Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader

. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered heartless or unpleasantly aggressive or forceful. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

In my case, I think I may have had an easier time dealing with this fear because my first taste of leadership came in a situation in which I was a blissfully (幸福地) ignorant outsider. It was in college, when I became president of the Cambridge Union debating society. Since I had grown up in Greece, I had never heard of the Cambridge Union or the Oxford Union and didn't know about their place in English culture, so I wasn't weighed down with the kinds of overwhelming notions that may have stopped British girls from even thinking about trying for such a position.

The same thing happened when my first book, The Female Woman, came out. I was 23 and my U.S. publisher, Random House, flew me from London to New York. They handed me my schedule, and my first interview was with Barbara Waiters on the Today show. This didn't confuse and shock me since I had no idea who Barbara Waiters was, and had never heard of the Today show. So I was less nervous than if I had been on a local show in A-thens that my family and classmates could have watched.

In this way, it was a blessing that I started my career outside my home environment. It had its own problems in that I was laughed at for my accent and was demeaned (贬低) as someone who spoke in a funny way. But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people's judgments than to overcome our own serf-judgment, the fear we internalize.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, "If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others？" I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.

According to the first paragraph, women leaders fear that they may be regarded as ______.

A．inconsiderate

B．lacking in womanliness

C．incompetent

D．lacking in leadership