Take The Lead:  A warrior women takes charge of her own destiny and follows opportunities as they arise.

 

What caught my eye in this image of a young woman was a determination and a love of adventure. She seems a bit of a rebel. I thought of the word “strong-willed”, often used to describe women negatively and how the same qualities in a young man might be described as “leadership” or “ability to take charge”. In this piece, she is warrior woman taking a road less travelled and in charge of her own destiny. I imagine her as she rides in the nearby mountains and experiences an exhilarating sense of freedom.
 

While life in the frontier west has been overly romanticized, it’s true that women discovered opportunities there to step outside their traditional roles. Women who travelled west were immigrants to territories where women, Indigenous, Mexican, and Spanish were already living with prestige and rights of their own. Perhaps living with the open prairies, big skies, and towering peaks of the west, made it possible for women to envision themselves in new ways. It’s true that the first 12 states to give women the vote were all in the west.