The Modern Woman seeks to make strong connections between women, vital resources, and important conversations to re-imagine what holistic success looks like for the modern woman and how our communities, businesses, and governments can provide the platform for us to achieve our goals.
We do this in two stages:
- Helping individual women. We will help individual women understand their own, personal definitions of womanhood and success.
- Removing barriers to success. We will remove obstacles for women everywhere by working to understand the challenges and needs presented by our cultures, communities and workplaces.
We are inclusive of all self-identified women: all ages, stages of life, and a variety of career and family backgrounds. Our conversations seek to be interfaith, cross-cultural, and international in order to help broaden the definition and context of “success” in all its multiplicity as well as provide a wider variety of solutions both politically and socially.
For example, success for one woman might be to have a high-level career and raise a large family. Another may be to be a stay at home mom with an only child. Yet another vision of success may be a single woman with no spouse or children, focused on a high-powered, high-impact career, or maybe being an entrepreneur and traveling the world. The Modern Woman endeavors to hold casual conversations and workshops that help community members discover pathways to each individual’s unique success, as well as uncover routes for local advocacy.
Our Guidelines
This space should be a place to speak about where our concepts of success, purpose, and fulfillment interact, support, and/or conflict with our gender identities and social norms. The space is inclusive of all self-identified women as well as allies in this process regardless of gender, culture, ethnic, racial, spiritual and other identities. As such, in all public forums, we keep the following guidelines in mind:
- No one is “other.” We recognize and celebrate the unique identities of all people (culturally, ethnically, racially, spiritually, gender identity, and more), but the problems and solutions we discuss will focus on our unique experiences and not on how a particular group affects us. Focusing on how a particular group affects us can generate the oversimplification of problems and individuals. Instead, we hope to have honest and candid conversations that steer us toward personal truth, inclusion, and empowerment.
- We’re here to provide resources, but we’re not the resource. We won’t claim to be experts where we’re not and we encourage our members to approach conversations in the same way. However, we are here to provide resources! We’re excited to connect our members with experts from around the world.
- We keep things anonymous. Anything that is said in our meetings or on our group chats should not be repeated with attribution. We understand that quoting one another can be useful, but in order to maintain a safe space, anything that is said will not be shared in connection to the original speaker.
Our starting projects will focus on self, home, leadership, and community. Some example topics to delve into are:
- Success as it relates to: Personal Life, Spiritual Life, Mental Health, Relationships, Marriage, Parenthood, and Professional Life
- Cross Cultural Definitions of Success
- Psychological and Neurological Connections and Bases for Success
- Interfaith Religious Texts Deep Dives on Gendered Concepts and Definitions of Success
- Intersectional Experiences of Feminine Success Across Race, Religion, and Gender Identity
- The Impact of Poverty on the Definition of and Luxury to Achieve “Success”
- Business Standards: Are They Setting Us Up for Success?
- American Culture’s Concept of Success’s Effect on Mental Health
- Expectations of our Neighbors
- The Role of Men: Social Norms and their Impact on the Success of Women
- Success and Resilience: Lessons Learned from a Year at Home
- and more!