Imagining Ourselves: A Generation of Women Poised to Take the Reins of Global Leadership

by Paula Goldman

The Imagining Ourselves project began in the fall of 2001, in a casual breakfast conversation with my friend Denise Dunning. I was twenty-six years old, freshly minted with a master’s degree in public policy, full of dreams about making a difference in the world . . . but jobless, broke, and utterly lost.


The timing for the initiation of my career could not have been worse. The economy was awful, and September 11 had just happened. I’d given up a fellowship to go to Israel and Palestine to write a book about peacemaking in the region because peace seemed like a naïve dream. For lack of a better plan, I grudgingly moved back home with my parents and started looking for a job in dot-com-bust San Francisco. I wanted desperately to do meaningful work, but getting any kind of work whatsoever was a challenge.


One Sunday, my friend Denise invited me over for breakfast. Somehow we began recounting the stories of young women we knew all around the world and the incredible things they were up to. Both Denise and I had worked and traveled in numerous countries, and each of us knew dozens of women in their twenties and thirties who were making courageous moves in their lives and contributing vital leadership to their communities. Many had started their own nonprofit organizations or were quickly climbing the corporate ladder, while others had made exciting innovations in the art world or were charting new ground in their families or personal lives.


It dawned on us that there was something quite remarkable that connected all of these stories -- a positive, empowered spirit that enabled women of our generation to engage fully with the world and to pursue goals and lifestyles that may not have been possible several decades ago. But why had this experience not been recognized or presented to the world at large? How could we publicly convey the sheer energy and beauty of our peers in a way that moved beyond old stereotypes?


“What about an anthology?” I asked Denise casually, not really even moved by my own idea. To my surprise, she responded enthusiastically and volunteered to help.


Like all of life’s best adventures, if I had known what I was getting into, I never would have started. Luckily, I had no clue. I thought the book would take about a year from start to finish. Nearly five years later, many women have participated, sending in artwork or writing in response to the question, “What defines your generation of women?” Imagining Ourselves is poised to inspire millions of young women and men to create positive change in their lives and in their communities.


And here is what we’ve found:


If you are a woman between the ages of twenty and forty living anywhere on the globe today, you are part of the most educated, most well-traveled, most professionally empowered, most international generation of women ever to have existed on this planet. It’s a story that not many people are telling yet, but it’s one of the most inspiring stories out there these days in a world full of violence and insecurity -- the story of a generation of women poised to take the reins of global leadership like no other generation in history.


Consider that more young women today have had access to formal education than at any other time in history -- by leaps and bounds. In 1999 and 2000, 96.5 percent of girls worldwide were enrolled in primary school, an astounding figure. In the eighteen years between 1980 and 1998, the literacy rate for all women worldwide rose from 54 to 68 percent, and there was an increase of nearly 200 million women in formal employment in the 1990s alone. This is also a generation that is increasingly connected across national boundaries, through the rapid spread of communications technologies such as the internet.


This is not, of course, to say that everything is hunky-dory. Women and girls still comprise over 70 percent of those living in poverty. And one hardly even needs to pick up the newspaper to remember how many people around the world -- men and women alike -- are living under conditions of violence and insecurity.


But such a paradox is precisely the point. Clearly, there are serious problems facing the world today. But perhaps for the first time in history, a generation of young adult women are poised with the resources and tools to do something positive to address the many challenges that face us, whether individual or collective in nature.


And it is precisely that positive spirit that filtered through when our team took a close look at the overwhelming amount of material we had collected from young women for our book and exhibit. Self-assuredness rang in the voices of so many young women -- and conviction that anything was possible. Whether in the arena of self-expression or professional achievement, whether in negotiating one’s identity as an immigrant or in reflecting on being a new mother, there was this utterly uplifting, seductive, funny, kick-ass spirit that united all of the young women with whom we were in contact.


Take, for example, the story of Mayerly Sánchez, a young woman in the book. In the midst of Colombia’s civil war, Mayerly had the idea to organize youth against the violence -- and she did. She orchestrated a historic national vote in which thousands of kids and teenagers across the country went to the polls to make a highly televised statement against the violence. And one month later, as a result, tens of thousands of adult Colombians also went to the polls to demand an end to forced kidnapping and abuses of children associated with the war.


Mayerly did not grow up as an elite member of her society. She did not have access to extraordinary wealth or networks of privilege. She, like so many of the participants in this project, was simply a young woman with a good idea who did not stop to question the proposition that she could make a difference.


And she is in very good company. She is joined by young women like Jess Loseby in England, a disabled mother who decided to have a family despite the stereotypes that disabled women might not be able to take care of children. Or women like Keina Davis Elswick, an African-American painter, who decided early on that not only would she become a professional painter -- but she would figure out how to make her dream career financially rewarding and sustaining -- and she did, even before she turned 30!


We have the power to move the world, each and every one of us. If you are a woman in your twenties or thirties, it is likely that you have access to more resources to transform your life, and the lives of those around you, than any previous generation of women in history.


Each of the women in the project has been able to make a difference in the world -- whether in their own lives, or the lives of others -- by simply having a good idea and following through with it, despite the obstacles we inevitably find in our path. That is the point of Imagining Ourselves -- and the kind of inspiring, positive momentum that the project is poised to release.