Brooke Shields has been in the public eye for decades, first as a child actress and model, then as an adult celebrity.
Her specific perch within American pop culture has given her a unique point of view about the lives and travails of women—and she doesn’t like what she’s seeing. Especially when it comes to her two young daughters, aged 18 and 21.
“I am really, truly, slightly terrified. And it’s almost not about politics. It’s this internal fear that I have for my daughters that they are losing their agency,” Shields said at Fortune’s Global Forum conference in New York City on Tuesday. She added, however, that her girls “have a stronger voice than I ever did at their age.”
Shields has been in the public eye for decades. She was a child actor and model, who was famously the face of Calvin Klein in the 1980s. She went on to star in film and TV as an adult, including the NBS show Suddenly Susan. In recent years she has spoken out about her childhood, and how she was sexualized at a young age in the 2023 documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.
During the pandemic Shields created an online community for middle-aged women to come together called Beginning is Now. The idea originated from the message that Shields felt she was continuously getting from the beauty industry: You’ve had a good run, but it’s over.
“It was this dismissive, sort of once your ovaries didn’t work you somehow lost value, and it made me very upset,” she said. She looked for like-minded individuals and quickly grew a large following of women who felt similarly.
“Real shared information and coming together and growing like this is going to be where I believe [women’s] power is because we’re formidable alone,” Shields said.