12 Lessons in Strength and Resilience from Remarkable Women

By Marianne Schnall

In the wake of the pandemic and growing social unrest, we are facing unprecedented challenges and uncertainty. It is a time that requires us to draw from our deepest reserves of strength and resilience, not just to be able to face our own personal challenges but also so that we find the energy and fortitude to help others and create the change we want to see in the world.  

During my over two decades as a journalist, I have been fortunate to interview a wide range of incredible and powerful women, all of whom have had to overcome a variety of obstacles in their lives and have important and inspiring wisdom to share. What I have found through my conversations is that being “strong” is not some measure of our physical strength or being “perfect” or “tough.” True strength and courage comes from allowing ourselves to be open and vulnerable, reaching out for help or joining forces with others, falling down and getting back up, and using our strength and influence to support others who are most in need.  

I decided to cull through my interviews for quotes that could help us all find courage, hope, and resilience to cope with whatever we are facing in our lives—and the inspiration to work together and support each other as we do the urgent and necessary work toward creating a better world.  

“I would encourage us to try our best to develop courage. It’s the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can be anything erratically—kind, fair, true, generous, all that. But to be that thing time after time, you need courage.” 

MAYA ANGELOU, 1928-2014
Poet, Writer, Civil Rights Activist

 

“There is no one way to [find the courage to face your fear]. I think it just comes from knowing, acknowledging the fact that it is scary but then kind of taking a deep breath, swallowing hard, and just doing whatever that is anyway. There is no easy way—just do it. It’s just one of those things that comes with the fortitude of like, ‘Okay, I have to do it. So I am just going to acknowledge the fact that this is how I am feeling about it, but it is not going to stop me.’ I am really trying to encourage people to do what feels scary.”

LUVVIE AJAYI
Writer, Speaker, Activist, Curator of LuvvNation

 

“I always push the envelope. I don’t want to be caught in the same place for very long, and any time I feel frightened of doing something, that usually means I better get in there and do it.” 

SALLY FIELD
Award-winning Actress, Director

“People should never give up—there is always hope…. If we all give up hope and do nothing, then indeed there is no hope. It will be helped by all of us taking action of some sort. Cumulatively, our small decisions, choices, and actions make a very big difference.” 

JANE GOODALL
Primatologist, Author, Speaker, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and Roots & Shoots

 

“Hope is hard. It’s painful. It requires patience and it’s erratic in its delivery, but it’s the most sustainable source of change and improvement possible. So I hold to two ideas: the first is hope, and the second is fight. Both have to be real and true, but they need help, and that means we have to fight for what we want. And I think with those twin obligations—the painful power of hope and the remarkable, sustainable nature of fighting—we can get things done.” 

STACEY ABRAMS
Political Leader, Author, Founder of Fair Fight and Fair Count

 

“I think right now it takes courage to live a life of hope.”

LOUNG UNG
Author, Activist, Public Speaker, Screenplay Writer

“Being brave is not being unafraid but feeling the fear and doing it anyway. When you feel fear, try using it as a signal that something really important is about to happen.” 

GLORIA STEINEM
Feminist Activist, Speaker, Writer, Cofounder of Women’s Media Center and Equality Now

 

“It’s okay to be afraid. Fear is normal and real and, in its own way, healthy.” 

STACEY ABRAMS
Political Leader, Author, Founder of Fair Fight and Fair Count 

 

“Stop assuming there is a point at which you won’t be afraid. You’re always afraid. Courage is fear management; it’s not the lack of fear. So, first of all, accept the fear, invite it in, get used to how it feels. Fear is only damaging when it dictates our behavior. So you weigh things against how important your fear is to you, how debilitating your fear feels. You just check in with that every so often and make sure you understand the impact of what you’re doing, and it gives you strength to keep going.”

ABIGAIL DISNEY
Activist, Philanthropist, Award-winning filmmaker 

“Sisters: talk to each other, be connected and informed, form women’s circles, share your stories, work together, and take risks. Together we are invincible.” 

ISABEL ALLENDE
Novelist, Feminist, Founder of the Isabel Allende Foundation 

 

“It’s so important that [women] look each other in the eye and go, ‘What’s happening is not okay, and we are not alone in trying to shift it. We are not alone in our pain, and we are not alone in transforming our pain into power. We’re all doing it, and we support each other in doing it.'” 

KERRY WASHINGTON
Actress, Activist, Executive Producer of The Fight Documentary 

 

“Creating community and safe spaces with other women, where we can share our stories and people can recognize that they’re not alone, is absolutely essential. You can cultivate courage on your own, but a lot of courage happens through connection and relationship with others. For me, it’s been incredibly inspiring to bear witness to women who, against all odds, assert the dignity of their work and their right to be recognized for the work that they do for families. That takes so much courage and is a huge source of inspiration and strength. At the end of the day, all of us need other people to inspire us and give us strength.” 

AI-JEN POO
Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Co-director for Caring Across Generations and a Cofounder of Supermajority

“You have to stay optimistic. You do sometimes feel very discouraged, but it’s also very important to remain optimistic and to see the silver lining in everything you do. Sometimes things look difficult, like there is no hope, but there is always a small glimmering of silver lining that is in everything.” 

WANGARI MAATHAI, 1940-2011
Kenyan Environmental Activist, Nobel Laureate, Founder of The Green Belt Movement 

 

“What kept me positive? For one, being bitter is exhausting. I’ve done that. I held it in my shoulders, back, stomach, and face. I aged. I hurt. I cramped. It was no fun. . . . The anger might have kept my body going, but without love, the soul would have just slowly crumbled and burned. It was the love that kept the soul going. So I think to be fully alive, you need both a healthy body and a loving soul.” 

LOUNG UNG
Author, Activist, Public Speaker, Screenplay Writer

 

“You can only be optimistic, because I don’t really know how you’d wake up in the morning if you felt pessimistic. It’s obviously easy to feel that way with the news—you can watch the news, and it feels like it’s the end of the world, very apocalyptic. So I just stay away from the news and try to find people around me who are doing positive things and look to them.” 

NATALIE PORTMAN
Award-winning Actress, Activist, Ambassador of Hope for FINCA International

“The most important [leadership quality] is the ability to connect with the problems of people who are not like you—those who have been underserved by government historically, who don’t enjoy the privileges that you do. So the ability to really connect with those people and design policies that will include their well-being—with an understanding that as they go, so goes the rest of the country—I think that is important and may be the most critical characteristic of a leader today. Because so often those are the people who are not going to be represented by a lobbyist or a very important vocal donor, so those are the interests that can get lost.” 

ANITA HILL
Attorney, Professor, Activist, Chair of The Hollywood Commission

 

“If you decide, ‘I will not stay in rooms where women are belittled; I will not stay in company where races, no matter who they are, are belittled; I will not take it; I will not sit around and accept dehumanizing other human beings’—if you decide to do that in small ways, and you continue to do it, finally you realize you’ve got so much courage. Imagine it: you’ve got so much courage that people want to be around you. They get a feeling that they will be protected in your company.” 

MAYA ANGELOU, 1928-2014
Poet, Writer, Civil Rights Activist

 

“Women view power differently. It’s not power over; it’s power with. It’s about empowering others. It’s not hierarchical; it’s circular.” 

JANE FONDA
Actress, Activist, Founder of Fire Drill Fridays, Cofounder of Women’s Media Center

“It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.”

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
First Female Secretary of State

 

“So many people are afraid to speak out; they’re afraid to ruffle feathers. But we have to. Every voice counts and that voice needs to be heard. And by not using your voice, you’re doing a disservice, not only to yourself, but to the community and the world at large. You have a responsibility to all of us. We need your help. I think girls and women are our heroes, and they need to start seeing themselves as our heroes and to come help us out of the mess that we’re in.” 

JENNIFER SIEBEL NEWSOM
Filmmaker, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of The Representation Project

 

“You can’t please everybody, so you might as well just speak the truth. That’s all your job is: to speak the truth. If nothing else because at least you know that you were authentic to yourself, and at the end of the day you have to basically answer to yourself, not anybody else. . . . I don’t think we can afford to be silent anymore. I think it is expensive to be quiet sometimes. I think it costs us more to be quiet than it does to speak up.” 

LUVVIE AJAYI
Writer, Speaker, Activist, Curator of LuvvNation

“I don’t think it matters who you are, where you come from, or where you want to make your impact. You can make your impact on your neighborhood block. You can make your impact on your local school board. You can make your impact on any issue that you think is important. But the promise is, because you think it’s important, it is important. Women’s views and their values are important, and as they communicate their views and values, they will change outcomes. And it could be as local as their block, or as important as a national debate. It’s important to be a voice for the cause that you’re fighting for. I think all of us can use our voices to be as powerful as they can be on any issue that we think is important.” 

KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND
New York Senator, Founder of Off the Sidelines 

 

“Take the tools and the skills and the resources of every kind that you have and go out, find something that you know is not fair, is not just, and begin to change it. In whatever way you know, in whatever way is appropriate for you, but don’t ignore it. Don’t think it’s somebody else’s job to change it. Confront it in your own way, and make it your job to make change.” 

ANITA HILL
Attorney, Professor, Activist, Chair of The Hollywood Commission

 

“My experience is, when I start flexing my activist muscles, when I start to do something that is bigger than me that is helping a bad situation, I tend to not be depressed anymore. I tend to feel empowered. So my advice is always do something to help.”

JANE FONDA
Actress, Activist, Founder of Fire Drill Fridays, Cofounder of Women’s Media Center

“I always go back to my grandmother’s advice to me, which was the first time I fell and hurt myself. She said to me, ‘Honey, at least falling on your face is a forward movement.’ And that came back to me many times as I failed to get the job or failed to do things perfectly or whatever. You have to be willing to be brave enough to risk falling on your face, to risk failing. Everything we do is about taking risks.” 

PAT MITCHELL
Media Executive, Author, Editorial Director of TEDWomen 

 

“Here’s one thing that I worry about: we’re not willing to make mistakes. We’re very nervous about making a wrong move and we worry that if we make the wrong move, then the consequences will mean that we never recover from them. It’s okay—in fact, it’s better than okay—to make mistakes, really big mistakes sometimes. So I would want to say to young women, ‘Hey, run for office, even if you think you’re going to lose. Take a hard class, even if you’re going to get a C in it. Go ahead and follow love, even if it doesn’t work out.’ We need just a little bit of courage to make mistakes, because that strikes me as where all the good stuff happens.” 

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY
Author, Public Speaker, Professor, Founding Director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center

 

“How have [my successes and failures] taught me? They are me. All my failures and all my successes as a mother and as a daughter and as a professional are me. I am a reflection of all of it. I reach out and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail. If I fail or get hurt, I pick myself up.” 

SALLY FIELD
Award-winning Actress, Director

“I think vulnerability is power. I like vulnerable and open people, and I think when you’re that way, you are actually being very brave. By presenting the real truth of yourself, who you really are, you change the molecules in the room.” 

AMY POEHLER
Actress, Writer, Producer, Cofounder of Smart Girls

 

“Be your authentic self. Authenticity is everything. Think of what you have to offer and how unique that is.”

NANCY PELOSI
Speaker of the House of Representatives

 

“There’s a saying that says, ‘To thine own self be true.’ I really think there’s so much more to that than meets the ear or meets the eye. I just think you really have to know who you are—come to terms with that, accept that and love that, and understand your talents, what your gifts may be, and how to develop them. If you’re comfortable with yourself and know yourself, you’re going to shine and radiate and other people are going to be drawn to you.”

DOLLY PARTON
Singer-songwriter, Founder of the Dollywood Foundation and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library

“It’s a courageous act to just be with whatever is happening at the moment—all of it, the difficult as well as the wonderful.” 

EILEEN FISHER
Fashion Designer, Founder and Chairwoman of EILEEN FISHER, Inc., Co-creator of the Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute

 

“Surfing your life is this idea of finding your center of balance, and then realizing that ‘nothing gold will stay.’ The sooner you realize that everything changes—that the things that happen to you are not you and that everything will be different all the time and you have such little control over the next wave, then you’ll just stay in the moment, find your gravity, and be open to what’s coming. Just don’t turn your back on the wave—it’s coming, no matter what; you can’t hide from it. So face the waves, try to catch one, and ride it.” 

AMY POEHLER
Actress, Writer, Producer, Cofounder of Smart Girls

 

“I would say that I’ve reached a really joyful stage that allows me to be fully present in every moment and to appreciate every person, every encounter, every moment in such a way that I feel so full of life.” 

OPRAH WINFREY
Media Mogul, Philanthropist

“Katharine Hepburn once said to me, ‘I’ve learned more from my failures,’ and it’s true: you learn. Somebody else said, ‘God doesn’t look for awards and accolades. God looks for wounds and scars.’ Most of us are wounded. I would wager that every single person carries wounds. And it’s through those wounds that we can blossom. 

Don’t give up that effort to learn from your wounds and your scars. All we can do is try to take it from here and learn and grow from it. We can’t undo the wounds; they’re there, and we just let them teach us and let the wounds make us better people.” 

JANE FONDA
Actress, Activist, Founder of Fire Drill Fridays, Cofounder of Women’s Media Center

 

“Some people are born with confidence. Some people are imbued with it based on their circumstance. But for a lot of us, confidence is borne of tragedy and disappointment, and the realization that we can still do more; it’s borne of resilience.” 

STACEY ABRAMS
Political Leader, Author, Founder of Fair Fight and Fair Count

 

“Look what you’ve already come through! Don’t deny it. You’ve already come through some things that are very painful. You have gone through some pain; it cost you something, and you’ve come through it. So at least look at that. Have the sense to look at yourself and say, ‘Well, wait a minute. I’m stronger than I thought I was.’” 

MAYA ANGELOU, 1928-2014
Poet, Writer, Civil Rights Activist

The majority of the above material is excerpted from Marianne Schnall’s books Leading the Way: Inspiring Words for Women on How to Live and Lead with Courage, Confidence, and Authenticity and Dare to Be You: Inspirational Advice for Girls on Finding Your Voice, Leading Fearlessly, and Making a Difference.

 

This story was produced in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation.

 

Marianne Schnall is a widely-published interviewer and journalist and author of What Will It Take to Make a Woman President?, Leading the Way, and Dare to Be You. She is also the founder of Feminist.com and What Will It Take Movements.