What I'd Be Thinking at Taylor Swift's Wedding Tonight
Issue 2891 -July 3, 2026
Tonight, approximately 1,000 people are walking into Madison Square Garden for what is being called the American royal wedding. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are getting married. In New York City. On the Fourth of July weekend. Because why not now and why not there?
I wasn't invited. You probably weren't either. But I've been thinking about Taylor Swift for over a decade now, and tonight feels like a moment worth marking — not just for the celebrity spectacle of it, but for what this woman's arc actually means.
We've been paying attention at Take The Lead since 2013 (the year we were born), when our blog pointed to a Twitter account called @feministtswift — a Brown University student reworking Taylor's lyrics into feminist messages because she couldn't quite reconcile loving the music with cringing at the message. Back then, Taylor Swift famously declined to call herself a feminist. She said she didn't think of things as "guys versus girls." We noted it. We hoped she'd come around.
She came around.
What followed over the next decade was one of the most remarkable public evolutions in recent memory — and not just musically. Taylor Swift became a case study in what it looks like when a woman learns to own her power and use it.
You know I love to talk about women and power J
She took on Apple Music in 2015 with a single Tumblr post and made a $700 billion company reverse course in 24 hours. She sued a DJ who groped her for exactly $1 — and won — turning the smallest possible dollar amount into the loudest possible statement. She reclaimed her own master recordings by simply re-recording all of them, turning an act of corporate aggression into a masterclass in creative ownership. She mobilized a generation of voters. She single-handedly moved the needle on every economy she touched — the NFL, the tourism industry, the stock market — just by showing up and being herself.
And through all of it, she kept shaking off the noise. The Kanye years. The media's endless attempts to pit her against other women. The breathless coverage of every relationship as though her love life were a public resource. She refused to participate in the "finite pie" narrative — as I've written before, the assumption that one woman's success diminishes another's. Her friendship with Beyoncé became a symbol of what happens when powerful women amplify each other instead of competing.
She even had the wisdom — and the audacity — to say: Never be so polite you forget your power.
That line is a whole leadership curriculum in nine words.
So tonight, if I were somehow sitting in those seats at MSG — surrounded by Lena Dunham and Stevie Nicks and 997 other people who got the call — here is what I'd be thinking:
I'd be thinking about the girl who once said she didn't see things as guys versus girls, and the woman who built a billion-dollar enterprise entirely on her own terms. I'd be thinking about how the journey from there to here wasn't a straight line — it never is — but that each chapter, including the messy ones, was written by her, for her, on her own timeline.
I'd be thinking that she chose a partner who, by all accounts, celebrates her visibility rather than competing with it. A man who sat in the stands and cheered her. I was lucky enough to be married to such a man for 44 years and Travis’s words bring a tear of joy to my eye. (Alex used to joke he never got a suntan because he walked in my shadow. Excuse the digression.)
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce at their recent engagement.
Travis Kelce is of course a celebrity too who, when asked about dating the most famous woman on earth, said he hadn't experienced a partner who understood the scrutiny the way she did. That's not nothing. That's actually everything.
And I'd be thinking that what we've watched over the past decade isn't just a pop star growing up. It's a woman learning — in public, imperfectly, magnificently — what it means to know her power. To use it generatively. To refuse the narratives that would diminish. her and write new ones instead.
That's what leadership looks like. That's what I try to impart in every woman who takes my 9 Leadership Power Tools course or attends one of our Power Up Conferences. Taylor Swift has been demonstrating it on a global stage whether she meant to or not.
Congratulations, Taylor. You were always the one to watch.
We've been watching since 2013. We’ll keep watching, eager to see what comes next.
GLORIA FELDT is the Co-founder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker, and a global expert in women’s leadership development and DEI for individuals and companies that want to build gender balance. She is a bestselling author of five books, most recently Intentioning: Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take The Lead for (Everyone’s) Good. Honored as Forbes 50 Over 50, and Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Find her @GloriaFeldt on all social media.