Women Behaving Courageously: The difference between a hero and a warrior
‘When NZ went into our first lock-down a neighbour was facing redundancy from her bank job. It appeared all the female tellers had been told to apply for a reduced number of positions, all the male teller jobs were deemed ‘safe’.
My neighbour, quite rightly was furious. She knew I’d written several books on leadership and asked if I’d written one for women in leadership – I hadn’t, so given we were in lock-down, I did.
As I started writing, I thought of all the female heroes who had inspired me as I grew up. I then mused over the modern-day women who had a whole new energy and passion, they seemed more ‘warrior’ than hero. Which led me to pondering the difference between a hero and a warrior
As I was thinking about brave women, I thought about all the women I know who ‘just get on with things’. No fuss, no mess, no drama. We may not class them as warriors, but for sure they are heroes.
Definitions: a hero is a real or mythical person of great bravery who carries out extraordinary deeds; a warrior is a person who is actively engaged in battle, conflict or warfare, a soldier or combatant.
My grandparents opted to bring me up, an illegitimate child in a small town where everyone knew I was illegitimate at a time when illegitimacy was not a cause for celebration. They never questioned their decision to raise me when it would have been so easy for them to insist that I be put up for adoption. They were heroes.
Think of women who have to give up a promising career to take care of a sick or handicapped child. Women who walk away from a career to care for elderly parents. Think of grandparents who instead of putting their feet up in their golden years take over raising grandchildren because their adult children can’t or won’t look after their children. These people are heroes.
Think about people, male or female, who are diagnosed with terminal illnesses; people who survive horrific accidents or come back from war zones mentally and physically broken. Think about people who lose a child or partner; think about people who suffer from depression. For all these people, simply getting out of bed in the morning and putting two feet on the floor ready to face another tough day makes them all heroes. If you have chosen to stay home with a handicapped child and give up your career, you are blessed. If you have chosen to walk away from a fabulous income to devote yourself to looking after an elderly parent, you are truly a hero, and if you have experienced some kind of horrendous loss and you are still getting on with things, one day at a time, then all hail you.
A warrior is a hero PLUS. No quietly getting on with things for them. They are loud, fearless and utterly determined to rock the boat. Meet The suffragettes.
Since the mid-1800s women in Britain had been agitating to be given the right to vote in general elections. Emmeline Pankhurst was the activist who spent 40 years trying to achieve what the women before her had failed to do. The women who joined her movement were often imprisoned; frequently force fed and abused verbally, physically and mentally for their efforts.
Make no mistake, the Suffragettes were deliberately loud and sensational. They were very deliberately militant. They attacked property, chained themselves to railings and generally disrupted society in ways never previously seen, particularly by women. The suffragettes felt it had already taken way too long and that previous efforts had been too ladylike, genteel and slow. No wishy-washy tameness for them.
One of the leaders of the group — Emily Davison — was arrested on nine occasions, went on hunger strike seven times and was force fed on 49 occasions. She literally threw herself in front of King George V’s horse at the Epsom Derby and subsequently died of her injuries. She became a martyr for the cause.
A women’s rights convention held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 is credited with being the event that launched the suffragette movement in America, yet it took until 1920 for them to be finally given the right to vote.
Women in New Zealand were given the vote on 19 September 1893, the first country in the world to accord that right to women. It took until 1928 for women in Britain to be given the vote, and until 1971 for the women of Switzerland; women in Lichtenstein had to wait until 1984.
Even though the efforts to win the right to vote in the UK had been slow, some women didn’t agree with these tactics. They believed it fed into the already entrenched belief by the men of the day that because women menstruated, they were way too emotional to be trusted with a vote, that their place literally was in the home.
The same rationale was used to keep women out of university and out of the professions. Men felt that all this emotion once per month meant women were simply too unstable to be trusted with a vote or position of responsibility.
For thousands of years we women have been labelled ‘emotional’. ‘Hysteria was the first mental disorder attributed to women (and only women). It was an all-embracing, catch-all diagnosis for symptoms including nervousness, hallucinations, emotional outbursts and various urges of the sexual variety.’
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In a hilarious article by Catherine Pearson, ‘Female Hysteria: 7 Crazy Things People Used to Believe about the Ladies’ Disease’, she writes that it was thought to be caused by ‘wandering wombs, sexy thoughts and that it could be cured by pelvic massage, a vibrator or a good hosing down’. Really funny on one level, but incredibly sad on another when you wonder if we’ve travelled very far from that level of thinking.
I recently had a skin complaint; an itch at the back of my neck that had no obvious signs of an infection or irritation. The male skin specialist I was referred to told me that in the 1950s if a woman presented with an ‘itch’ and there was no visible cause, they were diagnosed as being nymphomaniacs! At this suggestion, the female nurse and I made eye contact and both of us rolled our eyes. I eventually worked out that the cause of the itch was something in the clothing labels the manufacturers used.’
This is an extract from my latest book Women Behaving Courageously: How gutsy women, young and old are transforming the world. You can grab a free electronic copy of the book right here
I want to stir up women. I want to encourage every woman and girl to find her voice, to stand in her power, to challenge the thinking that we should be paid less than men for doing the exact same job, that when redundancies are necessary (as for my neighbour) men AND women are considered, not just the women. I want to ensure that we are valued for the differences we bring to the workplace not pilloried for them.
And so I leave the last word to Emmeline Pankhurst (would she be impressed at how far we’ve come, or would she be mildly miffed to discover that we are still fighting the same battles she so bravely fought all those years ago?)
‘Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.’
Ann Andrews, CSP. Author, speaker, profiler, Life Member PSANZ
Author of:
Women Behaving Courageously: How gutsy women, young and old, are transforming the world