This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The Small And The Mighty with Sharon McMahon | 247

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Why have we become so obsessed with celebrity and influence? It seems we’re infatuated with people in positions of power, with politicians, and with the uber-wealthy. Are they really the difference-makers we believe them to be? In this episode, Sharon McMahon talks about the change-makers that she calls the “small and the mighty”. Sharon is America’s favorite government teacher and proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. In her book THE SMALL AND THE MIGHTY: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, Sharon discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time. She also hosts the award-winning podcast,  ”Here’s Where It Gets Interesting”, and is the author of The Preamble, a Substack newsletter about politics and history.  The change agent, the innovator, the reformer, the disruptor, the mover and the shaker, the get shit done leader might not be on the ballot – it might be someone in your life, at work, in your community. You might be raising them, and it might even be you. So be mighty – regardless of the position you’re in. Connect with Sharon:  Website: https://sharonmcmahon.com/  Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709748/the-small-and-the-mighty-by-sharon-mcmahon/  The Preamble: https://thepreamble.com/  Like what you heard? Please rate and review

I am Nicole Kalil, and unless you've been living under a rock or are practicing extreme denial, you are likely very aware that the United States is in an election year. And I have to tell you, I'm not sure these years bring out our best. And while there are lots of opinions and beliefs and hopes and even some foaming at the mouth about who we think should be president, it makes me wonder, are we taking things too far? I'm not saying the choice doesn't matter or that there aren't consequences. I don't believe that at all. But are we putting far too much focus on two very specific politicians and not enough on

ourselves and the everyday people who surround us? The reality is only 45 men have been president in this country's history. And I bet you can't tell me all that much about them, their policies, their beliefs or actions outside of a small handful. Some have been great leaders. Some have not. And most, we have no idea. But I bet if we looked around, we could find far more and far better leaders from history, as well as currently, in other roles and in other places. I bet we could find more people who have

not been presidents than who have, that have made a greater mark, left a more impactful legacy, or made a larger contribution to the world. Even more than that, I bet there are people who have contributed to your life in some meaningful way whose name you don't know or who isn't being talked about in the news or on any of the medias. Why have we become so obsessed with celebrity influence? And I put that in air quotes because I worry that we become more concerned with being, but rather that we may have over-rotated. And also, in our effort to prove how right we are about our opinions and our choices as it relates to these people, that we've begun to sacrifice the values we claim to espouse. So on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, I've invited Sharon McMahon on to talk about what she calls the small and the mighty. Sharon is America's favorite government teacher and proves that the most remarkable Americans

are often ordinary people who didn't make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators, not the aristocrats, but the school teachers. In her book, The Small and the Mighty, 12 Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement, Sharon discovers history's unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time. She also hosts the award-winning podcast, Here's Where It Gets Interesting, and is the author of The Preamble, a Substack newsletter about politics and history. In all that she does from her work to her philanthropic initiatives, Sharon encourages

us all to become world-changing humans. So Sharon, I have to start by saying how grateful I am that your work doesn't focus on the famous and the celebrities and the politicians, but those everyday people who are doing extraordinary things. So thank you for doing that and for being here. My pleasure. Thanks so much for that great intro. Thanks for inviting me. My pleasure. All right. My first question, and I have many, is who are the small and the mighty? Can you give us some examples and maybe a bit about the criteria you use to identify them. Well, there are many small and mighty people, and I could probably fill many books with their stories, but I picked 12 people from history who

I feel like really do not get their just desserts. I refer to them as the auroras of history, the people who, you know, our view of them is eclipsed by these dominant sons of the wealthy and the famous and the people with all the ships and the tanks and the billions of dollars whose name grabs all the headlines. But if we, if we stop to look, uh, there is so much beauty to be found in their stories. I feel like we should spend more time looking for them. We should get up early and look for the auroras of history. So a few examples I can give you, if you'd like to hear a few examples of people who I feel like really fit this criteria of the small and the mighty are people like Virginia Randolph. Virginia Randolph was

a world-class educator. And I mean that literally. She educated people around the world. Her work deserves to be in the pantheon of educational greats. She is regarded in educational circles as as important as, say, a Booker T. Washington. But yet she's not in the books that our children are reading, by and large. Right. You know, maybe some people who live in Henrico County, Virginia, might recognize her name. But chances are really good that you don't. And Virginia Randolph had came from nothing. Her parents were enslaved. Her parents were formerly enslaved, I should say. She began working as a child. Her father died when she was a very young girl. Her mother was trying to support her four

daughters. And even her young children, including Virginia, had to go to work at a young age. So Virginia goes to school and is not successful in school. In fact, the teacher sent messages home to her mother. Like, I don't know what's wrong with Virginia. She just cannot learn how to read. And she really, really struggles in school. And after school, she has to go to her job, even at age seven, to be able to earn extra money. Well, what Virginia does with her life is continuing today to impact Americans. We just may not realize it.

She goes on to develop an incredibly important educational system that is adopted throughout the entire American South and over 1,000 school districts around the American South and also internationally. Historians of the time said that the phrase, I've hired Virginia Randolph as the teacher, needs to be like on the bronze plaques. So it's stories like her that I just really love being able to share. I'm asking this question because I host a podcast called This Is Woman's Work. Do you find, and I'm sure this is true regardless of gender, that there are small and mighty people, but is there any credence to the idea that some of the people we aren't hearing about are women and the reason we're not hearing about

them is because of their gender, possibly at the highest level above everything else. Is that fair to say? Okay. Totally. For a variety of reasons. One, of course, is that women socially during the early part of this country, and even still continuing today in some ways, women were not given the opportunities that men were, of course, right? Like they didn't even have legal rights to own things of their own. In some states, if your husband died, you weren't even entitled to your familial possessions. And I write about this in the book. If you wanted anything other than your family Bible, you would have to, as a widow, buy it back from the state of Illinois,

for example. So women had no, had few legal rights. So that's part of it. And then also a huge part of it is who has history been written by? You know, history has been written by the men with the most ships. It's been written by the people with the most dollars or the people who admire those people who have not spent time looking for the accomplishments of people outside of those headline-making stories. Agreed. So I guess my next question is, I started by kind of describing more traditional roles of power, right? These are the people we are hearing about. And you say that the best Americans are not always the famous or the powerful or the perfect. I don't think anybody's perfect. So tell us more about that. Do you actually think there are more of these small and mighty people than there are the people we know about? It's a very fair

characterization by orders of many magnitude, right? If we were to say, if I were to say, Nicole, who has had the biggest impact on your life? Would you say George Washington? No, right? Would you be like, you know what? It's Grover Cleveland. Biggest impact on my life. No, no. I'm going to start saying that though, just for fun going forward. Yeah, right. John Adams is the person I would name. Of course, these are figures from history that we recognize and we're not saying they did not contribute or do anything important.

That's not the position I'm taking. But in terms of the number of people that have been impacted by the small and the mighty who would say, because of her or because of him, my life was changed. Those are the people who deserve to be recognized and are not. They're not being recognized for their contributions. And, you know, I really push back against this idea that great Americans are people of the past, right? They're the people in the books. They're the people with the statues of the people with the marble things and the headstones than the, you know, like, yes, some of those are great Americans, but great Americans live

today. And the good news is we can choose to be one of them if we want to. It doesn't require fame and fortune. It doesn't require you to have a specially shaped rocket that goes to space. Do you know what I mean? And I think we need to redefine what greatness actually is. You know, as you were talking, it brought to mind, I was at a conference once and somebody asked like for you to write out your family tree as far back as you can go. And basically the gist of it was the vast majority of us didn't know the names of anybody past our grandparents.

Some people knew a couple of great grandparents, but that was really it. But the reality is those people have had great impact on us individually in the world. You know, they passed down beliefs and values and culture and so, so many things. So I kind of went historical again on that, but I agree with you completely. I think we are surrounded by people who want to make a difference, who are making a difference, who, you know, are changing lives individually and collectively. And it's just, I think maybe a responsibility on our part to go looking or to pay attention and not get sucked in to what, who Instagram says we should be paying attention to. If we spend all of our time paying attention to, say, the 15 elected officials that we could name off the top of our heads,

right? For some of us, it's more. Some of us, it's probably less. But if we spend all of our time and attention paying attention to what this presidential candidate says or that presidential candidate says, we are missing the good stuff, right? And why would we want to spend all of our life, our two short lives, why would we want to spend our two short lives honing in on what somebody said that one time into a microphone on Twitter? Do you know what I mean? Nobody gets to be 99 years old and is like, wow, I really should have left some more sick burns in the comments on Facebook. That's not a thing you will regret, right? But you will be recognized someday for what you did contribute. And, you know, let us be people who leave a legacy for our descendants instead of focusing all of our time outward on what other people are doing.

Yes. Okay. Now I have to imagine some people are thinking, as we think about voting, like there is that feeling of like, okay, my vote doesn't matter. It's just one of, you know, bazillions. And those of us not in power or without massive influence can often feel powerless or like what we do doesn't make all that big of a difference. How do we fight against that within ourselves? That's a really great question and one that I hear really frequently. And I think it helps so much to remember that if we are waiting for a feeling of hope, which is what this hopelessness is what you're describing, right? Like what I'm doing doesn't matter. It's a sense of hopelessness. If we are waiting for a feeling of hope to descend upon us in a beam of light from the heavens, or we are hoping to wake up one morning with the hope that floods our bodies, then we are going to keep on waiting. And that is because hope is not a feeling that we wait to experience.

Hope is a choice that we make. And when we choose to have hope, despite current circumstances, that is the place from which we can begin to make a real difference. That is the place that all of the people who are profiled in this book said, I don't know what tomorrow holds, but I am going to continue to move forward with hope. Because we cannot make any kind of positive change without hope that what we are doing will someday matter. And I can promise you that there were many people in this book who woke up in the morning and their lives were in shambles. Their lives were in absolute shambles. Everything had been taken from them. And this is true of more than one person in the book.

They have lost literally everything. And they continue to choose to move forward with hope. And that choice, not the feeling that we experience, that choice is what has allowed them to impact the course of history. And that's true for truly each and every one of us. So the advice that I would give to somebody who is feeling like my vote doesn't matter, nothing I say will make a difference is to stop waiting for that feeling of hope and to start choosing it instead. So I love that for so many reasons, but one of them is that I often, so I talk mostly about the topic of confidence and I often say confidence isn't a feeling, it's a choice. And so I think

that that's so true with a lot of these things that we think of as feelings, but the reality is we have everything to say about it. Choose it until you become it, right? You choose hope until the feeling catches up. If you're waiting for the feeling, we often will, just like waiting to feel ready. We don't get ready by waiting. We get ready by being in action. I also love what you said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's sort of a, this is the way we get anything done. It's one foot in front of the other towards what matters most, right? That's it. That's the deal. We just get into small action. I think sometimes people think they need to see the master plan, right? They need to know where

they're going from A to Z. So let me ask you, what would your advice be about where to start? Listen, almost everybody you're going to read about in this book had zero master plan. They literally were like, well, I'm going to board a train and I'm going to ride it till I run out of money. I mean, quite literally, that's a person in this book. So much of what has been accomplished, important things that have been accomplished in history have been done by people with no master plan, no training. Maybe they were born with the wrong credentials. They were born with a face that other people rejected because they were the wrong ethnicity or the wrong race.

They were born the wrong gender. And they just refused to be limited by what their life circumstances were. They just refused to sit in a sense of hopelessness and refused to allow the enormity of the problem, refuse to allow that to make them inert, refuse to allow that to make them feel so overwhelmed that they are just paralyzed with indecision. So one of the big lessons from history is that, number one, there's no one coming to save us, right? There is no one coming. It's us. We are the people. When women worked for over 80 years to gain the right to vote in the United States, and for Black women, it was longer than that in the South. Many Black women did not gain the right

to vote in the South until after the Voting Rights Act was passed in the 1960s. The 1960s, okay? So there's nobody out there, no mythical person on a white horse who was like, I have arrived with the plan, right? There's nobody who's like, the plan has arrived. So we need to let go of this idea that there's somebody out there with the plan and start putting one foot in front of the other. These are pregnant teenagers. These are the children of formerly enslaved people. These are people who are put in, who are imprisoned for absolutely no reason, who had no master plan, but refused to allow that to paralyze them from doing all the good they could with the resources they had available to them. So yes to all of that. And it feels like a good time for a story. Can you give us an example from the book that exemplifies what you're talking

about? There's a woman that I profile. She's one of my favorite people in the book. Her name is Septima Clark. And she was born in 1898 in South Carolina. She becomes a teacher at a time when Charleston, South Carolina did not allow black teachers, even in schools that served the black community. No black teachers were allowed. So she's forced to get a job on one of the barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina. And when she gets there, her school is literally, it's one room, it's falling down, it has no supplies, of course, and it doesn't even have glass in the windows. So in order to keep the bugs out, and of course, we all know that the bugs are copious in South Carolina. In order to keep the bugs out, they'd have to close the

shutters. And the children are literally having school in the dark. She's paid next to no money. But the school is called Promise Land School. And I can promise you that she did not look around that school each day and think, wow, I am really changing the course of history here. Those are not the feelings she had. Throughout the course of her lifetime, she is almost killed multiple times. She is falsely arrested. Somebody tries to firebomb her house. She is fired from her job. Her husband, she discovers, has an entire secret second life and a second wife and second children. One of her babies dies from an undiagnosed birth defect. She becomes the single mother to the one child she has that does live. She becomes so depressed that she is moments away from committing suicide. Okay, so these are not life circumstances that any of us would likely

be willing to trade. We would not look at that and be like, wow, that is a hero in the making. And this is, of course, at a time when therapy doesn't exist, when antidepressants don't exist. We would look at her life circumstances and think, she has every right to be depressed. She has every right to just sit in a pit of despair. And yet, what she did was decide, okay, well, I've been fired from this job. I'm going to do what I can. And what she ends up doing is creating something called Citizenship School, in which she begins to teach other Black adults who were deprived of the opportunity of education, teach them how to read, how to vote, how to write a letter to your elected official,

how to do basic math, so that they too can become involved citizens. And this idea of citizenship school spreads around the South and it moves huge numbers of members of the Black community onto the voter rolls who then can become involved members of society. But here is the kicker, is that this woman, Septa McClark, goes on to teach a woman named Rosa Parks, then of course goes on to change the course of history. Senator McClark did not wake up in the morning and really think, wow, I'm a world changer out here.

But without her persistent, continued effort to orient herself toward hope that what she was doing was just going to keep making a difference, we would not have the civil rights movement as we know it. So that's just one tiny example that I hope people will take away, that what we do actually really does matter. Yeah. Perfect, small but mighty example. Thank you. One of the things you say in the book that I'm really intrigued about, I agree, and I'm just intrigued on your perspective, is that we must sometimes work within the system before we can tear it down. And I feel like it's really hard when we think about movements or revolutions or things like that. You've got a lot of polarity in how people think

it should be approached and lots of name calling and things like that. Why do you believe and in what cases do you believe it's important that we work within the system in order for us to change it? Listen, I get the desire sometimes for like, let's just tear this whole thing down and start over. It's too broken. It's too corrupt. It's too terrible, it started wrong. You know, like, I really do understand the inclination, this notion of like, I don't want to wait for justice. I don't want to work a little bit each day. We're deserving of justice now, right now. So I do, I want to acknowledge that I do understand this, you know, propensity toward wanting massive systemic change right now. So this is not a value judgment against people who feel that way because I share your sentiments. but world history has occurred because of the efforts of people with incremental progress. Incremental progress is sustainable progress. This is just human nature, right? Anybody who

has tried to lose weight, they'll tell you, you can't lose 20 pounds overnight. You have to do it a little bit each day and you have to keep at it and you have to keep working at it. And if you want to sustain it, you have to do the following things. That's just one example of how human nature is. If you become sober, you have to work at your sobriety each day. If they just drop you off at a detox facility, you're going to leave and go right back to what you were doing. So change, lasting change requires concerted daily effort. So I think it's important to acknowledge that these systems that we have to work within can be changed. a power vacuum and somebody has the chance to seize power that is actually worse than what we might be imagining now, there's a big danger in a revolutionary mindset in some cases. It creates a power vacuum that allows the potential for something worse to take hold.

And we see that around the world. The United States has been involved in a few of those scenarios. Somebody worse takes over. And we don't want that situation either. Democracies thrive when people work together to change things. And that often requires an acknowledgement of what is, an acknowledgement of reality. So it's not, I understand the desire for immediate systemic change. I understand it. But I also am asking you to zoom out and look at the big picture of if we want this to change for the better for the long term, we have to work with reality.

Very well said. I would imagine when we think about change makers or people who do really big impactful things, a component of that is wanting to be remembered or legacy. And I feel like all of us want to leave some sort of legacy. Yeah. And so your team actually sent this question in advance and I thought it was a great question. I wanted to ask, who do you believe history will remember with kindness? Or maybe said another way, what should we be thinking about when we think about leaving a legacy? That's such a great question. I love this. I love this because if we think about what do I want my legacy to be, that allows us to then reverse engineer. What kind of person do I need to be now?

So that someday at my funeral, my descendants are like, dang, Nicole was an incredible grandmother. She was an incredible community member. I was impacted by her. If we think about what we want our legacies to be, we can then act accordingly, right? So this idea of legacy, of who will history smile kindly upon, it is almost always the people who are known for lifting other people up, not the people who made a career of putting people down, right? History smiles far more kindly on Abraham Lincoln, who certainly made mistakes as all people do, but who had made his mark by lifting people up. And it smiles far less kindly on Andrew Jackson, who made a career by putting people down. So that's one thing that I think is important to keep in mind. Great leaders are known for who they lift up and not who they put down. And the other thing that I always think of when it comes to legacy is that legacy incorporates all aspects of your life, including your digital legacy. It includes the direct messages that you're sending to people. It includes the comments that you're leaving online. And who we are in

secret is who we really are. And I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that often when, you know, like in the future, when we die, our descendants will be likely to gain access to all of our social media accounts. And so will historians of the future. In the same way that we now have the letters written between John Adams and Abigail Adams, we have these 1600 letters between them. Historians of the future are going to be able to read our direct messages. They're going to be able to read, you know, they're gonna be able to go to Facebook, file a historic records request, and get everything we ever posted on Facebook, including what we posted onto what we thought were anonymous accounts. So that's the other thing that I always think of is like, who I am in secret

is who I really am. What do I want people of the future to know about me? Let me reverse engineer that so I act accordingly. I am so glad I asked that question. I have never thought about that, like from the lens of what people will see and learn about me in the future. And I could not love this phrase more. Who we are in secret is who we are. I think of that as a call to action for myself and for everybody. I kind of said that in the intro is it's like in our effort to support one belief, how often we're sacrificing another. So

the example I give like with the elections going on is I am a very committed person. How do I demonstrate commitment while also demonstrating kindness? Like, so commitment to my beliefs and what I think is right, but also kindness to others, especially those who don't share those same beliefs, because both of those values are important to me. And both of those would be part of the legacy that I want to leave. And so how quickly in the face of something that, you know, pisses us off or like tugs at our emotions, we quickly will sacrifice one in the face of the other.

So all that to say, now I'm really starting to think about all the things I've ever written or put out there. All the DMs I forgot that I sent in the year 2011. Do you ever go on Facebook and the Facebook reminds you of something you posted and you're like, who was I eight years ago? This is bananas. That happens to me all the time. Bananas. Oh my gosh, totally. I love the memories. Yeah. I was actually way funnier like 15 years ago. I'm like, how do I get that back? But yes, I love the memories. And yeah, such a fascinating conversation. Sharon, thank you for writing this incredible book, for taking the time and energy and passion

to find and put out there for all of us to know and see these small and mighty heroes. And I know people listening are going to want to learn more. So again, the book is called The Small and the Mighty. And Sharon's website is SharonMcMahon.com. We'll put that and all the other links in show notes. Sharon, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Nicole. Okay, friend, a loving reminder that you can love your country without loving everything about it. You may not love its past or its current cast of characters. You may love its ideals, but not some of its policies. Loving something and seeing it for what it is, taking the good with the bad,

and giving it the gift of high expectations is what love is. At least that's how it looks in my mind. And if you think your candidate is all good and the other is all bad, then friend, you aren't thinking because nobody, and I mean nobody, is perfect. And I'd never want somebody who hasn't made mistakes and overcome them, who hasn't changed their mind in the face of new information, or who hasn't risked and failed to be our leader or even a leader. So vote, of course, be passionate, committed, and values driven. And remember the change agent, the innovator, the reformer, the disruptor, the mover, and the shaker, the get shit done leader might not be on the ballot.

It might be someone in your life, at your work, in your community. You might be raising them. It might even be you. So get out there and be mighty, regardless of the position you're in, because that is woman's work.