Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

Gloria Steinem died last week at 92, still working.

Not working in the way we usually mean it. Working the way she'd worked for almost a century: showing up, saying the true thing, trusting the next woman to pick it up.

I keep thinking about who actually knows what she picked up, and from whom. This isn't a new question for me. It's one I've been living inside for most of my life.

“ The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. — Gloria Steinem

From My Chair to Yours

I sang "I Am Woman" into my hairbrush before I understood a single thing the words were building in me. That was Helen Reddy. Ruth Bader Ginsburg came later, a different kind of voice entirely, but no less formative for me. They died eleven days apart in 2020, Ginsburg on September 18th, Reddy on September 29th. I remember noticing it at the time and not quite knowing what to do with it.

I built the first version of my business entirely around that same thread of women's empowerment: helping women to be happier and healthier at work. The business has widened since then, but the shelf behind my desk hasn't changed much. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is still there after my dear friend Jackie introduced it to me in college. So is Sally Helgesen's How Women Rise. Clara Bingham's The Movement is the most recent addition.

Steinem's death sent me straight to that shelf. I didn't pull anything down and reread it, yet. I just stood there looking at years of a life built on one question: what do we actually owe each other, across generations of women? It was staring back at me.

The Lens

One of the things Bingham's book keeps returning to is how much the feminist movement learned from the civil rights movement. Not alongside it. From it. The organizing, the language of equality, the willingness to make people uncomfortable in public. Friedan, Steinem, and the other women in that book didn't invent a method. They borrowed one that had already been fought for, at a cost, by people working for equality onaqQ` a different axis.

That's not a footnote. It's the whole shape of how change actually moves. Nobody starts from zero. Somebody upstream already paid for the tools you're using, and most of the time you don't know their names.

Which is the real problem with generations. Not that each one takes the work for granted, though it does. It's that each one starts believing its own fight is the first version of the fight. I sang into a hairbrush without knowing what came before Helen Reddy. Plenty of women younger than me are building careers without knowing what came before Ginsburg, or Steinem, or the factions inside their own movement that never made it into the version of the story we got.

Not knowing the work of the generation before you isn't a personal failure. It's what happens by default. Knowing it takes something deliberate, and passing it on takes even more.

And there is more work to do.

If any of this is new territory for you, or you just want a real entry point into the women's movement, start with Bingham's book. She did the work of tracking down the actual men and women who lived it and got them talking. It's an oral history, not a lecture, and it's genuinely beautiful.

Reflection

• Whose work are you standing on that you couldn't name if asked?
• What truth do you need to say outload?

Until we see each other again, I hope you have a powerful day.

-Joanna

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight

P.S. The women named in this newsletter are just a few of the powerful women who have shaped me. Feel free to reply to this email and name the women who have been formative in who you are, and who you are becoming.