{"id":1482,"date":"2018-12-31T17:28:28","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:28:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1482"},"modified":"2018-12-31T17:28:28","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:28:28","slug":"richards-make-trouble_110418","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1482","title":{"rendered":"Richards, Make Trouble_110418"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/span><\/p>\n

Cecile Richards<\/span> is a nationally respected leader in the field of women\u2019s health, reproductive rights, and social change. She began her career helping garment workers, hotel workers, and nursing home aides fight for better wages and working conditions. After years in the labor movement, she moved back home to Texas to help elect the state\u2019s first Democratic woman governor: her mother, Ann Richards.<\/p>\n

She went on to start her own grassroots organizations, and later served as deputy chief of staff to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. In 2011 and 2012, she was named one of TIME Magazine\u2019s 100 Most Influential People in the World. Richards was the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund for more than a decade and is a frequent speaker and commentator on issues related to women\u2019s rights and activism. Richards serves on the board of the Ford Foundation. She and her husband, Kirk Adams, have three children and reside in New York City.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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MEMOIR<\/p>\n

Cecile Richards <\/span>(with Lauren Peterson<\/span>)<\/p>\n

Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Touchstone<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-5011-8759-9 (also available as an e-book and an audio-book), 304 pgs., $27.00<\/p>\n

April 3, 2018<\/p>\n

\u201cLittle lady, you are just trying to make trouble.\u201d \u2014Sixth-grade teacher at University Park Elementary in Dallas<\/p>\n

\u201cWell behaved women seldom make history.\u201d \u2014Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,<\/span> Pulitzer-Prize\u2013winning professor of early American history at Harvard University<\/p>\n

Cecile Richards was raised on campaigns and social justice,<\/span> growing up in the political salon of her parents\u2019 living room in the John-Bircher Dallas of the 1960s. The Richards family decamped for Austin, where they \u201ctossed out their Frank Sinatra records for Jefferson Airplane,\u201d the salon included Molly Ivins<\/span> and Sarah Weddington<\/span>, and seventh-grader Cecile felt freer to make her first independent political statement, wearing a homemade black armband to school to protest the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

This child of the People\u2019s Governor left Austin to attend Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she met like-minded idealistic young activists and realized that \u201chistory wasn\u2019t just something to read about in books \u2014 it was being made right in front of us.\u201d Cecile went on to become a labor organizer and founded the Texas Freedom Network, the Texas Faith Network, and America Votes, all while juggling the responsibilities of wife and mother with an assist from husband Kirk Adams, whom she met during a campaign to unionize hospitality workers in New Orleans. Most recently Cecile was president of Planned Parenthood, where she led the organization in defeating Trumpcare; beat back multiple attempts to defund their work; and led the organization into politics as never before with their first candidate endorsements.<\/p>\n

Cecile was active in the trenches (I forgot to count the number of arrests) at the birth of the Christian Coalition and as the conditions that now dominate our national, state, and even local \u2014 which has historically been more pragmatic than ideological \u2014 began to appear on radar. Now that those conditions have, if it please the gods, reached their zenith, Cecile, like so many others in this country who experienced the night of November 8, 2016, with heartbreak, incredulity, and, yes, fear, has alchemized the trauma into determination and resistance. My favorite slogan from Cecile\u2019s experience of the Women\u2019s March is \u201cWe\u2019re not going to take this lying down!\u201d<\/p>\n

Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead<\/span> is the memoir of Cecile Richards,<\/span> labor organizer, activist, past president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and \u2014 as all Texans know \u2014 elder daughter of our beloved governor Ann Richards.<\/span> Make Trouble is part witty biography, part instruction manual with practical tips (\u201cDon\u2019t wait for all the boats to get in the flotilla \u2014 just start moving\u201d), and part inspirational exhortation to action.<\/p>\n

Cecile writes with personality and emotion. Make Trouble<\/span> sometimes reads like a no-nonsense business biography but more often it reads with wry humor, righteous outrage, and passionate commitment. Glimpses into Life with Ann are engaging and often amusing, such as the Great Chicken Massacre, when one of their dogs got into the pen. Ann consoled her son with, \u201cBut just think how happy that dog was!\u201d Sometimes the details related are disturbing, such as the fact that it is routine for a new leader of Planned Parenthood to have a security team evaluate the physical safety of the leader and her family, and the fact that the president of Planned Parenthood in Kansas wears a bulletproof vest.<\/p>\n

Then there are the light-bulb moments, as when a woman walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Houston and told the staff that she was there because she heard President Barak Obama<\/span> say on television that Planned Parenthood provides breast-cancer exams. Then there was the time they delivered birth control by floatplane to an Alaskan village in the Arctic Circle.<\/p>\n

There are more than a few touching details, which unexpectedly had me tearing up and rubbing the chill bumps on my arms, such as the Alcoholics Anonymous members who left their sobriety chips in tribute when Governor Richards lay in state at the Texas capitol.<\/p>\n

Candid photos are well placed in the text, including one of Congresswoman Barbara Jordan,<\/span> Governor Richards, and her granddaughter Lily at a Lady Longhorns basketball game. There are countless entertaining and instructive anecdotes, as well as jaw-dropping factoids, such as that there were more Congressional committees assigned to investigate Planned Parenthood than Enron or the global financial crisis of 2008. And the 900 percent increase in requests for IUDs, long-term birth control that could outlast a Trump administration, after his election. And a surreal, creepy meeting with Ivanka Trump<\/span> and Jared Kushner<\/span> post-election. If nothing else good comes of this, an entire generation of newly energized activists and a record number of women running for office are an unmitigated good.<\/p>\n

There is history here, especially the storied, proud history of more than a century of Planned Parenthood, from Margaret Sanger<\/span> to Griswold v. Connecticut<\/span> to the Affordable Care Act to Wendy Davis\u2019s<\/span> famous filibuster. As Cecile writes, \u201cI firmly believe that when half of Congress can get pregnant, we will finally stop arguing about birth control \u2026 and we might even fully fund women\u2019s health care.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the introduction, Cecile writes that she wrote Make Trouble<\/span> to encourage people to fight for what they believe. It will be discouraging and even depressing at times but it can also be inspiring and fun and \u201cit can introduce you to people who will change your life.\u201d I have one question: Which political office is she going to run for?<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re not scaring yourself, you\u2019re probably not doing enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go, y\u2019all. #Vote<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cecile Richards is a nationally respected leader in the field of women\u2019s health, reproductive rights, and social change. She began her career helping garment workers, hotel workers, and nursing home aides fight for better wages and working conditions. After years in the labor movement, she moved back home to Texas to help […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}