“There are a lot of mediocre men out there.” 

This is what I said to a former student who is now a co-worker when discussing some of the interesting men we have encountered in the education world, particularly some of those in leadership. 

I quickly countered my statement with of course, there are mediocre women in education too, and while I don’t always agree with everything he does, I respect my current building principal, but those mediocre men just always seem to have the confidence to demand a little more space, a little more voice, while some of the most amazing, hardworking, talented women I know, seem to make themselves small like a reflex. I once told one of the most amazing teachers I’ve ever worked with that if she were a man doing all that she does, they would name the library after her. I don’t know if any of the leaders in our school truly appreciated the amazing difference she was making for her students. 

Brilliant women quietly doing amazing things. Why does this seem like such a common scenario? Why in 2025, after supposedly so much progress, is it so hard as a woman to say I’m proud of my work? To speak with authority about her knowledge? I’ve watched my daughters as they’ve grown up and thought, if women could just hold on to all that energy and confidence that they have at five years old, they could take over the world. But it seems like somewhere around the abyss that is middle school, that confidence dulls, that reflex kicks in, and we’re asking if it’s okay to take up space, instead of claiming what we have earned.

Not too long ago, reflecting on myself and my perceived shortcomings, I revisited Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville and said to myself, how could you have listened to this throughout high school and be so pathetic now (it was a really down day). So many amazing women were creating music in the 1990s, across all genres. And these women were strong. I was a teenager in a small town back then, and my CD tower was filled with Tori Amos, The Dixie Chicks, Natalie Merchant, TLC and Erykah Badu. When we had to select a song that we thought reflected themes in Lord of the Flies for English class, I chose something from Juliana Hatfield’s Only Everything album. Armed with my CDs, I naively believed that as a society, we were moving towards something, something looking like equality, and everything would be great. 

Hah. 

Flash-forward to working in education, at least for the teachers and the support staff, a female-dominated profession, an older educator grabbed my leg under a table, a male administrator asked if I could keep up with him while wearing heels (yes, I could, they were pinstriped Mary Jane heels and I loved those shoes), and when pursuing an administrative job, after thinking I had made a good professional connection with someone in a neighboring county, he let me know what other connections interested him, and I silently vowed to never be in a room alone with him again. 

What was going on? Had Liz, Tori and T-Boz lied to me? The brighter future, being able to claim our space — what happened? Recently watching the Lilith Fair documentary, seeing what was going on in the background of this amazing collection of women in music, putting the music into the context of how toxic so much of 90s and early 2000s culture was, I found a little clarity. 

I think it’s easy to forget in 2025 how small media was in the 1990s. We didn’t have social media to discuss and dissect world events. Dan Rather brought us world news in 30-minute intervals. Seventeen and YM taught us how to be a woman once a month. You might discuss a story or event with your family or a few friends at school or at work, but there was not a constant analysis and discourse of everything happening with input from literally all over the world. So as I watched the documentary and saw Sarah McLachlan describing how she was told that you couldn’t have two women on a bill because nobody would come or how radio stations wouldn’t play two women back to back, I was shocked. We had the music in the 1990s, but few of us, through our narrow, filtered media, were cognizant of the full context of our world. 

The documentary showed me the context, including the disturbing backstory of the 1998 Grammy Awards. After the amazing success of this festival, Shawn Colvin, Paula Cole, and Sarah McLachlan, all Lilith performers and all Grammy nominees, were asked to perform together instead of being given their own performance space. In the documentary, they talked about what if they took a stand? Just walked, refusing to perform. In the end, they played along and performed, only for the story the next day not to be about their musical performance or the fact all three won Grammys that night, but Paula Cole’s underarm hair. 

The clips from the Lilith Fair press conferences were painful. Journalists pounded the performers with misogynistic questions, working overtime to trap the artists in contradictions. At one point, probably just exhausted from everything, Sarah McLachlan said yes, they’d consider having men perform. Thankfully, Emmy Lou Harris took her aside and told her not to change a thing, and stay true to the spirit of Lilith Fair. 

I knew none of this, a teenage girl who just loved the music and believed something great was happening. If I had known, if I could have gone online and read comments from all over the world analyzing what was happening and putting it into the context of the toxicity of society, maybe I wouldn’t have been so optimistic. Maybe I would have headed into college and a first job in education with a little more cynicism. 

I recently published a young adult novel that takes place in 1997 (Check it out here https://a.co/d/bJMW6qQ). While it is influenced by some events in my life, it is fiction, and in fiction, the writer can create her own world and write her own story, and in this world, I sent my protagonist Mara to Lilith Fair 1997. I remember reading about it and being amazed at the lineup but not daring to ask my parents if I could go. I know what the answer would be. Mara got to see the things I wish my teenage self could have seen, and those images challenged Mara’s view of what it means to be a woman, what it means to love who you want to love, and what it means to claim your identity. I let her see women so different from those of her church or her small town, and Mara found inspiration to use her voice, to claim her space, to see herself as something more than mediocre. As a writer, I could make Mara as brave as I wanted myself to be.

Watching that documentary as a 45-year-old mother, thinking about myself, my fictional character, the women on that stage, my daughters, where we’ve all been, where we are and where we are all going, I wondered about the spirit of that festival and that time that made small town girls believe in a better world. 

I think that spirit is still out there, somewhere. It’s still in classrooms at the high school where I work, a place where, year after year, I encounter remarkable young women who go out into this world and do amazing things. It’s in amazing leaders that I have seen some of my fellow teachers develop into in the last few years, and I hope it’s in my daughters, who I will remind every day that they are anything but mediocre.