A Woman’s Movement Powered By Our Remembering

by Sofia Platti

We launched Women Over Dinner in the last few years and officially turned it into a nonprofit movement just in the last six months. Our main course is a dinner that we hold where there is a structured format with questions specifically about our power as women. *Spoiler alert* If you had the full force of women backing you, what would that look like? How would that feel? What I feel when I hear this question is a taste of liberation. Rather than a putting down of men, or competing with women, we become that which inspires. This is our movement.

When presented with the desire from another woman working on the project to hold a dinner online, part of me felt thrilled while another part of me felt completely skeptical. How could we serve a meal online? Would it have that same feeling of intimacy that we have at our in-person dinners? We can’t even serve them food.

When I see the women walk through the doors at our Women Over Dinner events, I see the same hunger I had when I first walked into through this same threshold. Raw, beautiful, and a little shakier and more vulnerable than I might want to admit. I’ll speak for myself at least. I have an image to uphold.

So, there we were on Sunday, March 10th at 11 am Pacific, eagerly and hungrily awaiting as the women logged on one-by-one. There were mothers, sisters, friends, women who had never been to an event and from all over the world, from London, Ireland, Bulgaria, Hawaii, and all over the U.S. There was a woman who joined us from Australia where the sun hadn’t even come up yet.

It was so inspiring to see each woman pop up in her Zoom box like we were getting to see into her world.

We shared about the movement, opening both to the ways we’ve been changed by coming into contact with our own power, and feeling the force of women that stand before us.

There is this line from The Age of Eros, a manifesto written by Nicole Daedone, one of the women who birthed Women Over Dinner, “I’m going to ask you to consider the possibility that the way we think about things might not be completely accurate. That we might be confusing force with power.” This is what carries through the evening, each of us remembering the feeling of power in a room of powerful woman. It always feels softer than I think, and alive.

As we moved more than forty women into breakout rooms, each of us began answering the questions. One of the women in my breakout room shared that she has a force of women backing her but that it’s actually her own acknowledgment of it that blocks her from receiving it completely. What if what is really stopping me from being completely expressed is my own capacity to have it? To have and own the beauty and brilliance that lives within me?

As we came back together, there was a collective softening across each woman’s face, a remembering. From our Zoom boxes all over the world, the power was just as palpable. A reminder of the true nature of women, that when we remember, the world shifts. I felt the impact that day.

There was another woman from London who shared at the end that she wasn’t sure what to expect because she doesn’t find herself in rooms where women simply listen and that she felt heard in a way she had never experienced: “I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to be a woman, and I realized that me being a woman is my expression and there is space for all of us.” This is our movement, and it was felt in a 90-minute virtual “dinner.”

That voice in me that said, how could we possibly have the same impact while on Zoom? The way I was confusing force with power—that voice softened and settled, and I remembered.

“Are you feeding the mouths that are listening to you?” Reverend Joanne Coleman shared at the end. Right after she said this, I felt this deafening silence come over the room as each of us let that statement in. We hold the power, and our remembering of that is what nourishes. A movement powered by our collective remembering.

Our next Women Over Dinner Virtual is TBD, email sofia@womenoverdinner.org to get on our email list!

Since 2019 Sofia Platti has been a volunteer with Unconditional Freedom when she helped launch Free Food and hosted the weekly volunteer prison pen pal call for the Art of Soulmaking. She is a part of creating the Red Thread Women’s Movement and Women Over Dinner bringing her unwavering passion for women’s sovereignty and the realization of our full potential.