This week marked an important moment in our College community as we commissioned our 2027 student leaders. At the Commissioning Ceremony, I reflected on what leadership means at Brigidine – not simply leadership that comes with a title or a badge, but the kind that comes from knowing who you are and having the courage to live those values with purpose.
Recently, sadly, the world lost Dolly Parton. Dolly spent decades being told she was too much – too glamorous, too country, too outspoken to be taken seriously. Her answer was never to shrink. She said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” That is not vanity. That is leadership.
Dolly built a business empire and funded literacy programs that have provided more than 200 million books to children around the world, all while remaining unapologetically herself.
The world also recently lost Gloria Steinem, the American journalist, writer and activist who became one of the leading voices of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s. Gloria taught us something just as important: that leadership means using your voice for people who don’t yet have one. She reminded us that the story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to every woman who has spoken up for herself and for others.
These two women led in very different ways, but both demonstrated the courage to use their voice, stand by their values and create opportunities for others. That is the kind of leadership I want for each of our students: not leadership that waits for permission, but leadership that speaks because it must.
When we talk about leadership, we often picture something visible – standing at the front, being elected to a position or wearing a leadership badge. But some of the most important leadership happens in the quiet, ordinary moments nobody is watching: who we choose to sit with, what we say about a friend when she is not in the room, whether we make room for someone or close the circle around them.
As a society, we are rightly concerned about negative behaviours among adolescent boys at the moment, and those conversations matter. But as a community of women and girls, we must also be willing to look honestly at ourselves.
Unhealthy behaviour among girls is real, too, and it deserves to be named plainly: excluding someone, bullying – including the quiet kind that can happen online – criticising how someone looks, or gossip dressed up as concern. None of this is leadership. In fact, it is the opposite: the use of social power to make yourself feel bigger by making someone else feel smaller.
The leadership we hope to cultivate at Brigidine is different. It is leadership that brings strength and gentleness together.
That is not a new idea for us. It is, quite literally, what our College has asked of its students since its founding: Fortiter et Suaviter – strength and gentleness, held together rather than traded off against one another.
Our heritage gives us a strong foundation: a Brigidine tradition that calls us to lead with courage, compassion and conviction. Our horizon asks us to carry those values forward – to consider the kind of women, leaders and citizens our students will become, and the contribution they will make to the world beyond Brigidine.
It is a wonderful thing to recognise that the leadership Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem modelled in their very different ways reflects the same principles our Brigidine values have asked of our students all along: the courage to be exactly who you are, and the gentleness to make sure there is room at the table for others to be exactly who they are, too.
Our 2027 leaders now step into that tradition. They do not need to have all the answers. Instead, they are being entrusted with the opportunity to carry something forward – to lead by example and to demonstrate that leadership in the small, unwatched moments as much as the visible ones.
This is what it means to lead as a Brigidine woman.
Mrs Kate Quinane
Principal
