Women Behaving Courageously: Meet 2 rambunctious, LOUD and unapologetic warriors
Who was not horrified by the Parkland shooting? Yet another senseless massacre of kids just wanting an education. And who was not impressed with the kids that stepped forward and became the voice of the anti-gun movement?
Emma González was one of the female leaders of Parkland activism. Her mother is a maths tutor and her father a cyber security attorney. The family emigrated from Cuba to America in 1968. On the day of the school shooting she was in the auditorium with dozens of other students. When shots were heard they tried to escape but were told to stay where they were and to take cover. They were kept in the auditorium for two hours while the shootings took place.
Imagine the terror. Within days of the killing of 17 students, González turned her horror into activism. She has delivered numerous speeches since that fateful day, including at a gun control rally when she called BS on Trump and the NRA for continually refusing to tighten gun laws. Along with other Parkland survivors she launched ‘March for Our Lives’, a not-for-profit, non-partisan organisation calling for tougher gun laws and encouraging young voters to register to vote in the 2020 presidential election.
Variety magazine invited her to be one of their five 2018 Power of Women honourees, which she was reluctant to accept, not wanting to draw attention exclusively to herself. Thankfully, she saw the bigger picture and accepted the award.
Her mother was interviewed by 60 Minutes and said that she was a normal kid until the shooting but now:
‘It’s like she built herself a pair of wings out of balsa wood and duct tape and jumped off a building and we’re just, like, running along beneath her with a net, which she doesn’t want or think that she needs.’
Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez ?is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She beat a 10-term Democratic incumbent who at that stage was the fourth-ranking Democrat.
After just one year in office she has convinced every presidential candidate to support her Green New Deal. She has raised more money than any other Democrat, even overtaking the money raised by Nancy Pelosi.
She is fearless in challenging the status quo. She grills people at hearings, asking questions that really should have been asked by much more experienced senators who seem quite happy to use their precious time in the spotlight to pontificate and grandstand. Not so for Alexandria. She has also challenged the expectations of how young women (particularly young women of colour) should behave.
She absolutely takes on those older white men in politics who think women should be seen and not heard. She refuses to take donations from rich donors; she spends her time studying policy and preparing to ask those stultifying questions.
She called out the appalling rationale for separating children from their parents and the inhuman conditions families were being kept in on the border. She famously grilled Mark Zuckerberg over his willingness to let political parties post political adverts that were clearly lies.
She is polarising the right wing of politics: apparently Fox News can’t get enough of her. Trump has labelled her a ‘communist’ and the GOP use her as the example of the dangers of socialism, and she simply doesn’t care what these people think of her. She is 100% her own person.
Unlike most politicians who want to have their cushy job for life, she has said quite categorically that she doesn’t care if she is a one-term member of Congress.
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She believes that you can make ten years’ worth of change in one term if you’re not afraid.
‘People often say, how are you gonna pay for it? And I find the question so puzzling because, how do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent? How do you pay for anything, you just pay for it.’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
If you are a woman OR man reading this and want to know more about my 25 Female Warriors - you can grab a free electronic copy of the book?right here
Ann Andrews, CSP. Author, speaker, profiler, Life Member PSANZ
Author of:
Women Behaving Courageously:?How gutsy women, young and old, are transforming the world