American activist and women’s rights icon Cecile Richards is no stranger to troublemaking. She was raised in a liberal family in the ultra-conservative Waco, Texas and was encouraged from an early age to lead and campaign for change. Her first dalliances with resisting authority resulted in disciplinary action in the seventh grade for wearing a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.
Richards received support from her mother, Ann Richards, the former Governor of Texas, and her father, a lawyer who built a practice serving civil-rights plaintiffs, newspapers, and labor unions. At the age of 13, she was named an honorary page to the 62nd Texas State Legislator. By 16, she was helping her mother campaign for Sarah Weddington, the attorney who won Roe v. Wade, in her bid for the Texas state legislature. After graduating from Brown University, she became a labor organizer for service workers across several states.
For more than a decade, Richards was the President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and President of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. It should come as no surprise that the author of the New York Times bestseller “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead” is teaching young people how to regain control of their futures in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
In an opinion piece she wrote for Teen Vogue in May 2022, she said, “from climate change to college affordability, government and the people who run it have a disproportionate influence on your life. Get involved. Protest. Volunteer. Organize. This fall, you and other young voters will also have another crucial opportunity to help decide the political direction of America. You have a choice to make: Elect people who trust women or vote for candidates who have pledged to roll back women’s progress by 50 years.”
Richards founded the Texas Freedom Network, an organization formed to counter the Christian right, co-founded the women’s political activism organization Supermajority, and is on the board of the Ford Foundation, a global private foundation with the mission of advancing human welfare. She also serves on the board of advisors of Let America Vote, an organization that aims to end voter suppression.