What Makes A Wake Woman? Courage (Bonus Episode)

This is the third of four special guest tribute episodes closing out the Wake Women podcast, which will air its series finale on August 28th. Each tribute explores a single question: What makes a Wake Woman? This episode's answer is Courage — not the absence of fear, but the decision to go anyway. To show up against impossible odds, to walk into rooms where no one looks like you, to stop hiding and be fully seen, to look unflinchingly at a painful history and claim it as your own.Six Wake Forest women bring that answer to life. Erin Regan ('02), a Wake Forest soccer goalkeeper who became a wildfire firefighter, describes what it feels like to stand in front of a hundred-foot wall of flame and just try to make a dent. Sandi James ('06), a professional tackle football player and coach, is building the bridge in women's athletics while she's still walking it — and making sure it's steady enough for the women who come after her. Kate Lambert, an entertainment industry professional, makes the case for a different kind of courage: knowing your own worth before anyone else has confirmed it. Emily Goodson ('07), who has lived with a physical disability since childhood, spent years pushing her emotions down to survive — and then chose, during the pandemic, to stop and tell the truth about her life publicly, because the world needed to hear it. Carol Willis, a Wake Forest alumna who traced her family's roots to the enslaved people who lived and worked at President James Madison's Montpelier estate, describes the courage it takes to look unflinchingly at a hard history — and the extraordinary resilience she found on the other side. And Beth Hopkins ('73), one of the first women to integrate the residence halls at Wake Forest, left the university vowing never to return — and then came back, gave decades of herself to the institution she once wanted to leave, and now has a dormitory bearing her name. Her message to the students who will live there: tough times don't last, but tough people do.