Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Fearlessly Leaning In

The “What Would You Do if You Weren’t Afraid?” Tumblr is the latest project from Lean In, the global community born out of Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg’s book of the same title. The blog is inspired by studies showing that although women are graduating college with higher GPAs than their male peers, they are avoiding leadership roles and report being afraid to speak up. In response, the Lean In team asked women in and around New York City to tell them what they would do if they weren’t afraid.

So far, many of the answers are about work. Women report that they would “use their voices more in the workplace” and “ask for more money.” They would also quit their jobs and pursue more creative lives. They’d use the word “artist” and “writer” to describe themselves. Another trend are women who say that if they were not afraid they would live alone, travel alone and even leave the house alone at night. Others would call themselves feminists and speak undeterred about their political beliefs.

If you haven’t already, it’s worth taking a stroll through the blog; it is troubling and illuminating, and says a lot about the priorities of a capitalist society. A job, for example, should look a particular way: 9 to 5, at the very least; in an office; with a certain dress code; in a corporate culture (even for non profits), and with a salary at a certain level. It’s hard to take the leap that comes with living outside of this paradigm — it often means being without steady income and health insurance, as well as pushing back against assumptions about productivity and legitimacy.

The fact that women are afraid to do things alone doesn’t surprise me so much as it makes me feel deeply frustrated and sad. There are a lot of reasons to be afraid of living and traveling alone, one of them being that the reality of rape culture is apparently still up for debate.

The thing about fear is that it’s unpredictable. It can make you hide from the world — or push harder into it. It can trap us, hinder our memory and our reason, and convince us that it’s okay to treat each other badly. Naming it, saying it out loud, like in the Lean In Tumblr, is a good step. Maybe it’s a great step. But I suspect every woman who reads this Tumblr knows all about fears — those we speak about and those we don’t. I need more. I need a road map out of it.

So in case you were wondering, here are a few things I would do if I wasn’t afraid:

1.) Talk more openly and confidently about how the space I’m in now, as a secular Jew, is the most right I’ve ever felt and the most honest I’ve ever been with myself.
2.) Commit an act of civil disobedience that could result in getting arrested.
3.) Move to Israel for a few months, unintimidated by my exceedingly terrible Hebrew.
4.) Yell back at men who harass me and other women on the street.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.