Conversations with the CTGCA Team: Founder Mary Hughes
CTGCA Founder Mary Hughes discusses her inspiration for recruiting women into the State Legislature, what gives her hope and how she sees future generations sustaining the gender equality movement.
This interview has been edited for brevity. CTGCA Volunteer Jessica Sass interviewed members from our team to learn about their roots in the gender equality movement. To learn more about our Interview Series and read other pieces like this, please click here.
When you were a little girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?
It was a mixture. When I was 7, 8, 9, I started writing plays and putting those plays on in my school, but I didn’t know there was such a thing as a playwright. So I think my very first instinct was to be a playwright. Then when I was 12, 13, 14, I decided to be a lawyer. And I ultimately became a lawyer. But law wasn’t that satisfying to me, so I found my way to politics, which in many ways incorporates theater. So I feel as if the instincts that I showed as a child have come together in the work that I get to do.
Were your dreams at all modified, because of limited opportunities for your gender, race, abilities, sexuality, religion, etc.?
This is interesting. I’m sure they were. I never felt that way, though. I always felt that if I wanted something, I could do it or be it. And I didn’t feel limited. And I don’t know why that is. But it’s just true that I didn’t, and haven’t, felt limited.
Did you have a specific moment where you realized, “This is what I was meant to do”?
Yes, and I will always remember it. I was volunteering on a senate campaign in 1982 in Rhode Island. I was standing in the back of a union hall, I think it was Carpenters, with a whole bunch of guys who I did not know. I had been invited there by my moot court partner from law school, who was working on the race to help the last couple of weeks. And I realized, while I was standing there, that this was the work I wanted to do. And these were the people I wanted to spend time with, and that this was important work. And it felt very much like home to me. That was a great realization, and I never looked back.
Thinking of CTGCA and our focus on women championing women, did you have a specific mentor or loved one that guided you?
I think my grandmother confirmed for me the importance of women being useful in the world. She had been trained as a nurse in the 1910s at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, D.C. She had then married my grandfather who had been a Georgetown Law School student in the 1910s. When she married my grandfather, she stopped working, became the head of their household. In the early 1980s, I was visiting with her and asked her the happiest time of her life and she said, “It was when I was a nurse,” which immediately was like a clamp on my heart because she wasn’t a nurse for that long in her life. I asked her why, and she said, “Because I was useful,” and I thought that was just tragic. That such a gifted, capable woman had been sidelined almost her whole adult life saddened and angered me. She made me aware that it was very important to be a contributor, helping more people than just yourself. That was the bedrock for my advocacy for women to take their full measure of power and authority in governing.
As for the mentors that I had along the way who gave me a feminist perspective, it started with my grandmother and my mother too, but it was furthered by coaches who made me a better lacrosse player and law professors who were the only women on the law faculty when I was in law school and colleagues more bold than I. My mentors were women who had simply gone their own way — women who were barrier breakers, women who did the work to make changes. There were a lot of mentors.
What would you say is the happiest point in your life so far, and is there a distinction between your own personal happiness and fulfillment for the work that you do?
The happiest points are always the times when I am creating something — my firm, a campaign plan, Close the Gap California, the 2012 Project, a new op-ed — and any time my husband and I spend together.
I have been blessed to live a very integrated life. I don’t have much separation between my personal life, my political life, and my work.
I’m married to an elected official, so public and political permeates our lives and always has. He was in public office when I met him 32+ years ago, and he is still today. There isn’t much distinction between public-private for me.
How have you sustained the momentum in your passion?
It’s easy. My brothers and the people who know me best would tell you that when it comes to the things that are barriers or hurdles, it’s not that I am courageous or brave, I’m just completely oblivious. I just go right around the trouble spots and do what seems right or interests me. It’s not altruistic.
None of the success in the work that I do is ascribable to one person- campaigns and elections are team sports. But if you really hone your craft, you can seize the moment at which you say to someone, “You need to run for this office because you’re the right person at the right place at the right time. And if you get in, you’re going to win this race.” I’ve done this work for a long time and sometimes my instincts are good about things like that and you can make a difference in someone’s life. Most of the time, it’s completely collaborative work, which I love.
How did you come up with the idea for a project like CTGCA?
In the late 1990s, I was asked to join a team of researchers who studied the races of women candidates for governor. The Barbara Lee Family Foundation funded this research and still does, and it produced huge amounts of information about the barriers facing women for high executive office. Also around that time, a group of women leading women’s political organizations began to meet to refine strategies for electing more women to office. Over the course of those conversations, ideas would emerge and spark initiatives. Ultimately, I landed on recruiting as a central to success. I now believe another crucial element is numbers. We must flood the fields of candidates with talented women.
CTGCA came to be by simply asking “If only one in five legislators is a woman in California, what are we going to do about that?” and then making a plan based on everything I knew — about political institutions, legislatures, women’s ambition and the thwarting of it, and the larger challenges of running campaigns.
There was an interesting study in the late 1970s regarding men and women in State Legislatures — if you ask them, “Why did you run?”, men would say, “Well, I always thought it’d be a great job,” or “I always imagined, I’d be working on state policy,” or “I could see myself doing this work, and I just sort of followed that path.” If you asked women in State Legislatures why they’re there, a majority said they’re there because somebody they have respect for asked them if they would be interested in running.
Understanding that an invitation to run was a gateway for women, whereas men imagined themselves headed for Sacramento as a matter of course, led me to conclude we needed to go out and ask women to run. I had known for a very long time that women win open seats at the same rate as men and that open seats were the jump ball of politics — you’ve got to get in there and compete — so then I began to look at when seats become open and whether there were differences in the numbers in different election cycles. That’s why Close the Gap is structured the way that it is — for maximum advantage in ’24, ’26, and ’28 when so many legislators will term out.
How do you see future generations sustaining this moment?
You have a medium that the generations before you didn’t have, you’re digital natives.
Your job is to translate all of the rights and responsibilities for gender and racial equality to your generation in a medium they embrace. Every generation has a different challenge. Translating the women’s movement for full equality and using the Internet as the vehicle for more rapid progress in practices, policies, laws and culture.
What gives you hope regarding California’s future?
History gives me hope. Whenever I feel as if the world is a horrible place, I go back and think about my grandmother, and what her options were when she married my grandfather, and how she gave up the occupation that she came to see as the happiest time in her life. But the world is a different place now. Women don’t have to give things up to have a partner and a family and a full life. History tells me that while we are wayward and take long trips into pandemics and wars and social upheaval, in the end, we are moving toward a world of compassionate understanding and equality.
Is there anything else we should know?
For women, resilience is the greatest gift. And if you don’t have it naturally, develop it because you will never try hard or risk big things if you are afraid of failing. You have to try many times at whatever you do to get so good at it, so skilled at it, that you can use it to help others.
You’re going to make mistakes and a lot of them. I don’t embrace “Move fast and break things” or your number of failures indicates how innovative you are. But I do believe that failure is inevitable if you are trying to solve big problems. Failure is also transitory and a necessary teacher. Knowing that, internalizing that, is enormously freeing, a huge gift. I want women — especially young women — to know that. I’m not glorifying failure. But I am saying don’t be afraid of it.
Close the Gap California is committed to building on progressive women’s historic momentum by recruiting them statewide and achieving equality in California by 2028. Join us!
About Close the Gap California
Close the Gap California (CTGCA) is a statewide campaign launched in 2013 to close the gender gap in the California Legislature by 2028. By recruiting accomplished, progressive women in targeted districts and preparing them to launch competitive campaigns, CTGCA is changing the face of the Legislature one cycle at a time.
One in every four women in the Legislature is a CTGCA Recruit. Our Recruits are committed to reproductive justice, quality public education, and combatting poverty, and nine of 10 serving today are women of color.
