The Book of Gutsy Women

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

“When I started my career in the early ’70s, no women worked in the cattle yards. The guys didn’t like me being there, but I didn’t pick up on the subtle social cues; what I cared about was working with the animals and studying the cattle chutes. Being autistic was an advantage, because all the hostility didn’t affect me as much.”

  —TEMPLE GRANDIN

  I first learned about Temple from my Grandma Dorothy. It was over the holidays one year when I was in high school, and she had just read Temple’s book, Thinking in Pictures. My grandmother raved about Temple’s brilliance and how well she explained what it was like to think in pictures. I promptly borrowed the book and began to follow her work through interviews and other writing. Years later, my grandma and I watched a movie about her life. The more I learned, the more interested I became in Temple and her work. She links her ability to think in pictures—including her ability to innovate humane livestock handling designs in her mind before she ever commits them to paper—to her autism.

  Temple is not a hands-off researcher. She goes into the physical spaces where animals are kept, as well as the corrals and chutes they’re forced through; she has even stood in stun boxes where animals are killed. Her physical experience of an animal’s journey led to two of her signature designs. Her curved loading chute prevents cattle from seeing where they’re headed, so they are less likely to become stressed or injure themselves trying to escape. Her center-track restrainer holds cattle steady during slaughter so that they’re stunned without accidental injury. There is no need for an animal to suffer for anyone’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Even McDonald’s agrees: They hired Temple to improve animal welfare in the slaughterhouses that supply their hamburger meat, and she trained the first wave of auditors to ensure that the new standards were being respected.

  Though animal welfare is what she’s best known for today, it’s just one area where Temple is a trailblazer. When she was in college, science professor William Carlock supported her work building the first major design for a hug box, a deep-pressure machine to help calm hypersensitive people who may not be receptive to being hugged by another person. Temple used her version for decades until she became comfortable hugging people. Since then, Temple’s hug box and other related designs have helped countless others on the autism spectrum grow comfortable hugging and being hugged.

  Temple’s impact on raising awareness about autism and the value of supporting people who think, learn, and communicate in different ways is hard to measure. She has never hidden how her autism has shaped her life, or let the discomfort of others limit her. Temple has described the way her mind works as “literally movies in your head.” Research suggests that animals also think in pictures, helping to explain Temple’s empathy and extraordinary gift for understanding how to lessen their fear and pain; her realization as a teenager that animals experience the world the way she does was spot-on. The woman some doctors gave up on when she was two years old has helped transform how we think about animals and ourselves.

  Ellen DeGeneres

  Hillary

  Just thinking about Ellen DeGeneres puts a smile on my face. Not only is she hilarious—I can’t think of anyone else who can reduce people to tears of laughter by talking about yogurt or pharmaceutical side effects—she is brave and compassionate. Not only that, she is a human being: imperfect, flawed, and honest.

  Ellen was in born in Metairie, Louisiana, in 1958, the daughter of an insurance salesman father and a speech pathologist mother. Her brother, Vance, was four years older. Growing up in the Christian Science faith, Ellen later said she often felt out of place. Her family struggled with poverty, and her parents divorced when she was a teenager. To help her mom through painful times, Ellen made her laugh.

  “It’s our challenges and obstacles that give us layers of depth and make us interesting. Are they fun when they happen? No. But they are what make us unique.”

  —ELLEN DEGENERES

  An animal lover from the very beginning, a young Ellen dreamed of being a veterinarian. Fearing she wasn’t “book smart” enough, she dropped out of the University of New Orleans after a semester and worked odd jobs: painting houses, selling vacuum cleaners, waiting tables, and shucking oysters.

  In her early twenties, she started performing comedy, first for friends, then at local coffeehouses and comedy clubs. In 1982, Ellen entered a Showtime contest to be the “Funniest Person in America.” She won; it was her breakthrough moment. Despite the recognition, she battled nerves every time she took the stage. “I would choke,” she later said. “My material was strong, but I just wasn’t ready.” She kept at it, and at twenty-eight years old, she snagged a coveted stand-up spot on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. During his show, Carson often invited comedians to sit with him on the couch and talk after their set. He had never extended the invitation to a female comedian, but Ellen’s mind was made up: She was going to bring down the house with her set and perform so well that he would have no choice but to call her over. And that’s exactly what happened.

  Ellen’s hard work and talent were getting noticed. In 1994, she landed a starring role as Ellen Morgan on the television sitcom These Friends of Mine, which was later renamed Ellen. After three seasons, rumors started to spread that Ellen’s character was preparing to come out as a lesbian—and so was the real-life Ellen. She had spent years working to keep her private life and her public life separate. (“I never thought it was anybody’s business, who I am and who I am with. So I thought, ‘Why do people need to know?’ ” she would tell Oprah in an interview.) Before the episode aired, Ellen put the speculation to rest with a 1997 Time magazine cover that bravely declared “Yep, I’m Gay.”

  Meanwhile, Ellen was fighting a behind-the-scenes battle with her network and her show’s sponsors. There weren’t many openly LGBTQ characters on television—if any—and coming out on the show was seen as a risky move. But Ellen won, and in the show’s fourth season her character came out as a lesbian—a milestone in television history. “The Puppy Episode” was the show’s highest-rated episode, with around forty-four million viewers tuning in. It later won an Emmy Award, and Ellen was renewed for a fifth season.

  CHELSEA

  It was perfect that Oprah, another hardworking, trailblazing woman in television who broke so many barriers of her own, guest starred as Ellen’s therapist on the coming-out episode of her show. After the show aired, Oprah encountered a backlash that was, she said, like nothing she had ever experienced before. But she never questioned her decision to stand by her friend. “I did it because she asked me to do it and I wanted to support her,” Oprah said later. “Being able to be free, literally, and to express herself in a way that she can be 100 percent truthful with the audience has allowed them to fall in love with her.”

  Ellen learned firsthand that breaking down barriers, while important, can also be painful. Today her coming-out episode is recognized and celebrated for helping change hearts and minds and bringing long-overdue visibility to LGBTQ people on-screen. But she faced a difficult backlash at the time. Advertisers pulled their ads from the show, and religious groups called for a boycott. In season five, ABC began some episodes—absurdly—with a parental warning, which she was strongly against. The network canceled her show the next season, and Ellen battled with depression. She later joked about the “meerkat closet,” which was her funny way of describing other LGBTQ celebrities popping their heads out of their dens to see what happened after she came out, then diving back into hiding when they witnessed the aftermath.

  It’s fitting, though, that Ellen had the last laugh. In 2003, she began hosting The Ellen DeGeneres Show, a talk show that’s now in its sixteenth season. Besides her successful television talk show, Ellen is also a bestselling author, a voice actor, and was the first openly gay person to host the Academy Awards ceremony, in 2007. In 2012, she won the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for humor. She has a new television show called Ellen’s Game of Games and a game called Heads Up! (a favorite pastime on our campa
ign plane in 2016).

  I’ve visited my fair share of talk shows over the years. They are some of my favorite stops, and none more than The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which I first visited in October 2005 as senator from New York. I promised Ellen I would show her around Staten Island, and a month later, we were riding the ferry together. One of my all-time favorite episodes involved the phenomenally talented Kate McKinnon doing impressions of Ellen and me—they were spot-on! Best of all, Ellen ends every show by encouraging audiences to “be kind to one another.”

  “Most comedy is based on getting a laugh at somebody else’s expense. And I find that that’s just a form of bullying in a major way. So I want to be an example that you can be funny and be kind, and make people laugh without hurting somebody else’s feelings.”

  —ELLEN DEGENERES

  Besides Ellen’s historic career, she has also used her voice for good causes. In 2011, as secretary of state, I named Ellen the U.S. Special Envoy for Global AIDS Awareness. She brought to the effort not only her sharp wit and her big heart but also her impressive TV audience and social media following. She has raised awareness and donated millions to charities and people in need, from supporting sick children and their families to wildlife conservation efforts. Along with her wife, Portia de Rossi, she has helped to send a message to LGBTQ young people that the future ahead of them is a hopeful, accepting one. When President Obama awarded Ellen the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, she was overwhelmed with emotion, and so were the rest of us. Seeing her earn such a well-deserved and hard-won recognition was a poignant reminder of the power of a single voice to spark immense change.

  In recent years, she has spoken candidly about how hard it is to embrace her full, complex self in the public eye—to choose not to dance when she’s not in the mood, to tackle tough topics, and to care less and less about being liked. Even the title of her latest comedy special, Relatable, is a tongue-in-cheek affirmation that sometimes the bravest—and hardest—thing we can be is true to ourselves.

  Maya Lin

  Chelsea

  Growing up in Ohio, Maya Lin loved working in her father’s ceramics studio, casting bronzes in her school’s foundry, and building miniature towns. She took those passions to college, studying sculpture and architecture. When she was a senior at Yale, she had the confidence to enter the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s national competition for the design of a new monument on Washington, D.C.’s National Mall to honor those who had fought and died in the Vietnam War. In 1981, the selection committee chose Maya’s proposal out of more than fourteen hundred submissions. Her design was simple. Two black granite walls, each close to two hundred and fifty feet long, standing at their highest above ten feet and sloping down to under a foot, all sunk below ground level. There are more than fifty-eight thousand names on the walls.

  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has received countless accolades from veterans’ groups and architectural critics alike over time, including the prestigious Twenty-five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects. But when its design was chosen, it was surrounded by controversy for its simplicity, its color, and its artist—a mix of sexism, racism, and doubts that anyone so young could be charged with such an important task. But Maya believed in her design, and the selection committee stayed firm in its choice. When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial officially opened in late 1982, Maya was twenty-three years old. It is now one of the most visited memorials in Washington, D.C. Standing in front of the walls, as I have done, enables the viewer to see one’s reflection. It is a haunting and moving experience.

  HILLARY

  When I saw photos of the memorial, I couldn’t imagine its power. But when I first visited in the 1980s, I felt it all around me. Being surrounded by the names of the fallen and the visitors searching for their lost friends and family members is an overwhelming emotional experience. I used to visit there when I’d leave the White House, wearing a baseball cap and casual clothes for incognito walks around the Mall.

  After finishing her graduate studies, Maya continued creating important public art pieces. The Women’s Table at Yale chronicles the number of women at that institution from its founding in 1701 until 1993, the year the sculpture was completed; women’s enrollment would surpass men’s in the first-year class for the first time two years later, in 1995. The Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, is a memorial fountain with the names of forty people killed from 1954 to 1968 while courageously fighting for civil rights in the United States. It includes the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his iconic quote “Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” In my early twenties, I took a friend who was planning to do a PhD in history on a road trip across the South. The Civil Rights Memorial was one of many stops in Montgomery, and one of the most memorable and moving of our trip.

  Maya has said her virtual memorial, What Is Missing?, will be her last memorial. What Is Missing? aims to raise awareness about the growing number of endangered species around the world and the growing crisis of a sixth extinction (the argument that we are in the middle of a man-made mass extinction event). It is poignant and appropriately alarming; I hope it is also galvanizing.

  HILLARY

  Ever since Chelsea was a little girl, she has worried about what happens to endangered animals like whales and elephants. Inspired by a whaling trip when she was seven, she asked for a membership to Greenpeace as a Christmas present. And in 2019, she wrote a children’s book about species going extinct: Don’t Let Them Disappear.

  Maya’s interest in environmental conservation started at a young age; in elementary school, she promoted a boycott of Japan to oppose their whaling practices and dreamed of being a zoologist. Today, in addition to What Is Missing?, she is part of the Confluence Project, an effort to connect people to the Columbia River ecosystem in the Pacific Northwest through indigenous communities and voices. She has said she hopes to help stop us from degrading our planet and is optimistic that art can change the way people think, including, presumably, how we think of our relationship and responsibility to nature. That conviction is also evident in her “wavefields,” which are exactly as they sound, stunning waves built out of grass and soil. On a trip to the Storm King Art Center in New York, I was mesmerized and disoriented by the seven almost-four-hundred-feet-long ripples of earth seeming to form waves in motion. All I could do was wonder: How did the ocean merge with solid ground?

  For almost my entire life, Maya’s work has given us different ways to look at the world, confront our past, and imagine a different, healthier, more sustainable and just future. With guts, humility, and compassion, Maya poses a question to all of us: What more can, and must, we do?

  Sally Yates

  Hillary

  Like many Americans, I got my first sense of Sally Yates’s courage through a breaking news alert.

  “CNN, January 30, 2017: Trump fires Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for ‘refusing to enforce a legal order’ on immigration.”

  That didn’t take long.

  Ten days earlier, Donald Trump had been sworn in as president. Seven days after that, the White House ordered its notorious, bigoted travel ban. Among other things, the ban would prevent more than 218 million people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for the next three months. And it banned all refugees worldwide from entering the U.S. for four months, with an exception made for persecuted religious minorities, specifically Syrian Christians. As a candidate, Trump had threatened “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Now it looked like he was following through.

  Sally Yates was running the Justice Department in the early days of the Trump administration. And it turned out she was exactly who America needed there and then.

  Usually, attorney general is a political appointment. That wasn’t the case for Sally. She had been a lawyer for the government for nearly thirty years—ever since she made the jump to public service as a young lawyer in G
eorgia. She had been working at a distinguished Atlanta firm that had a history stretching back over a century, a job that offered a path to a life of wealth and prestige. But Sally had walked away. Instead, she went to work for the United States of America.

  As an assistant U.S. attorney, Sally prosecuted white-collar fraud and political corruption cases, eventually becoming chief of that section in the Justice Department. She was also the lead prosecutor in the trial of Eric Rudolph, the domestic terrorist who bombed the 1996 Olympic Games, two abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar. Sally was exceptional at her job: She got promotion after promotion under both Republican and Democratic presidents. Politics didn’t matter. What mattered was the law—and the Constitution above all.

  President Barack Obama nominated Sally to be U.S. attorney of the Northern District of Georgia. She was the first woman ever to hold that position. A few years later, he nominated her to be deputy attorney general of the United States—the second-highest position at the Justice Department. It was during her Senate confirmation hearings for that role that this prophetic exchange occurred.

  JEFF SESSIONS: Do you think the attorney general has the responsibility to say no to the president if he asks for something that’s improper?

  SALLY YATES: Senator, I believe the attorney general or the deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution, and to give their independent legal advice to the president.

  Soon she showed the world what that obligation meant.

  When President Obama left office, Loretta Lynch stepped down as attorney general, leaving Sally running the Justice Department temporarily until a new attorney general was confirmed. Sally no doubt planned on a quiet week or two at the office, keeping everything running smoothly, making no news, then tendering her resignation after a long and distinguished career—and maybe heading somewhere sunny for a well-deserved break.