USA TODAY Announces 2023 Women of the Year

It’s OK to fail, that’s how you learn.

Don’t let fear hold you back.

Welcome the future, don’t be afraid of it.

Here are some of the tips USA TODAY’s Women of the Year would give their youngest. Today USA TODAY is announcing our 12 National Women of the Year, and on Sunday we will feature one extraordinary woman from each state. All have had a significant impact on their profession, their communities and our country.

Many of our winners would choose to give a similar pep talk to their youngsters: you have this.

“Hey Miche – you’re good enough. You can do it,” the former first lady michelle obama looks younger. “I remember feeling so much anxiety when I was younger. Did I belong? Did I measure up?”

Actor and mental health advocate Goldie Hawn would tell her younger self to get out of her comfort zone “and do it.”

“I was a dancer and said yes to a job that took me to the next stage of my life,” Hawn said. “If I hadn’t said yes, I wouldn’t have been here.

Actor Sheryl Lee Ralph, Emmy-winning co-star of “Abbott Elementary”, would tell her young self to be patient – ​​with herself and with others.

” Are you doing well. Everything will be fine,” she said. “You are perfect as God created you. There will be times when you will be the underdog. But believe me, the day will come, whether you like it or not, when the underdog will be on top.”

Grace Young is a cookbook author turned activist. The pandemic has led her to defend businesses in America’s Chinatowns.

“For a lot of my life, I wanted to be perfect. If I wasn’t, I was really hard on myself,” she said. “And I think I would say to my younger self, and to young people today, that it’s more important to do that, and it’s the process and the journey that teaches you more and enriches your life. It shouldn’t be perfect. Imperfection is what makes it great.”

Environmental activist, model and Native American advocate Quannah Chasinghorse says she is proud when she returns to her community and sees elders and children excited about who they are.

“Many of our fellow citizens carry the shame due to generational trauma,” she said. “To see these young kids having healthy representation and having healthy people they can look up to and when they go to the store to see an Indigenous person on the cover of a catalog or a magazine. It’s just a dream. “

Nicole Mann is NASA’s first Indigenous woman in space, having paved the way as a Naval Academy and Stanford graduate, Colonel in the Marine Corps, and test pilot for the F/A-18 Hornet and the Super Hornet deployed twice to Iraq and Afghanistan. She says her pride comes from her 10-year-old son.

“Right before launch, we were hanging out at Kennedy Space Center, and he came up to me and he was like, ‘Mom, you know, I’m really going to miss you when you’re gone, but I want you to know that I understanding what you are doing is really important, for space exploration and for all humans on Earth. He said to me, ‘Mom, I want you to know that everything is fine and that I am really proud of You.’ It completely made me cry.”

• All United States Women’s National Team filed a lawsuit demanding equal pay and working conditions in football. They won. In May 2022, US Soccer announced agreements to pay the men’s and women’s national teams equally and fairly for World Cup prize money. “Hopefully when I leave this game I leave it better to the next generation,” said defender Crystal Dunn. “It’s really important that we set the stage for them to have an easier journey in this game, to be able to make a living playing this sport.”

• Maura Healey is the first woman to be elected governor of Massachusetts and one of the first two lesbian women to be elected governor of a US state. While working in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, she led a successful legal challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, helping pave the way for marriage equality to become the law of the land.
• Monica Munoz Martinez, an associate professor at the University of Texas, has dedicated herself to exposing the history of anti-Mexican violence on the US-Mexico border. She believes that everyone should have access to truthful accounts of their own history. She helped launch Refusing to Forget, a nonprofit that calls for public commemorations of the murder and oppression of Mexicans in Texas.

Women make up more than 25% of the voting members of the 118th Congress, the highest percentage in US history. There are 25 women in the Senate, tying the record, and a new record of 125 women in the House.

“The presence of more and revolutionary women on Capitol Hill has changed not only the face of Congress, but also its agenda,” writes Susan Page, Washington bureau chief. “They have stepped up research into women’s health, reformed the way sexual assault allegations are handled in the military, and addressed issues that affect the daily lives of children.”

Yet the United States lags behind the most mature democracies in Europe and the world in terms of the percentage of women in national legislatures, tied for 72nd in the world by one measure.

Roberta “Bobbi” Cordanopresident of Gallaudet University, knew from childhood that she wanted to be a lawyer, but law schools tended not to accept Gallaudet graduates, she said, because they “didn’t believe that deaf people could be lawyers at the time”.

So she went to an audition college.

At home, she and her parents used sign language, but in the hearing world, “I had to learn to survive socially. … And that experience was often lonely,” she said. “It was tough. I had no interpreters, I had no note takers, I had no type of accommodation. I was basically on my own, mine.”

“That got me to where I am today, and that’s being a bridge between the deaf community and the hearing world.”

When Sandra Day O’Connor, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, the first woman on the high court, who graduated from Stanford Law in 1952, it never occurred to her that she would struggle to find a job in law. “Here are all these notices on the Stanford Law graduate internship bulletin board, ‘Call us, we want to talk to you.’ Well, I called all the numbers and none of them even spoke to me. Not one,” she said in a 2009 interview.

So she offered to work for the San Mateo County District Attorney in California for free and put a desk next to her secretary.

“I loved my job because I immediately started getting answers to legal questions that had been submitted by the various county officials, officers, boards and commissions. … And I had been there for about three month and a half when he was appointed county judge. And that created a vacancy. My supervisor was appointed county attorney, and then I got a bona fide job with a salary and an office. What about do you think?”

O’Connor, now 92, lives in Arizona and is no longer in the public eye, sharing in an October 2018 letter that “Doctors have diagnosed me with the early stages of dementia, likely Alzheimer’s disease. ‘Alzheimer’s’.

She also said in that letter, “As a young cowgirl from the Arizona desert, I could never have imagined that one day I would become the first female justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. J hopes to have inspired young people in civic engagement and helped pave the way for women who may have faced obstacles in pursuing their careers.”

She did and does. Like all our women of the year.

Nicole Carroll is the managing editor of USA TODAY. The Backstory offers a look at our biggest stories of the week. If you’d like to receive The Backstory in your inbox, sign up here. Contact Carroll at EIC@usatoday.com or follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/nicole_carroll. Subscribe to USA TODAY here.

Posted
12:23 UTC on March 17, 2023
Update
13:03 UTC on March 17, 2023