08/21/2025
💛 Two horsewomen enter the barn.
One is shaped by patriarchy.
She didn’t design it — she was handed it.
And like so many before her,
she carried the cost of belonging:
to believe that control is competence,
that obedience is respect,
that dominance is leadership.
It was never her truth,
but it became her inheritance.
And because the horse yields,
the story continues —
familiar enough to feel safe,
entrenched enough to feel unshakable.
But familiarity is not truth.
It is only an echo.
And the echo is not our destiny.
—
The other is shaped by science.
She didn’t inherit it — she chose it.
Not a story passed down unquestioned,
but a practice built on observation,
tested through evidence,
strengthened by replication.
Science taught her that behaviour is never random —
always meaningful,
always with purpose,
always shaped by consequences.
For her, evidence matters.
It draws a clear line between cooperation and coercion,
between quiet that is chosen
and quiet that is imposed.
She knows that behaviour understood can be resolved,
while behaviour suppressed only waits to return.
She knows that learning built on choice is what creates trust.
That autonomy transforms “I must” into a willing “I will.”
That true partnership can only exist
when the horse is free to say no.
—
Where patriarchy demands toughness,
science asks for humility.
Where ego clings to control,
science insists on clarity.
Our choices shape not just horses, but the young girls who watch us.
Patriarchy teaches them that hardness is strength,
that silence is respect,
that to belong they must shrink their softness.
Science shows them something different:
that strength can look like listening,
that respect can grow from choice,
that trust — not toughness — is the real measure of leadership.
—
Because patriarchy didn’t die when women entered the horse world.
It dies when we stop measuring our worth within it by toughness at all.
This weight was never ours to carry.
It asked us to shrink, to harden, to obey —
but it was never our truth to live.
We were never meant to be less.
Our softness was never weakness.
And our horses were never meant to be conquered.
That inheritance was handed to us.
But it does not have to remain with us.
—
Here is where the choice stands:
to keep echoing what was,
or to step forward into what should have been.
For ourselves.
For our daughters.
For the horses who walk beside us.
✨ This is In Her Lead.
