To celebrate Women’s Day, we’re interviewing Katherine Heigl — actress, dog rescue advocate, and Badlands Ranch founder — about the inspiring women in her life and her hopes for women of the future.
In celebration of International Women’s Day, can you tell us about a woman who has been a source of inspiration or mentorship in your life?
The woman I always name is my mother — and I know how fortunate I am to be able to say that, and I don’t take it for granted. I find her curiosity and enthusiasm for life, her pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and her fight for joy, despite grief and sorrow, incredibly inspiring.
I do try in many ways to model myself after her and the way she approaches being alive. Like her compassion and her willingness to always give and to give back, no matter what. She’s always found a way to give back and make others and their needs important.
I really believe so much of the giving back that I’ve done in this world is because of her setting the bar for me and teaching me how valuable and how important it is. And our foundation, the Jason Debus Heigl Foundation, was really begun by my mother. It was her inspiration, it was her idea, and it was her initiative. It’s something that I am incredibly proud to be a part of.
Caring for the voiceless, the weak, and the innocent is to me, my greatest calling — and feels like the most valuable thing I can do with my life. And my mother taught me to do it.
So my answer is always Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, Nancy.
What are your hopes and aspirations for future generations of women?
My hope for future generations of women — my hope for my daughters — is a world where they can move through it unapologetically. Where they can set the bar for their own lives, and live by that — without having to make themselves small, without having to apologize just for existing, and shining, and being bright.
I have to preface this with saying I feel incredibly fortunate — I know that I have privileges here that I wouldn’t have in many, many places in the world. But that’s not to say that there aren’t walls we bump up against, as women. And I think that has been going on for far too long. I think it’s time for us to put our foot down, to make a stand. We can only do that by standing together.
What I’m trying to really teach my daughters is not that you have to like everybody, or that everybody has to like you — but that you have to support each other’s very right to exist. When it comes down to it, in the great tug of war of power and control and having a voice, we have to be on the same side of the rope, and we have to pull together.
That’s what I most wish for. That not only we stop moving through the world quietly, sweetly, gently, demurely —
there are times and places for that — but I think more often than not we need to be just as vibrant and as loud. And as seen as we can be.
We need to do it together, and we need to celebrate other women who are doing that, and we need to celebrate it in ourselves.
At Badlands Ranch, we’re grateful to work with such empowered women like Katherine Heigl — and wish everyone a happy International Women’s Day!
To hear more from Katherine, follow Badlands Ranch on social media:
https://www.instagram.com/badlandsranchpets/
