By Juli Metzger—
MUNCIE, IN—We lost Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton just eight days apart. It’s been a hard stretch to sit with. Two women, two completely different playbooks, and yet both gave us a masterclass in how to live.
Parton was a songwriter first and foremost: thousands of songs across six decades, her words doing the work of getting a feeling exactly right, over and over. But she didn’t stop at the page. She backed that gift with her time and her treasure, in scholarships, in books mailed to children for free, in jobs. Steinem was a writer too, a journalist who spent decades in print, co-founding Ms. magazine to make sure women’s stories had a permanent home. Her particular gift was finding the words women already felt but couldn’t yet say for themselves and putting them into public language. Different words, different mediums, same instinct: both rose by lifting others rather than climbing over them.
I don’t have a magazine or a media empire or any musical talent whatsoever. Most of us don’t. But I know something about what it feels like to be lifted this way, because in 2016, I was named an Athena Award recipient here in our community.
I’d won professional accolades before, but it wasn’t that kind of award. It was something more. I suspect any recipient would tell you the same. Ten years later, I still think about what that recognition actually did. It wasn’t the beautiful statue or diamond necklace that meant so much, though that didn’t hurt. It was the way it named something I hadn’t fully claimed for myself: that the work I was doing quietly, in rooms nobody was watching, counted as leadership. It gave me permission to take my own impact seriously, and it introduced me to a network of women doing the same work in their own corners, many of whom I never would have met otherwise. That’s the part people don’t expect. The award doesn’t just honor a life of character, it multiplies it, because recipients go on to mentor, hire, and nominate each other.
That’s what Steinem and Parton understood in their own ways, at a much larger scale: that lifting someone isn’t a single transaction. It compounds.
In our community, the Athena is awarded by Women In Business Unlimited an organization created by a small cadre of Muncie feminists 30 years ago. It’s this network that’s given me far more than I ever expected, though I hold no formal position. I’m not on the board. I simply attend the monthly meetings. Anyone can. All of you should. It’s where women lift other women by including them around the perimeter of the room, showing off their businesses or their wares. It’s where panels talk about starting a business, doing it “scared,” staying motivated, believing in yourself. More than half the room, every month, are women entrepreneurs. I know because every meeting opens with introductions.
Athena nominees are judged by women who don’t live here, chosen intentionally so they carry no prior knowledge or bias toward any nominee. That’s part of what makes receiving the award mean so much.
Since then, I’ve nominated many women, and several have won. I often nominate women I know only in passing. I use the opportunity to get to know them a little better. It’s the women I’ve seen interact with others, who frankly are often going unnoticed.
And I’d bet that everyone reading this already knows someone who belongs in this conversation: the colleague who mentors without being asked, the neighbor who’s quietly the reason a program stayed alive, the woman whose name doesn’t come up but whose presence is felt. These are women who won’t talk about themselves. It’s up to you to notice them.
That’s the point of the nomination. Someone has to ask. Someone had to nominate me. Someone had to see me and the work I had been doing.
I’m asking now. Who will you nominate? Who will you lift? Nominations are open until Sept. 30 at wibumuncie.org/athena-catalyst
Besides being a 2016 Athena recipient, Juli Metzger is a retired journalist and journalism educator. She is a former publisher and newspaper editor. She is past chair for the Indiana Youth Institute and chair for Project Leadership, a local nonprofit whose mission is to end poverty. Today, she works with local nonprofits to tell their stories.
