We owe it to our moms: See who our Women of the Year look to for inspiration

Our USA TODAY Women of the Year honorees say they owe a lot to their moms.

Almost all of them named their mothers when asked who inspires them and who they look up to.

We learned more about them through the people who helped make them the people they are today.

Our Moms

"My mom, she's a survivor of a lot of things but also she’s a nonconformist. Being raised in a small town in Mexico, she went against the grain and decided to get an education and become a teacher. Back then, It wasn't normalized for a young woman to focus on education before more traditional expectations, like getting married and becoming a housewife," says Marilena Vega, a community organizer in Idaho. She helps raise money and distribute supplies to farmworkers across the state. By sharing stories from her community, she hopes to spread awareness of the harmful working conditions farmworkers are often exposed to. Vega and her fellow organizers are continuing to advocate for legal protection of farm laborers across the country.  

"She continued to hold her ground despite the different challenges and judgments she received. She persevered and survived a difficult and challenging environment. "

Lauren Carlson, a family nurse practitioner in Oregon, owes it to her mom.

"My mom is someone that I really look up to, for many reasons, but I think in a different way now that I’m an adult and a mom myself. I really admire her sense of perseverance, her confidence, her genuine love for other people, her generosity, and I think her sense of optimism, and her work ethic as well. She was a single mom for most of my teenage years and just seeing how hard she worked and what she sacrificed to make sure that we had everything that we needed and beyond, it just means a lot," she says.

Eva Longoria doesn't hesitate when asked who she looks up to.

"My mom. I looked up to my mom growing up. So many people today, their role models are celebrities. Mine weren't. We didn't grow up with that celebrity culture, so my role models and the people I looked up to the most were my Aunt Elsa, my mom and my sisters. 

I'm the baby of four girls. I have all women in my family, I have nine aunts, and they're all educated, all independent, all financially stable. So I got to see those examples, and go, 'OK, that's what it means to be a woman, that's what it means to be successful, and that's what it means to be intelligent.'

I was blessed with incredible role models around me that I knew exactly who I wanted to be."

The women who filled in for moms

"My mom passed away unexpectedly when she was 42, and obviously the world changed in every conceivable way. But one thing that changed was in the midst of this chaos, these women came out of the woodwork, women who didn’t even know our mother. And they started to help. It started the way you would expect, casseroles and extra carpool shifts, but it continued on. My dad was a single father at 44 with three kids, and they would coach him on parenting. They made a difference in all of our lives, and it sort of connected the dots between the things I did as a kid to help others that feel really small and the things that this community of women did for our family that felt really big," says Wendy Steele, of Florida.

Steele is the founder and CEO of Impact100, a nonprofit dedicated to mobilizing women in philanthropy

Our children

"My family and friends, but truly, my daughters. My daughters are fierce. From 9 to 30-plus years old, they are fierce young women that are wrangling life and doing the impossible. They teach me things every day; to be a better version of myself. And of course, my mom, my dad, my siblings, my husband, who is a combat veteran that now serves in law enforcement. But on the day to day, it's my daughters," says Qwynn Galloway-Salazar of Georgia.

Our Heroes

"I look up to Harriet Tubman, who was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I like to reflect on Harriet Tubman's ability to overcome adversity. Not too long ago, I went by her birthplace. I stood out in the field while the sun was setting and thought about this woman, who’s my height, coming from a house in this cornfield, walking to a creek where she's going to take people to freedom and do that time and time again. She didn't have a GPS. She didn't have a cellphone. Yet, she did it time and time again," says Maj. Gen. Janeen Birckhead.

As a United States military officer serving as Maryland's 31st adjutant general — as well as the only Black woman in the country leading a state and second woman to do so in the state’s history — Birckhead currently holds the top military position in the state after being appointed in 2023.

S.C. House District 31 Rep. Rosalyn Henderson-Myers says her main focus is to “make the lives of women better.”

The woman she looks up to: Barbara Jordan.

"She was the first person that I had seen, a black female, who was very articulate, very sure of herself, driven, but at the same time, moved with grace," she says.