Women, power, and the future of democracy

I once thought I would name my child Eleanor, after Eleanor Roosevelt.

I was drawn to the way she exercised power — advising a nation, shaping policy, advancing human rights — at a time when women were rarely granted formal authority. She understood that influence and title are not the same thing, and that women have long shaped democracy from spaces not designed to hold them.

As I grew older, I came to understand something more precise: while some women’s leadership was made invisible, Black and Brown women’s leadership was actively erased. That distinction is not rhetorical. It is structural. It determines whose authority is legitimized, whose labor is archived, and whose contributions are treated as foundational rather than peripheral.

At the very last moment before leaving the hospital, we named our son Atticus — not as literary nostalgia, but as responsibility. A responsibility to raise a young man who understands justice as action. Who believes women. Who recognizes whose histories have been systematically excluded from our collective memory and carries a commitment to do better.

Those commitments were shaped by leaders who refused to fragment themselves for political comfort. Shirley Chisholm ran for president as a proud Black woman and a proud woman, insisting democracy cannot function if it serves only the few. Audre Lorde reminded us that liberation is collective or it is not liberation at all. Toni Morrison warned that systems of oppression rely on distraction — diverting attention from truth, accountability, and the imagination required to build something better.

As we move from Black History Month into Women’s History Month, those lessons feel urgent.

Human rights are not divisible. When one community’s freedom is threatened, the promise of democracy is weakened for all of us. You come for one, you come for all.

And today, we are witnessing renewed efforts to narrow that promise.

Across the country, immigrant families are detained in the name of enforcement. Books are challenged. Curriculum is constrained. Reproductive autonomy remains politically unstable. The struggle over whose stories are told — and whose are dismissed — is not symbolic.

It is about power. It always has been.

Here on the South Coast, that reality intersects with economic and civic life in measurable ways.

Women are sustaining small businesses in an economy where women-owned enterprises receive a fraction of available capital. They are navigating childcare costs that, in Massachusetts, often exceed in-state public college tuition and fees — shaping whether full participation in the workforce is possible. They are advocating for reproductive health access in a region that only very recently provided procedural abortion services. They are leading classrooms, nonprofits, health centers, and grassroots movements — often without the formal authority or resourcing that matches the scale of their contributions.

This is not peripheral leadership. It is democratic infrastructure.

Durable civic infrastructure does not emerge by accident; it requires coordination, sustained investment, and accountability.

Democracy does not endure simply because elections are held. It endures when leadership pipelines are cultivated. It endures when institutions reflect lived experience. It endures when those historically excluded from power are resourced not just to participate, but to govern.

Massachusetts may be viewed as politically stable, but stability is not self-sustaining. It is built — through equitable economic policy, sustained civic participation, and leadership that reflects the communities it serves.

If women’s leadership — particularly Black and Brown women’s leadership — is treated as supplemental rather than foundational, systems become brittle. When it is architected into governance, philanthropy, and public policy, systems strengthen.

On the South Coast — as in communities across the country — we have an opportunity to make that choice deliberately.

That means investing in young women and gender-expansive youth not as future volunteers, but as future policymakers and elected officials. It means recognizing reproductive justice as economic justice. It means grounding regional decisions in disaggregated data that captures lived reality, not flattened statewide averages. It means resourcing organizations that advance economic security, civic leadership, and bodily autonomy as interconnected pillars of democratic durability.

This work is not abstract.
It is not ceremonial.
It is necessary.

Women’s History Month should not ask only who we celebrate.

It should ask what we are building — and who we are willing to resource to build it.

If we understand women’s leadership as democratic infrastructure — not a theme, not a panel, not a seasonal acknowledgment — then investing in that leadership becomes not aspirational, but strategic.

The strength of our democracy — on the South Coast and across the country — will be determined by whether we make that investment deliberately, consistently, and at scale.

Christine Monska is executive director of the Women’s Fund SouthCoast and vice chair of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women.