The Awakened Woman

by Tererai Trent

  Is this a silly story about an adult woman crying over a giant stuffed animal? Or a story of a stupid woman who welcomed her estranged and untrustworthy husband back into her home? That is not my experience of it. This is a story about how unlikely ideas and actions reverberated in the universe so that I could pursue my dreams, and so that I would have comfort on the long road ahead. Zuda’s uncle gave me a way out of no way; this salesperson saw my heart’s longing, my grief mixed with embarrassment and my need to be held, and she held the space for me.

  How can I say that these acts were not essential to helping me walk the path toward my dreams? I needed to find a doorway at a dead end, and Zuda’s uncle showed me how. I needed to be held and the stranger held me: she gave me the opportunity to grieve, to be warmed by memories of my childhood, to feel seen and heard in a foreign place, and to bring joy to my children as they made the difficult move away from their home.

  My sisters, there are so many ways—big and small—that we can be a source of opportunity for others, and it is just as important that we are prepared to receive opportunities when they come to us. In my own life that meant I needed the courage to speak to the stranger Jo Luck when she asked me my dreams, the open heart to accept the teddy bear—and a thousand other moments along the way. Perhaps my story can be an opportunity for you, or perhaps the other women in this chapter will hold you like a giant yellow stuffed bear offered by the generosity of strangers.

  Other women’s successful actions are not your competition; they are your inspiration and your opportunities. Sometimes the best way to overcome our own silencing is to see how others are rising above theirs. When we truly understand other women’s journeys, the contours their paths take, the steep climb and the silent terrain that become more visible when we share them, we can know for sure that we will also make it. We need the wisdom of those who have traveled the same paths, these women pathfinders, the torchbearers, the ones who have been silenced but have found their redemption against all odds, claimed their own voices, and then remembered those left behind.

  Native American poet, novelist, and activist Paula Gunn Allen writes that one of the weaknesses of women’s empowerment as imagined by white women in the West is that there is little sense of history or memory of past successes. The Native American emphasis on continuity, heritage, and lineage offers an important contrast to the Western emphasis on the new, the modern, the future, and the young.

  When we emphasize forgetting rather than remembering the past, Gunn Allen writes in “Who Is Your Mother?,” we forget that we have successful egalitarian and female-centered social models to build from. This knowledge is crucial to making the invisible stretch of road feel passable. She writes, “Feminists too often believe that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of its rules of civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchical societies on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time.”4

  For Allen, this means bringing the recent past of indigenous cultures back into the conversation, from the history of the women-affirming Iroquois and their Council of Matrons who influenced policy, worship, lawmaking, and matters of lineage, to my grandmother’s secret women’s society and their celebration of women’s bodies, to modern sayings illustrating the prominent place women hold in society, like this from the Cheyenne: “A people is not conquered until the hearts of the women are on the ground.”5

  I also imagine it to mean that we stop ignoring or cutting down the many examples of strong, successful women we have all around us, not just from the past but also in the present. Let’s stop losing that time; let’s embrace and celebrate models of female equality and empowerment without fear of competition.

  Let’s learn and remember—and be prepared to give and receive encouragement wherever we can. We must always be getting more and more familiar with creativity, with finding pathways when none are clear, with resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity. Submerging ourselves in inspirational stories by fellow women can help us act.

  Torchbearers

  Today Jo Luck remains one of my torchbearers. Soon after I obtained my master’s degree, and before I began applying to doctoral programs, I landed a job with Heifer International at their headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas. I was elated to be named deputy director of planning and evaluation, responsible for the organization’s impact assessments. Who would have thought that one day I would work for a global organization known for its focus on ending poverty in the world?

  I had no idea that Jo Luck also worked for Heifer International. When I met her all those years ago, I thought she was one of the organization’s donors. Little did I know she was now the president and CEO of the organization that had just hired me. It was then that we reunited and began a long friendship, both amazed and overwhelmed by the miracle of our connecting once again.

  My job with Heifer International involved traveling to all the places the organization did outreach and evaluating the outcomes. In the summer of 2003, my first trip with Heifer International took me to Africa, which enabled me to visit home for the first time since 1998. One of the first things I did was to visit my rock to dig up my list of dreams. I checked off the first three dreams and reburied the container. I sat for so long by the rock that protected the now dirty handwritten list that I’d written fifteen years ago that my mother came to fetch me.

  Yet to this day, even with all these synchronicities, I never asked Jo Luck about that day in 1989 when she sat with me on bare ground and asked me my dreams and told me that they are achievable. I thought perhaps she could tell me something about the magic of that day so that I could give it to you in this book, dear ones. Was there something that pulled her to our group? What beckoned her to nudge and ask me about my dreams? Was there something in the weather? Her responses were more than I expected.

  “I am certain that our bond is more than coincidence,” Jo Luck said in her beautiful Southern drawl. “However, it is stunning when one thinks of the odds that we met in an African country, shared life-changing words in a brief time together, unknowingly documented the encounter with a happenstance photo on my small camera, and have remained connected over the past two decades as our paths continued to cross.”6 Jo Luck continues:

  On that day in Zimbabwe I was scheduled to meet with the men of the village, as was the usual custom. Afterwards, I asked to meet with the women, which was unexpected but was agreeable. We gathered under a tree near a small mud hut in a circle, and Tererai and I sat next to each other. As we talked I asked someone to take a photo. I wanted to share the picture at headquarters to stress the importance of talking and listening with both the women and the men of the community. We were launching a participatory approach as a governance model for local leadership as an important component for sustainable development.

  Several years later amazingly Tererai was hired and working at Heifer’s headquarter offices. She told her story about the dream circle and the resulting wishes she made and had at that time nearly achieved. That was the first time I made the connection that she and I sat together in that circle. I found the photograph to show her, and we marveled that our acquaintance had come full circle.

  Do you hear what I hear in this story, sisters? I had hoped for magic from Jo Luck’s telling: some formula for giving and receiving opportunity that would help you traverse your own invisible stretch of road. Yet once again, Jo Luck offers me wisdom I could not have seen coming. The magic is that there was nothing special in this encounter and yet everything was special. Jo Luck was doing her job. She had no idea that I was in the middle of a storm, or that my life was falling apart.

  She had no idea the effect she had on me until years later. She asked to talk to the women, and the simple, profound act of two women’s conversation—our call and response—was a transformational moment. Her act was simply her presence and her asking without real
izing the seed she was planting. My act was simply my responding and my receptivity to her answer: it is achievable. With that, my world changed forever; with that, thousands of girls’ and women’s (and boys’ and men’s!) lives changed forever through my educational outreach.

  This, sacred sisters, is the profound power of your actions. Only you can decide: Will you be present enough to ask another woman about her journey, her dreams? Will you be able and strong enough to discern the depth of what is being said and the meaning of the silences in between the words? Will you be prepared to answer when she asks you?

  The stories I share here profile some of the world’s unheard sacred sisters whose great hunger, self-determination, and belief in their purpose and its sacred responsibilities are making the entrenched road possible for their sisters. When asked, they were brave enough to answer, and then they promised to be present to all those who have yet to be asked. Using their dogged determination, and without much moral support or financial aid, these heroines of their own stories are addressing the root causes that first brought us here, and rejecting the external and internal barriers that continue to perpetuate the silencing of adult women.

  I am sure you will love these women as I do. Some of these unsung heroines come from less than desirable circumstances in life but went on to overcome their own silencing, becoming pathfinders, giving us hope and a compass reference that indeed, it is achievable. I offer these stories to you so that you may reflect on how nothing and yet everything about them is special: flow with the presence found here, the purpose, the dreams, the acts of finding voice, the answers given when a call is made, and the power of calling out to others, that are all so beautifully and diversely portrayed by these women.

  Taking a Chance on Your Dreams

  In 2009, Diane Ramsey had a well-paying, impressive corporate job. She also volunteered her time as conference chair for an organization that would subsequently become Iowa Women Lead Change (IWLC), a nonprofit whose sole focus is to advance women’s leadership. For months leading up to the conference, Diane spent nights and weekends and every free moment of her seventy- or eighty-hour workweek helping to make their annual conference a success.

  One day Diane and her supervisor, the highest-ranking woman in the organization, had a meeting in Diane’s office. Her boss flippantly picked up the conference program and then flicked it back down on the desk. “I haven’t even looked at this,” she said. “I don’t believe in women’s conferences, or women’s leadership for that matter.”

  These words were profoundly destructive and hurtful to Diane. “With those few words,” Diane recalls with impressive clarity, “she had entirely devalued that experience and my contributions.” Diane remembers that this woman did everything she could to undermine the strong women who worked for her. In that moment, she says, she knew that in too many instances she had allowed her boss to take her power.

  Not long after this exchange, Diane left her job. She had no plan, no idea of what she would do. All she knew was that she had a dream: the desire to do something that was mission driven. Then she was approached to lead the grassroots organization that would become IWLC.

  “After working in corporate positions my entire career,” Diane reflects, “my husband wondered if I’d ever be hired for a ‘real’ job again. People did not understand why I would give up the security and compensation of my position and want to work that hard for something that many people didn’t understand, or value.” Deep down, though, Diane knew this was something she had to do. “I had not been born with wealth or privilege, yet have had opportunities and experiences that I could never have imagined having.” She had to share that with other women.

  As Diane began devoting more of her time to the next Iowa Women’s Leadership Conference, she also began transitioning the grassroots group from an event to an organization focused on advancing women throughout the region—and she was offered a brand-new role: chief executive officer.

  In the fall of 2012, I spoke at a luncheon in Des Moines, Iowa. Diane was in attendance. I provided each attendant with their own “dream can” and asked them to write a sacred dream down and bury it somewhere safe. On Diane’s slip of paper, she says, she wrote “make IWLC self-sufficient.”

  Her planted dream quickly bore fruit: “After I wrote down my dream for IWLC to become self-sufficient, we had our biggest conference to date with Martha Stewart and Gloria Steinem (among others). Conference registrations for nearly a thousand seats sold out in two weeks. That gave us a cash reserve so that our fledgling organization could move out on its own.”7

  On November 1, 2013, Diane moved into IWLC’s first office. The organization continues to grow. They have had more than nineteen thousand women attend their events. Diane reflects, “Every day I get up knowing that I am helping other women. I have so many ideas about new programs and projects flowing that it can be difficult to prioritize. I have surrounded myself with women I respect, who share the passion around our mission, and with whom I enjoy working.”8

  Diane often hears from women for whom IWLC has given them back their voices. One young woman who was completing her PhD in psychology decided not to go into private practice after attending the conference on an IWLC scholarship. Instead, this young Latina chose to move to a community in Iowa with a large Hispanic population, because she believed it was the best way for her to impact the greater good. Diane’s mission continues to expand.

  “We have fueled a passion for women to invest in themselves and not settle for the status quo,” Diane says proudly.9

  Women Educating Women

  Hope Sadza is the founder of the Women’s University in Africa, the only university in the region that focuses on promoting gender equity and women’s access to college education. Hope was born and grew up in the African suburb of Salisbury, now called Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. Her mother was a trained teacher and her father was one of the first African men to buy a fleet of taxis to ferry Africans from their poverty-stricken townships to the city where most of them worked at low-level jobs.

  Hope always knew that education was her calling and she wanted to be a teacher. After she obtained her degree from the University of Missouri in 1980, soon after her country’s independence, Hope’s passion for adult women’s education became her hunger, a sacred calling. She went through several jobs, and in 1989 was appointed public service commissioner of the Republic of Zimbabwe. Here she realized that there were very few places for promotion of women. Many women lacked degrees, confidence in the interview room, and the ability to express themselves even when they knew the answers or had ideas for the jobs. A nagging desire empowered Hope to ask, “Would there ever be a time when the government of Zimbabwe would have great numbers of women to steer the ship of economic and social development?”10

  Hope realized that many women were very smart, but they felt inadequately prepared because they lacked the education or even professional training needed for higher positions within the government. An academic certificate, a degree, more professional preparation—something to boost their confidence was needed. It was their last mile to promotion, and that entrenched mile represented a good salary, independence, and importantly, equal participation in society.

  There were many barriers that kept women from attaining these goals: the policies in place, of course, but also the blindness of the policy makers to the root causes that created this situation in the first place, and their failure to address the structural needs that would make education accessible to women and girls (access to education, child care, economic empowerment, changing social norms and practices). Hope also realized that some of the inequalities in sub-Saharan African countries are remnants of British, Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian colonization, which to this day perpetuates current inequities in education and the silencing of women’s voices.

  How in the world do you close this invisible stretch of miles when there are no universities to take care of mature women? Even those who can afford to go back and
finish their secondary (high school) education had no time to go to school as they had to balance work, taking care of children, and, if married, taking care of the husband and his extended family. All of this falls on the shoulders of the woman! “Every day, I went to bed asking myself, how could the women I saw around me, from age twenty-five and beyond, even up to sixty plus years, access higher education?” Hope’s desire to change things—to make this seemingly impossible passage from women who are devalued and undereducated to women who are educated policy makers in all areas of the national fabric—became her only thought. “I had many sleepless nights,” she says.11

  Hope strongly felt Africa could not develop economically and socially if half of its population (women and girls) could not take part in discussions, policy-making, and decisions for development. “Women should learn about why they are on the bottom of the development pile. So many women are lost at the bottom of this pile, kept from using their voices, and the lack they represent disempowers the next generation of women as well,” declares Hope. “I resolved: I was going to create a university for silenced African women and for any woman who is struggling.”12

  This was not easy. “I was in for a shock,” reflects Hope. “I felt silenced, dejected, and rejected when I shared my dream to open a university for women. Many friends, and most men, thought it was just sheer madness and impossible. I heard negative statements like ‘Why don’t you start by having a high school first before you jump to open a university?’ Some men said, ‘Has a woman in Africa or in the world ever opened a university?’ ” Devastated, but still firmly committed to her dream to establish a university for women, Hope’s simple response was “Yes, this woman is called Hope and she dreams of success. I will empower women to have a public voice.”13