“I’LL BE DAMNED if my own daughter is going to sit in classes with one of them,” my father roared.
When news broke that the University of Georgia was about to admit its first black students, my father tried everything short of imprisoning me to keep me from accepting my scholarship to study there.
When UGA made its historic decision a few weeks before I started my first semester, I thought it was the best news I’d heard. The civil-rights movement had already won some other victories, most significantly the battle to integrate the schools of neighboring Alabama. On June 11, 1963, Governor George Wallace—who had declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his inaugural address—had famously stood on the steps of the University of Alabama campus to try to stop black students Vivian Malone and James Hood from coming through those doors until the federal authorities, the Alabama National Guard, stepped in.
The governor of Georgia, Ernest Vandiver Jr., decided to try to keep his state, the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from becoming a battleground, and integrating the University of Georgia was one big step forward. Three days after Charlayne Hunter (later Hunter-Gault) and Hamilton Holmes arrived, an angry mob hurled bottles and bricks at Charlayne’s dorm—the very one I was assigned to.
As Charlayne would later write in the New Yorker, “The town police threw around tear gas, ostensibly to disperse an already-thinning crowd. By the time the state troopers arrived, the protesters were long gone. The university suspended me, they said, for my own safety.” That’s right—Charlayne and Hamilton got suspended, not their racist hecklers! A quick protest from hundreds of teachers and students restored them to campus.
I met Charlayne Hunter my first week on campus, and while understandably cautious, she seemed to appreciate somewhat my overly effusive welcome and offer to walk with her to class from Myers Hall.
I knew what she had already been through—more than eighteen months in court simply to attend UGA, which she chose for its strong journalism program, for which she was highly qualified. From day one on campus, she endured racial slurs, her car tires were slashed, and even some professors refused to address her in class. In all the clear demonstrations of racism, I never saw her express anger or fear, even though she told me later that she felt both often. Outwardly, she always appeared composed, prepared, and purposeful toward those who opposed her presence as well as to those who welcomed it.
I easily remember the fear I felt but never saw in her face during the times I and other supportive students walked with her through the rock-throwing, angry groups of students. She never lost her composure or deviated from her purpose. In a moment that must have felt somewhat redemptive, she returned in 1988 as UGA’s commencement speaker—the first person of color to give the speech in the university’s 185-year history—and in her stirring words, she told a new generation of students that “I stand before you now… because we have had our justice after all.”
Forty or more years after we marched together in Georgia, Charlayne and I reconnected on one of my first trips to Africa. She had married a South African and was NPR’s African bureau chief—just another plaudit in a career that has included positions at the New Yorker and the New York Times (where she got them to stop using the word negro to refer to African Americans), national correspondent and anchor positions at PBS’s The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and CNN. She’s also written several highly acclaimed books—and even started a South African wine company!
When we met for coffee in Johannesburg, Charlayne wore a traditional African caftan, her hair now a beautiful Afro, and looked every bit the warrior woman she had been at nineteen. At seventy-six, she’s as dangerous as ever; just check out her Twitter feed!
MORE THAN ONCE, marching for African American civil rights in the South in the 1960s, I would hear a shout from fellow white southerners on the sidelines: “If they don’t rape you, we’re going to kill you.”
It was an ugly, scary time, and it was hard to find equilibrium between all the diverse parts of my college life, which was, not unexpectedly, crammed with activities. I joined a sorority to help me navigate social life in a big university where I knew so few people. Through Phi Mu, I made lifelong friends, especially my roommate at the sorority house, Glenda Grimsley. She has been my best friend from college until now. Like Glenda, I was also active in campus politics and activities, running, unsuccessfully, for class president my sophomore year. “Pick Patsy” was my campaign slogan, with posters that featured my face inside a daisy. I didn’t get picked.
I worked part-time at a dress shop, and I joined the civil-rights protests whenever possible. I lost my balance between what really mattered and what was popular more than once while trying to find where I felt I belonged and where I felt a sense of real purpose. I wanted to focus on something more than getting through college as fast as possible to avoid more of the accumulating student loans that were necessary to augment the scholarship.
Fortunately, I had a new mentor, a new rabbi, in the form of my college advisor, who helped keep me focused during tumultuous and transformative times for this small-town girl.
“Education is your ticket to being in all the parades that matter,” Dr. Boyd McWhorter reminded me. “Focus on that first—learn, then do. If you try to do everything, be everything, right now, you could lose yourself.”
It was good advice—but I didn’t fully adopt it. There were too many exciting opportunities everywhere around me, so I did it all. Or tried.
I was being pushed and pulled between a strong urge to be an activist, wanting to be on the front lines to right the many wrongs I witnessed close-up during those years in the South, and a desire to be popular and accepted within the dominant culture, which, to say the least, was not an activist or feminist one in the sixties at UGA.
That tension between wanting to fit in and fighting for change that began in college has continued, as I have often straddled (and sometimes bridged) different worlds and perspectives: I’ve juggled being an activist and a journalist, and not always successfully, especially since I often worked with people whose views on race, gender, and politics were opposite to mine. Sustaining relationships with family and friends across political differences, geographic divides, and life experiences was always challenging.
ONE SUSTAINING UGA relationship is with Tom Johnson, who became Lyndon B. Johnson’s press secretary, publisher of the LA Times, and later president of CNN where we reconnected. Tom was an early role model, friend, and advocate—putting me forward more than once for the right career opportunities. He’s a world class connector, but his first connection—introducing me to a man I would marry—wasn’t as successful as some that followed.
It was one of those hot, sticky, early fall nights that people who grew up “below the gnat line” in Georgia know well. (The gnat line refers to the part of Georgia where those irritating little creatures live all year long because it never gets cold enough in the winter for them to hibernate or die.)
My college boyfriend and I were on Tybee Island, off the coast of Savannah, for a friend’s wedding, where I was one of the bridesmaids. We’d been dating for two years—“pinned”—which was considered the step before engagement.
On the long drive down from Athens to Tybee that day, he talked about getting married, while I silently contemplated how to break the news that I planned to end the relationship. He was the perfect college boyfriend, fun-loving and a great dancer, but I wasn’t thinking about marriage. I was far too curious about the world, too serious about my growing activism, and already committed to graduate school with plans to go for a PhD. I wanted to write and travel the world, not follow the BS with MRS or MOM, which was the expected path for Southern good girls. I was definitely a good girl, committed to being a virgin when I did get married.
That night on Tybee Beach, after too much champagne, I allowed him to pull off my bridesmaid’s dress, which stuck to my body in the midnight heat. The kissing and fondling that always ended didn’t stop. I remember the pain of entry and an immediate feeling of fear that was almost paralyzing as I was sure, that instant, that I was going to get pregnant. After all, I had just sinned, according to the Baptist preachers I heard every Sunday in Swainsboro.
I’m being irrational, I told myself as I rather frantically tried to get back into my sticky dress. No one gets pregnant the first time they have sex! The fear was palpable; the reality of what had happened, nauseating. The next day, visiting my parents in Swainsboro, I could barely look at my father; the shame and fear that I often felt in his presence were more intense than ever. I was certain that something had happened on the beach that would change my life forever.
I WAS RIGHT. I was pregnant.
In my final quarter of living in the Phi Mu house, my body already felt like it no longer belonged only to me, and my mind raced with ways to fix this situation, trying to remember all the remedies I’d heard supposedly bad girls used when they got pregnant. It was the dark ages for women in terms of reproductive rights—no birth control pills, no legal abortions. Being pregnant out of wedlock—another quaint phrase—meant that marriage and babies were a lock, to be sure. A lock on all my dreams.
Castor oil. I’d heard taking a large dose of the popular laxative would work. It didn’t, but it surely made me sicker. After another month of almost constant sickness, I finally drove myself to Atlanta and saw a gynecologist. “Mrs. Greenfield,” he said, with a tone that indicated he knew I was using a fake name, “congratulations, you’re going to have a baby.”
Bursting into hysterical tears, I called Glenda, my best friend and roommate, who quickly went into battle-plan mode. “You’ve got to tell your parents… and him,” she said. “And arrange a quick wedding. I’ll help put it together. No one has to know.”
“There has to be another solution,” I protested and heard myself say the words, “I’ll get an abortion.” Just the word conjured up images of dark alleys with dimly lit rooms where so-called physicians helped girls in trouble for a few thousand dollars. I’d seen those films, usually ending with the girl bleeding to death.
But I’d also heard of the girls who had survived them and went on with their original life plans; maybe that could happen for me too. Glenda wasn’t supportive of this option but offered to help. We asked around discreetly “for a friend” and got a name and number. One week later, I was driving to the appointment, having borrowed the cash from an unsuspecting and generous sorority sister, but Glenda had decided that she couldn’t let me go through with it.
“I told him,” she explained. “He’s on his way to Atlanta to ask you to marry him.” I’m not sure I would have gone through with the plan even if she hadn’t intervened, but suddenly I felt completely out of control of my life.
“YOU’LL LOSE YOUR graduate fellowship if you get married,” the dean of graduate school told me when I said I was getting married. Male students didn’t lose their fellowships if they got married, but females did. At home, my announcement created a scene. My father remained stoic and silent while my mother focused on what people would say. We decided on a story for the public, that we had had a secret marriage in the summer.
Sometime in the fall of that year—how telling that I can never recall the date—we got married in a small chapel in Athens. I can’t remember anything about the day except that I cried throughout the ceremony. How sad for the man who loved me and never wavered in his commitment to “do the right thing.”
On June 5, 1965, our son, Mark, was born in Piedmont Hospital, now called Piedmont Atlanta Hospital. As was the custom then, I was knocked out with drugs and have no memory whatsoever of his birth. I woke up to find a big, round baby sucking on my breast, something else no one prepared me for. In fact, I was so unprepared for childbirth that I actually went into the hospital with my hair styled in a beehive, with dozens of hairpins that had to be extracted, one by one, when I went into labor. Plink. Plink. After eleven hours of labor, I looked like Phyllis Diller.
Mark was perfect. Motherly love took over, pushing away the anger and disappointment of missing my graduation ceremony, which was that same day. I’d so wanted the chance to march across that stage and be handed the evidence that I had, indeed, graduated with honors. But I also loved my son, fully and deeply, and gave myself over to that feeling.
Still, I was nowhere near where I had imagined myself to be at twenty-two. I had made a mistake, and I had to make the most of the unexpected fall on the journey and keep moving forward.
Within two short years, I knew that the marriage wasn’t going to work. I was juggling teaching sixth grade in a challenging middle school on Atlanta’s south side, finishing graduate work at Georgia State University, and also caring for a baby. My husband was looking for a good job and trying to transition from being considered the most likely to succeed, according to all our college friends, to the financial challenges of supporting a family without having completed a degree. We were both unhappy, and I didn’t see this changing even if we kept trying.
My mother advised me to accept my fate and stay put. “You made your bed; now you have to lie in it.”
My friends worried for me, and what would come of my life if I left. “What will you do as a single mom?” “Who will pay your bills?” I was already paying the bills.
This was my “problem that has no name,” as Betty Friedan had called it in her book The Feminine Mystique, where she’d written, “I had a hunger that food cannot fill.” I had read her book and was captivated by the news about women’s marches for equality going on in New York and Washington, and I was experiencing a profound AHA moment about inequality as well.
With Mark nearly three, I went for the divorce—mutual agreement, split of the assets (which was zero), taking half the bills (which were big!).
AFTER THE DIVORCE, I signed up, along with Glenda, to take a group of students to Europe on one of those “if it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” tours. It was my first trip outside the United States, and I discovered a passion for travel that has only increased every year since. As a divorced working mom, I also discovered that much of what I wanted to do would often conflict with my new responsibilities. I had custody of Mark and was receiving the state minimum for child support ($350 a month at the time), which didn’t even cover the babysitters necessary for me to both teach and finish my coursework for my PhD. I was hired as an instructor at UGA to teach two courses while finishing my thesis and had to delay my doctorate plans as my student loans had run out.
I discovered that I loved teaching; my theatre training paid off big time as I kept my students’ attention with dramatic readings of contemporary poetry or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the subject of my master’s thesis. “You’re one of the most popular instructors,” my graduate advisor told me at my first semester’s review. “Students are competing for your classes!”
When one of my colleagues shared with me that he’d gotten a raise for his second year, I asked for one, too. We had the same credentials and experience. The head of the English department smiled serenely at my request even as he denied it: “John’s a married man with a family to support.” No matter that I had a child to support as well. It was my first direct experience of equal work for unequal pay, and it further radicalized my fermenting feminism.
I poured myself into the social-justice protests of the day and was soon arrested for participating in a civil-rights march. Along with several of my freshmen students, I was herded into a holding pen at the Clarke County Jail. When the police discovered my faculty card, I was released without charges after a lecture from the sheriff about how we “liberals” needed to just move north and stop corrupting the young people we were supposed to be teaching.
THE CLARKE COUNTY sheriff’s moral compass was despicable, but his sense of direction was keen; it was indeed time to move a bit farther north.
Virginia Commonwealth University had once been dubbed the “hippie’s college,” and joining the faculty there the following year was, for me, another big step away from what civil-rights activist Virginia Durr dubbed the “magic circle” of Southern womanhood: playacting the well-brought-up, conformist Southern belle; going crazy (if she had any spark of creativity whatsoever); or becoming the rebel and cutting ties with all expectations and “privilege.”
Mark and I lived in a big house in the Fan district, Richmond’s “Greenwich Village,” with Dr. Casey Hughes, another divorcée and friend from UGA, and her two children. We quickly became the center of a growing student revolution happening on many college campuses where students, passions fueled by other social-justice movements of the time for black Americans and for women, began to make demands to have a louder voice, more freedoms.
Our house was like an ongoing consciousness-raising session with groups of students, other faculty, and regular out-of-town visitors crashing on various sofas and extra beds. There was rarely a night when there wasn’t a group meeting or civil-rights or student-rights demonstration or an antiwar rally, and sometimes all of them rolled into one continuous house party.
Casey and I also ran the community women’s consciousness-raising sessions, while holding down jobs that paid us less than our male colleagues and fending off the sexual overtures of so-called liberals who took up the label only when it became associated with sexual freedom. It was the time of communes, communal sex and drugs, love and peace, but for me, it was a year of financial challenges, anemic paychecks, and a son who needed more attention than he was getting.
I enjoyed teaching but the salary was not really enough to cover my bills and pay back student loans. I also longed to have time to write or go back to graduate school for my doctorate. And while I was as engaged as I could be in many activist activities, being in Virginia still felt like being in the backwater of a rising tide elsewhere. So when a college friend who had gone to work for the popular weekly LOOK offered to introduce me to the editor to pitch a story about the student uprisings that were big news at the time, I leapt at the opportunity to share my experiences as one of the faculty sympathizers. I drove to New York for the interview, and although the story idea was turned down, I got an offer for a job as a researcher with a salary that was more than I made as an assistant professor.
Even more important to me at the time was what I perceived to be a chance to start over in the city of my childhood dreams. I had been there once before, a brief visit as part of my studies as a drama major at UGA, and I had felt immediately at home, in sync with the city’s rhythms that matched my own so much better than those of a college campus. I said good-bye to Casey and our communal home, and Mark and I headed for New York.
DAVE MAXEY, LOOK’S managing editor, gave it to me straight.
“Listen, Pat, I’d love to guarantee that this is going to work out for you, but you’ll have to turn in some stories that you pursue on your own, and if I like them, I’ll publish them. Meanwhile, your job will be to do research for the other writers and occasionally, maybe I can get you an assignment with one of our photographers. You can learn a lot by watching them cover a story.”
It didn’t take but two of the martini lunches typical of the day to discover why everyone slumped over their typewriters between 3 and 5 p.m.—yes, typewriters, with actual desk phones and desks and offices, think Mad Men with our own “Jon Hamms” and romantic intrigues and pretty out-front competitiveness. In this totally foreign world of New York journalism, where most of the women went to Smith or Barnard and carried a certainty about them that I clearly lacked, I was anything but confident. I was scared that any minute I would be found out to be a small-town girl whose only experience at this point had been teaching freshman English.
I had to fake confidence and channel Mrs. Reid’s words (“speak up because no one else is going to do that for you”) more than once when challenged to step back or step aside. I channeled Grandmother, too, and just kept moving forward, as fast as my too-high heels would carry me. (Later, a fellow writer, Pat Carbine, said without looking up, “New York streets are better navigated in more sensible shoes. And they’re less noisy, too.”)
Navigating motherhood in NYC was another challenge entirely. The cheap loft I sublet over a Chinese restaurant in lower Chinatown—on the Bowery, actually—wasn’t a great place for Mark, who was four years old and eager to explore. After the first weeks, my mother suggested he live with her and my father until I got settled. Mark liked that plan, given that the grandparents spoiled him, and they would laugh and smile when he was around, rare events during my own childhood. He could also visit more easily with his dad, who was still living in Georgia. So I agreed, and Mark went to Swainsboro for the summer.
Alone now in the big city, I began to see a big story developing in my neighborhood in Chinatown. Gangs were being formed among different groups of new immigrants, and fights began to break out over who controlled a block or got to sit on a certain stoop outside a particular restaurant.
“It’s getting violent there,” I explained to the skeptical-looking editor when I pitched the story, “but I’ve been volunteering at one of the community centers for new residents, and I think I can get the kids to talk to me about what’s going on.”
I did manage to get two key gang leaders to talk to me, and after a few conversations that revealed the story of two rival gangs and their families, my editor encouraged me to keep listening and writing. Maxey also realized the story was gaining in importance as the violence in Chinatown was making headlines in the New York Post and Daily News.
By mid-September, my story had been approved; the storyboards were put up for the editorial staff, a practice in those days for magazines. I can still visualize the photographs and headline: “Chinatown: A Family Divided.” My first story with a byline was scheduled for the October issue, and I was moving forward faster than I had imagined toward being a bona fide writer in the city of my dreams.
I had moved uptown, too, out of the Chinatown sublease to a ground-floor apartment in a townhouse on the Upper West Side, at that time the less expensive side of Central Park, and Mark had returned from Swainsboro. I had a downtown artist boyfriend, an uptown apartment, a son in a public school that I could walk him to every morning, and a job I loved. Success!
Until one morning, only a month or so later, when the news came over the loudspeakers at Cowles Communications, the company that owned LOOK, that the magazine would not be publishing another edition; the business was bankrupt. Tubs full of ice and Bloody Marys were offered to the stunned staff, and realizing that I was now unemployed and with no idea what was next, I passed on the drinks and started making calls. In the chaos of the next few days, as the television cameras showed up to cover the dismantling of the offices, I was asked by a television reporter about what I would do next. Noting that she was employed and I wasn’t, I looked straight into her camera and said, “I think I’ll try television!”
I DID TRY—AUDITION after audition followed my onetime, brief television report on the Chinatown story—but Christmas came and went and there were no offers. I was broke and still unemployed.
But before giving up entirely, I made one more call—to David Garth, the political media guru I had met while reporting a story on the US Conference of Mayors for LOOK. Garth was going to run the media for former New York mayor John V. Lindsay’s newly announced campaign for the presidency.
“Want to help me elect a president?” David asked when I explained my plight.
A job! “Yes, when do I start?”
David Garth already had a reputation as a great propagandist, and I’d join his media team alongside a young Yale graduate named Jeff Greenfield, who had already worked for Robert Kennedy as a speechwriter. Our assignment was to conceive, write, and produce political ads that would secure wins for Lindsay in the Wisconsin and South Carolina primaries.
Jeff and I produced more than thirty campaign commercials for Lindsay, and I learned fast how to conceive, write, and edit political television commercials that at that time were starting to transform all political campaigns. It was a high-stakes, high-pressure environment and a learning opportunity that would serve me well post campaign, even though I wasn’t sure how at the time.
Even then, Garth Associates had better equipment and more advanced technology than the networks I’d been auditioning for. We had a state-of-the-art Avid editing system inside a mobile truck, and we wrote, edited, and got thirty-second commercials on the air within hours, not days. I learned more during three months on the road with Jeff and more from David Garth about how to tell a story than I would have learned in months, maybe years, at a television station.
I loved it, too, but I didn’t like being away from Mark as much as I was. Fortunately, Mrs. Weiner, the kindly babysitter who lived upstairs in our brownstone, had moved into our small apartment to care for Mark while I was on the road five days a week—until, that is, this new career also came to an abrupt end.
Lindsay lost the primary elections, and he called it quits. Garth had other campaigns and I could have continued to work on his team, but my dream was still to get a job in television and hopefully one that would allow me to be a more present parent. When I told Jeff Greenfield, my Garth colleague who had become a close friend, that I was leaving to pursue a job in television, he predicted, “Television will ruin your life!” Ironic words from a man who later became a network television star political correspondent and analyst.
Mayor Lindsay’s quixotic campaign became memorialized the next year on the big screen in one of my favorite Robert Redford films, The Candidate, inspired by David Garth’s dictum that “any campaign can be won with the right media campaign.” Redford’s character in the movie had that right media campaign and won his election. At the end of the movie, the winning candidate looks up after his victory speech and asks, “Now what?”
I had the same question! I was at yet another crossroads and ready to once again risk starting over.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Ai-jen Poo
When Ai-jen found herself volunteering at a domestic violence shelter for immigrant women, she was struck by how difficult it was for the women—all of whom were working full-time—to make ends meet. Many of the women worked in low-wage service occupations, caring for the families of others, yet were finding it impossible to care for their own families. Later on, when Ai-jen’s family was no longer able to care for her grandfather, they were forced to place him in a nursing home, and it was at the nursing home that Ai-jen observed close-up the challenges for caregivers, 90 percent of whom are women and disproportionately women of color, and the impact on people in need of care, like her grandfather. It’s been her life’s mission to fight for the rights of caregivers—nannies, housekeepers, home health aides, and all the others who, while caring for our most vulnerable, are themselves undervalued, underpaid, and subjected to discrimination and harassment. In 2010, she helped get the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights passed, which has brought protections to more than 200,000 domestic workers in New York.
Many caregivers, of course, are undocumented immigrants, and Ai-jen has pushed tirelessly to create a path to citizenship for them. She speaks for the caring economy; she represents the people who care for the rest of us and to win them legal rights recognizing and protecting their dignity and humanity.
A recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Award, Ai-jen is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, codirector of Caring Across Generations, and author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America. I talked with Ai-jen about her journey to becoming a dangerous woman, determined to change the world for caregivers.
What does becoming more dangerous mean to you and your work?
Ai-jen: While I’m not sure others see us this way (yet), the domestic workers movement is dangerous. Fighting to recognize the value of the care economy is dangerous. Building power of poor women of color is dangerous. It disrupts conventional wisdom about what we value and who has power, which gets to some pretty fundamental questions about society and how we’ve organized it. Much of our world has been designed by and for rich and powerful white men. The idea that we should not only empathize with but see domestic workers as powerful is a dangerous idea.
I’ve personally felt the most dangerous when working collectively with other women in a way that challenges or threatens the existing logic or consensus that keeps power in the hands of those who already have it—it can be through pushing new ideas, new ways of doing things or being, and certainly when demanding new configurations of power.
Has age been a factor for you in this journey to embracing risk and speaking up for others, many of whom don’t have a public voice?
Ai-jen: Because I’m a “younger” woman—well, that’s all relative—and a woman of color, an Asian woman in particular, and because of the way Asian women are racialized, I don’t think most people think of me as dangerous. At least, not initially. Maybe disruptive, more like an annoyance than actually dangerous. I associate danger with risk, fear, and threat. I don’t think I inspired those emotions in people until I was older and much more established. People always underestimate women, especially women of color.
What are the biggest remaining challenges to your creating the changes you set out to do?
Ai-jen: I’ve certainly had challenges in my work, but I think of it like this: most change that’s worth fighting for, that’s truly meaningful in people’s lives, requires some disruption and will instigate some level of backlash. Some people will not be happy, and they may even attack you, try to undermine you. Every action causes a reaction. It just means you have to stay really grounded in your sense of purpose, anticipate and prepare for the reactions, and have practices that keep you focused on purpose. I also prioritize keeping people around me who I trust to keep me on purpose. The beautiful thing about danger and risk is that you never have to do anything alone.
Do you agree with the idea that we are living in dangerous times and dangerous times call for dangerous women?
Ai-jen: I think we’re living in dangerous times. I often compare it to a sun storm, a weather pattern that’s common to parts of the Midwest and the Southeast. It’s when it’s pouring down rain and the sun is still shining brightly through. We are living in a political sun storm, and women are the sun—we keep showing up to march, to call Congress, to support survivors, to run for office, and to vote. We are holding the democracy up and together. And yet the forces pouring down rain are powerful. More than a challenge, women—all of us—are in the fight of our lives for the soul of the country. And it’s dangerous.