When Women Rise Together: The Practice of Solidarity
Moving beyond comparison toward relationships rooted in truth, difference, and mutual flourishing
There is a particular kind of relief that comes when another woman does not ask you to become smaller in order to remain connected to her.
You can speak about what you are building without apologizing for your ambition. You can share your joy without disguising it. You can be uncertain, brilliant, grieving, powerful, tender, or still becoming—and she does not turn your aliveness into a measure of her own worth.
She does not need you to dim. She makes room for your light while remaining rooted in her own.
This is one of the possibilities of solidarity between women: not sameness, constant agreement, or unquestioning loyalty, but a relationship spacious enough for more than one woman to flourish.
Many of us long for this kind of sisterhood. Yet longing alone does not create it. Women, too, are shaped inside patriarchal, racialized, classed, and competitive systems. We can carry the very patterns that have wounded us. We may compare, exclude, silence, idealize, diminish, or withhold support—not because cruelty is inherent to women, but because belonging and safety have often been organized around scarcity.
Solidarity begins when we become willing to see those patterns without turning that recognition into shame.
The Inherited Fear of Another Woman’s Light
Across many cultures, women have been taught that there is limited room for their power.
There is one seat at the table. One woman can be admired. One can be chosen. One can lead without becoming threatening. Within this arrangement, another woman’s beauty, love, confidence, recognition, or success can feel less like evidence of possibility and more like evidence of our own insufficiency.
Comparison becomes a way of locating ourselves within the hierarchy. Competition becomes a strategy for securing approval. Silence becomes a condition of belonging.
These patterns are personal, but they are not merely personal. They live within what I call our **personal ecology**: the relationships among our memories, bodies, beliefs, cultures, institutions, and environments. A woman’s response to another woman is never formed in isolation. It may carry old experiences of exclusion, cultural rules about femininity, economic insecurity, family roles, racial or caste hierarchies, beauty standards, or the memory of what happened the last time she became visible.
Understanding this context does not excuse harm. It helps us interrupt it at the roots.
We can ask:
What taught me that her expansion requires my contraction?
Whose approval am I still competing for?
What becomes possible when neither of us has to disappear?
What History Leaves in the Body
History holds countless accounts of women punished for crossing the boundaries prescribed to them—for speaking, healing, studying, organizing, resisting, owning knowledge, practicing outside accepted religious authority, or simply becoming inconvenient to those with power.
The European and colonial witch persecutions were complex historical events shaped by religious authority, law, economics, local conflict, misogyny, and social control. Women were the majority of those accused in many regions, and some women also participated as accusers or witnesses within these systems.
That complexity matters. Patriarchy does not operate only through men. It is reproduced through institutions, customs, rewards, fears, and relationships—and people of every gender can be enlisted in maintaining it.
The legacy is not that women are destined to betray one another. It is that communities can learn to police women’s difference, and women may learn that proximity to power is safer than solidarity with someone marked as disruptive.
Even when we have no conscious memory of these histories, their cultural echoes remain recognizable:
Do not be too visible.
Do not make others uncomfortable with your truth.
Do not become the woman people talk about.
Do not stand beside her too openly, or the consequences may reach you too.
Naming this inheritance allows us to choose differently. We can respect the adaptations that once protected women while refusing to pass their most constricting forms to the next generation.
Sisterhood Is Not Sameness
bell hooks challenged women to move beyond an idealized sisterhood based solely on a shared identity or shared victimhood. Women do not all experience the world in the same way. Race, class, caste, sexuality, disability, citizenship, age, religion, and access to institutional power shape whose voice is welcomed, whose pain is believed, and whose leadership is supported.
Solidarity cannot require a woman with less power to ignore those differences so that everyone can feel united.
Nor does solidarity mean that women must approve of everything another woman does. We can name harm, hold boundaries, disagree, and ask for accountability without dehumanizing one another. Honest challenge can be an expression of care when it protects dignity rather than performing superiority.
True solidarity does not say, *We are all the same.*
It says, *Your life may be different from mine, and your freedom still matters to me.*
It asks us to remain curious when another woman’s experience disrupts our assumptions. It asks those with greater access to share space, credit, information, resources, and influence. It asks us to notice not only whether we have found our voice, but whose voice is still being interrupted around us.
This is how sisterhood becomes more than sentiment. It becomes a practice of relationship across difference.
When Another Woman Rises
Another woman’s expansion can awaken many feelings at once.
We may admire her and envy her. We may want to celebrate her while grieving something unlived within ourselves. We may feel inspired, threatened, hopeful, or left behind.
Solidarity does not require us to deny these responses. It asks us not to turn them into punishment.
Envy can become information. It may reveal a desire we have not permitted ourselves to name. Comparison can become inquiry. It may show us where our worth has become entangled with recognition, appearance, partnership, motherhood, achievement, or belonging.
The practice is not to become a woman who never feels jealousy. It is to become a woman who can meet jealousy without allowing it to govern how she treats another woman.
We can pause long enough to say:
Her life is not evidence that I have failed.
Her visibility does not erase me.
What I admire in her may be inviting something in me to awaken.
When one woman rises, she does not automatically open the way for all women. But she can choose to turn her access into a wider doorway. She can name the women whose work made hers possible. She can mentor without demanding imitation. She can advocate in rooms where decisions are made. She can create structures that do not require the next woman to survive what she survived.
That is how individual success begins to become collective change.
Solidarity as an Everyday Practice
Solidarity is built through ordinary decisions, repeated over time.
It can look like:
Celebrating another woman without making her achievement a judgment of your own life.
Sharing her work and naming her contribution clearly.
Speaking her name in rooms where opportunity, funding, recognition, or leadership is being discussed.
Refusing to participate in gossip designed to punish a woman for being visible, ambitious, direct, unconventional, or imperfect.
Believing a woman’s account long enough to listen carefully, without rushing to defend the person or institution with more power.
Offering honest feedback privately and with dignity rather than using public correction to establish superiority.
Paying women fairly, crediting their labor, and sharing access rather than offering only encouragement.
Remaining present when a woman takes a principled risk—even when association with her is not socially convenient.
Examining which women are absent from your circles, and why.
These acts are small enough to practice today and consequential enough to change a culture.
A Circle Wide Enough for Becoming
I know the fear of being seen. For years, I hid without fully recognizing that I was hiding. Judgment felt inevitable. Becoming “too much” felt dangerous. Concealment could look like humility while quietly functioning as protection.
As I began to reclaim my voice, I discovered that emergence is not only an individual act. We become through relationship. Some people will experience our growth as disruption; others will recognize it as permission to meet more of themselves.
I now dream of communities in which every child can witness women relating without ranking one another—women who can lead and listen, shine and make room, repair after conflict, honor difference, and refuse the idea that only one of them can belong.
This does not mean creating perfect circles without tension. It means creating circles capable of truth, accountability, restoration, and growth.
A shift begins each time a woman chooses celebration over diminishment, curiosity over assumption, and shared power over proximity to hierarchy.
We do not rise together by pretending that we have never wounded one another.
We rise together by becoming responsible for what we carry forward.
A Reflection for Your Journal
Bring to mind one woman whose presence, work, or becoming awakens something strong in you. Without judging the feeling, ask:
What arises in my body when I witness her visibility or success?
What story does her life activate about my own worth, belonging, or possibility?
Is there something I admire in her that I have not yet given myself permission to embody?
Where might I be withholding recognition, support, or generosity because comparison is present?
Which women experience less access or safety than I do, and how could I practice solidarity without speaking over them?
What is one concrete act of support I can offer today—with sincerity, consent, and no expectation of return?
Let the answer be specific. Send the message. Share the work. Name the contribution. Offer the introduction. Defend the boundary. Make the room more spacious.
Not because women owe one another unconditional agreement, but because a more life-giving world becomes possible when we stop treating another woman’s flourishing as a threat to our own.
May we become women who do not ask one another to shrink.
May we build circles wide enough for truth, difference, and becoming.
May we rise—and widen the ground beneath us as we do.
With Love,
Salana Aura.
Scholar’s Note
In *Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics* (2000), bell hooks writes that “sisterhood is concretely possible, that sisterhood is still powerful.” Her chapter “Sisterhood Is Still Powerful” presents solidarity not as automatic unity among women, but as a political and relational practice requiring women to confront sexism, racism, classism, and the desire to dominate one another.