Gloria Feldt

Gloria Feldt was the CEO and president of Planned Parenthood from 1996 to 2005, the world’s largest reproductive health and advocacy organization. She was named by Vanity Fair one of “America’s Top 200 Women Leaders, Legends, and Trailblazers,” Glamour’s “Woman of the Year." 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Sam Edis and I'm Amy Nelson. Welcome to What's
Her Story? With Sam and Amy. This is a show
about the world's most remarkable women, their professional and personal journeys. Together,
we'll hear from Gold medalists, best selling authors, and leaders
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join the conversation anytime on Instagram at What's Her Story Podcast.

(00:30):
Gloria Felt was the CEO and President of Planned Parenthood
from to two thousand five, the world's largest reproductive health
and advocacy organization. She was named by Vanity Fair one
of America's Top two hundred Women Leaders, Legends and Trailblazers,
and the Glamour Women of the Year. Most people know

(00:52):
you today as a women's leadership expert, but your history
is perhaps one of the most fascinating things about you.
You went from being a teen mom to leading Planned Parenthood. Well,
I think it was very symmetrical that I would go
from being knowing what it's like to be a very

(01:13):
young mother to understanding the struggles that women have to
wanting to help all women be able to plan in
space their childbearing, and so it really was a fairly
seamless thing. But I really got my my grounding in

(01:34):
volunteer work that I did for the civil rights movement.
After I had had my three children and I was
twenty years old, and I sort of woke up. And
partly it was because the birth control pill came out.
Right about this, share with us, what was it like
to become a teen mom? Was it intentional? Was it
a surprise? How did people in your family react? It

(01:57):
didn't take me long to realize I had not made
the wisest choice. But here's the thing. I had grown
up in small Texas towns. The little town where I
went to high school called Stanford is very like if
you've ever seen the movie or read the book The
Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry. It's one of those

(02:18):
dying West Texas towns. And it was a great place
to be a teenager because you could you know, it
was like everybody knew everybody and it was one great community.
It felt that way. But girls were not given aspirations
for careers or even in particular going to college. The

(02:43):
girls who were rewarded were those who were engaged and
married early, like in high school or right out of
high school and having children and being a support system
for everybody else. It was not unrelated that my family
is the only Jewish family in town in the Bible Belt,

(03:05):
where the first question everybody asked you is where you
go to church? And it was you know, even to
this day, my high school colleagues, who I still love
and in touch and in touch with, they never let
me forget that I am different. They never let me
forget that. And I hated being different because what does
a teenager want. A teenager wants to fit in. A

(03:28):
teenager wants to be the class favorite, which I got
to be. A teenage girl in football crazy Texas wants
to be a cheerleader, which I got to be. So
you know, I got to be the All American girl.
And that was that was the flip side of that
was that I bought the whole culture. You know, there

(03:48):
was no sex education other than a book that my
father gave me when I was thirteen, Bless his Heart,
which made me very popular at summer camp. But and
it got just completely worn out by all all my
friends at summer camp. And you know, I hadn't really
I would say the kinds of things that we talk

(04:09):
a lot about now, Teaching our children just didn't happen.
Then you were kind of allowed to just grow up.
And I made not the wisest choices, and yet at
the same time life turned out pretty well. So I
think that having those children at that stage of my

(04:30):
life forced me to grow up really quickly, forced me
to take on levels of responsibility that taught me the
things that I needed to know later on when I
became a CEO. What kind of a mom were you
then in Texas? And what kind of a mom was I?
You'd have to ask my children that, Um they were um,

(04:53):
you know, as one of my children said, you did
the best you could. And I think that there's a
lot of truth of that. I was a very engaged
mom and my children were the center of my life,
partly because I had ideas about how I wanted them

(05:14):
to grow up. And of course, your children never do
what you think you want them to do. But I
did have ideas about that that I tried to inculcate
and uh to, you know, to a greater or lesser extent.
But there again, my children grew up in Odessa, Texas,

(05:34):
the home of Friday night lights, and they graduated from
Permian High School. So I'm telling you that was the
story of our life, right there, a documentary of our life.
And so the culture had changed. The culture changes for
each generation, and you may think you know how you
want to raise your children, but something will be different
for them that you will not understand. At that point,

(05:58):
you were a teen mom raising kids with this husband
who was also a teenager. Right. What led to the
end of your marriage and what was your ambition like
at that point. Did you always just think you were
going to be a wife and that was it. I
wanted to be the perfect Susie homemaker wife, and then

(06:21):
I found out it wasn't quite as much fun as
I thought it was going to be. So I started
to college when my youngest was four months old, and
as I started learning about the world and being more
a part of the world outside of my family, I
started changing. But things were also changing in society. You

(06:42):
asked me about my husband. He was nineteen when we
were married, and I would say that as parents who
were that young, we did pretty well, and we were fortunate.
We always had a roof over our head, and we
we never had a lot of money, but we weren't destitute,

(07:02):
and we had parents who were reasonably supportive. I always
say my my father had a clothing factory, so I
always had fabric and I made clothes for everybody. And
my ex husband's family had a farm, so I always
had great food. So we were good. But as with
most teenage marriages after eighteen years, by that time we

(07:22):
had just become completely different people from each other. And um,
we still respect each other, we're still in touch, but
it was time to move on for both of us.
When you went back to college when your youngest child
was four months old, like, that wasn't probably expected, right,
maybe even by yourself. It's like, how did your family

(07:44):
react to that? How did your husband react to that?
Your parents? Like, what did they think of you? My
family was delighted because they had always assumed I would
go to college, and you know that I would at
least have an education, whether I did it as a
fessional thing or not. They they valued education, and I

(08:04):
remember my father gave me fifty dollars for my first
semester's tuition, and my husband's parents were not so appreciative
of it. They thought it was not a good idea
for me to leave the children even the two days
a week that I that I took my classes. I
was very careful to take my classes all Tuesdays and Thursdays.

(08:27):
And there was a lovely young woman who was a
neighbor who would come to our house and knew the
children and took care of them. So I knew they
were they were well taken care of. But my husband's
family was not so pleased. Although they weren't terribly vocal
about it, I would say that that my husband was

(08:48):
reasonably supportive. He wasn't he wasn't going to change his behavior.
As long as I was still doing the cooking and
cleaning and taking care of the kids, he was fine
with it. So it took me twelve years to finish
because I was taking courses more slowly because there was
only a community college in Odessa, Texas at the time.

(09:10):
And that was good, as it turns out, because it
gave me some time to get involved in community service work.
You know, from my youngest years, I saw my grandmother volunteering.
My my mother and father were you know, they volunteered
for things, and so following that pattern, I got involved
with the civil rights movement, and that's where I learned
that people can change things. People working together can change things,

(09:34):
even if they start with very little power. At what
point did you decide to join Planned Parenthood? As I
was doing the work in the civil rights movement, I
noticed that women were doing the frontline work and the
men were getting most of the leadership positions on credit.
So you know, the lightbulbs start going off, and I

(09:54):
started getting more interested in helping women in general, and
I was I was volunteering for a head Start, and
then I was offered a job at head Start, so
I was. I taught head Start for five years and
during that time, one of my teaching colleagues, and believe
it or not, the priest of her church, we're on

(10:15):
the local plan parented board. It was a brand new
little affiliate in the early nineteen seventies, and she asked
me to do some volunteer work for Planned Parenthood. And
that was actually my introduction to the organization. So it
wasn't a oh, my goodness, I'm going to go get
involved with Planned Parenthood. It was my colleague said, would

(10:37):
you serve on this committee? And I said yes, and
I went to my first They invited me to attend
a board meeting So I went to my first board
meeting and they were arguing about whether to serve teens
on their own consent. Again, as a teen mom, I'm thinking, yeah, yeah,
you should. And they finally voted that after a girl

(11:01):
had had one quote illegitimate child, then she could get
birth control on her own consent. And the county judge
was on the board, this tall, lanky guy, and he
leans back in his chair and puts his boots boot
up on the table and he says, well, now, if
that ain't shutting the barn door after the cow's done
got out, And I'm like, what is this organization? Who

(11:25):
are these people? So I really didn't have anything to
do with it for a while. I mean it was
I wasn't that turned off, but I you know, I
just didn't get that engaged with it. So a few
years later, the University of Texas opens a branch in Odessa.
I enrolled so I can finish my degree, planning to

(11:45):
be a high school social studies teacher. And the last
course that I took was an ecology course, and I
decided I would do my paper on this little plan
parent an affiliate. I called the executive director and ask
her if I could interview her. And I interviewed her,
a nurse practitioner, a couple of board members, and two

(12:06):
weeks later she called me and she said, I'm leaving.
I think you should submit a resume. And I thought, well,
I've never had a formal job interview before. I've never
had a resume. I'm imminently unqualified. I am in no
danger of being hired, but it'll be great experience to
go and have this interview. And so I went for
an interview, and then I went for a second interview,

(12:27):
and lo and behold they offered me the job. And
I have no idea to this day why I was
foolish enough to say yes when I had no idea
what I was doing. But it sounded kind of interesting,
so I said yes, and there we are. Thirty years later,
I retired as the national President. You just never know
where life will take you if you just say yes. Well,
Amy and I always say that we're we're big yes people.

(12:49):
We love to say yes to things. And there's so
much rhetoric for women on how you should say no
and say no to all these opportunities, and and doors
closed when you say no, and they open when you
say yes. And so when you say something, you just
said something that struck me. You said, I don't know
why I was foolish enough to take it, But I
really don't think that speaks to who you are. You

(13:10):
are such a positive person, and through all of the
battles you face throughout your life, you maintain a smile
and a positivity about people working together. Where does that
come from? It's so funny. I am often asked, particularly
by younger women, why I look like I'm so optimistic

(13:30):
in spite of all of the things that they're encountering
every day. So when I look back, I can say, well,
it's because I have seen that you can make change.
And again, I'll go back to those early days of
seeing in the Civil rights movement people without any power,
without any money, yet getting together and making some of

(13:51):
the most profound and fundamental change for our whole country,
and and just knowing that you can, you can have
an impact, knowing that what you do does make a difference,
really drives me. And I would say that the other
piece of it for me is that at this point

(14:11):
in my life, almost every day I get either an
email or a call or something comes from someone that
says you helped me in this way. You you saved
my life. You you know now with the courses that
I'm teaching, I I hear, Okay, I took this course,

(14:34):
and I would have never valued myself enough to apply
for that next job. But now I know the value
I bring and so I did and I got it.
And those are the things that you know, even the
small things that feed my passion, that feed my optimism,
and to know that that we can we can make

(14:56):
change in this world. We can do that. And now
a quick later in your life, you wrote a book
about power, women in power, and women's relationship to power.
I think I have a good sense of where your
relationship is now to power, and I think it's part
of your optimism. But like, where was your relationship with
power at that point in your life? You know where,

(15:19):
You've graduated college, You've been part of the civil rights movement,
You've worked for head Start for five years. At this point,
you have raised three kids. Really, so, like, what was
your relationship with power? Like? Then I have to answer
that question by going back to my teen years where
I did not feel that I had power, I did
not feel that I had the ability to determine the

(15:40):
course of my own life. And it was obviously was
very responsive instead of proactive about things. And I I'm
fortunate that my father always told me I could do
anything my pretty little head desired. That was his language.
And I witnessed my mother a woman who felt she

(16:02):
couldn't in fact, do much of anything that she wanted
to do. That she was always doing what someone else
wanted her to do, and it was not. Her big
rebellion in life was at fifty she became a c
p A and that was it was huge, but because
she was extremely brilliant, So my female role model was

(16:25):
not empowered, as it were. But I did have that
little voice in the back of my head that kept
coming back to me. So once I had started to
college and started on you know, meeting other women who
were involved in the community or or involved in careers,
I slowly began to realize that I guess I do.

(16:47):
I guess I can determine the course of my fate
as opposed to simply letting it happen to me. And
it wasn't any one thing. It was a lengthy process,
and I will tell you to this day, I still
have my moments I will catch myself, you know, I
will catch myself using language that sounds like I'm a

(17:08):
powerless little girl, and I'm like, what's wrong with you?
But these cultural things are hard to overcome. However, the
the the other piece of that is that the more
you use your courage muscles, the more powerful you will feel.
And so taking risks. I love seeing people encouraging young

(17:32):
girls today to play sports and to take all kinds
of risks, because that's how you get a feeling of
being powerful, and that's how you grow those courage muscles
and in willingness to take on things even if you
may not succeed. So what was it like for you
to take over a national role at Planned Parenthood. There's

(17:56):
a story I have to tell you about when it
was all happening that I was having to decide whether
to even apply for that position. So I ran the
affiliate in West Texas for four years. At that point
I was ready to move to a larger community, larger affiliate.
The I went to Phoenix. I I was in Phoenix
and ran the Arizona affiliate for eight years, for eighteen years,

(18:19):
and at that point I was getting kind of bored
I was ready to I wanted to start writing books then.
That was actually my goal at that time, and I
had set up my life so that I could take
a year or two off and and write a book.
And at that time there was an opening for the
national Planned Parenthood position, and I was being heavily, heavily
heavily recruited. About that time, my husband and I went

(18:42):
on a hike on the Milford Track in New Zealand,
and um, I discovered the first day that I would
have to face some fears that I didn't know I
was going to have to face. I am terrified of
suspension bridges, and it turned doubt that I would have
to cross twenty two really rickety. I mean these weren't

(19:04):
like nice metal big bridges like we see here, but
there's little rickety wooden planks with maybe one line of
wire on the side that you could hold onto. Well,
I mean I freeze up. I just I'm terrified. And
I get to the first bridge and I'm clutching my
walking stick like like it will save me, and people

(19:26):
are lining up behind me. Only one person at a
time can cross this bridge. So I start across the
bridge finally by by telling myself three things. Number One,
you have to keep your vision, your eyes on the
other side where you want to go, your intention. You
have to take a deep breath and have the courage

(19:48):
to believe you can get there. And then finally, you
have to take the action, because without the action, none
of the rest of it really matters. You have to
start putting one ft in front of the other, in
front of the other, in front of the other, until
you get to the other side. And while I was

(20:08):
doing that, my life was passing in front of my
my mind, and I I was realizing that I just
before I had left, I had found out that I
was the candidate they wanted and I was going to
have to decide if I would take that job. And
it was a time when there were some problems. There was,

(20:33):
I mean, it was not only that the political situation
was extremely tense, a lot like it is today. But
that didn't really bother me. People were getting murdered, people
were getting I was getting personally stalked at home, getting
neo Nazi calls on my home phone. I had my

(20:54):
personal I mean, you know, I have was picketers, and
you know, I knew it was a dangerous physically dangerous
thing to do. I knew that I would have to
bring the entire organization through a process of dealing with
it emotionally and otherwise. It was a time when the
organization had had several leadership changes, like four leadership changes

(21:15):
in five years, so they're all kinds of problems. And
this was all flashing in front of me in this
short period of time that I'm going across the bridge.
By the time I got to the other side, I
realized a few things. One is that you know, I
didn't lose my fear even after crossing all twenty two
suspension bridges, but I learned that I could do it.

(21:37):
And the other thing I learned was sometimes you have
to cross that bridge sometimes at your moment, Sometimes you
have to just not worry about the raging river below
or the jagged rocks on the side. If you're the
right person to do something, and you know that you are,
and they know that you are, you have to stand
up in the moment and take that opportunity. And it

(21:59):
was an opportunity. It was a great opportunity for all
of the travails, uh, you know, it was it was
a great opportunity to be able to practically reconstruct an organization.
I took the whole organization through a twenty five year
out visioning process, and whole sets of new programs started
growth again, got contraceptive coverage by insurance plans on the

(22:22):
political front, and that was all great, um, but it
was also exhausting and very exhausting. So I wore myself out.
I really literally just wore myself out. You said, you
really change the organization. You brought what I think is
really an entrepreneurial spirit to a very established nonprofit. Like

(22:44):
do those two things can they work together? I wouldn't
have thoughts so, but they do. I wouldn't have thought so.
And you probably heard the saying that Ginger did everything
Fred did but backwards and in high heels, and leading
a nonprofit is a lot like that. You have to
have all the business sense, but you do it where
you don't have as much money or access to resources.

(23:07):
And we we did have to be very entrepreneurial because
there were so many changes in the health care system,
so ways that we were able to provide women's healthcare
at low fees or no fees for the women who
couldn't afford it. We had to be very scrappy. You know,
we we literally created you know what you see now
as the on every corner little uh dock in the box.

(23:29):
I call them the urgent care centers. I'm telling you
planned parent to it, invented that little neighborhood clinic that
is very responsive to the needs of people. Doesn't do
every service, but you do what you do well, and
you do it at a price people that can afford,
and with good customer service. And you know, we we
sort of invented that. And also the use of nurse

(23:52):
practitioners as clinicians and providers and found that the patients
literally like that better because nurses are trained more in
an educational mode, you know, to really talk to people.
So that part of it was really fun. That part
of it was fun, And I guess I know my
father was an entrepreneur, and I guess I had just
ingested some of that in my daily life with my family,

(24:14):
and to this day I enjoy that that aspect of
what I do in a nonprofit. You were also a
pioneer of getting contraception covered by insurance. How did you
make that happen? It wasn't just me, for sure, there
were people who had started seeing the injustice of it.

(24:35):
And for example, there was a young woman in Seattle,
a young pharmacist who discovered that her pharmacy didn't cover
her birth control pills, and so she sued them. And
that was how I got got, you know, aware of
what was going on. You know, sometimes there's an injustice
you don't even see because it's invisible. Women were just

(24:56):
accustomed to paying for their pills and we didn't even
question it. Right well, there were a couple of states
where they had started being some grassroots movements to get
insurance covered, and so I quickly saw that this was
one of those things that almost everyone could coalesce around.
That we could get some Republicans then I don't know

(25:19):
that we could. Now we could get Republicans and Democrats
to come together on something that would prevent the need
for abortion. For one thing, and that was it made
such economic sense because being able to have children when
you're ready to have children results in better prenatal care
outcomes that results, and it enables women to enter the workforce.

(25:42):
All of those things are are great intellectual arguments, and
so I really I saw that as being something that
could bring a very fractured country together around an issue
because Americans use birth control at some point lives for
goodness sake, so almost everybody thinks contraception is a good thing.

(26:05):
So that was one part of it. It was that
big macro concept of how could we how could really
have a national dialogue about something that could bring people
together on issues that had been very fractured and contentious.
So that was one. But the other thing was it
was that that's just the injustice of women not getting

(26:27):
this basic healthcare paid for, and we didn't even hadn't
even been being noisy about it. So I started trying
to get legislation, and we ended up the first piece
of federal legislation we got was in the Federal Employees
Insurance Program and that is the largest insurance plan in

(26:48):
the country. So once that insurance plan covered it, most
other plans started to follow suit. And then these this
legislation started bubbling up from the states as well individual states.
But here's the thing to know, couldn't get any media
coverage of it at all. Couldn't get any public, you know,

(27:12):
big public discussion of it until Viagra viaggregates approved by
the f d A, and suddenly every insurance plan is
covering viagra. Well, the next day I'm on Good Morning
America because suddenly it's become a big issue. It's like,

(27:33):
what insurance plans will cover viagra, which is hardly necessary.
I mean, it's fine, it's good, but necessary. No birth
control for women is a necessary health care provision. And
so that's when it became a big public issue and
it got a lot more attention, and then we were

(27:55):
able to make it more of a normalized thing. And
now a quick break. Over the course of the years,
I imagine your relationship with money has changed enormously. How
did it evolve from those teen years to today? You're

(28:15):
so right, so right saying my relationship with money has
changed a great deal. When I was very young, I
discounted the importance of financial stability or just you know,
financial capability. I really discounted it. And probably that's because

(28:35):
although we were never wealthy, I never had to worry
about the next dime. And I think when you grow
up in abject poverty, you learn very quickly how important
money is, and so I I didn't really pay that
much attention to it. I hate to say this, but
I never negotiated my salary until I became the national

(29:01):
President of Planned Parenthood, and even then I didn't negotiate
it because it was more than I had been making,
sounded like a lot. Then I came to New York
and I had to figure out how to pay for
a New York apartment. So at that point I went
back and I renegotiated because it was clear that I

(29:25):
had greatly undervalued myself and slowly as time has gone on,
and partly this is because of my study of women's
relationship with power. In our culture, power and money are
very much synonymous, and so if our relationship with power
is ambivalent, our relationship with money will be ambivalent as well.
And I now can see that it was pretty foolish

(29:47):
of me that, to me, the best thing that ever
happened was direct deposit into my bank account of my
of my pay. I was doing the work I wanted
to do. I didn't want to think about it otherwise, Well,
that was not very smart. That was not very smart.
And I think that financial literacy for young women is
just incredibly important and understanding the importance of not just

(30:09):
what's in your paycheck, but how you build your wealth,
how you build your how you build your your wealth,
for your for your future and the future of your family,
and that was just not even something that I It
was not even a concept for me until recent years
and now in in in the work that I do
with Take the Lead, we definitely talk about the relationship

(30:30):
between money and power and that it's that money and
power are both like hammers. You can build something with
it or you can break something apart. They have no
characteristics of their own, so it's what you do with it.
If what you do with it is something good, well,
then why shouldn't you have the financial capability? So that's

(30:51):
that's my personal rethinking about money and power and how
you deal with them and how you help women have
a better relationship with money. Another thing that changes every
time is our relationship with friends. And oftentimes when we're
you know, younger, raising kids, it's hard to make time
for for friends who are your friends now and what
do you what do you do with them? Well, one
of the things that somebody told me when I left

(31:13):
Planned Parenthood was that your rolodex is going to change quickly,
and the people who will answer your phone calls will
change quickly, and that is definitely true. You find out
who your friends are who your real friends are. But
but that so, so my friends now tend to be

(31:34):
fairly diverse, fairly much more diverse than they were earlier
in my life. And that's a deliberate thing. And whenever
I start noticing that all of my friends are my age,
I start trying to make sure that I have friends
who are in younger generations A so I know what's

(31:54):
going on in the world and be so I will
always have some friends. It's a real thing, you know.
It probably has something to think about. I'm very blessed
to have a few women friends who started zooming at
the beginning of the pandemic and it was just one
of those oh why don't we do this on Sunday

(32:14):
and and it became a regular weekly thing. And I've
come to so appreciate that community of women who care
about each other. So you just touched upon aging. It's
hard to believe you are seventy nine years old. What
is your relationship like with aging and beauty and how
has that changed. I can't believe I'm going to be

(32:37):
eighty years old either. I'm fortunate to have good health.
But I'm fortunate to have good health, I think because
I do take care of my health. And being in
very stressful jobs, I learned the importance of exercise. And
and also I will tell you when I left planned parenthood,
people started asking me if I had a facelift. No,

(32:59):
I didn't have a facelift. But I'm getting Actually, I'm
getting sleep every night, which is I didn't for nine years,
especially as the national President. I ran on four or
five hours of sleep every night. And you cannot do
that and stay healthy. So exercise is is really my
secret sauce. It makes me feel, it releases those happy hormones,
and I get really cranky when I don't get to exercise.

(33:22):
So I would say exercises my secret sauce. A little
green tea is my secret sauce. And not letting things
get you down. You know, as you get older, you
learn you can do these things and survive. You just
learn that. And the more you learn that, you let

(33:43):
other things roll off your back. It's not as important anymore.
So you have fifteen grandchildren and six children? Is that
number correct? Right now? That number is correct, But I
do need to I do need to say that three
of them are my bio logical children, and three of
them are my current husbands of biological children. And then

(34:06):
between the two of us we have those fifteen grandchildren,
of whom a few are great grandchildren. For those that
are girls and even the boys, how are they being
raised differently even than you raised your children. The youngest
of the great grandchildren is six years old. And when
I see her now, I will tell you that from

(34:26):
her birth she has been given all kinds of girly
girly things, clothes really clothes, and they let her do
makeup and stuff that I'm going, why do you do that?
But on the other hand, she is an athlete. She
is you know, she is in her physical body, which
I think this is a new generation of girls who
know how to take up space. You know, they know

(34:49):
the strength of their bodies. That is not something that
I knew. And I am so glad to see that.
And I'm so glad to see that her family gives
her that they give her lots of opportunities to to
to be in in different kinds of sports and gymnastics
and things that she enjoys and that give her that

(35:10):
feeling of physical strength. I think that's fantastic, Gloria. What
do the next ten years of your career look like
the next ten years of my career look like this.
First of all, I am planning this year to raise
a lot of money to make Take the Lead a
self I mean, a sustainable organization. You see. The problem

(35:33):
for me is I know how to do almost everything
in an organization since I started with a small one
and grew it to a big one in La la
la la la, And I now you know, I just
I can just do too many things, and I'm doing
too many things, so I need to So my my
plan here is to to raise enough money to to
build a sustainable infrastructure be able to have a succession plan.

(35:57):
I want someone else to run the organization, believe it
or not, even despite the fact I've been a CEO
for pretty much all of my career life. I love
the mission, I love the I don't mind fundraising, I
love doing the public facing work. I I love the
relationship building and all that. But daily operational stuff, no way.

(36:20):
And then, as I am able to ease myself out
a little bit, because you know, I'll keep I'll keep
doing what I do because I take the lead is
really based all on my own intellectual property, and I'm
donating the use of all of that to take the lead,
and I will continue to do that, but I want
to be able to oversee that use of that, you know,
my books and my courses and that kind of thing.

(36:42):
But beyond that, I also have realized that I have
had the opportunity to be both a maker and an
observer of really important elements of history, and so I
haven't saved everything, but I want to organize my papers

(37:04):
and put them into uh some kind of place where
they will not just be on a shelf, but will
be available as working tools and documents for women's leadership
for perpetuity. So I don't know what that's gonna look
like exactly, and I'm open to ideas from people for

(37:26):
exactly how to do that, but I see that as
being something that I definitely want to do in the
next five to ten years. So I feel a responsibility
actually to do that, because when you don't know your history,
it's hard to create the future of your choice. You know,
we have these little what we call our jewelry power
tools that take the lead. And I'm wearing the know

(37:48):
your History lantern that gives you insights into yourself because
we are all formed by the history that that made us,
and so it's important, and I want the next generation
to know the history and to be able to apply
it to their own advancement and their own leadership. So
that's what I see the next ten years as being, well, Gloria,

(38:11):
we are going to go to our speed round. Now.
We're just going to ask you a few quick questions
and you can give us quick answers. Amy, do you
want to kick us off? Yes? What book are you
reading now? I'm reading one called My Grandmother's Hands and
it is about racial trauma. It's an incredible book. It's
just an incredible book. I'm usually not reading things that

(38:33):
are that deeply into psychology, but but the author's voice
is so gorgeous. Also, it's like it's just fabulous. It's
it's wonderful, wonderful insights. I just finished reading a book
about that was set in Odessa, Texas, the first novel
I've read in a long time, called Valentine. It's a
hard book to read, but it's a hard scrabble life

(38:55):
in West Texas and it's very true and I got
a lot the laughs out of remembering some of the places.
As I was listening to it. You're an expert on leadership.
Who if you had to name three leadership experts you admire,
who would they be one of them? I just did
a I just did one of my LinkedIn lives with

(39:16):
this morning. Her name is Felicia Davis, and she's one
of the leadership ambassadors for Take the Lead. She has
an organization called the Women's Collective, and she does branding,
self branding for women. And she can take my very
straightforward ideas and turn them into really cool ways of
teaching them. And I think teaching is something you are

(39:37):
doing all the time when you're a leader. Have to
be able to put things into story form and communicate
in a way that people can hear you. So that's one. Now,
this is somebody who is not alive anymore. But Warren
Benness was one of the people from whom I learned
the most. And what I learned from him was the

(40:00):
principle that the first duty of a leader is the
creation of meaning. And I'll tell you that that really
that Relea stood me in good stead and one of
my former mentors also also male. You know, I have
to understand there weren't that many female mentors for me
when I was when I was getting into leadership roles.

(40:20):
I almost find myself channeling him now. But the things
I learned from him were and then I go back
and I reread his books all the time. His name
is Watts Whacker, and he was a futurist, and it
was like anything is possible. Those are the things that
have helped me do what I've done. What is your

(40:43):
nighttime routine? My nighttime routine is I I'm sorry to
admit this. I usually do an extra couple of hours
of work first of all, but then I lift weights
with my husband and that is kind of like our
little routine before we go to bed. As he's not

(41:03):
great on exercise, so I'm always trying to encourage him.
And so we've started lifting weights together at night. And uh,
that's it. How do you keep your romance alive? Look? Look,

(41:23):
I think laughing a lot, laughing a lot. We talk
about that a lot that we do laugh a lot together.
We don't do any of the things that you're always
people always talk about. You know, there you don't see
any candles and you know, like soft music and stuff
like that around here. But you know what, he's ninety
one and I'm eighty and we just are still all
over each other all the time. Lou Burns has been

(41:48):
listening to our interview and he will be asking you
the final question from the male perspective, what was your
role in the Civil Rights Act of in that time period?
Who did you work with? And also did you get
any flak from your neighbors and people that was around you,

(42:09):
because obviously you grew up in a time where segregation
was still happening. Indeed, all those things right now. I
was home with three small children during the height of
the of the of the movement of the sixties, and
so while my heart would have gone to Selma, you know,
physically I felt I couldn't do that. So I looked

(42:30):
for things that were local, and mostly the things that
I did were getting involved with with groups like there
was an organization at the time, I don't know if
it still exists called the Panel of American Women. That
was the name of it, Panel of American Women, And
you could call upon them to bring a panel to
your group where there would be four or five people,

(42:52):
each one representing a different race or religion. And that
was the kind of thing that I was able to
get myself involved with I had no idea, Sam, I
should have known just by doing math that Gloria was
about to turn eight. And it got me thinking that,
you know, we've done a number of these interviews now,

(43:13):
and we have interviewed many iconic women who are still
doing so much work in their seventies and eighties, and
it just it just makes me rethink everything I've ever
thought about my own career, like in this really inspiring, amazing,
profound way, like I aspire to be like Gloria Felt
and Gloria's sinum. Glorious Chinam also is in her eighties

(43:36):
and she is still not just like kicking, but she's
making change in the world and she's out there. And
I really when when we meet these people, I don't
think there's any difference between us and them. I mean
in terms of like the whole adage, like ages just
a number. They embody it, they really do, and they
don't get discouraged even though they're fighting some of the

(43:58):
same bullshit fight they've been fighting for fifty years. They
just keep going. And I love hearing about their friendships.
It's so important. We always talk about this, Sam, like
how important friendship is for women, and these are women
who can still tell stories about going out and having
fun with their girlfriends, like life is long and there's

(44:19):
so much to do, and I think it's and it's
beyond friendship book. I just think they both have fun.
Like you know, it's the whole thing that you and
I always talk about how we're some of the few
people who know will just like hop on a plane
in a moment's notice and say, yeah, I'll show up
at that and just make it work, and we are
our tendency is to say yes over no. I think
that if you look at the people we've interviewed, and
there's such a wide variety right of everything from ethnicity

(44:43):
to background, culture to careers, and one of the things
that kind of ties them all together is that optimism
and that zest for just digging into life. One thing
in Glorious Story that I loved is that she built
this in amazing career in a very nonlinear way. And

(45:03):
I also think that's something that we see among these
really amazing legendary women that we talked to who are
in their seventies and eighties, is they have lived a
thousand lives. They have reinvented themselves seventy two times, and
I hold on to that right after what I've been
through in the past couple of years, that you can
reinvent yourself and you can live a new life and
live to breathe another day, and it's just incredibly inspiring.

(45:26):
Gloria is still plotting her next course. Like when we
asked her, what does your career look like in five
or ten years? Like she had an answer. It was there.
She knew she's not done. Thanks for listening to What's
Her Story with Sam and Amy. We would appreciate it
if you leave her review wherever you get your podcasts,

(45:47):
and of course, connect with us on social media at
What's Her Story podcast. What's Her Story with Sam and
Amy is powered by my company, The Riveter at the
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park place Payments dot com. Thanks to our producer Stacy
Parra and our male perspective Blue Burns m HM.