Under apartheid, the women we met had been homeless squatters on this desolate piece of land off the highway; they had nowhere else to go with their children. Together, they started to build a community. They formed their own housing and credit association, modeled on the Self Employed Women’s Association started by Ela Bhatt in India. Pooling their savings and microloans, they bought shovels, paint, and cement, and learned how to lay foundations and put in a sewer line. When Chelsea and I visited, they had built eighteen homes. When I came back with Bill on a state visit a year later, there were 104. I loved a line from one of the songs they sang as they worked: “Strength, money, and knowledge—we cannot do anything without them.” Good advice for women everywhere!
The women decided to name the settlement after Victoria Mxenge, a South African anti-apartheid activist. She was working as a nurse in 1964 when she married civil rights lawyer Griffiths Mxenge, who was well known for defending victims of apartheid. While working and raising her family, Victoria also got her law degree. After she finished her studies, she joined her husband’s practice in 1981.
That year, her husband was abducted near their home and murdered, his body mutilated by the apartheid government. Victoria took over his law practice, continuing the struggle for liberation and vowing to discover the truth about her husband’s murder. She represented youth who were mistreated in detention facilities, defended anti-apartheid activists being tried for treason, and became a member of the Release Nelson Mandela Committee.
In 1985, she spoke at the funeral of the Cradock Four, young activists who had been murdered by the security police. “… when people have declared war on you, you cannot afford to be crying,” she said. “You have to fight back. As long as I live, I will never rest until I see to it that justice is done, until Griffiths Mxenge’s killers are brought to book.”
Just a few days after that funeral, she was murdered in the driveway of her home in front of her children. It is believed that she was killed by the government’s security forces. Thousands of people attended her funeral; mourners took to the streets and clashed with the police, leaving several people dead and more injured. In 2006, she was posthumously awarded the Order of Luthuli in Silver for her contribution to the field of law and her role in the fight against apartheid’s oppression.
When I returned to Cape Town as secretary of state in August 2009, I visited the Victoria Mxenge community once again. I even helped do a little landscaping (and there was also some dancing involved!). Patricia Matolengwe, the head of the Victoria Mxenge community, told me how much progress they had made—in part because they were driven by the enduring example of Victoria’s bravery. They had gone from eighteen homes in one place to more than fifty thousand across South Africa, and had taken over more land to keep building. I was honored to learn that they named a street after me, and I have the souvenir street sign they gave me. But the real story of that visit was how these poor, landless women had been empowered by another woman’s life and death, and used her example to chart a better story for themselves. It reminds me of the words that tens of thousands of women chanted as they protested back in 1956 to demand an end to apartheid: “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.”
Ai-jen Poo
Chelsea
Ai-jen Poo is a self-described futurist. Her understanding of the changing demographics of America and its workforce are at the heart of everything she does—from her earliest activism to her work with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which she cofounded in 2007. She has a sense of where our country is headed (or at least should be headed) and what we need to do to build a more hopeful and equitable future for everyone.
The daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, Ai-jen was born in Pittsburgh in 1974. Her mother had moved to the United States to study chemistry and later became a doctor. Ai-jen remembers that her mother was the only woman in her medical school class who was also raising two young children. She spent her career treating patients with melanoma, and Ai-jen grew up hearing about the stories and struggles of cancer patients and their families, and surrounded by her mother’s commitment to do all she could for every patient.
Ai-jen became an activist while a college student at Columbia University. “I started volunteering at a domestic violence shelter for Asian immigrant women, which then led me to organizing,” she remembers. “In general, I was hungry to understand how to have an impact on the world. I signed up for every class on social change, feminism, and movements for justice I could find.” One night in April 1996, she and some of her fellow students occupied Columbia’s Low Library to demand that the university hire more ethnic studies faculty and design a curriculum that reflected the diversity of New York City and America. She stayed in the building all night and was arrested the next morning. Calm and undeterred, Ai-jen kept advocating for what she knew was right—and necessary. She soon took part in another student-led occupation: This time, they took over the school’s main administrative buildings for five days, teaching their own classes. The protests helped put pressure on the campus to create the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, which still exists today.
“When you listen to women, especially to those who have been the least visible in society, you will hear some of the most extraordinary stories that represent the best of who we are as a nation.”
—AI-JEN POO
After graduation, Ai-jen went to work for the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. The experience opened her eyes to the fact that domestic workers—including housekeepers, nannies, and home care workers—were some of the most underpaid and exploited people in New York City. Despite the essential work they did, including caring for children and the elderly and making it possible for people with disabilities to live independently, they frequently labored in the shadows, excluded from the basic protections that should be afforded to everyone working in America. Ai-jen believed it was past time to start valuing and empowering these “invisible” workers. She started a new organization called Domestic Workers United to help lobby for long-overdue policy changes in New York City.
In 2007, Ai-jen, together with fifty domestic workers and organizers from around the country, founded the National Domestic Workers Alliance. It was an effort to take her local work national, to recognize and support “the work that makes all other work possible.” She helped pass a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in New York State in 2010. It granted rights like overtime pay, paid family leave, and protection from harassment and discrimination to domestic workers. It was the first time that some of America’s 2.5 million domestic workers had guaranteed access to these protections. I remember thinking about my Grandma Dorothy after it had passed. As a young teenager, she worked as a maid and “mother’s helper,” and while she was always grateful for what she saw as her employer’s kindness, she worked hours each day before and after school; her working conditions nearly ninety years ago are not too different from what many domestic workers face today.
“The work itself is associated with work that women have historically done, work that’s been made incredibly invisible and taken for granted in our culture. But it’s so fundamental to everything else in our world. It makes it possible for all of us to go out and do what we do in the world every single day, knowing that the most precious aspects of our life are in good hands.”
—AI-JEN POO
Since New York’s breakthrough law, seven more states—and counting—have passed similar legislation. In 2011, inspired by her family’s experience caring for her grandfather in a nursing home, Ai-jen launched a new initiative called Caring Across Generations, which aims to address the need to better care for the elderly with respect and dignity.
Three years later, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of her game-changing work. Even though the recognition was exciting, it felt complicated to Ai-jen. “Representing a workforce of unrecognized and undervalued women, I’m very conscious about the politics of visibility. I work with so many women who deserve recognition and ne
ver receive it,” she said later. Following the advice of a mentor who encouraged her not to shrink from her “moment in the sun,” she decided she needed to own her contributions and successes—and share them. Especially since receiving the prestigious award, she has gone out of her way to create “moments in the sun” for more of the women she works with—whether they’re domestic workers or her colleagues at the office.
HILLARY
In addition to being a tireless organizer, Ai-jen radiates compassion and empathy—two things we urgently need more of in our country’s policy discussions. She is a beautiful speaker and writer and has a unique ability to bring moral clarity to any issue. Today she is organizing women—and men who believe in gender equity—through a new group, Supermajority, that has brought together leaders from reproductive rights, racial justice, and economic opportunity to work together toward a common agenda.
The principles of Ai-jen’s work are expansive; she doesn’t limit herself to one cause or issue. She has advocated for a path to citizenship for undocumented people in America, many of whom work as caregivers. Ai-jen and her colleagues have helped launch a campaign to keep families together at the border, and she has argued that what we are facing is a national moral emergency; I couldn’t agree more. She has urged Americans to “think like a domestic worker who shows up and cares no matter what. [Choose] love and compassion, no matter what. Show up like a domestic worker, because our children are counting on us.” Her words rang true the day she uttered them and every day since.
Sarah Brady, Gabby Giffords, Nelba Márquez-Greene, Shannon Watts, and Lucy McBath
SARAH BRADY
GABBY GIFFORDS
SHANNON WATTS
NELBA MÁRQUEZ-GREENE
LUCY McBATH
Hillary
Many of the people I admire are not lifelong activists but reluctant advocates who find themselves wholeheartedly taking on a cause. That is certainly true of Sarah Brady, Gabby Giffords, Nelba Márquez-Greene, Shannon Watts, and Lucy McBath. None of these women dreamed of becoming a national leader in the fight for gun violence prevention. But when the issue forced its way into their lives, they took it on—knowing what they were up against, knowing the resistance they would face, but also knowing that the pain of doing nothing would be far greater than the pain of doing something so hard. Each of their stories is different, but they share a common dedication to preventing more families from having to live through the pain of losing a loved one to preventable gun violence.
On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, was shot in the head during an assassination attempt on the president’s life. He was left partially paralyzed and with brain damage. His wife, Sarah Brady, became a gun control activist. Her mission was simple: to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, children, and the mentally ill. She tirelessly lobbied legislators and made speeches and television appearances in support of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Bill. When that bill was finally signed into law by my husband in 1993, Sarah and James were there.
“The gun lobby finds waiting periods inconvenient. You have only to ask my husband how inconvenient he finds his wheelchair from time to time.”
—SARAH BRADY
The Brady Bill required a five-day waiting period before the purchase of a handgun, and a background check on individuals seeking to purchase firearms from a federally licensed dealer. And it worked: Around 2.1 million ineligible people were stopped from buying a gun between 1994 and 2014.
Sarah didn’t stop after the Brady Bill was signed. She served as chair of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. She spent the rest of her life speaking out about loopholes in our gun laws that allowed, as she pointed out, “deadly consequences.”
Thirty years after James Brady was shot, on January 8, 2011, Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords, a third-term Congress member from Arizona, was holding a public meeting with constituents in the parking lot of a Safeway supermarket in Tucson. Gabby had served in the state legislature from 2000 through 2005 and was elected to Congress in 2006, where she made her mark standing up for America’s security and standing with the men and women who serve in our nation’s military. She was a rising star in the Democratic Party, often considered a future candidate for the Senate and even the presidency. I admired her for her quick wit, bold ideas, and ability to hold a rational conversation with anyone—no matter the political views.
On that morning, as she greeted the people who had come to see her, a gunman shot her in the head and killed six and wounded thirteen others. Despite the national news incorrectly reporting otherwise—a painful reminder of the importance of fact-checking—Gabby survived. She spent months in a rehabilitation facility working to recover her strength. She did it all with her trademark humor, kindness, and relentless optimism. (On January 8, 2014, she marked the three-year anniversary of the shooting by going skydiving. She told the Today show that it was “a lot of fun” and “peaceful, so peaceful.” )
“Even in our grief, we must summon the courage to fight against this fear. Americans must find the courage to imagine a country where these massacres do not occur. Our leaders must find the courage to accept the confines of their politics and pursue the moral necessity of peace and safety.”
—GABBY GIFFORDS, AFTER THE 2018 SHOOTING IN PARKLAND, FLORIDA
On August 1, 2011, Gabby returned to the House to vote and received a standing ovation before resigning the following January to focus on her physical and speech therapy. I’ll never forget the sight of her standing there on the House floor, surrounded by friends and colleagues, as resolute and brave as ever. From that moment forward, with the support and partnership of her remarkable husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, she has dedicated her life to helping save the lives of others by advocating for gun violence prevention. “We need politicians to show the same courage demonstrated by survivors of gun violence: challenge the NRA, and pass safer gun laws,” she has said. “But we also need to be tough. That’s why we hold politicians accountable when they take NRA money and vote against the safety of our kids and communities.”
In 2017, I attended a ceremony for the commissioning of a United States Navy ship, the USS Gabrielle Giffords. The ship’s motto is “I Am Ready.” That’s Gabby. She came out of a tragic experience with grace and faith that are hard to imagine. Instead of asking the question many of us would ask—“Why me?”—she asked herself how she could make the most out of the miracle of her survival.
Less than two years after Gabby was shot, twenty schoolchildren and six educators were murdered on December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. One of those children was six-year-old Ana Grace Márquez-Greene—a singing, dancing, joyful little girl. Her mother, Nelba Márquez-Greene; her father, Jimmy Greene; and her brother, Isaiah, were plunged into unfathomable shock, sadness, and anger, just like every other family struck by death that day.
A marriage and family therapist, Nelba understood the grief she was experiencing, but that didn’t make it any easier. In the months and years since, she has been open about her struggles with depression, even her thoughts of suicide. She gets through the pain in part by working to build a country where no other family has to suffer the way hers has.
CHELSEA
In 2013, Nelba started the Ana Grace Project, which aims to confront isolation in schools by promoting community, professional development, and music and arts opportunities. I’ve been honored to support this wonderful organization and am grateful to call Nelba a friend. She speaks openly and bravely about her grief, the additional pain brought by those who deny the Sandy Hook tragedy, and her eternal love for both of her children. “I would say that the only difference between the early days and now is that the shock has worn off,” she said. “When you have lost a child, a beloved, prayed-for child, to gun violence, I will only say for us, it doesn’t get better.”
When I met Nelba, she gave me the book that she and her daughter
had been reading the night before Ana Grace went to school for the last time: Junie B. Jones and the Mushy Gushy Valentime [sic]. She asked me to read that book to my granddaughter. It was an extraordinarily powerful gesture from someone with a gift for helping others to understand the depth of sadness she and too many other families have had to endure. She recently posted on social media a picture of a pink bicycle, hanging up in her garage, unused. “Some survivors do not want to be visible,” she reflected. “It doesn’t mean they’re not courageous. Some do want to be. There is no right or wrong way. Either case requires care, as long as we have to look at hand-me-down bikes hanging from garage ceilings and empty seats where children should be.”
Nelba also described to me an experience that is all too common for anyone who takes a stand against gun violence: being subjected to vile harassment on the Internet in an organized effort to intimidate and silence. (“You look like you should be deported,” someone tweeted at her on her birthday.) Nelba and everyone else who withstands that kind of viciousness—like the Sandy Hook family that has been forced to move seven times because of it—deserves our support for their tenacity and resilience.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 27