Free What Will It Take to Make A Woman President?: Conversations About Women, Leadership and Power by Marianne Schnall Page B

would go out nights and weekends and campaign. Andseveral months into my own first election, I was feeling a little sick in the mornings, and there I was, working a job full time and campaigning nights and weekends and had a three-year-old, come to find out my husband and I were expecting our second child. So when I announced—even though I was already several months into my campaign—that I was pregnant, I had people come up and tell me that I wouldn’t be effective, that I needed to drop out of the race, that I should have an abortion because I wouldn’t be able to get the job done. And, you know, I kept focus on what I wanted to accomplish in the end, which was to go to the Capitol and make changes on these different policy issues. So I kept running my campaign, and on election night I was eight months pregnant, and then I actually had my son between the primary and the general election in September—the election was in November. And I didn’t have an abortion; I, of course, continued on with my pregnancy and that was twenty-three years ago. And not only did I win the House of Representatives seat back in those early days, I was able to pass over a dozen pieces of legislation into law. And I was very much in the minority in the Oklahoma Legislature. I was one of three Republican women at that time, so I was very much in the minority as far as political party and being a female.
    Then I went on to run for lieutenant governor, four years after that, and by that time my children were four and seven. And I ran for a statewide office, which was not easy, because I had the regular things a mom does—you have to bring your children to school, picking them up and going to their after-school activities—and trying to deal with some tough issues as lieutenant governor. But I won that race and served twelve years as the first female lieutenant governor of our state. Then, in between all of that, I became single and was a single mom, and that was challenging. I also had a mother who became sick at that time and bedridden, and she was widowed so I was taking care of my mother and my children in a state-wide elected position, which was tough. But then I just kept workinghard. I basically prioritized my time to where—certainly my faith is very important to me, which carried me through that time—but my children were a top priority, and then my work was my third priority and keeping that balance of what was really important in life helped me be effective. And then I ended up running for Congress and became the second woman elected to Congress. We elected our first woman in 1920, and she only made it through one term and was voted out of office. We hadn’t had a woman go to Congress since 1922.
    So I served four years in Congress, and it was challenging as a woman trying to live between two states. By that time, I had one child that was in college and one that was a sophomore in high school, and I was coming home every weekend, trying to take care of them and balance family and work and do my job effectively. Then after four years of doing that, I was recruited to run for governor, and that was challenging, too, trying to be in Congress and come home on the weekends to not only see my children and take care of things at home as a single woman, but also run for statewide office again.
    And to my surprise, during all that time, I reconnected with an old college friend, a wonderful man that I had known thirty years ago, and in between all of that, a life surprise came up and within a couple of months, he asked me to marry him! I was like, are you kidding? [ laughs] I’m in Congress, I’m a single mom, and I’m running for governor. I’ve got a little bit going on in my life right now. I said, this is a serious thing, to remarry, but there are times in your life when you know that you know it’s the thing to do. So we actually got married during my campaign for governor. He had four kids, I had two, so now we have six together.