I can wrap my mind around the fact that men feel threatened by women being their boss, taking their jobs instead of their orders. A shift towards equality always hurts those who were in dominant positions.  I cannot understand, however, how women can long for a return to a status quo that celebrates their subjugation, narrows their independence, controls their bodies. Making decisions that give other, competing women the finger.

Maybe the fantasy held by anxious, disenfranchised males that a strongman will reinstate control and status at large is reflected in the fantasy of women that their prince will come through the house door, no longer angry and punitive with his place in the world restored.

Let’s look at those who never bought into that and held their own in a misogynistic world. I am linking to an article about an extraordinarily strong woman I had never heard about. What a discovery.

368 Years Before Hillary, This Trailblazing Feminist Demanded Her Right to Vote

Then there are portraits of those who shaped their households or their surrounding culture or their countries’ fate by various forms of leadership.

Raphael Soyer,  Golda Meir (1975)

Hannah Arendt in a sketch seen in VOGUE….

Muhammad Yungai  Angela Davis 

Barbara Berney Indira Ghandi (2010)

As for photographic portraits, here are some of my own role models when it comes to fierceness and determination: those who are or have been fighting cancer and excel in competitive dragon boat races.