On March 13, 2023, Glendale, Arizona mayor Jerry Weiers signed a declaration to change the city’s name to Swift City in honor of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour starting its first leg in their town. Even before the tour started, public figures were already anticipating the potential economic power as an engine for local development.

Glendale is outside the capital city, Phoenix, and boasted a robust suburban population of over 250,000 people in 2021 with a median age is 33.9 years old, and one-fifth of the population in their 20s. Glendale is in Maricopa County, home of challenges to the 2020 Presidential election voting process. It hosted Super Bowl LVII on February 12, 2023, and could handle a super bowl-style audience like those of the Eras Tour. The Eras Tour start in Glendale was the beginning of the equivalent of 26 Super Bowl events held within the span of five months ricocheting across the country.

Glendale’s history is more than just the Eras Tour and Super Bowl LVII. The women of Glendale, Arizona have been active for more than a century in shaping the local landscape. For example, in 1901, the Glendale Women’s Club was founded with a goal of raising money for the city’s first library and parks.[iv] The club’s leading women at the time hired an architect to design and build their club house with California Red Wood. The club house opened in 1913 and was the largest meeting hall in the community for decades. Without these women, the fabric of the community would not have been the same. Maybe crime would have been higher or property values lower with no library or parks. Yet we rarely connect the multitude of hours women spend volunteering in our communities to the overall wellbeing and economic value of said communities.

In Glendale, as in other communities across the nation, women both thrive and struggle to make ends meet. Our challenge is to understand how we create neighborhoods, communities, cities, and states that allow women and caregivers to flourish in a way that guarantees their ability to support their families and the next generation while advancing their own personal aspirations, talents, and goals.

After Glendale, the Eras Tour passed through Las Vegas and Arlington, Texas before landing in Tampa, Florida. Tampa has the second highest number of Taylor Swift fans per capita – second only to Santa Clara, California. Florida has history of ambitious women, which may explain their love for Taylor Swift. Florida is the only state with a female founder of a major U.S. city, Miami. A woman from Ohio, Julia Deforest Tuttle, whose entrepreneurial spirit and familial interests led her to follow her parents in adulthood to the south Florida is considered the mother of Miami, claiming fame for believing in its future and founding the city. She purchased and owned the land of present-day Miami, Florida in the late 1800s.

Not only was Julia decisive in convincing male railroad executives from the north to pursue a route to Miami, but she also opened the first laundry, bakery, and dairy in town. Alongside Julia, Mary Bulmer Brickell owned large amounts of land and the local trading post with her husband. Together Mary and her spouse donated land, as did Julia, to railway executives in support of the expansion of a railway system to the tip of Florida’s eastern coast.

The history books do not tell us how these women acquired such power and sway to influence business executives, but it is clear they themselves were entrepreneurs with a dedicated vision. Julia’s spouse died early, leaving her in control of the family resources and business. But, even without the direct knowledge of the inner workings of Julia’s relationship with her spouse or even the independence with which she was raised by her family, her vision and passion were documented in the letters she wrote.

According to the New York Times, in one of Julia’s letters she wrote to a friend, “It may seem strange to you, but it is the dream of my life to see this wilderness turned into a prosperous country. Where this tangled mass of vine, brush, trees and rocks now are to see homes with modern improvements surrounded by beautiful grassy lawns, flowers, shrubs and shade trees.”[vii] She believed the site could be a major city providing access to the global south and was persuasive enough to convince male railway executives that her ideas had value. Among all the constraints that may have been pressing down on her for being a woman and a widow in an “unsettled” land, she used her situation to effectively persuade.

After iterative failures at convincing railway executives to build a railway down to Miami, in 1896 a deep frost crossed over the state of Florida. The area of Miami was spared. Julia took advantage of the situation to send the railway executive Henry Flagler a bouquet of citrus branches from her home, which had been spared the frost, and this convinced him of the value of a railway to Miami.

We are left with crumbs of Julia’s existence, prowess, and power. Only by reading letters and other informal notes used to document her lived experiences, do we understand the impact she had on the Miami we all know today. Julia was not officially listed as a founder of the city, a privilege assigned to four businessmen. But, she was the driving force behind its incorporation, early inception, and birth. This is yet another lost story of the lively economic personas the women around us have, yet we are unaware if we limit ourselves to just reading traditional history books.

When the Taylor Swift Eras Tour came swooping into the Houston area—the birthplace of Beyoncé—on April 21, 2023, for a three-night event, the locals benefited. Many attended the concert themselves. Others travelled from nearby towns as tens of thousands of fans descended on the city. Hotels in the area increased occupancy to 87%, with downtown hotels at 93.9% occupancy rate. This would be only the beginning of what many news outlets would eventually start reporting as “Swiftonomics,” or the economic impact of Eras Tour concerts in cities across the country. Just like locals in other locations who created unique honors and remembrances for Taylor, the stadium rebranded itself for the weekend concerts as NRG Stadium (Taylor’s Version).

For at least a decade, the Houston area has been honoring its top 30 most influential women because “…women today have more opportunities…because they are creating them. They are courageously breaking glass ceilings and overcoming barriers in their respective areas, not only for themselves, but for the advancement of the women who come after them.” The 2024 honorees included leaders from all angles of life including community development nonprofits, engineering, finance, public relations, and the list goes on. So many talented women in positions of influence and power throughout the community. Every year, more of them get recognized and celebrated.

Sarah Syed, for example, is a 2024 honoree. Sarah is a native Houstonian who comes from a rich history of immigrant parents and refugee war survivor grandparents. She has worked to increase voter engagement in Harris County by registering more than 30,000 Pan-Asian and Latinx voters in less than two years. She has also participated on local government advisory boards and advocated to help those displaced by war who arrive in Houston. Sarah exemplifies the power of local women to influence their communities and local governments.

ReShonda Tate is another honoree. ReShonda’s influence is expansive as a journalist and author of 54 published books. She writes adult and teen fiction and nonfiction, has had an expansive acting career, and has worked as a television reporter and anchor for a handful of TV stations. Not only has ReShonda had an active career, but she is also a spouse and mother of three children plus two bonus children. ReShonda exemplifies how women in the Houston area show up every day for their communities and families.

At the end of April, the Eras Tour descended into the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. Signs with “A-Tay-L” for ATL, the abbreviation of the Atlanta airport, covered buildings across the city and, during her April 29th show, she sang “High Infidelity” from Midnights (3AM Edition), in which her lyrics ask, “Do you really want to know where I was April 29th?”

Atlanta is the home of political leader and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, girdle-hugging tights innovator Sarah Blakely, and power broker Anne Cox Chambers, who co-owned the family business with her sister for 33 years and has a wing in the Louvre named after her. The 58th mayor of Atlanta was Shirley Franklin, the first black woman elected mayor of a major city in the south.[iii] She created programs to improve water and clean energy throughout the city. Atlanta boasts strong female leaders like civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, who continued her work after her husband’s assassination, and Anne Rivers Siddons who rebelled her parents’ expectations that she become a school teacher and would become a productive, successful writer writing about political and social change with strong, female characters.

The Atlanta Women’s Foundation, like Houston’s Top 30 Women, promotes women through the Inspire Atlanta program. The program provides exposure to women community leaders and encourages the development of leadership characteristics with a focus on critical issues facing women and girls in the area. Similarly, Women United, founded in 1999, is a program in the United Way of Greater Atlanta that focuses on harnessing the unique talents of women in the area to increase opportunities for women and children to thrive. These programs not only shine a light on women’s talents but also help build them up to advance overall community wellbeing.

By May 5, the Eras Tour was passing through Nashville, Tennessee, the state Dolly Parton claims home. Nashville memorialized a bench in Centennial Park in honor of Taylor Swift and renamed the weekend, “Taylor Swift Homecoming Weekend,” in honor of the star. The weekend also brought with it a nasty set of thunderstorms. A total estimated 212,000 fans attending the concert (not including those who watched without tickets from a pedestrian bridge nearby), with some fans waiting out the storm for hours in the stadium just for a chance to see Taylor perform. Taylor’s three nights in Nashville set a record for most attendees at any even at the Nissan stadium all three nights. Hotel capacity was 96%, and hotel taxes alone generated a revenue of 2.2 million for local government.

Women across the country work and play hard, driven by ambition to make themselves and their families economically better and their communities strong, and the women of Tennessee are no different. Beverly Robertson grew up in Memphis.[v] After finishing school at Memphis State with a major in special education, she taught for three years while working evenings for the Holiday Inn Worldwide company. She worked to acquire additional leadership education and moved her way up company ranks until Holiday Inn Worldwide was sold, at which point she joined her spouse’s small business marketing firm, bringing in numerous national accounts. Eventually, she accepted a temporary position as interim CEO of the National Civil Rights Museum and ended up staying – raising millions of dollars for the museum. So much success in business development led to her final position as the CEO and President of the Greater Memphis Chamber – a position she also took on temporarily to help traumatized staff who had just lost their leader after his tragic murder but, once again, she stayed for a handful of years before retiring. Beverly, like so many smart, talented women, used her relationship building skills to excel in unique and different professional pathways in the economy that benefitted local economic development of Memphis.

Aside from Memphis, where local women are making a difference, Nashville, Tennessee is considered the country capital of the world and home to many famous female musicians. It is where Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift got their start in the country music industry. Of course, the Taylor Swift Eras Tour stopped in Nashville. Fans, leaning female and young, showed up dressed in their favorite era and, the last night of the show, sheltered in place for almost four hours as a thunderstorm passed through before being allowed to find their seats. According to The Tennessean, the Nissan Stadium account tweeted “Drop everything now…meet me in the pouring rain. Shelter in place has officially been lifted. Fans, please start making your way to your seats.” And the National Weather Service tweeted, “Ready for it? The storms are weakening considerably…” as it hinted that the show could, in fact, go on.[viii] At this point in the tour, everyone was getting on board with the realization that the scope and experience brought to towns across the country by the tour was monumental, larger than life, and benefitting local economies in a major way.

Taylor Swift grew up on one of the over 1,400 Christmas tree farms in Pennsylvania and maybe not so far away from the childhood home of Frances Perkins, the first female U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. When the Eras Tour made its way to Philadelphia, famous friends and entertainers like Blake Lively, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lawrence, and Sabrina Carpenter showed up in support of the super star.

Swift herself supported local businesses in many ways. She ordered 70 boxes of pizzas and 100 cheesesteaks from local restauranters after her shows, and donating to a local foodbank, Philabundance. But Taylor is not unique in terms of investing in and contributing to the local economy.

Women turn up in communities across the country actively engaging in economic activities as diverse as volunteering, mothering, and working towards building communities that help youth and adults thrive and that is true of the women who led the charge to manifest Chinatown in Philly. The women of Chinatown fought for six decades not only to save Chinatown from developers but also to protect young Asian children who had been experiencing racism, bullying, and taunting from kids at school.

Cecilia Yep, considered the grandmother of Chinatown, is one of these women. Recently widowed and with three children, she refused to leave her home unless the mayor created additional alternative Chinatown housing for families. She successfully acquired new housing for families who owned and lost their homes, families with Section 8 Vouchers, and elders. Cecilia’s efforts transformed economic development in Chinatown and improved the environment for numerous families. Her community activism was likely not counted on any official statistical leger. It is representative of women’s volunteer work in the area over the past two hundred years – since the time of the American Revolution.

This active (and often invisible) economic engagement of women in Pennsylvania goes back to the Continental Army during the American Revolution (and even further). During the American Revolution, women and children followed behind frontline troops providing critical resources for the army’s survival. The encampment of Valley Forge estimated around 250 to 400 women present and providing critical resources for the war.[vii] Women worked as nurses, made/mended clothes, cared for children, and sold provisions to the army. Centuries later, Taylor Swift would grow up on a Christmas Tree farm about 40 miles Northwest of Valley Forge.

On May 12, 2023, the Eras Tour made its way to the Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles football team.  The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that for every three fans who came with tickets to the concert, one fan came without a ticket just to listen from the parking lot. An estimated 20,000 fans without tickets listened from outside the stadium.[viii] Women in sparkle and girl fans of all ages took in the experience in all its shiny glory, using their hard-earned money – some traveling from afar – for the live experience of a Taylor Swift concert in her home state. By now, the tour had started garnering regular, natural attention.

As the Eras Tour descended onto MetLife stadium just outside of New York, fans had a surprise waiting for Taylor. As she played Marjorie, a song she wrote in honor of her late grandmother, also a singer, fans used their cellphone lights to light up the stadium for Taylor. Taylor reciprocated to her audience by revealing the music video for Karma and bringing Ice Spice on stage to perform the song with her. She regularly users her fame to uplift other young female artists and, in doing so, contributes to reducing barriers and challenges within the industry for women.

Marjorie, Taylor Swift’s paternal grandmother, was an opera singer and TV show host in Puerto Rico.[iii] She had been a stable influence in Taylor Swift’s life as a child as someone who always supported her dreams and passions. Marjorie was of the same generation of other remarkable New York women who influenced TV and finance, like Muriel Siebert.

Muriel was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1928, she attended Western Reserve University in 1949. A trip to New York in college drove her desire to work on Wall Street. She would eventually get her chance, but it wouldn’t be easy. The only time the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) had previously allowed women onto its floor was in 1943 to fill more than three dozen positions vacated by soldiers sent overseas during World War II.

She sought advice from an investor she trusted, searched for the required sponsor within the NYSE, and after nine rejections, finally received a yes. She became the first female member in the 175-year history of the NYSE, purchasing her seat on the exchange in 1967. Two years later, she launched her own brokerage firm, Muriel Siebert & Company. Later in her life, she donated millions of dollars to support women business leaders. If you ever visit the 7th floor of the NYSE, you can thank Muriel for the women’s bathroom. She threatened the building management that if they did not create a women’s bathroom on the 7th floor, she would install port-o-potties as a solution until they fixed the problem.[viii]

It would take another fifty years before the NYSE would achieve another feat with Stacey Cunningham taking the helm and have its first female leader as the Board’s 67th President. Progress is often glacial, and the NYSE is no different. But today women have more opportunities than they have ever had in the financial world, and women like Siebert and Cunningham are highlighting women and creating opportunities for more women to participate.

By June 9, 2023, the Eras Tour had made it to Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan. This was the first stadium Taylor performed in when she sang the National Anthem at a Detroit Lions game during the release of her first album. The University of Michigan is also where a younger Madonna was first exposed to dance at before she left for New York to risk everything in pursuit of a music and drama career in NY. We all know how that turned out. Flavor Flav, known as a huge Taylor Swift fan, called “King Swiftie” by some, was in the audience. Detroit is known not only for Taylor Swift’s visits and the automobile industry, but also for women who carved paths throughout its history.

Elizabeth Denison Forth was born in Detroit in the 1780s. Born into slavery, she and her family crossed over to Canada to freedom, but she returned to Detroit five years later and became the first Black property owner in Oakland County. She created an episcopal church for people from all walks of life to worship, which still exists today.

So many women have been critical to the advancement of communities in and near Detroit. Laura Smith Haviland was a quaker who developed the first anti-slavery organization in Michigan and was a superintendent of the underground railroad in Detroit, Fannie M. Richards was the first Black school teacher in Detroit who brought kindergarten programs to the city, Ruth Ellis was an LGBTQ+ rights advocate whose home became a safe place for Black LGBTQ+ people in the city, and Grace Lee Boggs was a Chinese-American human rights activist whose acts included protesting poor living conditions and organizing.

Lest we forget women like the great singer legend Aretha Franklin (who insisted on getting paid in cash before the show to secure payment), or Fannie Peck who founded the National Housewives League to empower female domestic workers and give them a voice for their economic activity within the household in the early 1900s. All these powerful women from Detroit’s history would have been proud of and, perhaps, attended the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in support of this mega superstar woman bringing together fans from all walks of life for an over three hour experience both entertaining and record-breaking.

By the time the Eras Tour reached Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 23, 2023, some might claim Taylor Swift as a real serious adventurer. She had developed and produced an over three-hour long concert tour spanning all the eras of her career. She did it that way because she saw its potential and believed in herself. She created a masterful performance art that worked for her and coalesced with her lifestyle. For at least six months over the spring and summer, she would perform on weekends and head to her home base during the week to continue producing music and spend time with friends.

In Minneapolis, Taylor might have felt comfortable because she was in the home of one of the biggest female adventurers of all time. Ann Bancroft became a world-renown polar explorer and inspired generations of women and girls to believe they could do anything they set their minds to. In love with nature since childhood, Ann’s curiosity led her to become the first woman in history to cross both the North and South poles, in 1986 and in 1993, respectively.

Other notable women from the Twin Cities include Nellie Stone Johnson who helped organize the state’s first Democratic-Farmer-Labor party in the 1940s, and Ruth Nomura Tanbara, a Japanese American who resettle in St. Paul during World War II. She led relocating over 100 Japanese Americans from West Coast internment camps to Minnesota by helping them find housing and other critical services. These women saw problems or challenges for their communities and created solutions. They challenged themselves and those around them to solve major societal dilemmas and explored unknown territories. In this way, they are like Taylor and many other women across the country who live bold, curious lives every day.

Taylor arrived in Kansas City, Missouri on July 7, 2023. I attended this Eras Tour concert with my daughter. If I had ever wondered what all the hype was about Taylor, it smacked me in the gut like a brick that night.

I learned quickly that a unique aspect of Taylor is the way she interacts with her fans. It is a back-and-forth experience like waves lifting the tide of an ocean in and out with each second, note, and lyrical chord. There is no Eras Tour experience like the other. Each location has its own unique vibe, often with special treats for the fans, and in Kansas City night one, we received the treat of a lifetime.

Swift had decided to unveil Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) on that day along with a brand-new music video played at the concert for the from the vault track, I Can See You. The video included some of her favorite people from that era of her life, including her ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner, whose Swift claim to fame is being an inspiration for the song “Back to December,” along with Joey King and Presley Cash who were in Swift’s 2011 “Mean” music video. These talented artists, Swift, and the over 70,000 fans in attendance that night will always share the unique experience of watching that music video together on the big screen.

The Eras Tour travels through all of Taylor’s eras of her musical life and includes an acoustic set where she changes up the “surprise songs” she sings at every concert. And, for the U.S. version of the tour, Swift vowed never to repeat a surprise song unless she messed it up. This rule changed in her European 2024 summer tour where she decided to kill the rule and mash together however she wanted. A reinvention that delighted fans and had them tuning in to see if their favorite song would be mashed up even if it had already been sung. On social media, fans in the U.S. diligently tracked each song sung and crossed their fingers that their favorite song was not crossed off the list before the night they would attend the concert.

The acoustic set is what sets aside each concert experience as a one-and-only event. You can tell that Taylor enjoys the acoustic set as much as her fans. Her ability to get up on stage with no background sound, no band, and just sing – her, her guitar or piano, and her voice – reminds me of our next figured local female wonders. The Mariachi Estrella of Topeka, Kansas was the first-ever female-only mariachi band.

Mariachi Estrella is an all-female mariachi band that started in a church in Topeka, Kansas.[iii] Some of the women were homemakers with a spouse and children. Others were divorced, separated, or single – some with and some without children. What drew most of them to the church band was the comradery they experienced with each other each week practicing together, laughing, and sharing stories. But that was only part of it.

The women had a sense of pride in the fact that they were an all-female Mexican mariachi band in a time when that was unheard of. They developed a support network for each other that lasted and from which to bounce ideas off around major and not-so-major events happening in their lives. They became famous by playing both local events and traveling to mariachi competitions where their unique all-female composition set them apart from all the others.

Mariachi Estrella has a tragic side to its story. While playing an event in Kansas City on July 17, 1981, a couple of the band members were passing through a skyway connecting the Hyatt Regency to another building when the skyway collapsed, killing two of their members along with 112 other individuals.

We might not ever have heard about these adventurous women today had it not been for one of their granddaughters, who wrote about them in her college thesis, and the Kansas Public Radio, who reported the story.[v] They were bold, courageous, and ahead of their time – like so many other women in communities across the country. If only we were better at seeing and reporting these stories, we might know about all the other Mariachi Estrella-like women groups in neighborhoods across the country and globe.

Taylor Swift, who often writes in her lyrics about historically memorable women like her grandmother Marjorie, heiress Rebecca Harkness, actress Clara Bow, singer Steve Nicks, and the impossible-to-tie-down Idina Sackville (nicknamed: the Bolter), would surely be amazed by the Mariachi Estrella band of women and their uniquely memorable story of female community, persistence, and resistance.

Tremors measured on the rector scale when Taylor arrived in Seattle, Washington for the Eras Tour. But rather than shivers coming from far below the ground, they started on land. The tremors measured the dancing, shaking, and jumping of thousands of Swifties without concert tickets who were standing outside the open-air stadium hoping to hear her perform. By now it was well known that fans without tickets were spending the day outside the stadiums for the chance to hear Taylor’s concert.

According to Rolling Stone Magazine, the rector scale measured seismic tremors at a magnitude of 2.3. Starting at a slow crescendo, it accelerated through the eras from Lover (2019), to Fearless (2008), Evermore (2020) through Red (2012) to Midnights (2022).

Seattle is a town nestled in the quiet but jagged slopping hills of the Northwest. Clashing with Canada and south of Alaska, the vibe is one of adventurer or climber of mountains. In 1926, Bertha Knight Landes, mother of three who met her husband during college at the University of Indiana, became not only the first female mayor of Seattle, but also of a major American city. In what I identify as the “Hillary Clinton-effect,” or society’s knee-jerk resistance to competent women in leadership, Bertha had succumbed to her opponent, an unknown male politician, and served only one term as mayor. Even so, she left a lasting impact on city government for cleaning house by removing local government corruption and installing an honest and scandal-free administration.

More recently, Seattle boasts of women like soccer star and equal pay advocate Megan Rapinoe, basketball great and LGTBQ+ advocate Sue Bird, and Assunta Ng, who founded the Seattle Chinese Post, which for decades was a staple for the region’s Chinese communities. Seattle, like other regions across the nation, is filled with local stories of women engaged in amazing economic activity and talent that helps them, their families, and their communities flourish. Society just needs to get better at telling their stories.

As the United States grew into the nation that exists today, women across the country fought for rights and equality in local municipalities and states everywhere. Los Angeles and Stockton, California, where Dolores Huerta grew up with her mother, two siblings, and extended family, was no different.

Before Dolores, there was Clara Shortridge Foltz, who lived from 1849 to 1934. She is known as the first woman to practice law on the West coast. She became famous for making speeches on women’s voting rights, filing a lawsuit to gain admission into the university, and authoring state legislation on women’s rights to pursuing a business. Charlotta A. Spears Bass (1874-1969), also from L.A., was the first U.S. woman to run an African American newspaper, The Eagle. She published pro-suffrage editorials and encouraged Black men to vote. Her dedication and determination paid off when she eventually became the first woman nominated to run for Vice President of the U.S. on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952.

The Eras Tour’s last leg of its 2023 U.S. schedule was Los Angles, where Swift descended for six sold out concerts. It is also where she recorded the Taylor Swift Eras Tour Concert Film. It’s ironic that Swift chose her last U.S. 2023 performances in Los Angeles SoFi Stadium to produce her concert film, which would completely rewrite both how movie theatres distribute films (without a Hollywood broker) and how artists, who disproportionately live in the Los Angeles/Hollywood area, interact with business moguls.