What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power (78 page)

MS
: What words of wisdom or advice would you have for girls and young women today if you could deliver a message?

CJ
: I would say learn as much as you can, absorb as much as you can. It’s easier— information is actually available to us now. Develop friends and contacts, and I don’t mean in a way of using people, but in an interested way—building your networks, tapping people that are of interest to you, and understanding their time constraints, but asking for information. And working as hard as the devil and knowing that even some guys don’t make it [
laughs]
, so it’s a question of working hard and working to your best, identifying what it is that you actually want and then creating—if you’re having children—create the village that will allow you to raise them and still have productive well-paying work. I don’t want to say a job; it’s work [
laughs]
.

CECILE RICHARDS

“Perhaps the most unique thing about women is that we reproduce. We have children. It is sort of an essential part of humanity [
laughs
] and yet, when you don’t have women in the room making fundamental decisions about women’s health and reproduction, then all the joys and challenges that happen once you do have children
—
childcare and healthcare for kids, and education
—
it’s critical that you have women debating these policies and representing that point of view.”

C
ECILE
R
ICHARDS IS
president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, PPFA’s advocacy and political arm. She is a leader in national progressive politics with more than twenty years of experience working on behalf of reproductive freedom and social justice. Prior to joining PPFA, Richards served as founder and president of America Votes, a coalition of more than thirty national organizations, including the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. America Votes was created to maximize voter registration, education, and mobilization among grassroots organizations. Directly before serving as president of America Votes, Richards worked as deputy chief of staff for Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, where she played a key role in the Congress member’s election as the first woman Democratic leader of the House of Representatives. She is the daughter of former Texas Governor Ann Richards.

MARIANNE SCHNALL
: I always like to start my interviews by mentioning how this whole book was inspired. I have two daughters, one who was eight at the time that Obama was elected. We were talking about how wonderful it was that we had our first African American president, and she just looked at me and deadpanned, “Why haven’t we ever had a woman president?” It was one of those things that was so innocent and simple and obvious, and I found myself almost stumbling a bit to answer it. What would you have said? Why do you think we’ve never had a woman president?

CECILE RICHARDS
: Well, I think in many ways, as women, we haven’t demanded a woman president. And I think it is our opportunity and our obligation to make it happen. It’s funny, because almost the exact same thing happened when my sister and I were young and my mother took us to an exhibit on Texas history in San Antonio. It was a folk-like museum. We’re sitting there in a darkened room, and they’re showing slides of the whole history of Texas and my little sister turned to my mother and said, “Where are the women?” Because there literally were no women in this entire thing. Maybe one. And it made my mother and some other women she knew get together and create the Texas Women’s History Project, which again sort of put together this whole traveling road show and now is actually, I think, housed in the Texas Women’s History Museum in Dallas. But it was the same thing, where sometimes it takes this sort of “out of the mouths of babes,” these questions that inspire women to say, “Well, you know, that’s a really good question,” and do something about it.

So I think your daughter’s question is exactly right. It’s not anyone’s responsibility but our own to make sure that women are not only able to be astronauts and athletes and everything else, but that they also hold the
highest government positions in the land. I’ll never forget my very first few months here at Planned Parenthood. I went to the Supreme Court. We had a major case to argue, and sitting there in the audience and seeing—because it’s such an intimate, small space—this tiny, fierce woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was holding on her shoulders the entire population of women in this country. And of course, it was a choice issue, so she was trying to represent all of us. It was so stunning; it made me realize how other disenfranchised groups have felt all their lives of not being represented in the highest court in the land. There is a lot more that we have to do, but a lot of opportunity, and it’s up to us to do it.

MS
: There have been women showing up in leadership positions in a lot of other sectors, but still, particularly in government, in politics, women are really lagging behind. What specific obstacles do you think keep women from entering and advancing through the political pipeline, and what do you think we can do to change that? Do you think part of it is the fact that we just don’t see ourselves there, so it doesn’t occur to us? Or is it because there are structural obstacles?

CR
: Well, look, I think that absolutely all the structural aspects—we could go through the sexism at every level of whether it’s sort of all the additional hurdles you have to leap over. I certainly saw them first hand with my mother, but I see them now every day with the women we work with who are in office, who are running for office. So those exist and that’s how it is. But I think one of the major obstacles we face is that we keep thinking there’s going to be a perfect moment, where someone is going to come to us and say, “Wow, you would be perfect to run for the United States Senate,” or “I really think we should put you forward for state House or to become governor,” and we think there’s a perfect moment in which our children will be the right age, we’ll have all the correct degrees,
know the right people, we’ll have had all the correct experiences—and that simply isn’t how life works. And as women we’re so caught up in doing everything right that I think we are sort of pre-conditioned to wait for the perfect time, and it just doesn’t happen. And I still see that. Actually, I just spoke to a bunch of young women last night in Washington, hundreds of young women who are politically active and in their twenties, and I said, “Look, the most important thing to learn is to just say ‘yes.’ Whenever the next opportunity comes to you, don’t think about whether you have the right clothes, or you have the right degree, just say ‘yes.’” And it was like dropping a match on kindling. I feel that for all of them, too, they just need permission to just go out and do the next thing. And it is hard for women to do.

MS
: Where do you think that comes from? Does that come from the media? Is it coming from cultural conditions, or from women’s nature itself? It seems so important to figure out where that comes from, so we can switch it the other way.

CR
: I am not exactly sure what it is. I think that we spend a lot of our lives taking care of other people—whether it’s our children, sometimes our spouses, sometimes our parents—and I just don’t think we put ourselves first. And whether it’s simpler that way, it’s fear of failure, or we are conditioned to believe that we need to make sure we are taking care of everyone else before ourselves. I’m so proud of the women I do see now, understanding all of the obstacles and what they’re going to face, particularly in public office and in campaigns. I think it just takes a super-confident and super-resilient woman to put herself into the political environment these days. So I don’t know all the reasons why we hold back, but I do believe, as women, we could do even more to encourage and support the women we do know that make that leap.

MS
: Sometimes this is framed like a fairness or an equality thing, but why is it this important to not just women, but the United States and world, that women are equally represented at the table?

CR
: There are a gillion equity reasons, but I can tell you from the very narrow perch that I sit on, which is in the arena of women’s health, the classic example was the debate over healthcare and whether or not maternity benefits would be covered by health insurance. We had members of the United States Senate arguing against it, because they were never going to need maternity benefits. It’s as fundamental as that. Perhaps the most unique thing about women is that we reproduce. We have children. It is sort of an essential part of humanity [
laughs]
and yet, when you don’t have women in the room making fundamental decisions about women’s health and reproduction, then all the joys and challenges that happen once you do have children—childcare and healthcare for kids, and education—it’s critical that you have women debating these policies and representing that point of view. I could give you countless examples in the Affordable Care Act where if it had not been for Senator Barbara Mikulski or Senator Debbie Stabenow—I could go down the list—that bill would look radically different. And it is in large measure because of the women in Congress, and I include Leader Nancy Pelosi in this, as well, that women’s health made such an advance in this bill. It simply wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

MS
: I know that you worked as Deputy Chief of Staff to Nancy Pelosi, and I will be interviewing her for this project, as well. She almost always grants me an interview; she’s so fantastic. What did you learn from that inside look in terms of working with a woman leader in Congress and how government works?

CR
: Nancy Pelosi, in my mind, is the most extraordinary politician I’ve ever had the opportunity to really observe first hand. Because she understands a fundamental rule about politics, which is people do things for their reasons, not for your reasons. And she understood, better than anyone I’ve ever seen, how to bring people together, based on their interests, whether it was their districts, their backgrounds, their committees, their personal histories, she was able to bridge what is an incredibly disparate Democratic caucus and actually make things happen. Plus, she’s absolutely the hardest working woman that I’ve ever been around, and she never expected someone else to get the job done. She absolutely was in there. And as you say, if she always grants you interviews, that’s a classic example about the Leader. I think the other thing that’s interesting about Nancy and other women that get into office is I would say
99
percent of them went into public office because there was something they wanted to get done. You could talk about Jan Schakowsky, who cut her teeth on food safety as a young mother. You could talk about Donna Edwards, who really worked her life on women’s issues and domestic violence issues. Chellie Pingree, who spent a large part of her career on consumer issues and fairness issues. That’s what is different to me, at least at this point, with the women who are in office, is that they really aren’t there just for the sake of being in office. They ran—especially in the early days—against enormous headwinds. They ran for office because there was something that they wanted to get done. I know of course all the research shows that, in fact, women in office do get more done [
laughs
] . . . once they’re there!

MS
: Of course, talking about needing strong women leaders and role models, your mother—former Texas Governor Ann Richards—was really a hero to so many people. What did you learn from growing up in the house with such a passionate woman and watching her career?

CR
: It’s interesting, and you probably already know this, but when I grew up my mother was a housewife, that term we used to use in the olden days. She never worked outside the home until Sarah Weddington, who was then in her twenties, wanted to run for the state House and she couldn’t find anyone to run her campaign and asked my mother to do it. So that was really a radical change. So in terms of growing up in my household, it wasn’t that I was growing up with Madeleine Albright, or someone who had been this career person. It was really someone who had followed a very traditional life, back in those days what was considered a traditional role for women, particularly in Texas, and it wasn’t until much later that she really came into her own and had her own career and her own independence. I did learn a lot from her. There’s a million things we could talk about, but I do think her model was actually, ironically, when she first ran for public office, it was because the folks in our town had asked my dad to run and he didn’t want to and he looked around and said, “Well, I don’t know, Ann, do you want to run?” She was never on the top of anyone’s list and, again, that’s what she always said to women is, “Don’t wait until they ask you. You’ve got to just push your way through that door and demand to be part of the process, because if you’re waiting for someone to ask you, it’s likely not going to happen.”