Madeleine Albright made history, then insisted on helping other women make theirs.

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At some point in her long and powerful career, Madeleine Albright decided she needed no invitation to speak her mind, no matter how many men in the room.

“I think this has happened to every single woman,’ she told Paste BN Editor-in-Chief Nicole Carroll in 2020. “If you’re the only woman in the room and there is a discussion going on, you think to yourself, ‘I’ll say something.’

“Then you think, ‘No, I won’t say it because it will sound stupid.’ Then some man says it and everybody thinks it’s brilliant and you’re really mad at yourself for not having said something.”

She put up with that for too many years, she said, but teaching at Georgetown University helped her reframe the problem. Her motto for her students: “You have to interrupt.”

No raising hands. No hoping someone will see you and think you have something to say.

“I now interrupt a lot,” she told Carroll. There’s not a woman reading this who doesn’t understand the power of her resolve. Too many of us envy it, still.

Albright was a sign of brighter futures

Albright died this week, at age 84. Obituaries rightly note that, after representing our country at the United Nations, she became the first woman to serve as U.S. secretary of State, from 1997 to 2001. To many, this feels like ancient history now, when 168 women serve in Congress – 144 in the House, 24 in the Senate – and Kamala Harris is vice president of the United States. It’s not enough, but there’s no denying the progress.

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For many of us, though, Secretary Albright was the surest sign of our own brighter futures. After a unanimous Senate confirmation, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of our government. And yet, she was accessible. She was a tower of might, not height, a woman with an easy smile who spoke six languages and loved to talk about her vast collection of lapel pins.

She was not born to an easy life. She was a child of Czech refugees who fled the Nazis and raised her to be Catholic. Only after she became secretary of state did she find out, through Washington Post reporting, that she was Jewish and that 26 family members were killed in the Holocaust, including three of her grandparents.

She responded to this discovery with the love of a loyal daughter. "My parents were fabulous people who did everything they could for their children and brought us to this amazing country and were protective, overly so in terms of worrying about us and all kinds of things. I can't question their motivation. I can't. I don't know how else to put it."

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How was she this strong, I used to wonder. I found the answer, at least in part, after reading her 2012 book, “Prague Winter,” which chronicled the first 11 years of her life “against the backdrop of a country and continent ripped asunder by Hitler, then Stalin.”

That little girl, immersed in so much fear and suffering. This passage from her last memoir, about why she wrote “Prague Winter,” has stayed with me: “I wanted to write the book because it was in those war-raged years that I learned how to be who I am. Repeatedly uprooted, I felt like a migratory species fleeing each unwelcome change in the climate. I could not help but develop a measure of self-reliance.” 

Albright believed that a woman who climbs must reach behind her. She lifted other women, always, and expected nothing less from the rest of us. In February 2016, at a campaign event for her longtime friend Hillary Clinton, Albright repeated a line she had used “a thousand times before”: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Many of us who are veterans of the women’s movement knew what she meant – how could we not? – but her timing was off. The admonishment landed badly with some young women, particularly those who were supporting Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders.

She apologized.

“One might assume I know better than to tell a large number of women to go to hell,” she wrote in a subsequent piece for The New York Times under the headline, “My Undiplomatic Moment.”

“I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another, but this was the wrong context and the wrong time to use that line. I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based solely on gender. But I understand that I came across as condemning those who disagree with my political preferences. If heaven were open only to those who agreed on politics, I imagine it would be largely unoccupied.”

She could not resist the “however,” and it was a necessary one.

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“I do want to explain why I so firmly believe that, even today, women have an obligation to help one another. In a society where women often feel pressured to tear one another down, our saving grace lies in our willingness to lift one another up. And while young women may not want to hear anything more from this aging feminist, I feel it is important to speak to women coming of age at a time when a viable female presidential candidate, once inconceivable, is a reality.”

My memorable Madeleine moment

A few times over the years, I had the chance to talk to Albright. Mostly we discussed whatever was happening in the world, as I was always eager to pick her brain and she was ever patient with the endeavor. Our most memorable conversation, though, was a personal one over dinner, with my husband. This was in the fall of 2012, just weeks before President Barack Obama’s reelection.

After the new year, Hillary Clinton was expected to resign as secretary of State. At that dinner, I asked Madeleine if she knew whether Hillary had decided to run again for president. She answered as a concerned friend, and one who knew the toll of the job.

“I’ve been telling her to take some time off for herself,” she said. “Long walks, lots of rest, and plenty of laughter with old friends. Only then should she decide whether she’s ready for another presidential race.”

I have no idea whether Hillary took her advice, or even how strenuously Madeleine was insisting. What I do know is that, in that moment, I came to see how every woman needs a friend like Madeleine Albright.

Connie Schultz is a columnist for Paste BN. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, "The Daughters of Erietown," is a New York Times bestseller. Reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz