Creativity Quote by Holly Near

“The women’s movement completely changed attitudes all over the world in ways we’ll never be able to count” lands like a singer’s aside between verses: a plainspoken line that smuggles in a radical claim. Holly Near isn’t tallying policy wins or landmark court cases. She’s pointing at the quieter, harder-to-measure revolution: the shift in what people feel entitled to want, to refuse, to name out loud.

The phrasing matters. “Completely changed attitudes” is sweeping on purpose, a pushback against the perennial urge to treat feminism as a niche interest group or a checklist of reforms. Near’s “attitudes” signals culture: dinner-table assumptions, workplace expectations, the texture of relationships, who gets believed, who gets interrupted, what counts as ambition. That’s the real arena where a movement either takes or doesn’t. And she insists it took.

Then comes the slyest part: “ways we’ll never be able to count.” It’s a defense against the demand for metrics, the familiar rhetorical trap where liberation has to justify itself in numbers. Near’s subtext is: if you only credit what fits in a spreadsheet, you miss how social change actually works. The women’s movement made new kinds of lives imaginable, and imagination doesn’t audit cleanly.

Context sharpens the intent. Near came up in a music-and-activism ecosystem where songs were organizing tools and memory devices, carrying politics into rooms that wouldn’t read manifestos. This line honors that grassroots diffusion: the movement didn’t just pass through legislatures; it seeped into language, humor, desire, and self-perception. The uncountable is the point.