"When you get to the top, stay there and make sure other women join you"
About this Quote
Power, in Maureen Reagan's telling, is not a victory lap; it's a job assignment. "When you get to the top, stay there" carries the hard-nosed realism of anyone who's watched women get treated like temporary guests in rooms built by men. The phrasing isn't poetic, it's practical: don't just break the ceiling, plant your feet on the broken glass. In celebrity culture especially, visibility is both currency and cliff edge. You can be celebrated as a symbol one week and replaced by a fresher story the next. "Stay there" reads like a warning against being tokenized and then quietly ushered out.
The second clause is the kicker: "make sure other women join you". It's not a feel-good add-on; it's a demand for leverage. Reagan isn't describing personal fulfillment, she's describing a duty to convert individual access into structural change. The subtext is that women who "make it" are often pressured to prove they're exceptional by distancing themselves from other women. She flips that script: your legitimacy is measured by who you pull up, not who you outrun.
Context matters. As the daughter of Ronald Reagan, Maureen Reagan lived inside inherited networks of prestige, while also navigating the gendered expectations of political family branding: supportive, photogenic, non-threatening. Her line feels like a refusal to be only an ornament of power. It's a concise argument for solidarity that doesn't romanticize the climb; it treats the top as contested ground worth holding until it stops being rare for women to stand there.
The second clause is the kicker: "make sure other women join you". It's not a feel-good add-on; it's a demand for leverage. Reagan isn't describing personal fulfillment, she's describing a duty to convert individual access into structural change. The subtext is that women who "make it" are often pressured to prove they're exceptional by distancing themselves from other women. She flips that script: your legitimacy is measured by who you pull up, not who you outrun.
Context matters. As the daughter of Ronald Reagan, Maureen Reagan lived inside inherited networks of prestige, while also navigating the gendered expectations of political family branding: supportive, photogenic, non-threatening. Her line feels like a refusal to be only an ornament of power. It's a concise argument for solidarity that doesn't romanticize the climb; it treats the top as contested ground worth holding until it stops being rare for women to stand there.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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