Leadership Quote by Patricia Ireland

Power is framed here not as a reward for exceptional women, but as a birthright women have been trained to forget. Patricia Ireland’s verb choice - “organize” - matters: it rejects the comforting fantasy that change arrives through personal confidence or individual “breaking the glass ceiling.” Organization is infrastructure. It’s dues-paying, coalition-building, the unglamorous work of turning private frustration into public leverage. The sentence is less pep talk than strategy memo.

The most radical move is the inward pivot: “so that women see ourselves.” Ireland isn’t primarily arguing with men; she’s naming the internalized citizenship gap that makes exclusion feel natural. “See” signals perception as a political battleground. If you can’t picture yourself as a legitimate holder of authority, you’ll self-select out before anyone has to push you out. Her target is the cultural reflex that treats women’s leadership as an exception needing justification, while men’s is background noise.

“Entitled” lands with deliberate provocation. In a culture that uses entitlement as an insult (especially against women who ask for more), Ireland reclaims it as democratic language: rights, not favors; leadership as something owed, not granted. Coming from a major feminist organizer in the late 20th-century U.S., it echoes fights over workplace discrimination, reproductive autonomy, and political representation - arenas where “choice” rhetoric often obscured the reality that choices without power are just constrained options. The line insists that the revolution starts with a new self-concept, then moves outward into institutions that have long depended on women doubting their own legitimacy.