Reading: How to Feel Like You Belong. Again.

Tuesday night I got on a Zoom call.  

With 100,000 women. 

Not only was it fun to be a part of someone else’s call — so I could enjoy just listening and not presenting — but I was struck at how delicious it felt to be surrounded by this incredible depth of female energy. 

These were women from around the country, from every race and background and age, with various abilities, famous and average, who are coming together to move American women forward into the future, and to hopefully elect our first female President. 

A New Sense of Belonging
After so many years of feeling like all I hear is the noisy segment of the population that hopes to push women back to 1950, it created a warm sense of belonging and sisterhood. It’s the one I felt part of when I ran women’s magazines Redbook, Marie Claire, and More. It’s the sense of sisterhood I felt when I marched at NARAL rallies in the ’90s and when I got our congress to create a moment of TALK about domestic violence when I was running Redbook. Or when I got 17,000 Redbook readers to sign bounce-back cards asking the President to take assault weapons off our streets; or when I was able to donate over $1 million reader-donated dollars to women’s charities around the world at Marie Claire. 

It felt incredibly good to feel like someone cares about women again. Like women care about women again. Like we are ready to fight to keep our rights to make our own decisions and live our lives as we see fit. It feels like women are recognizing our power again — and not being afraid to embrace it. 

It feels to me like an opportunity for a new sense of belonging — to something larger than ourselves. 

When Women Work Together We’re Unstoppable
My experience is that when women decide to get something done — and especially when we decide to band together to do it — we can make anything happen.

I hope that you have the opportunity to take part in this amazing, unique, historic moment of women’s power. I hope you will find your own way to get involved. We have been working so long to get to a place where women can care for ourselves and our families, where we can protect and empower our daughters, where women don’t have to live in fear or depend on a spouse to survive. (As many of you know, this is very personal for me, having come from a family of divorce where my mother fell apart afterward because she had no support system and no decent income.) 

Women really can do anything they put their minds to. That’s also what CoveyClub is about. We do incredible things for each other: we teach each other, we encourage each other, we call each other out. If you haven’t joined us, now’s the moment. Because everything just gets better when women support women.