The Book of Gutsy Women

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  In 1944, she became the second black woman to attend Columbia Law School. By this time she was working for a wartime agency that supported family members of servicemen. When she told her supervisor at work why she was leaving, he scoffed, echoing a refrain she would hear throughout her life: “Women don’t get anywhere in the law.… That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard, a complete waste of time.”

  “I rejected the notion that my race or sex would bar my success in life.”

  —CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

  While in law school, Constance joined the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund. After graduation, she was hired to work as a law clerk for Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP’s chief counsel and a future Supreme Court justice. There, she helped write briefs for the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Three years after Brown, she argued and won the right of the Little Rock Nine to attend the previously all-white Central High. She defended protesters arrested during the Freedom Rides of the 1960s and students who were expelled from school in Birmingham, Alabama, for taking part in public demonstrations. She also served as lead counsel on a case to allow a high school student named James Meredith to gain admission to the University of Mississippi, likely becoming the first black woman to argue before the Supreme Court in modern times. Over the course of the case, she made twenty-two trips to the state. She would later describe the day Meredith accepted his diploma from Ole Miss—the first black student to graduate from the institution—as the most thrilling day of her life. Of the ten cases she argued before the highest court in the land, she won nine.

  She was ironclad in her convictions and always positive, though part of her strength was how gracious she was in her arguments. When a reporter once wrote that she had “demanded” something in court, she corrected: “What do you mean ‘I demanded the court’? You don’t demand, you pray for relief or move for some action.”

  Constance’s quiet activism was evident in the courtroom and beyond. “She visited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail, sang freedom songs in churches that had been bombed, and spent a night under armed guard with Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader who was later murdered,” wrote the New York Times in her obituary. In 1964, at the age of forty-three, Constance entered politics. She accepted a nomination to run for the New York State Senate on one condition: that serving in office would not interfere with her work for the NAACP. She became the first black woman to serve in the state Senate, then the first to serve as Manhattan borough president—a position for which she was unanimously chosen by the city council to fill a vacancy. She was later elected to a full four-year term with bipartisan support. As borough president, she worked to revitalize Harlem and improve housing and schools. Her work captured national attention, and President Lyndon B. Johnson soon appointed her as the first black woman to serve as a federal judge. Throughout her nearly forty years on the bench, she earned a reputation for being fair-minded.

  By the time of her death in 2005, Constance had earned eight honorary college degrees. She hadn’t simply overcome the injustice she experienced as a child; she dedicated her life to correcting it on a grand scale, giving other people of color and other women opportunities she could only dream of as a little girl. “Her métier was in the quieter, painstaking preparation and presentation of lawsuits that paved the way to fuller societal participation by blacks,” wrote the New York Times. “She dressed elegantly, spoke in a low, lilting voice and, in case after case, earned a reputation as the chief courtroom tactician of the Civil Rights Movement.” In her autobiography, Equal Justice Under Law, she explained that setbacks in the struggle for civil rights and progress could not be abided. “We all believed that our time had come and that we had to go forward,” she said. Generations of lawyers and Americans are glad she did.

  Edie Windsor

  Hillary and Chelsea

  Chelsea

  Edie Windsor didn’t set out to change the course of American history. Born in 1929, she grew up at a time when a woman was generally expected to settle down, get married, and let her husband support her. Instead, at twenty-three years old, Edie was divorced, living on her own in New York City, and supporting herself. But Edie didn’t let that stop her. She got her master’s degree in math and became a computer programmer at IBM in the 1950s and ’60s, when women were still very much in the minority across the company. The photos from the time show Edie looking determined, standing in front of a computer the size of a room; or sitting behind a desk, in charge, and clearly loving it. When Maya Angelou declared, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it, possibly without claiming it, she stands up for all women,” she could have been describing Edie.

  While Edie was making history in her professional life, she was also in the process of making history in her personal life. In 1963, she met a graduate student named Thea Spyer, and the two danced all night. Over the next two years, they fell in love. Before Stonewall, before Pride parades, before two women could legally marry anywhere in the world, their devotion to each other was its own quiet, revolutionary act. They loved each other through good times and hard times—including the hardest time of all, Thea’s diagnosis of progressive multiple sclerosis. For decades, Edie gladly took care of Thea.

  After being told in 2007 that Thea had no longer than a year to live, they flew to Canada and were legally married. When Thea died two years later, Edie was overcome with grief. That grief was compounded by the realization that she owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes she wouldn’t have had to pay if she had been married to a man—as Edie used to say, “if Thea had been Theo.” She knew she had two choices: Accept this painful injustice or fight back. She chose to fight, all the way to the highest court in the land. With her brilliant lawyer, Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, by her side, they made the case for her marriage, indeed the case for equality, forcefully and poignantly.

  Hillary

  Through it all, Edie’s strength never wavered, though she did confess to one moment of panic: the day she saw her name in print as “United States v. Windsor.” It’s only fitting to know that’s how she will be immortalized in history books, in a landmark decision synonymous with equal rights and dignity under the law.

  Edie’s battle affirmed the fact that progress—especially in a vibrant pluralistic society like America—takes a whole lot of persistence. True to form, after Edie won her fight, she didn’t quit. She kept on fighting for others. She mentored and supported women in technology. She assiduously corrected misinformation about MS, because she couldn’t stand the thought of causing more fear and uncertainty for anyone living with the disease, or for their loved ones. She was a source of inspiration and friendship for Jim Obergefell, who later brought his own case to the Supreme Court, which made marriage equality the law of the land in every state. The LGBTQ community had given Edie the strength to live her truth, and she dedicated her life to paying it forward.

  Chelsea

  I’ll never forget joining advocates back in 2011 during the ultimately successful fight to pass marriage equality in New York; we had failed to pass it in 2009. Marc and I had gotten married in 2010, and it was the happiest day of my life to be able to marry my best friend. It also renewed my commitment to marriage equality. It seemed obvious that every New Yorker—every American—should have the same right I had. I was very proud in 2013 when the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional. My father had signed DOMA in 1996. It never should have become law and I will always be grateful to Edie for helping ensure it didn’t stay law.

  Edie felt strongly that as necessary as it was, marriage was just the beginning—and she was right. She talked often about how wrong it was that LGBTQ Americans in many parts of the country can be married on Saturday, evicted from their home on Sunday, and fired on Monday simply because of who they are. She also spoke out about laws passed at the state level that treated LGBTQ Americans as second-class citizens; about LGBTQ youth homelessness; about the cruel a
nd inhumane practice of so-called conversion therapy, which is child abuse by another name; and about the crisis of violence against the transgender community—especially transgender women of color. “It’s been the joy of a lifetime to see the world change for the better for LGBT Americans before my very eyes,” she said. “But even though I’m not so young anymore, I’m not willing to stop fighting.”

  Hillary

  It was hard to say goodbye to Edie in 2017, but she left us with so much. She pushed us all to be better, stand taller, dream bigger. She didn’t just want us to say the right thing, she wanted us to do the right thing. She embodied the words of Mary Oliver: “There is nothing more pathetic than caution / when headlong might save a life, / even, possibly, your own.” Edie did everything headlong, including fall in love again—something even she never thought was possible, until she met her second wife, Judith Kasen-Windsor.

  Because of Edie, people came out, marched in their first Pride parade, married the love of their life. Women followed in her footsteps in science, technology, engineering, and math, shattering stereotypes and breaking barriers of their own. Advocates and activists watched her stand up to injustice and found renewed determination to wage their own battles. After she died, people took to social media to share their favorite memories—everyone from friends to fans to a fact-checker who once worked on a profile of her. (All hail the fact-checkers!) One man told the story of running up to Edie at the Container Store on Sixth Avenue, with a little encouragement from his then boyfriend, now fiancé. He thanked her and told her that she and Thea had changed his life. Edie grabbed his arm, winked, and said, “Don’t thank me. Just get married. It’s the most magical feeling to wake up married.”

  The magic of Edie Windsor was simple but powerful: She had a fierce belief in the value of being true to yourself. Whether she was reminding friends of her and Thea’s credo, “Don’t postpone joy,” or standing before the Supreme Court, Edie Windsor was always exactly herself and no less. When her lawyer, Robbie, asked her to make fewer references to her love life with Thea in order to make herself more palatable to the Supreme Court, Edie reluctantly agreed, on one condition: that their deal expire the moment the case was over. (And, as Robbie tells it, expire it did.) In her final days at a hospital in Manhattan, Edie still insisted on having her nails manicured and hair set, even if the only visitors she saw that day were her nurse and her wife.

  Edie was brave, endlessly determined, the kind of person you always want in your corner. It meant the world to me to have her support in my campaign. During some of the toughest days of the election—and the days that followed—I thought about Edie and her long struggle. I thought about how she never got discouraged. How she experienced loss, grief, and injustice, but how that only made her more generous, more openhearted, and more fearless in her fight. She refused to give up on the promise of America, and she refused to shrink any part of herself in order to fit into the America she dreamed of. Through determination and sheer force of will, and by being the most honest version of herself that she could imagine, she brought us one step closer to that more perfect union.

  Ela Bhatt

  Hillary

  On my first trip to India in 1995, I met one of the twentieth century’s most effective political and labor organizers, Ela Ramesh Bhatt. Following Gandhi’s example, she founded the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in 1971.

  Both a trade union and a women’s movement, SEWA had more than 140,000 members when I visited, including some of the poorest, least educated, and most shunned women in India. It has now grown to more than one million members. Many of the SEWA members had entered into arranged marriages and then lived in their husbands’ households under the watchful eyes of their mothers-in-law. Some had lived in purdah—the enforced isolation within their own homes that is applied to certain Hindu and Muslim women in South Asia—until their husbands died, were disabled, or left, and they had to support their families; all struggled day-to-day to survive. SEWA offered small loans to enable them to earn their own income and also provided basic literacy and business education training. When I visited SEWA headquarters in Ahmedabad, Ela showed me the large books kept in SEWA’s one-room office that recorded the loans and repayments. Through this system of microfinance, SEWA was providing employment for thousands of individual women and changing deeply held attitudes about women’s roles.

  Ela received a bachelor of arts in English and a law degree and then joined the legal department of the Textile Labour Association, where she headed its women’s wing. Thousands of women worked in the textile industry, but most were self-employed at home rather than working in factories, so the labor laws did not apply to them. Ela decided to organize them and to seek better working conditions and income for them. She encountered stiff opposition from businesses and governments but kept pressing her mission and became known as the “gentle revolutionary.”

  Ela, a practitioner of Gandhian nonviolence, stresses the centrality of the peaceful struggle against injustice. When I was secretary of state, I proudly gave her the Global Fairness Initiative’s Fairness Award for helping more than one million poor women in India to greater dignity, independence, and self-sufficiency. I have often referred to her as one of my personal heroes because of her life’s example and SEWA’s achievements. I have stayed in touch with Ela and her successors over the years, and I visit SEWA members and stores when I go to India. But the memory of that first visit is indelible.

  Word of my visit had spread through the nearby villages in Gujarat, and nearly one thousand women flocked to the meeting, some of them walking nine or ten hours along hot, dusty paths through the countryside. Tears filled my eyes when I saw them waiting for me under a large tent. Fanning themselves in their sapphire-, emerald-, and ruby-colored saris, they looked like an undulating human rainbow. They were Muslim and Hindu, including untouchables, the lowest Hindu caste. There were kite makers, scrap pickers, and vegetable vendors. While I sat in front, Chelsea sat down among the women in the audience.

  One by one, women stood up to share how SEWA had changed their lives, not only because of the small loans they’d received and the help SEWA had given them in their businesses, but also because of the solidarity they felt with other struggling women. One woman struck a common chord when she explained that she was no longer afraid of her mother-in-law. In the culture many of the SEWA women shared, the mother-in-law typically exerts rigid control over her son’s wife as soon as the couple marry and move in with his family. Having her own market stall and her own income gave this woman welcome independence. She added that she was no longer afraid of the police, either, because a group of SEWA-sponsored vendors now protected her from harassment by overbearing officers in the market. The dignified bearing, chiseled faces, and kohl-rimmed eyes of the speakers belied their difficult lives.

  “A woman who tends a small plot of land, grows vegetables, weaves cloth, and provides for the family and the market, while caring for the financial, social, educational and emotional needs of her family is a multifunctional worker and the builder of a stable society.”

  —ELA BHATT

  Finally, I was asked to make closing remarks. After I finished, Ela took the microphone and announced that the women wanted to express their gratitude for my visit from America. In a stunning flash of moving color, they all sprang to their feet and began singing “We Shall Overcome” in Gujarati. In that moment, the thread connecting Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence to the American civil rights movement came full circle, back to India. I was overwhelmed and uplifted to be in the midst of women who were working to overcome their own hardships as well as centuries of oppression. For me, they and Ela were a living affirmation of the importance of women’s rights.

  Temple Grandin

  Chelsea

  As a toddler, Mary Temple, as she was known then, didn’t speak. The doctors her parents brought her to in their hometown of Boston didn’t think anything could be done to help her. Her parents were advised to
institutionalize her, an all-too-common practice even in the 1950s. But her mother, Eustacia, refused to accept that verdict. First she found a doctor who suggested speech therapy, which worked. Then she sent Temple to school, even though it was sometimes challenging for her to be in a classroom because she didn’t learn or communicate the way other kids did. When Temple was fifteen years old, she went to her aunt’s ranch, where she had a life-changing realization: The animals she saw there felt the same intense fear and sensitivity to sound and touch that she did.

  Temple Grandin has spent her life working to improve the living conditions of livestock in a male-dominated industry. Despite the challenges she faced, Temple never doubted her mission, her training, or her unique qualifications. After studying human psychology in college, she completed a master’s degree and a PhD in animal science. She went on to design facilities around the world that lead to fewer animal injuries and less stress, and she has helped come up with more effective stunning methods so animals are killed more humanely, with less pain. Over time, she won over an industry that was skeptical of her approach and rife with sexism. Temple’s scoring system to assess how the livestock industry treats the animals that ultimately wind up as steaks, burgers, chops, and bacon is now the standard assessment tool for most of the livestock industry in the United States and Europe.