What Women Want (2026)

Every year I dedicate the service closest to March 8th, International Women’s Day, to the question of What  Women Want. Women, of course, aren’t monolithic and what we want isn’t an easy thing to capture.  Women are a lot of things. We’re the people who apply mascara without a mirror on the subway, who  wipe snot from a toddler’s nose, even if the toddler isn’t ours, who wear high heels and short skirts, who drink  pumpkin spiced lattes and text our friends when we get home so they know we’re safe. We’re the people who don’t wear make-up or scarves in our hair, who keep our distance from children,  especially the ones with runny noses, who look fabulous in combat boots and cargo pants, who like Gatorade and  ham sandwiches, whose friends are elderly neighbors or aren’t known much outside of Reddit. Some women are hot all the time, wearing layers they can shed through the day, opening windows to sleep  even in January, and some women are cold, no matter the season. We joke that my sister-in-law could be burning  in hell and she’d still reach for a sweater. 

For a century, public opinion has tried to capture What Women Want, tried to figure out where they’ll  spend money, who they’ll support in an election, how they’ll respond to a news story or policy or if they’ll adapt  to new technologies.  

But women want different things. 

The women in Afghanistan, the women who were born into freedom but were forced into burkas, not  allowed to leave their homes, to see doctors, to go to school, those women want their lives back. The women in Iran whose daughters were killed last week in their school as part of an aggressive show of  force by an insecure American president and incompetent Defense Secretary, want to roll back time so they can  change everything that happened that morning, keeping their daughters home and safe.  The women in Russia whose husbands were forced into the army occupying Ukraine, who have not heard  from their spouses, who do not know if their lovers are alive, want their families intact, want to hold the men they  love in their arms to whisper in their ears, “You’re safe.” 

The women in Ukraine want to stop being so strong, want to collapse into their fear and anger, want to  scream from the bottom of their powerlessness, howling into the black hole of injustice where their neighbors  have died, where their homes were destroyed, where their strength has been sucked from their bodies and  disappeared.  

The women of Congo want an end to sexual violence perpetrated on them as a weapon of war, a war they  did not start and cannot stop, a war that makes their pain a sign of victory, a war that is designed to humiliate and  traumatize girls whose mothers watch powerless, horrified, filled with rage and unsure if survival is worth the  price extracted. 

The immigrant women of Minneapolis want to go to the supermarket without the threat of being captured,  kidnapped, abducted, sent to an American detention center where they will live in a cell so crowded they can’t  even lie down to sleep, where they won’t be able to call home, where they will live hungry and afraid until they  are sent to countries on distant continents surrounded by unfamiliar languages and people with no way back. 

Young women want to walk to their apartments without worrying that the only thing keeping them safe is  the key they slid between two fingers and the performative smile they use to hide their vigilance and fear. Old women want to be seen by society, just to be seen, to know that their opinions, concerns, joys, wisdom,  experience is not ignored, not dismissed as irrelevant because their hands are covered in sun spots, and their  eyelids have fallen over their thinning lashes. 

Black women want to stop having to work twice as hard to get half as far, to stop having to prove  themselves even when they’ve reached the peak of their careers, have accomplished more, achieved more,  succeeded more than the men in their industries.  

And they’d like to stop having to be so resilient, stop having to go high even though the rest of the world  has gone so low, stop having to suck it up, turn the other cheek, be the bigger person, and to, every once in a  while, have the temper tantrum they so fully deserve. 

Women aren’t one thing. 

Some women are proud of their military sons, and some join up themselves, donning uniforms and  machine guns, itching to get to the front lines, and some want their husbands called to war, taking their violence  out of the house, maybe even with a secret hope that they never return. 

Some want to show their bellies, flat or round, and some conceal their whole bodies, neck to ankles. Some cover their heads and others dye their hair to match the rainbow. 

Some write their phone numbers on bar napkins, kissed in red lips, and slipped to the woman drinking a  beer with friends who seem to bore her. 

Some women carry lies on every breath. 

Some speak truth oblivious to consequence. 

Some make music.  

Some run long distances. 

Some own closets filled with shoes. 

Some are wondering how much longer they can go on. 

What do women want?  

We want to be able to balance five cups of coffee in a four cup tray.  

Or hold the phone, and a stack of mail, and a handbag, and the dog’s leash in one hand while trying to get  the keys into the lock with the other. 

We want not to be so weighed down by that tote bag heavy with a wallet, umbrella, a pair of heels for  when we get to the office, half eaten bags of smoked almonds, crumpled receipts that should have been turned in  three weeks ago, and the sadness of each unhoused person we walked by, even as we tried to distract ourselves  with thoughts of anything and everything else. 

White women are not one thing. There are white women enlarging their lips, breasts, butts and whatever  else they think will attract the male gaze, wearing red hats and t-shirts with arrows pointing to their crotches  letting Donald Trump know he can grab them any time, hoping to get onto a billionaire’s government subsidized space-ship while complaining that immigrants shouldn’t have access to services like emergency doctors when  their child is having an asthma attack. 

There are also white women blocking the exits to parking garages preventing ICE from leaving with their  nefarious motives, putting themselves between danger and the vulnerable, filling city streets with bodies and  signs, making visible the resistance of the majority to the degradation of our democracy, of our morality, of the  core of who we have claimed or maybe pretended we were, white women who risk their own lives for the sake  of others, who take the heat, redirect the attention, white women getting pepper-sprayed, getting murdered in front  of their wives in their own cars.  

Women want what people of every gender want. We want love and affection, we want softness, and  security, we want to know those we love are safe, we are safe, we will be safe even as we age, even as our bodies  become less capable, even if we disagree, even if we don’t have a lot of money or no money or no way of getting  money. We all want to live in a world without violence, without fury, without reckless politicians or greedy  billionaires or power hungry tech bros who feel disconnected from responsibility or planetary relationship. 

Women want what everybody wants, we want clean air and fresh water and the freedom to explore our  own humanness without interference.  

We want food that nourishes us and access to healthcare we can afford without worry. We want opportunity and relevance. 

All of us. Every one. Every one in this room, everyone on Madison Avenue, in New York City, and state,  everyone in this country, in every country. Everyone regardless of how they voted or who they think is stopping them from getting what they want or what they think they need to do to get it. 

Women want what men want, what non-binary people want, what trans people want. We want to live our  lives fully, feely, openly. 

We want joy.  

We want rest. 

We want music and dancing and reading and thinking and laughing. We all want laughing. We want survival without required resilience. 

We want recognition without a fight.

We want safety without compromise.  

We want to wear what we want, live like we want, do what we want without threat or fear or complaint or  excuse or criticism. 

We want to belong.  

And we want Love. Unapologetic, unmoored, unbound Love. Love that has been released from its  shackles, love that’s been liberated, love that is liberating, love that sets us free. 

That’s what women – and everyone else – wants.