Cecile Richards with husband, Kirk, and children Daniel, Hannah, and Lily.
My mother, Ann Richards, grew up in a time when most women didn’t have many options; you could be a teacher, a secretary, a domestic worker, or a nurse, and that was pretty much it. My kids, though, grew up seeing women in charge. Our life was such a matriarchy that when my son, Daniel, was three he said, “When I grow up, I want to be a woman.”
This was less gender confusion than gender envy. The women he knew were in power, doing important and cool things.
My twins were nine months old and in a Snugli when they began going to see the University of Texas Lady Longhorns basketball team. Lily and her friend Amanda even had the honor of wiping up the basketball court floor during timeouts. At the time, the longest-serving women’s basketball coach, Jody Conradt, had the winningest record for a college women’s team. We were season ticket holders, as was everyone we knew. In those days, if they had dropped a bomb on the Erwin Center during a Lady Longhorns game, every lesbian and progressive in Austin would have perished.
Mom and her friend Barbara Jordan, then in a wheelchair, would sit courtside and cheer like teenagers. Barbara took the sport seriously and did not go easy on the women when their game was off. You could hear her voice thundering from the sidelines, just as if she were back in the middle of the Watergate hearings: “Women, can we not shoot any better than this?” It wasn’t until they were much older that the twins learned men played basketball too.
Still, as far as we had come, the stereotyping of boys and girls from the earliest age was heartbreaking. The teacher in Hannah and Daniel’s kindergarten class gave out “awards” at the end of the year. For the girls? “Most Helpful to the Teacher” and “Friendliest Student.” The boys’ diplomas were very different: “Most Likely to Invent Something” and “Best in Math.” It was maddening, part of a pattern we fought hard to break.
When we moved to Washington, D.C., Hannah joined the Girl Scouts. I, too, had been a member back in the day, and my memories were of camping and working for badges, in addition to sewing baby blankets for the local hospital. Hannah, though, spent her Girl Scout year doing three things: getting ready for the cookie sale, selling the cookies, and tabulating the sales. I’m sure this is not the experience of every Girl Scout troop.
Meanwhile, Daniel was in the Cub Scouts, and he didn’t have to sell a thing. Daniel and I carved a car for the Pinewood Derby and competed with Cub Scouts from all around the area. His den was taking bike rides along the C&O Canal, learning about rocket ships from astronauts, and volunteering at Loaves and Fishes, the local soup kitchen. When the Cub Scouts decided to discriminate against LGBTQ kids and leaders and we decided to drop out, Daniel was disappointed, but I was devastated—I lived for those Pinewood Derby competitions!
Finally one day I’d had it. I said to Hannah, “What if we started our own organization, one where we didn’t have to sell cookies and could do the cool kinds of things the Cub Scouts do?”
Hannah was game, so along with a half dozen of her friends from her fourth-grade class, we got ourselves organized. The girls met and determined they needed a name and a T-shirt. They decided to call themselves the Future Women Presidents, and one of the artistic moms in the group designed the shirts. They went camping and learned how to make a fire and cook outdoors. They painted a mural at a community center. They hiked, recycled, visited the Museum of Women in the Arts, and then, through a miraculous series of events, got to visit the White House and even the press briefing room. It seemed only fitting for the Future Women Presidents!
As the girls moved out of elementary school and into junior high, the FWP dissolved. I still think if we had stuck with it, we could have gone national.
I recently came across an old photo of the Future Women Presidents, now all women in their twenties. It’s nice to think that early on they had the chance to think big thoughts, learn some self-sufficiency, and be proud of the women they would become.
One just received her master’s degree in public health, working on reproductive health care. Another is working with a food kitchen. They are scattered from San Francisco to South Africa, and it has been wonderful to see them grow into confident women. And the Girl Scouts? These days they’re on the move, teaching girls math and science, business and leadership skills.
I know all three of our kids secretly wished that at least once, on “career day” at Lafayette Elementary School, one of their parents was a firefighter or librarian or something they knew how to explain to their friends.
By that time Kirk was neck-deep in labor organizing and I was fighting for reproductive rights. We were always going up against some tough adversary, and the dinner table conversation was usually about some injustice somewhere or our overwhelming frustration with the political scene in Washington. George W. Bush was President, and had recently nominated Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court, so we were in constant battle.
One day Daniel came home and announced that his third-grade classmates had been talking about what they wanted to be when they grew up. He had decided he wanted to be a potter.
Daniel had not shown the slightest talent or interest in anything artistic. “That’s great, Daniel!” I said. “What a fascinating thing to do. How did you decide that?”
“Because, Mom, nobody doesn’t like a potter.”
A little bit of my heart broke that night, and I realized how much he and his sisters had internalized some of the toughest parts of life as an activist. Daniel was learning that going up against the powers that be means there will always be someone who doesn’t like what you’re doing. That’s the life Kirk and I chose. As a result, the kids learned that not everyone is going to love you, and that’s okay.
Years later, instead of becoming a potter, Daniel headed off to Allegheny College in rural western Pennsylvania. He also became an activist and learned to stand up for his beliefs, which didn’t always match up with the beliefs of his classmates or the campus administration. I’m pretty sure he is the first and only Allegheny student to both chair his fraternity’s social committee and serve as the vice president of the reproductive rights organization.
The kids learned that going up against the powers that be, not everyone is going to love you, and that’s okay.
One of his proudest moments (and mine) was his fight to get reproductive health services on campus. Daniel called me to say he’d met with the head of the school clinic. “We went in to talk to her, because, Mom, they won’t even prescribe birth control for students, and it’s hard to get it off campus. I told her that, honestly, kids weren’t breaking their legs every weekend, but they were having sex.”
Eventually, the campus agreed to provide prescriptions for birth control for students, a major win. Daniel went on to help organize “slut walks” and the sex fair at Allegheny, where they attracted the attention of the Drudge Report for holding a session on female orgasm in the school chapel. I called Daniel to congratulate him when I saw the headline.
His explanation? “She was the most popular speaker, and the chapel was the biggest meeting space we could find.” That’s my boy!
From Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead, by Cecile Richards with Lauren Peterson, published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. Excerpted with permission.
Cecile Richards has been a lifelong activist for women’s rights and social justice, including more than a decade as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund.