Since 1990, Glamour Magazine has chosen women every year to win its Women of the Year award. Glamour aims to cover taboo topics most women are deeply invested in.
Glamour categorizes its award recipients as “trailblazers, rule breakers, visionaries and champions who have defined each year.” This year, six awards were given out, each for a unique reason. The recipients included Tyla Seethal, Demi Moore, Pat McGrath, Rachel Zegler, Rachel Griffin-Accurso and five players from the Women’s National Basketball Association.
Each recipient was honored at the annual ceremony on Nov. 4 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. This year’s theme was “sisterhood of all kinds.” Griffin-Accurso, known on the internet as Ms. Rachel, delivered one of the most memorable and emotional speeches of the night as she advocated for children in Gaza.
Griffin-Accurso arrived at the ceremony in an upcycled dress embroidered with drawings by nine different Palestinian children from Gaza.
In her speech, she called all the children by their names, gently touching each drawing as she expressed how honored she felt wearing their artwork and how proud she was of all of them.
Each drawing was created to represent an aspect of that child’s story. Griffin-Accurso walked on the red carpet with photos of all the children and their original drawings.
On the front of the dress, six-year-old Luna drew herself hugging a giant watermelon slice. Eight-year-old Anne drew a peaceful dove filled with flowers and 12-year-old Ahmed drew a woman with wings roller-skating, as well as a boy carrying a house on the back of his shoulders. Rama drew a girl happily walking to school and a bucket pouring out the entire universe.
On the back of the dress, nine-year-old Shahed, who lost 18 of her family members, drew a sailboat that read, “Ride with us.” Mohammed, who creates art with his remaining two-and-a-half fingers, drew two yellow doves looking toward hearts of peace. Nine-year-old Sarah drew a picture of one of her dreams for the future with the sun of freedom peeking over the horizon from a safe home and a garden where she can play with her brother.
The trail of the skirt was adorned by Anne’s 15-year-old sister, Rahaf.
The drawing depicts her younger sister feeding a lost and injured stray cat despite the food and supply shortages in Gaza. Amid the surrounding rubble, Anne is smiling in the drawing, and the cat’s bowl reads, “hope.”
Griffin-Accurso tearfully spoke for children around the world in her speech, an act she has done throughout her online presence. In a previous interview with Glamour, she said that her love and care for children “doesn’t stop at the children in our country. It embraces every child of the world. I don’t think that our love should end at religion or skin color or where people are born.”
She started her YouTube channel to help children like her son Thomas, who has a speech delay, and quickly became a household name for younger children as a childhood icon like Mister Rogers. She now also uses her large platform to be an activist, tailoring her conversations to adults and becoming a loud voice for children everywhere, especially for children in Gaza.
She has also called out the U.S. government for its role in the loss of monthly SNAP benefits and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for ripping parents away from their children. She spoke of the children dying in Sudan and how Palestine must be rebuilt and secured for the children there.
When ending her speech, she felt that someone else’s words were more important than hers, so she told Rana’s story. Rana lost both of her sisters in the war, and her nine-month-old sister died in her arms during an airstrike. “I want to tell the world that my sisters are not numbers,” Griffin-Accurso recited. “They are moons. They are like the stars. They shine and they sparkle,” she said.
She was met with a standing ovation as she left the stage.
