The True Source of Women’s Empowerment

A letter to a friend

Dear Renée,

I couldn’t resist your question on the meaning of women’s empowerment. Here’s my take on it after working with women at all phases of their lives and in so many different cultures and environments. And of course of my own unique experiences.

The one thing I believe that is common to all women, regardless of age or place, is the desire for the freedom to choose…to choose how they will live, to choose their work, to choose what they offer, to choose their relationships …simply to make choices that are aligned to their truth or values.

Those values do change over time so what a woman values when she’s is 20 is different at 30, 40, etc. But the desire to choose freely remains throughout.

There is the inner game (less obvious) of empowerment and the outer game (obvious). The outer game is in the environment, the laws of a given country or place, the mores of a society, the physical limitations of place. This is where advocacy plays a role. We can advocate for change in our environments to better women’s situations without taking away from other groups of people. This is how we make the human collective better.

The inner game is the tougher one, believe it or not. It’s what women tell themselves, what they believe about themselves and the many ways women limit their own ability to self-affirm and self-actualize. This is how things like “the imposter syndrome” and “the confidence code” emerged as ways of looking at our beliefs and assumptions about ourselves.

These are the messages that we integrated as little girls only to later discover that they keep us from being the highest creative expression of ourselves be it through work, art, community or family.

Polarizations limit us. As an example, do women have to choose between a career and family? No, but society by and large does not support a woman who chooses both.

Why are women leaders assessed as either a bitch (assertive) or nice girl (nurturing) without valuing the gift behind the behavior? These assessments divide us.

Back to empowerment — the freedom to choose how to live up to one’s potential. There are so many ways we can express ourselves (leadership, family, art, spirituality, science, humanities, activism, etc.) if we choose to empower ourselves first and foremost, to be comfortable with our own definition and expression of power.

A woman’s sense of power does not conform to the masculine definition of power. Yet we constantly seek to measure ourselves by a standard that we will never meet because we are not male. Simone de Beauvoir, French author, philosopher and early feminist, wrote “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself — on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”

You see Renée, I believe that at the core of empowerment is love. Not the mushy kind of love, but that deep core inside us that brings our feminine light to the world, that impulse to create life in whatever form that keeps us true to ourselves.

And it’s in that love that Simone de Beauvoir recognized the source of our true power. That source, to me, is where a woman’s true empowerment lies and it is we who must first empower ourselves as women unapologetically.

Photo by Alexandru Zdrobău on Unsplash