BY: BELLA LEVAVI, SUMMER 2020 COLLABORATOR AT POWER IN PLACE
The women who come before us are what make us who we are today. The female role models in our lives show us all we can accomplish and empower us to achieve great feats.
While looking through the role models of the women on our website, I found they all had feisty mothers and grandmothers that worked hard to create communities and help others. It is no coincidence that our mothers, aunts, and grandmothers are the first women we see interacting with the world because they dictate what we will accomplish later on. It is clear that these mothers put all the female politicians on our website in the positions they are today.
Maura Healey, Massachusetts Attorney General, said, “I remember my grandmother as the backbone of the family...[I] saw the power and strength of a woman for the first time first hand through that experience.”
Maura Healey and many other women we interviewed saw these powerful women in their own lives, and said I can do that too, and took the power that they saw and turned it into positions in government.
As a young woman myself, I see other women around me creating great undertakings whether it is running for office or doing other work to uplift the community. I use their power to give myself the confidence to keep their legacy going and work hard to create change. These stories of ancestors of hard working women are not just single journeys of going against the current, but a chain of women uplifting each other to create even greater good every generation to come.
Bella Levavi is a rising junior at Smith College majoring in Government and English. She is involved in Smith's newspaper the Sophian and the college radio station. She is passionate about vegetarian co-ops, writing, and social justice.