Don't Exist to Endure x Joan of Arc Pullover Hoodie

Joan of Arc heard the voices of Saints Michael, Catherine of Alexandria, and Margaret of Antioch beginning around age 13. These saints told her to help Charles VII be named the rightful king of France and to drive the English from French soil during the Hundred Years' War. In John Everett Millais's 1865 painting "Joan of Arc," we witness the young peasant girl kneeling in prayer, her gaze lifted toward heaven, holding a partially sheathed sword - capturing that sacred moment when she first heard the divine voices that would change the course of history.

Joan of Arc was never believed. From the moment she first heard the voices at 13, people dismissed her, mocked her, turned her away. She was a peasant girl - illiterate, powerless, female. She claimed to hear saints. She insisted she could lead an army. Everything about her existence challenged what society deemed acceptable for women. Yet she persisted, and she was right.

Joan faced relentless interrogation during her trial. When asked why she wore men's clothing, she responded that it was more proper to dress like this when surrounded by men than wearing a woman's clothes. They exploited her lack of formal education, trapped her with theological terminology she couldn't parse, and condemned her for refusing to submit to church authority over her direct experience of the divine. At her execution, she called on the name of Jesus until the end, insisting her voices truly came from God.

Women do not exist to endure. We do not exist to quietly accept dismissal, mockery, and oppression. Joan of Arc was 19 when they killed her for saving France, for proving that women didn't need male authority to be powerful, to lead, to hear God, to change the world. But they couldn't kill her legacy. Twenty-two years after her death, her sentence was overturned. The church that condemned her eventually declared her a saint. History remembers her not as a heretic but as a hero.

When we wear Joan of Arc, we wear a reminder that being silenced doesn't mean we were wrong - it means we were dangerous to those who benefit from our oppression. We wear armor, literal or metaphorical, not because we want to fight, but because the world refuses to let us exist peacefully as we are. We hear our own voices - our intuition, our truth, our power - and we refuse to deny them, even when the cost is high.

Joan didn't just fight against the English. She fought against every societal structure that said women couldn't lead, couldn't have direct spiritual authority, couldn't be believed. And though they killed her for it, she won. Because every time her story is told, another woman realizes: I do not exist to endure. I exist to fight, to lead, to be believed, to be powerful.