does that?
There were lots of other boyfriends, prompting lots of questions on my part, and lots of deflecting smiles on hers. She'd been part of the flapper wave of the Roaring 20s, those young women who had the audacity to drink, smoke, and dance in public with carefree abandon.
My grandmother didn't get married until she was 26, late for that era, because she said she was having too much fun. Her career choices were certainly limited. Plus, she fell in love with August Buhr, a quiet, Missouri-born farm boy, who came to Detroit to work at (and one day own) a machine shop. Together they raised three kids during the Great Depression followed by the hardships of WWII.
She was a feminist before there was such a term and considered herself my grandfather's equal. He was quiet and always seemed a bit stuffy, sitting at the table in his Sunday best, an impeccably starched shirt, only visible beneath the edges of a fanned-out newspaper. I don't think he liked children, let alone grandchildren. When I asked what she saw in him, she said he was handsome, made her laugh, and was good in bed. That half smile returned and I knew that's all I was going to get. Did I really want to know more?
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I was frequently off track, sometimes recklessly so. It wasn't the Roaring 20s but it was certainly the Crazy 70s. I was burning through money and shuffling through dalliances with volatile men at alarming speed. As Leo Sayer sang in 1978, I was also "dancing the night away."
Like many young adults, rather than talk to my parents about my troubles, I turned to my grandmother. Mainly because she never expressed shock or disapproval about anything I ever shared. She simply listened without judgment and offered advice only when I asked for it. She knew how to make sure I felt heard, helped, or hugged. When a therapist once described those vital three Hs for me in that way, I immediately thought of my grandmother.
She especially urged me to avoid dwelling on mistakes. Fix what's wrong, apologize if necessary, but, above all, move on. Of course I often ignored that advice and chose to wallow in regret like it was an Olympic sport. I could hear her voice saying: Moll (why she called me that, I'll never know), your pity party is helping anyone, especially yourself.
Later in life, after shelling out sizable sums of money to learn how to heal, I remembered that the best coach I ever had was Otile, whose priceless advice was to love myself no matter what. She'd ask: Who better to be friends with than myself: the person who'd been there from the start and who'll be there with me at the end?
This Saturday, on this day to celebrate fabulous women, I'll write about my grandmother in my journal and talk about how grateful I am to have known her. Or maybe I'll take my mother's advice and say a prayer.
"There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it."
Those words were uttered by Alice Paul, who was part of a dedicated contingent of suffragists who formed the National Woman’s Party. They picketed the White House in 1917 during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency and became known as the “Silent Sentinels,” due to their silent but persistent protesting.
In time they stepped up their efforts and started getting arrested for more "bold" acts of civil disobedience. On November 14, 1917, Paul and her colleagues, were jailed and horribly abused while in police custody.
As arrests of suffragists increased, so were reports of them being beaten and held in "cold, unsanitary, and rat-infested cells," according to the Alice Paul Center for Gender Justice. Many of those jailed staged hunger strikes, borrowing tactics from British suffragists in the early 1900s. In Paul's case, prison officials moved her to a sanitarium "in an attempt to have her declared insane."
Eventually news leaked out about a particular "Night of Terror" that resulted in a public outcry that forced Wilson to change course and declare his support for women's suffrage.
The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution (ratified on August 18, 1920) gave women the right to vote, following nearly a hundred years of courageous efforts on the part of hundreds of suffragists who never gave up the fight.
My grandmother was among the 26 million women who were eligible to vote in the 1920 election. How many actually did is still under debate. Many factors continued to block their path, including various methods of voter suppression and lingering cultural pressures, including disapproving family members who discouraged their mothers, daughters, and sisters from actually casting their votes.
I knew my grandmother voted but I never found out for who: James M. Cox or Warren G. Harding (who won the presidency in the 1920 election). Don't we all wish we could sit down with our grandparents and ask them such questions?
Expanding rights for women across race, class and geography
Soujourner Truth, the 19th century former slave turned abolitionist and women's rights advocate, would not live to see women win the right to vote. Not to mention witness black women achieve parity with their white, middle-class sisters-in-arms (before or after securing the right to vote).
In fact, a serious disparity persists to this day among women due to race, class and geopolitical differences. It's a central part of what International Women's Day is all about.
In her landmark speech before a Women's Rights Convention in 1851, "Ain't I a Woman?" Truth affirmed her claim to be recognized as a woman with civil rights at a time when she was also battling to be seen as a human being rather than property a white man could own.
Near the end of her speech, she noted, "If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!" As memorable a quote as any coming from her contemporaries, including Abraham Lincoln, who once invited the formidable Truth to the White House for a visit.
Truth also knew how to cherish what she'd already fought hard to attain. She offered: "Life is hard battle anyway. If we ... sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life's light [to] be determined by the darkness around me."
Her profound words are a reminder to all women never to lose sight of what they've accomplished even while soldiering on to do more. Whether it's embracing a will of iron to get things done or to savor a well-deserved "sit-down," as Otile Buhr would put it, Truth urged women not to forget to live in the moment while imagining a better tomorrow. A remarkable 19th century version of mindfulness if ever there was one.
My list of remarkable women goes beyond family members and famous pioneers like Truth. It also includes teachers, bosses, colleagues, girlfriends, and even a pugnacious nun from my Catholic grade school.
Most of us know influential women, past and present, who've helped teach us something, encouraged us to be someone, and continue to inspire us to be our best selves. All women this Saturday are sisters for a day. And many are still struggling to be heard, helped, or hugged. Let's do this on a global scale. The universe just might be listening. If nothing else, say a prayer. Thanks, Mom!
If you need help with anything that was shared in this blog, book a discovery call below. Remember I'm here to listen and help you map your path forward.
Comentarios