Cecile Richards Was Our Era’s Great Feminist Institution Builder

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.

My second encounter with Richards came in 2012, when she had become a national figure at PPFA, and this one was far more personal. I wangled a press pass to a panel Richards was on at the New Yorker Festival of Ideas. Toward the end of the session, I asked why, when we talked about “women’s rights,” the word lesbian never came up. An annoyed moderator, Dorothy Wickenden, asked what the question meant; the two conservatives on the panel (Margaret Hoover and Kellyanne Conway) looked off into a vague middle distance; and Melissa Harris-Perry tried to answer me. Richards said nothing.

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.