BY MELANIE WARNER SPENCER

Channeling smart, brassy, big-haired Texas women in the fight for our rights and lives 

Since moving from Texas to Louisiana about a decade ago, when people ask me what I miss most, my answer is good Tex-Mex and Mexican food; Lone Star beer (even though I don’t really drink anymore); and a certain kind of smart, brassy, big-haired Texas woman. Then I joke that one thing I don’t miss is draconian legislation aimed at women, but that’s because I live in Louisiana and don’t have to miss it. 

Speaking of spicy Mexican food and spicier women, one morning in 2005 I managed to experience both in Austin, but probably not in whatever way you are thinking right now so get your filthy mind out’ the gully. That day, my friend Michael and I went to Las Manitas Avenue Cafe on Congress Avenue for breakfast. Unfortunately shuttered in ‘08, Las Manitas was cultishly popular among everyone from politicos to the populace. A small gaggle of women appeared on the other side of the glass as we approached the diner’s door, so Michael opened and held it, while we both stepped back to allow them the right of way. Now, I’ll admit the details of the next few minutes are hazy; it happened fast. We heard the words “Thank you, baby,” in an unmistakable Texas drawl from beneath a swirl of impossibly high, cotton candy-airy white hair. Michael probably said you’re welcome, but he also may have stood there like me imitating a largemouth bass, mouth agape. Once inside the restaurant, we reattached our lower jaws and quiet-screeched to one another “That was Ann Richards!” Or maybe we ran around in circles shrieking it while bumping into furniture, walls and other people. I don’t know because we may have blacked out. But I do know that even after being suitably sedated by enchiladas, we were still agog at having had a brush with the larger-than-life feminist, former educator, former State Treasurer, 45th Governor of Texas. That first part is key, because while her governorship lasted only one term, Richards’ legacy of fighting for the rights of women continues to this day through, among many things, her Ann Richards School For Young Women Leaders and her children, one of whom is Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood. This is all to say let’s address the suffocatingly large elephant in the room: Now more than ever, I miss Ann Richards  — and a few other smart-as-a-whip Texas women so strong they make Samson look sensitive  — because women in Texas (and many other states) are literally fighting for their lives. 

Wherever you sit on the pro-life versus pro-choice spectrum, y’all think long and hard about this: Women are dying

Wherever you sit on the pro-life versus pro-choice spectrum, y’all think long and hard about this: Women are dying and a cruel irony is that the ones dying are pregnant women who want to keep their babies. In September of 2024 NBC News reported that following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care, “From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period.” Please explain to me how this is pro-life? 

This is not OK. We are not OK. 

We (women and every other group fighting for their rights) have one wheel down and the axle dragging. We are demoralized. We need and deserve a break. The only good news, if you can call it that, is we aren’t starting from scratch and tasked with reinventing the wheel. Some of Texas’ foremothers, such as the aforementioned Ann Richards, fought this fight and if we look to them, we’ll find encouragement, empowerment and guidance. 

Ann Richards is quoted as saying, “Power is what calls the shots, and power is a white male game,” but she also said, “I'm not afraid to shake up the system, and the government needs more shaking up than any other system I know.”

At the 1971 National Women's Political Caucus in Texas Liz Carpenter, reporter, executive assistant to Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson and press secretary and speechwriter to First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, urged us to be assertive and loud, “We mean to be in on the decisions. So — if we seem a little pushy.  If we seem a little noisy — it is because we shout so you will hear us.”

In her “All Together Now” essay, Barbara Jordan, a lawyer, educator and politician with a long list of “firsts” under her belt, reminds us to hold onto our humanity, “One thing is clear to me: we, as human beings, must be willing to accept people who are different from ourselves ... I’m an incurable optimist. For the rest of the time that I have left on this planet I want to bring people together. You might think of this as a labor of love. Now, I know that love means different things to different people. But what I mean is this: I care about you because you are a fellow human being and I find it OK in my mind, in my heart, to simply say to you, I love you. And maybe that would encourage you to love me in return.” 

But it’s funny, fiery, fearless newspaper journalist and political commentator Molly Ivins I want to leave us with, because after spending the past week immersed in her writing and the documentary “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins,” I have renewed energy to face what’s ahead of us in the coming months and years. 

“Until June 26, 1918, all Texans could vote except ‘idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane and women’.”

When you wonder if we’ve made any progress at all, Ivins reminds us that “Until June 26, 1918, all Texans could vote except ‘idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane and women’.” Ivins was a staunch free-speech defender who gave as good as she got. She is quoted as saying (or writing or both), “It is one’s bounded duty as a good American citizen, as a civil libertarian, a believer in the constitution and the principle of free speech, to stand up for the right of these blue-bellied nincompoops to spew whatever vicious dribble they want to. It says so right there in the First Amendment.” When your energy for all of it is flagging, repeat this mantra from Molly, “What you need is sustained outrage … there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority.” Or this handy reminder, “Things are not getting worse; things have always been this bad. Nothing is more consoling than the long perspective of history. It will perk you up no end to go back and read the works of progressives past. You will learn therein that things back then were also terrible, and what’s more, they were always getting worse. This is most inspiriting.” Many times, Ivins told us to raise hell and she issued this directive, “So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.” And finally, Ivins’ most important reminder of all, “We are the deciders. We’re the ones that run the country. Those people up in your state capitals, those people up in Washington, they’re just the people we’ve hired to drive the bus for a while. So it’s up to us. You have to take civic responsibility.”

As I sit in my living room in New Orleans writing and raging in solidarity with my Texas sisters, hot off the heels of a daily ritual of yoga, meditation, reading the news, sobbing, tarot, caffeinating and hollerin’ into the void, the questions far outnumber the answers. Why do men (and apparently a lot of women) hate women so much they pass legislation that kills us and elect to the country’s highest office a person found liable for sexual abuse (who, it’s worth mentioning has clearly lost his vertical hold and, as the saying goes, is such a liar he’d beat you senseless and tell God you fell off a horse)? Why can’t all women’s clothing have pockets? Why have women been bullied, violated and vilified so much and for so long that now I — a Buddhist-leaning, nap-enthusiast lifestyle journalist — have to write about politics? If I could answer the first and last questions, I wouldn’t be sittin’ here in pocketless shorts. So instead, I’ll close with one more bit of advice from Ivins that is both a warning to everyone on all sides of the aisle and a call to action, “We are so frightened that we think we can make ourselves safer by damaging our own freedoms. Now, when you make yourself less free, you are not safer. You’re just less free.”

Y’all, it’s time to fight loudly for our freedom; it’s time to raise hell. 

…

Melanie Warner Spencer is an award-winning journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in print, digital outlets and wire services, including Reuters, throughout the United States and around the globe. Spencer has been a staff features reporter and columnist at The Austin American-Statesman, a senior reporter at The Houston Chronicle and served as press secretary and speechwriter for Texas First Lady Anita Perry, which resulted in being declared an Honorary Texan in a proclamation issued by former Gov. Rick Perry. If that’s not confounding to both conservatives and liberals alike, Spencer also had a stint as the managing editor of the Texas Catholic Herald newspaper. After many years spent in lifestyle journalism as editor of New Orleans Bride, New Orleans Homes, Acadiana Profile and Louisiana Life magazines, Spencer is having more fun than the law should allow working as an independent journalist based two hoots and a holler away from Texas in New Orleans, Louisiana.