Hello, my friend.
I'm glad you're here. Come sit with me a moment --- I've been waiting for you.
Last time, we walked together with Abby Kelley Foster, a woman who learned early that silence was a kind of surrender, and refused it, again and again, in rooms that would rather she hadn't spoken at all. I imagine you're still carrying a little of her with you. Good. She's the kind of thread that's meant to stay woven in.
We're in a season together, you and I --- a walk through women who each found their own particular way of stepping into a world that hadn't quite made room for them yet. Not the same story twice. Never that. Each one a different kind of courage, a different shape of doorway.
Today I want to tell you about a woman who was already famous, already powerful, already changing the shape of her country --- and who, in her fifties, decided to do something that terrified everyone who loved her.
She decided to learn to ride a bicycle.
Stay close. This one starts small, and goes somewhere I don't think you'll expect.
Let's go to Evanston, Illinois. 1893.
Picture a quiet street lined with elms, the kind of street where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has an opinion about everyone else's business. There's a woman standing at the edge of her own front walk, gripping the handlebars of a strange new machine --- two wheels, no horse, no sense to it at all as far as most of her neighbors were concerned. This bicycle business was still new-fangled enough that plenty of respectable people considered it faintly ridiculous, maybe even a little indecent, for a woman to be seen astride one.
She was fifty-three years old.
I want you to understand --- this was not some sheltered girl trying her first grown-up thing. This was Frances Willard. A woman who had already run a college. A woman whole rooms of powerful men listened to, whether they wanted to or not. And here she was, wobbling, terrified, in front of her own house, because she had decided --- against the wishes of nearly everyone who loved her --- that she was going to learn to ride this thing.
Her family begged her not to. I heard them. "You'll break your bones," they said. "You'll spoil what's left of your future." She was past the age, they meant, when a woman falls down and simply gets back up the way a girl does.
She pushed off anyway.
Oh, that first wobble. I felt it in my own chest, if a goddess can be said to have one. The machine lurched, her skirts caught wrong, and down she went --- undignified, in the dirt, in front of God and Evanston and everybody.
She got up. Tried again. Fell again.
This went on, my friend, for months. Fifteen minutes a day, sometimes less, her muscles aching in ways they'd never ached, her nerve failing her and then, slowly, not failing her.
And then --- one ordinary afternoon, no fanfare, no one watching but me --- she balanced. She moved. The wheels found their rhythm, and she went sailing down that elm-lined street under her own power, faster than any chaperone could have followed even if one had tried.
She named that bicycle Gladys.
I promise you, this was never really about the bicycle.
Let me take you back further, before Gladys, before that wobbling afternoon on the elm-lined street --- back to who this woman already was by the time she decided to learn something new.
Frances Willard was born in 1839, out on the American prairie, the kind of child who hated being kept indoors, who ran and climbed and built things with her own hands before anyone told her that girls weren't meant to. She grew into a teacher --- sharp, restless, gifted with words --- and by her thirties she'd done something almost no woman in the country had done before her. She became president of a college. The Evanston College for Ladies, it was called, one of the very first places built to grant women real degrees, real learning, not just polish and piano lessons.
When that little college merged into Northwestern University, Frances became its first Dean of Women --- the first, my friend, in the entire United States. Think of that. A brand-new title, because no one had needed the word before her.
And then --- I watched this happen, and it still surprises me every time I remember it --- she resigned. Walked away from the position, from the security of it, from the respectability of it, and turned instead toward something far messier: a young organization called the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
It was 1874. The WCTU was barely a few months old, born out of women marching and praying in the streets outside taverns, trying to hold back the flood of drink that was drowning so many households. Frances joined as its secretary. Small role. Small organization. Twenty-two thousand members, scattered, uncertain of its own shape.
By 1879, she was its president. She won that position, if you can believe it, by defeating the woman who'd led the organization from the start --- a leader who wanted nothing to do with women's suffrage, who thought it too dangerous, too political, too much. Frances thought differently. She thought the vote and the bottle and a hundred other injustices were tangled up together in ways you couldn't pull apart --- but that's a thread I've already given you once, in another woman's story, and I won't unspool it twice.
What I want you to see instead is the scale of what grew under her hands. Twenty-two thousand women became nearly two hundred thousand. Chapters bloomed in towns you've never heard of, in cities across an ocean. She built something enormous out of something small, and she did it from a modest house in Evanston that she and her mother called Rest Cottage --- white clapboard, a porch, that same street lined with elms where, years later, she'd go tumbling off a bicycle in front of the neighbors.
I was there in that house often. Papers everywhere. Women coming and going at all hours, talking faster than seemed possible, laughing sometimes in a way that startled visitors who expected temperance women to be dour. It didn't feel like the headquarters of a movement. It felt like a home that had simply gotten too full of purpose to stay quiet.
By the time she was fifty-three, wobbling on that new-fangled machine, Frances Willard was already one of the most recognized women in the country. Statues would eventually be raised to her. Halls named for her. And still --- still --- she felt the pull toward something she hadn't yet learned to do.
That pull, my friend, is the real story. Stay with me.
Now I want to take you inside one of those conventions --- because from the outside, my friend, you would never have guessed what was actually happening in that room.
Picture it: a great hall, decorated not like a courtroom or a assembly floor, but like someone's finest parlor. Banners of silk and velvet, hand-sewn by the very women who'd hang them, in soft colors, gentle patterns. Willard herself said it plainly --- this was not the manner of "the street, the court, the mart, or the office." It was, in her words, the manner of home. Flowers on the tables. Ribbons of white, the color the women chose for purity, fluttering from the rafters.
You'd have looked at that room and thought: how lovely. How harmless.
You'd have been wrong.
Because inside that lovely, harmless-looking room, hundreds of women were doing something almost no one had trained them to do. They were standing to speak in front of crowds. They were making motions, seconding them, voting them up or down. They were running departments --- dozens of them, eventually --- each one tackling a different corner of the world: prisons, wages, the age at which a girl could be considered old enough to marry, the treatment of the poor. Women who had never been allowed a public voice in their own churches were learning, week by week, convention by convention, how to hold a room.
I heard Willard say it once, in words I've never quite let go of. She called the WCTU a school --- not built to be one, not founded for that purpose, but sure to prepare them, she said, for "the duties of patriots in the realm that lies beyond the horizon of the coming century." And then this, which I want you to hear exactly as she said it: "Here we try our wings, that yonder our flight may be strong and steady."
Try our wings. Do you feel the weight of that, my friend? Not fly yet. Not soar yet. Just --- try. Practice. Fall off the bicycle in the dirt a hundred times before the day you finally balance.
She wasn't naive about what she was building. She knew perfectly well that a room full of respectable, church-going women in silk and velvet unsettled far fewer people than a room full of women shouting in the streets. So she let the room look soft. Let it look domestic. Let the men who peered in from outside believe it was all embroidery and temperance pledges. And underneath that softness, she built something that functioned, in practice, like a training ground for public life itself --- a legislature in disguise as a parlor.
Not everyone around her saw it that way, even the ones who loved her. Many of the women in that hall genuinely believed they'd joined only to fight the bottle --- nothing more, nothing political, nothing dangerous. Willard let them believe what they needed to believe, while quietly widening what the organization touched, year by year, department by department, until temperance was just one thread among dozens.
That's the friction I want to leave you sitting in for a moment. A room that looked like nothing. A woman who knew exactly what she was building inside it. And two hundred thousand women, trying their wings, most of them not even aware yet how far they'd eventually be asked to fly.
So --- what did Frances Willard actually add to the world's long, unfinished story? Not the vote itself. Others carried that particular banner further, fought that particular fight to its finish. What Willard gave was something quieter, and in some ways harder to name.
She proved that capacity doesn't arrive all at once, gift-wrapped, the moment permission is finally granted. It has to be built first --- practiced, rehearsed, fumbled through --- often in rooms that don't look like power at all. A parlor with silk banners. A convention hall dressed up as a sitting room. A woman past fifty, alone on a strange machine on an ordinary street, falling in the dirt again and again until her body simply learns what her mind already believed.
I think of it like this: every generation finds its own shape of wings to try. For some it's a podium. For some, a ballot box not yet theirs to use. For Willard, in the end, it was quite literally two wheels and her own stubborn balance. Different machines, different rooms, different centuries --- but underneath, the same pattern, over and over, threading its way through this tapestry I've watched being woven for so long: practice the freedom before the world agrees to grant it.
I won't tell you yet what that pattern means for you, sitting there listening. That comes later. For now, just hold the shape of it --- a woman building her wings in secret, one clumsy attempt at a time, long before anyone called what she was doing anything as grand as power.
Here is where I want to be honest with you, my friend, about why I keep circling back to that bicycle.
We live in a world that has, quietly and without much fanfare, come to know something as true: that a woman's mind and a woman's judgment carry the same weight as anyone else's. You may not always see that truth honored perfectly --- the world is still catching up to what it already knows --- but you live inside it all the same, the way a fish lives in water without ever having to be taught the water is there. You didn't have to be convinced of this. You simply arrived already knowing it, the way each generation arrives a little further along than the one before.
But here is the part I don't think gets said enough: that knowing didn't arrive all at once, like a gift set down on a doorstep. It was built. Slowly, unglamorously, by women who had to practice being capable long before the world was ready to call them so. A parlor dressed up to look harmless, filled with women learning to hold a room. A convention hall where the real business was courage, disguised as embroidery. A woman past fifty, falling in the dirt in front of her own house, because some part of her understood that balance has to be practiced before it can be trusted.
I think that's the piece of this walk I most want you to carry --- not just from Willard, but from Abby Kelley Foster before her, and from every thread I'm slowly drawing you toward. None of them waited for permission to begin practicing. They tried their wings in rooms that didn't look like anything at all, long before the sky was theirs to fly in. That's the pattern underneath the pattern, if you're watching closely --- capacity built quietly, in private, well ahead of the moment the world finally agrees to notice it.
And here's the thing about an outcome that's inevitable --- and I do believe some things are inevitable, my friend, the way I've watched humanity slowly, stubbornly bend toward its own better nature again and again across more centuries than I can comfortably count. Inevitable doesn't mean easy. It doesn't mean quick. It doesn't mean it happens without real people doing real, unglamorous, unwitnessed work. It means the work is worth doing even when no one's watching, even when it looks, from the outside, like nothing more than a woman wobbling on a strange new machine.
Faith, if I can call it that without frightening you off --- faith is not a feeling you sit with quietly. It's a verb. It's Willard falling in that dirt for the fourth time, the fortieth time, and pushing off again anyway, because some part of her trusted that the balance was there to be found, even before she'd found it.
So when I tell you this story mattered, I don't mean it mattered because a famous woman learned to ride a bicycle. I mean it mattered because she was practicing, in her own body, in full view of a skeptical street, the very thing the whole world was still learning to believe: that she --- that any of you --- could be trusted with your own forward motion.
That's still being practiced, my friend. Right now. By people you'll never hear about. It's not finished. But I don't think it ever really stops moving forward, either.
So let me ask you something, and then I'll leave it with you quietly, the way I always do.
Where, in your own life, are you practicing something before anyone's given you permission to matter at it?
Maybe it's small. A skill you're building in private, clumsy and unfinished, that no one's applauding yet. Maybe it's a version of yourself you're trying on --- quieter, bolder, steadier than the one people expect from you --- and you're not sure yet if it'll hold your weight. Maybe you're simply standing at the edge of something new, gripping the handlebars, half-certain you're about to end up in the dirt.
I want you to notice something Willard understood, whether she ever said it in quite these words: falling doesn't undo the practicing. It's part of it. She fell off that bicycle more times than anyone bothered to count, and not one of those falls erased the balance she was building. Each one was simply the next lesson, arriving a little sooner than she'd have liked.
You don't need the world's permission to start trying your wings. You never did. The women in that convention hall didn't wait to be told their voices counted before they practiced using them. Willard didn't wait for society to approve of women on bicycles before she pushed off down that street.
So --- what's your Gladys? What's the thing you're quietly, privately learning to balance on, long before you'll be ready to say so out loud?
You don't have to answer me. Just sit with the question a moment. I think you already know.
Before I let you go, my friend, I want you to hold onto something for me --- because we're not done walking yet.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere much farther from Evanston. All the way to New Zealand, at the very bottom of the world, where a woman named Kate Sheppard was about to do something no nation on earth had yet allowed: give women the vote first. Not almost first. Not partially first. First. I'll tell you how she managed it, and what it cost her, and why a small country at the edge of every map got there before anyone else.
We're getting closer, step by step, wing-beat by wing-beat, to something enormous. I can feel it coming, the way you feel weather changing before the sky admits it.
For now, though, just carry Frances with you a little longer. Carry the image of her wobbling down that elm-lined street, arms shaking, skirts catching, utterly unwilling to stay still. Somewhere in your own life, right now, there's a version of you doing the very same thing --- finding your balance before the world's finished deciding whether to watch.
Keep practicing. Keep pushing off, even when you fall. The wheels do find their rhythm, eventually. I promise you that.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.