With the days of International Women’s Month upon us, here’s a tale of two women and the two songs they made decades apart.

Let’s first go back to the 1970s, when star rockers such as Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Patti Smith were paving the musical way during the heyday for the women’s liberation movement.

There was another lady with a lesser-known name and a quieter voice: Helen Reddy.

For much of her career, the singer who gained fame on an Australian talent show rarely wrote her own songs. Her first hit was a 1971 cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

It’s not exactly an anthem for the independent.

Reddy, who is described as a feminist but in a not-in-your-face way, later said she had been looking for a song that aligned with her feelings on women empowerment.

“All I could find were these awful songs like, ‘I am woman and you are man, I am weak so you can be stronger than,’ ” she once said, as quoted in a Rolling Stone article. “So I realized the song I was looking for didn’t exist, and I was going to have to write it myself.”

That’s when the phrase “I am woman” came to her “over and over,” Reddy said in a 2014 interview with Houston Public Media. “And I thought, well, this has to be a song.”

So it was a song. A hit song. Shortly after “I Am Woman” came out in 1972, the folksy tune — which proclaims “I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman” — trailblazed its way to the No. 1 spot.

Lyrics such as “yes I am wise, but it’s wisdom born of pain” seem way ahead of their time. And this song stood the test of time. When Reddy died in 2020, one journalist made a case for “I Am Woman” being pop music’s first-ever feminist anthem.

Here’s where I confess that I hadn’t heard about Reddy until recently. I’ll doubly confess the discovery happened, in a roundabout way, because of TikTok.

Fast forward to late 2021.

There’s a 21-year-old woman named Emmy Meli. She’s working at a golf course. She’s a singer, but not a well-known one.

Just like Reddy, the words “I am woman” just came to Meli’s mind one day.

Or, rather, in a dream. As Meli told Variety magazine, she dreamt that a black cat was scratching at her and told her: “You’re having trouble embracing your femininity and stepping into your personal power.”

That inspired Meli to make personal mantras to tell herself each morning. One was, “I am woman. I am fearless.”

She soon found a drumbeat on YouTube and turned the mantras into a short song, which she shared on TikTok one evening. She had a few thousand followers at the time.

The next day, her video had more than 27 million views.

The catchy clip, showing off Meli’s soulful and raspy voice, played off her mantra.

“I am woman, I am fearless,” she sang. “I am sexy. I’m divine. I’m unbeatable, I’m creative. Honey, you can get in line.”

As the song went viral and blossomed into the background noise for an empowering social media trend, Meli realized she would have to write the rest of the song.

So she did. Her song went on to gain 100 million listens on Spotify. And so, 50 years later, another song titled “I Am Woman” became a hit.

Last month, I did what you do when you have a song stuck in your head and want to know more. I wanted to know who was behind this TikTok hit.

Google brought up Reddy’s name and song.

That’s when I let the internet take me on a trail.

I learned the songs with the same name are not purposefully connected. Meli said in one interview that she didn’t know of Reddy until a mention from a TikTok commenter.

I learned a lot about Reddy, a quietly bold change-maker. In her 1973 Grammy acceptance speech, she thanked “God because she makes everything possible.”

How do we not see more Helen Reddy T-shirts for sale?

Along with many others, she is the kind of woman we should be celebrating for International Women’s Day. She is the kind of woman who helped others, such as Meli, to chase their dreams. Both have inspired others to not just sing along, but to believe those words.

In 1972, it was revolutionary for Reddy to sing these lyrics, “If I have to, I can do anything.”

In 2022, Meli proudly sings, “I am anything I want.”