Upon winning best actress, Jessie Buckley, Oscar award-winning star of Hamnet, stated in her acceptance speech,

“We all come from a lineage of women who continue to create against all odds.”

A few days later, while paying for some new clothes for myself, the woman behind the counter complimented my necklace. When I told her I had bought it at an antique store, she shared a beautiful thought; that there was a woman before me who wore that same necklace and loved it the way that I do.

I have always loved and honored the fact that I am here because of my mother’s strength, just as she is here because of hers, and so on. To me, the power of motherhood is what shapes each of us into who we are as women. It is both easy and important to honor the women who share my blood. However, it is just as easy to forget the thousands of women we will never know who shaped us just as much as our mothers.

I don’t mean only the women who fought for our right to vote or those who advocate for equal pay. I mean the women who quietly reshaped the world in smaller, often unnoticed ways. I mean the women who sewed pockets into their dresses because 1920s fashion designers didn’t want to ruin the silhouette of the woman’s body. I mean the women across all cultures who learned different braiding techniques to protect their daughters’ and sisters’ hair. I mean the women who used ground minerals to create eyeliner. The women who lived ordinary lives in times long before I was even a thought yet still shaped the person I’ve become.

We are not who we are by chance. As women, we owe our entire being to every woman who walked this earth before us, changing the world simply by their presence. Whether it was a woman who fought for my right to vote, or a woman who donated a necklace to an antique store so that another woman may love it someday, we owe it all to them. Every day, I am honored to call myself a woman, knowing that we have our own unique, beautiful, challenging world to navigate and that every woman before us is there to help us down the path of life.

To the women who gave me life, to the women who gave me rights, to the women who gave me pockets in dresses, to the women who gave me the jewelry I wear today, I owe it all to you. Thank you to every woman who has been and who will be.