When I tell people that I attended an all-girls high school, they usually respond in one of two ways:
“Wasn’t that… a lot?” or, more concerned, “Are you OK?”
They imagine cattiness. Competition. Cliques. The kind of girlhood shaped by stereotypes rather than substance. What they don’t imagine is leadership. Or softness. Or the kind of sisterhood that quietly teaches you how to unapologetically take up space.
I attended Western High School — the oldest public all-girls high school in the United States, and a predominantly Black girls school, at that — so, long before I understood the importance of girl-centered spaces, I was already being shaped inside one. At Western, being a girl was not a limitation. It was the entire point.
In those hallways, girls ran everything. We were the student government. The athletes. The debate captains. The prom committee. The morning announcements. There were no boys to defer to, no shrinking to be more palatable, no waiting to be chosen. Leadership didn’t feel like an exception; it felt expected. Confidence wasn’t something we borrowed from boys’ attention; it was something we practiced daily.
As junior and senior class president (as well as junior prom queen), I experienced Western’s sisterhood at its loudest, and its most tender. Don’t get me wrong. There was definitely competition. And sometimes that competition came with sabotage, drama, and what felt like the Burn Book scene in Mean Girls — chaos, rumors flying, alliances shifting overnight. Campaigning for class president and prom court at the back to back? Yeah… that was something. People said the meanest things about me. Made up hurtful and exaggerated rumors. Vandalized posters. The whole nine yards.
But here’s what people don’t understand: At the end of it, we were still sisters.
People think girls are inherently competitive in a way that’s destructive. My lived experience taught me something different: Competition and sisterhood can coexist. Yes, we fought. Yes, we argued. Feelings were hurt. But when it was time to show up — prom day, Unity Day, graduation — none of that mattered. We still zipped each other’s dresses. Fixed each other’s hair. Hyped each other up before walking across the stage. Like real sisters, the love wasn’t fake; it was layered.
Walking through those doors as a freshman forced me out of my shell. It taught me to fight for my spot. To keep fighting. To keep showing up. And no matter how hard it got, I knew my sisters would be there to catch me if I stumbled. They would never let me hit the ground.
As I came into my own during those four years, I also learned that leadership in a girl-centered space meant something different. It meant listening. It meant understanding. It meant trying so damn hard not to be messy and gossip with (or about) the very people I was elected to represent. It meant being a teenage girl while code-switching into a grown woman when it was time to handle business. Balancing emotion with execution. Softness with structure.
Western didn’t just shape how I led — it shaped where I felt called to exist. I got my first internship junior year of high school and was one of only three girls in the space; I quickly realized how different it felt to be in an environment where women were not centered — where our voices felt smaller, and our presence less understood. It didn’t feel like home. Since then, I have consistently found myself — intentionally, subconsciously, and through what I can only describe as God’s divine alignment — working in predominantly women-led spaces. Whether through organizations like Her Campus or the YWCA, I have continuously been in environments where women are centered, leading, and building. It no longer feels coincidental. It feels like a calling — like legacy in motion, unfolding exactly the way it was meant to.
Attending the oldest all-girls public high school in the country didn’t just teach me the meaning of sisterhood. It taught me the act of sisterhood. When girls are centered, we don’t shrink — we expand. We build. We lead. We create worlds where we are not an afterthought, but the foundation. And when we rise, we reach back to help the ones to come after us — because that’s what sisters do.