Standing on the Backs of our Mothers

Inheritance, Freedom, and the Choice to Rise

It’s 2026 and millennial women like myself are the first generation of American women to experience, as a whole, life with the cage doors open instead of slammed shut. I won’t say that women have experienced true liberation; they haven’t. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I’m not going to go into them today. What I am going to go into is the opportunity that exists for us that did not exist for the many of the women that came before us. 

And I’m going to add a caveat: legally, these opportunities are now available. But in many cases, culturally and societally, they are not. 

In 1969 California was the first state to legalize no fault divorces. This means that my mother was a young girl when an American state began to address the issues surrounding the divorce process and people being locked into unhealthy marriages. Before this, divorce required that the party requesting divorce prove that the other spouse was ‘at fault’ for the dissolution of the marriage. Common at fault complaints could be adultery, excessive cruelty, abandonment or neglect, drunkenness, or fraud. But this fault had to be proven, so divorce was difficult and costly. My state of Utah wouldn’t follow suit until 1987. And New York wouldn’t finalize this law until 2010. 

At this same time, legally most women were not in a position to provide for themselves financially due to discriminatory practices within the national financial and employment systems. So if a woman was in a problematic marriage, she had to find a way to provide for herself if she left while the system was designed to ensure she could not.

In 1974 the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed, which finally made it illegal for financial institutions to withhold credit cards, bank accounts, and loans on the basis of gender. Until this time, these institutions often required the signature of a male counterpart — father, husband, or brother — to extend credit or financial resources, including a bank account, to a woman. 

Marital laws locked men and women both into marriages that may or may not have been functional, and were often abusive, while financial laws ensured extreme difficulty for the woman if the marriage dissolved. 

I said before that Millennial women are the first generation to have the cage doors opened. And this is because of culture. Though the laws began to remove barriers to women creating lives that they felt empowered in, culture did not catch up initially. In many ways, culture still has not caught up. 

The generations before me — my mother, my grandmother — were still locked in the cultural narrative of defined gender roles. The father was the spiritual head of the home and financial provider. The woman was the nurturing force within the home, she bore and raised children, and she kept the home orderly. In my mother’s case, she also did plenty of odd jobs to add a little extra income to the family finances, which was also quite common. 

Culturally it was acceptable for a woman to help provide financially but if she were to build a career, there would have been talk. I cannot speak to a single woman in my life that I was close to that had a career or was financially capable of taking care of herself in the event of a divorce or her husband’s demise. The women I knew that did have full time jobs also birthed child after child and somehow managed to maintain the home as well. Their husbands did not hold down consistent jobs. These men were fine with the wife managing literally everything. Yet they were still the head of the household and the women were still required to defer to them as the leaders. 

So though the laws were beginning to open up the possibility of freedom for women, because culture didn’t support that, many women found themselves ‘free’ while still enslaved. Those that worked 40 hours a week like the men were still required to fulfill all the wifely duties expected of them while their husbands were free to do as they wished. Those that didn’t work were expected to follow his rule and his directives. The women were meant to listen and follow. I will say, gratefully, that my parents disagreed with the suppression of women, and as a result they made sure I knew how to access my voice. 

The experiences of the women I know aren’t an isolated piece of my culture. They were part of American culture at large. This is why I say we are the first generation of women with the cage door open. We’re the first with the opportunity to fly. The wings of the generation that should have been able to fly were still clipped and for millions of them, their cage was still locked. 

I have had the privilege of working with women who broke the cage open, and I tell you there is no greater privilege. I have seen them face their demons and push against culture that tells them no. I have seen them stand and fight for others and bleed themselves dry to make this world better. I have witnessed as they broke through years of conditioning, shifted their entire way of being, tapped into the deepest wells of strength to keep going when it would have been so much easier to stop. I have stood shoulder to shoulder with greatness — with their feminine power rising to shatter their cages. The more I learn, the more I understand how high the mountain was that they had to climb to create what they’ve created. 

And now it falls on us. We are the first women in American history that  have the opportunity to shatter every glass ceiling. We are the first that have the ability to reject abuse and cultural narratives that require our diminishment for the comfort of the system. We are the first generation of women that has the power to change the entire narrative both historically and moving forward and make a better world for our children and grandchildren. 

Our generation, men and women alike, are the first in American history as a whole that has the opportunity to completely change the way marriage and relationships function as a whole, which in turn can massively shift society. It’s on us to choose whether we embrace personal growth, responsibility, and healthy relationships to ourselves and others, or whether we continue to outsource our beliefs of ourselves and the world to people that make the claim they know more than we do. 

I’m here to tell you the people that make that claim are wrong. Their beliefs of you don’t replace your intuition, your gut instinct, your intuitive guide and that connection to Source that exists within you. They do not get to position themselves between you and your God, your nervous system, your body, or any other thing that belongs solely to you. 

They are not the authority over your life. 

You are.

And for the first time in history, you can be. So to the women of my generation, we are standing on the backs of our mothers and grandmothers. We are living in the world the women before us fought for with their blood, their bodies, and their tears. 

Where will we carry this? 

How far will we rise?