Picking up where women’s liberation left off in the 1980s, Richards moved feminism into the nonprofit board room, championing institutional strategies that mobilized women’s votes and dollars to defend against the Republican right. Those institutions—America Votes, Planned Parenthood, Texas Freedom Network, and Supermajority, and the digital site Abortion in America (founded last year in response to the Dobbs decision)—are her great legacy.
In the Richards household, political and social institutions made progressive ideas real. The daughter of civil rights attorney David Richards and Ann Richards, a feminist who climbed the Texas Democratic Party ladder to become the state’s second woman governor in 1990, Cecile’s childhood in Dallas and Austin was steeped in politics and social activism. Not surprisingly, she learned to fight conservatives early, and was expelled from public school for wearing a black armband on campus to protest the war in Vietnam.
In a short 13 minutes, you could feel the electricity of a feminist dynasty. Not yet 40, Cecile Richards had, as former NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue writes, “cut her teeth on union organizing.” She was a veteran of two political campaigns—Sarah Weddington’s successful 1973 run for State Legislature and Ann’s gubernatorial run in 1990—as well as a stint as deputy chief of staff for future Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and she was a co-founder of her first nonprofit, America Votes.
Imagine my surprise when, after the session ended, Richards quickly made her way down the steps to the front row where I was seated. I can’t remember precisely what she said, but it amounted to this: You asked a good question, and it deserves a conversation—which is precisely what we had, for about 20 minutes, one that covered marriage equality, health care, reproductive rights, and economic discrimination. It was a different kind of electric moment than at the convention, which signaled a different moment in feminism: Institutions and leaders now took it for granted that combining an activist mentality with institutionalist pragmatism could crack any policy nut, no matter how tough.
Now, as we enter a second Trump administration and mourn the loss of a great activist, I remind myself: The feminist institutions Cecile left us with did not fail. They were merely insufficient to the task, and had she lived, she would not have rested until she learned why.
Putting those institutions back in the fight is now up to us. Cecile would demand that we do it: After all, she has showed us how.
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