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One Friday morning I was reading the newspaper as I do every morning, and it suddenly struck me that the times had changed right before my eyes. I said to my husband, “There are women at every level of government and business and entertainment. They are skilled, experienced, and powerful. That didn’t used to be the case, when I was growing up. Now they’re everywhere!” He said, “I’m glad you’re seeing that.”

Skim over the list of female leaders just from that one morning’s news:

Letitia James, Attorney General for the State of New York

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany

Mary Louise Kelly, NPR interviewer

Jena Griswold, Colorado Secretary of State

Susan E. Rice, diplomat, policy advisor, and former US ambassador to the UN

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan Secretary of State

Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association

Ellen V. Futter, President of the American Museum of Natural History

Stacey Abrams, candidate for Governor of Georgia and founder of Fair Fight Action

Ayanna Presley, Representative of Massachusetts

Charlene Carruthers, activist

Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota

Jenny Schuetz, urban economist at the Brookings Institute

Abigail Staudt, lawyer with the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland

And then I came across an article describing a leader stepping down after a lifetime of striving: Marian Wright Edelman, 81 years old, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, retiring after nearly a half century. She wasn’t stopping her work. She had been protesting police brutality all summer along with millions of others. About the protesting, she said, “It felt like everything I’ve been living all my life. You see yourself again at 17, 18 and 19….”

Edelman could have sounded discouraged. After all, most of the issues she was protesting sixty-some years ago still exist. And yet to me, that Friday morning, she was speaking a different message: Don’t lose heart; we’re making progress. Don’t stop agitating, and don’t give up.