The first time I saw Jacinda Ardern speak, at a press conference shortly after she was elected Prime Minister of New Zealand at the age of 37, I felt something close to revelation.

This was before Ardern rose to international prominence: before the Christchurch massacre in 2019, when she responded to an act of anti-Muslim terror not with platitudes or distance, but with moral clarity and solidarity; and before the COVID-19 pandemic, when she led her country with a model few others were able to replicate—managing to keep New Zealand largely safe and open while the rest of the world shut down.

But even before those defining crises, something about Ardern felt quietly radical. It wasn’t just that she was a woman in power, or even that she was a young woman in power. It was that I had never

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