Dear John,
Thanksgiving has a way of slowing the world down.
The year, which so often rushes past in a blur of headlines and hurried days, finally pauses long enough for us to notice the people who walked beside us.
You are one of those people, and we are deeply thankful.
It has not been an easy year for women. There were those who tried to turn back the clock, to shrink the space women have fought so hard to claim. But you would not allow it. You helped keep the door open. You kept the light burning when it might have flickered out.
Movements are made of small, steady acts—a petition signature offered freely, a phone call made at the end of a long day, a conversation that refuses to let injustice go unremarked.
These are the unheralded gestures that shift the course of things.
As you gather with friends and family, and as the warmth of the holiday settles in around you, we hope you’ll take a moment to know this: you made a difference.
Because of you, the cause of women’s equality did not lose ground in a year that tried very hard to take it from us.
When Thanksgiving passes and we return to the work ahead—work that will ask much of us—we will walk forward together. Hope, after all, is not something that happens to us. It is something we build, hand in hand.
With gratitude that reaches well beyond the holiday,
Happy Thanksgiving,
