Huma Abedin On What A Pet Cat Taught Her About Representation While Growing Up In The Middle East
i think back to um my childhood and my experience and i um you know i grew up in the middle east and i grew up in a in a culture and a place where you didn't see a lot of women out in the workspace or doing very much and so i when i when i wrote my book i share the story of my grandmother who lived in india and in a time when girls were not sent to school and when she was eight years old she went and went to her parents and said i demand to be educated in university school and she went to school left home every day and back then it was considered shameful for a girl to be seen leaving her home and she was educated went to college and then produced my mother who became a fulbright scholar which then led to me when i was growing up in saudi arabia you also didn't see a lot of girls wandering around in the streets and i remember we had a little pet cat who we named tiger and she was a female cat and i remember thinking every time tiger would leave and wander in the streets like how lucky she was that she had the freedom to wander the streets and to the point that all these ladies have been making about seeing something to believe it's possible for me that didn't happen until i was watching tv one day and saw christian amanpour um talk about you know to the point everything that all of you said really resonates with me this notion of seeing something to believe it's possible and i saw her and i believed anything was possible so when i walked into the white house to then work for hillary clinton um who 53 years ago when she was giving her commencement speech at wellesley university said politics is the art of making the impossible possible and so much of that journey every single day i said myself the day i woke up and did not want to go to work is the day i would give notice and that's what it is to find purpose in your life to do something that you love to be at a table and to always believe that there's space for more for more people for more women and yvette when you said this notion of throwing down the ladder it's something i say all the time which is the way i was raised in politics and in my profession our is the opposite when you're climbing up the steps of that ladder you're responsible to reach below and reach for hands below you and not step on the fingers of those below because then there is no progress for everybody