As Mother Nature continued to impress Londoners this week with her fiery blast of ‘early spring’, a crowd of people gathered in Brescia’s Auditorium last night to hear our International Women’s Day lecture given by Globe and Mail foreign correspondent Stephanie Nolen. Stephanie is perhaps best known for her award-winning collection of women’s stories in 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa, but she is even more compelling in person than she is in her writing.
Stephanie wove for us a tapestry of ordinary women living lives of poverty, oppression, disease and illiteracy, each one choosing, despite all of that, to improve the lives of those around them. These unintentional leaders have taken up the task of educating women, of nursing the sick, and caring for the orphaned. Stephanie’s stories were told casually, interspersed with humour and anecdotes. As I looked around the audience of primarily women, there were smiling faces. Everyone was obviously enjoying this balmy evening’s outing among friends and like-minded strangers.
But, when I lingered even a moment on some of the faces, I noticed something else…a sharpness just below the surface. There was a definite discomfort; a recognition of something more pointed in Stephanie’s message. The ‘feel good’ surface of these stories of strong women seemed to be wrapped around a more challenging core.
It has been a while since I found myself totally consumed by a righteous cause. Clearly, life has ‘gotten in the way’ of the young activist that I was in my earliest days. I was squirming in my seat last night, perhaps not alone in questioning how my life might have amounted to more positive change in the world. For many, our contributions have been reduced to donating money to the loudest headlines or, if feeling particularly committed, boycotting manufacturers or nations with objectionable records. Is that the greatest contribution that I might hope to make in improving the world?
For me, International Women’s Day has been about the headlining women who became famous through their public struggles and prolific accomplishments. As a young law student, I could get very excited about the contributions of Nellie McClung or Clara Brett Martin or Agnes Macphail. But who is getting excited about the contribution of the unknown African woman living in some remote village, infected with HIV, quietly raising the orphaned children of other AIDS victims in that village? For this woman, it would seem that ‘choosing to lead’ is a decision that exacts a far greater cost with much less return.
I have a tendency to ‘measure’ leadership around me and a tendency to be more impressed by the large leadership gestures that I witness. What an important reminder that leadership that is quiet, and perhaps without followers, and not well-received, is often more likely to change the world. Choosing to lead is not always met with celebration or adulation or headlines. In parts of the world, leadership for change can amount to a death wish. For that nameless woman in Africa, perhaps part of her leadership legacy is me thinking about her, half a globe away, uncomfortably wondering what more I should be doing.
One Response
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Rebecca Says:
Wow! This is the message that today’s women (and men for that matter) need to hear. Being a leader isn’t about doing something on a grand-scale that invites recognition; it’s about doing something. That can mean taking the initiative to take on a role of encouragement in someone’s life. That can mean curing cancer. It’s so important that this generation realizes that a leader isn’t just the person in the spotlight. A leader can work quietly in the background. I choose to be a leader by taking my talents, material goods and interests and using them for the amelioration of people around me. I’m not trying to make a big difference, just the difference that I am capable of making and I trust that that will be a benefit to humanity in some way or another.