Celebrating Women 2026

Today, and every day, I invite you to join me in celebrating women who have inspired you in some significant way. It could be a family member, a neighbour, a teacher, a writer, artist, musician, journalist, scientist, athlete or someone involved in some other endeavour.

For me one of the first was Anne Frank whose moving diary awakened the compassion that led me later in life to facilitate recovery in holocaust survivors and others who experienced trauma of some kind. As a young student at the University of California at Berkeley, I came to admire Rosa Parks, a civil rights activist who refused to get off the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, along with Angela Davis, a courageous feminist, political activist who was more of a contemporary than Rosa.

I want to pay tribute to Dorothy E. Smith, a British-born Canadian sociologist and writer, who at the beginning of my career invited me to co-edit and contribute chapters to Women Look at Psychiatry which exposed the systemic oppression of women by the psychiatric profession. The book created a space for women to tell their moving experiences of being harmed by the very experts they turned to for help when they were in emotional turmoil.

Each one, with the guidance of feminist therapists, went on to discover they were “not crazy after all”, that they were not “mad but angry”. Each went on to successful careers in their respective fields. One became a prominent advocate for mental patients. My list of inspiring women is a long one as I am sure are the lists of each of you reading mine. There are all the suffragettes who succeeded in getting women the right to vote.

There are the groundbreaking journalists such as Barbara Walters, June Callwood, Barbara Frum who paved the way for today’s Christiane Amanpour, Adrienne Arsenault, Lisa LaFlamme and so many more. I treasure the poetry and writing of Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Emily Dickenson and the numerous other women who found and used their voice.

Judy Chicago in Through the Flower conveys the challenge of being a female artist in a man’s world. Chicago went on to assemble hundreds of women to collaborate in co-creating The Dinner Party, which honours women who left their mark on the history/herstory of the world. Georgia O’Keefe is a beloved artist to desert women and art lovers worldwide. Emily Carr was a landscape artist whose paintings and writings were inspired by the monumental art portraying the villages of the First Nations and the landscapes of British Columbia. Amelia Earhart, the first woman to do a solo flight across the Atlantic paved the way for future careers in aviation for women drawn to flying or to joining astronaut crews. In every field women’s contributions have been blocked, overlooked or minimized. I tip my hat to the corrective collective of scholars who have made efforts to set the record straight by teaching Women Studies courses in every discipline, encouraging women to enter the trades, sports and every sphere where we have been excluded or restricted.

Perhaps the most important task for each woman reading these words is to reflect on your own life, values and aspirations. It is by freeing ourselves of other people’s expectations and scripts that we reclaim our own authority. While it is important to acknowledge our mentors and teachers, it is our own personal accomplishments and essence that I suggest acknowledging and celebrating on International Women’s Day and every day!

BE YOURSELF, not a copy of any other person.