The Work We Leave Behind
My grandmother with her children on Mother’s Day. A newspaper mention of Allied Upholstery in Paradise Valley. An ad for Allied Upholstery, the family business my grandmother helped build.
Last week, Gloria Steinem died at 92.
Her passing made me think about the women who came before us, not only the women whose names became part of history, but the women in our own families whose work quietly changed what was possible for the next generation.
My grandmother worked as a seamstress alongside my grandfather in their upholstery shop. She helped build that business while still carrying the traditional responsibilities expected of women of her generation. She did the work of an owner, but she was not an owner.
My mother spent much of her life working for herself, first cleaning homes and later caring for elderly people in their homes as a CNA. My sister took another step and built a bookkeeping business on the side. Today, my nieces are building businesses of their own in cosmetology and digital marketing, including businesses that now provide the primary income for their families.
When I look at those generations together, I see choices expanding.
Those choices widened because women challenged the rules and expectations that made arrangements like my grandmother’s seem ordinary. But progress also happened inside ordinary families, when one woman worked a little differently than the woman before her and the next generation grew up seeing more possibility.
That matters because the question is not only what women before us fought for. The question is what we are doing with it.
What we inherited was not an easier path. We inherited more agency over the path itself.
And there is still a cost to exercising that agency. A decisive man is often seen as a leader, while a decisive woman can quickly become “difficult.” Gloria Steinem spent decades challenging the boundaries placed around women, and I have heard someone close to me dismiss her as simply “a crazy woman.”
That reaction tells us something. The boundaries may have moved, but the discomfort with women who confidently use the space they have gained has not disappeared.
Which is exactly why creating more opportunity is not enough. The choices women make with that opportunity also deserve to be taken seriously.
That is the standard I want SheAchieves to hold itself to: respecting what a woman chooses to build and allowing her to define success for herself.
Sometimes the simplest way to honor that is to recognize the women doing it around you. Who is the woman in your life whose work deserves to be seen?
She may never know who is watching. But simply by doing the work and building something in her own name, she makes that possibility easier for another woman to imagine. Research suggests that entrepreneurial role models can strengthen a woman’s belief in her own ability to build.¹
Take five minutes and nominate her for the SheAchieves Big Sis Award. Tell us who she is and why the work she is doing deserves to be recognized.
Because progress is not only made by the women whose names become history. It is also made when one woman creates an opportunity for another.
Thank you, Ms. Steinem, for helping create more of that possibility for all of us. Godspeed.
¹ BarNir, A., Watson, W. E., & Hutchins, H. M. (2011). “Mediation and Moderated Mediation in the Relationship Among Role Models, Self-Efficacy, Entrepreneurial Career Intention, and Gender.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41(2), 270–297.
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