by Brenda Wintrode
Former Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards declared Thursday that since stepping down from the reproductive rights organization, she’s shifted her focus to turning out more women voters for the upcoming election.
The activist and author told a crowd of over 100 people at the Dean’s Lecture Series that she has partnered with other non-profit leaders to create a women’s power-building organization called Supermajority.
“Our slightly ambitious goal for 2020 is to run the largest woman-to-woman voter turnout program in the history of this country,” Richards said during the series, which was sponsored by the College of Arts and Humanities.
The idea behind Supermajority, according to Richards, is to “organize and mobilize women to change the opportunities and fight for gender equity in a real and permanent way.”
“We want to build a world where our lives are safe, our bodies are respected, our work is valued, our government represents us and our families are supported,” Richards said, listing what Supermajority calls “The Majority Rules.”
“And the super rule – and this is really important – that the lives and experiences of women of color have to be front and center.”
Richards said that after 12 years lobbying congress and advocating for women’s access to reproductive healthcare, her team was still unable to realize the type of healthcare system they envisioned. They felt they needed to do more, she said.
The epiphany prompted Richards to join forces with Ai-Jen Poo, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Alicia Garza, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, along with civic organizers Jess Morales Rocketto, Katherine Grainger and Deirdre Schifeling.
“We had to roll up our sleeves and figure out how to build the kind of country that we want to live in, where people are free to get the health care that they need,” Richards said.
Richards showed a Supermajority video during her talk, which stated that women are not only the majority gender in America, they are the majority of voters, grassroots organizers and donors to political campaigns.
“One of us can be dismissed. Two of us can be ignored. But together, we aren’t just the majority- we are the supermajority,” women appearing in the video said.
In the introduction to her 2018 book, “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead– My Life Story,” Richards explained what drew her to Planned Parenthood was its history— “the history of brave, troublemaking women (and a few good men) who risked their reputations and even their lives to change things.”
Richards’ activism career began in high school with protesting the Vietnam War and organizing labor workers. She went on to work for the Texas gubernatorial campaigns of her mother, the late Ann Richards, and served as House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff from 2011 to 2012, according to her biography supplied by the university.
Richards took a moment in the beginning of her talk to honor her late mother, with whom she shares a strong resemblance, and reminded the audience that she comes from “a long line of strong Texas women.”
Fellow Texan and event attendee Eleanor Grosvenor said she identified with Richards having been raised in a family that advocates for the rights of others. The materials science and engineering major remembers her mother taking her to a Planned Parenthood luncheon back home to hear Richards speak.
During the question and answer period, the sophomore asked Richards if she had any advice for her male counterparts in the engineering department who often want to advocate for women’s rights but aren’t always sure how.
“Don’t wait for women to bring up the issues,” Richards said, directing her comments to Grosvenor’s cohort. “Bring it up yourself…don’t make the women [be] the ones to call it out.”
Grosvenor mentioned a key message she took away from Richards’ talk.
“No matter what field you’re going into, you can make a difference,” said Grosvenor. “No matter how small, we can all do something.”