Lorissa Rinehart Built A Bridge to Our Future
She's a writer of forgotten women's history who knows that what comes next is up to us.
Hi Lorissa, and welcome to the Womancake interview! How is your work day going?
It's going great. I am a working mom, so the work day is a fluid idea. It begins around seven and ends around eleven, and I work around school and potty training and cleaning and cooking and all the other things. There's no such thing as a as an average workday, but today is going great,
You're in the eye of the storm, as it were, right now. I just learned about your work very recently, and Iām already a huge fan. Will you talk a little bit about what you do and how you do it?
I'm a writer, and I'm particularly interested in women's history, politics, war and peace and their intersections, of which there are many, and yet so little is written about that. My first book is called, āFirst to the Front.ā It is the biography of Dickey Chapelle, who was a combat journalist during the Cold War, predominantly, and really documented so many of those small conflicts that came to define the cold war in Algeria and Cuba, and then, of course, later on, the engulfing conflict of Vietnam. She really documented the people on the ground, not just Americans, but people from all over the world fighting for their freedom. And you see so many of the narratives that she was writing about that are so little reported on continuing to play out in Cuba, in China's influence over Southeast Asia and Ukraine, and so on and so forth.
My second book is coming out November 2025 about Jeanette Rankin, who was the first woman elected to Congress, and I'll just be brief, because it doesn't come out for a while, but when she was working for suffrage and then running for Congress in 1914 through 1916 in Montana, the state was very much controlled by corporations. She took on these corporations herself, and there are so many lessons that we can learn from her legacy in this new age of oligarchs.
So then my Substack, which is how we met, is called The Female Body Politic. I started it as a response to the 2024 election, but I am fueled by my passion for positive change through political action, and my surprise that so little has been written about women's involvement in the political process. I know we have histories here and there about suffrage, about change-makers like Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm and so many women who have done so much. But I am interested in looking at it not as one-offs, but as a progression, because I believe that women can access their best and most effective power through community. Not just of our present day, but also through all the women who came before us. Seeing what they did and how they did it, how they succeeded, how they failed, and how they can lead us into this future that we all envision for ourselves.
Your first book was highly acclaimed, and I canāt wait for your second one. I will just say here that the reason that I wanted to speak to you is because of your recent Substack post, which is about the current state and future state of the ERA. This dovetails beautifully with Womancake Magazine's 2025 theme, which is increasing older women's visibility, in particular, but all women's visibility. I have been following the progress of the ERA for, I don't know, 25 years. I've always kept an eye on it. I've always been a big fan of it, but your post completely changed my mind. Will you talk a bit more about the post?
Well, like you, I am a huge proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. I believe it should have been ratified. I believe it should have been a constitutional amendment. I believe in gender equality under the law, but the way in which the ERA was written, and the ways in which the political process and the legal process have become mired, I have come to believe make it an impossibility to ratify it at this point. I talk about the reasons why in my post, but I would also say that the primary reason why I believe, not from a legal standpoint, but from a philosophical standpoint, that the era should not be ratified in its current form, is because itās a house of cards, and in the current political environment, it will topple at the first wave of litigation, of which there will be many. And if this happens, the legitimacy of gender equality under the law on which the ERA rests will itself be questioned and undermined.
So this, to me, would be the larger disaster, and instead of continuing to try and prop up a piece of legislation and amendment that has shaky foundations, I believe we have to begin again and build a new foundation.
I know you're not an attorney, but I'm curious to know if all bets are off and anything is possible, can you give us a sense of what a brand-new way forward would be?
[With] women's suffrage, what they did was they got enough states to ratify to give women the right to vote [and] that basically changed the electoral map. So once the majority of states in the Electoral College had granted women the right to vote, it then put pressure on the federal government to ratify, and then it went back to the States again to be ratified.
The second tack you can take is what the ERA did [originally], which was introducing it in Congress, passing in Congress, passing in the Senate, and then you take it to the States for ratification by passing this first step that the suffrage movement spent 72 years on.
So if we were to begin again, I believe that we as women should follow the suffragist model. It was a huge debate within the suffragist camp whether they should go state by state or push for a national amendment first. But the reason why I think we should go state by state again is because, as we look at all of our institutions in our democracy right now, they are in crisis, and the only way to rebuild is to do so from the ground up. We need to build a women's movement grass blade by grass blade, brick by brick. It is difficult and grueling work, but it is the work that has to be done.
I love that, and I feel inspired just hearing you talk about it. I feel inspired for the fight, and if or when that new movement takes off, I hope that you will position yourself publicly within it, because I think youāre articulate and wonderfully informed and very compelling. OK, Iām going to pivot to some Womancake questions now. So as I mentioned, the theme of Womancake this year is increasing our visibility. Will you share the environments in which you currently feel the most visible and invisible, and why?
I'm going to bring this back to my idea of community involvement and the importance of community. I feel very, very visible in my community. I have built a community of friends, but also I am fortunate to have a family in which my passions, my dreams, my work and my labor is visible. [Womenās] labor is often made invisible by society, and by the gendered relationships in which we exist. When I decided to get married and have children, I was very intentional about making my labor visible to my partner, who is a wonderful man, but still he said to me at the beginning, āWhy are you always telling me what you're doing? You don't need to make this so transactional.ā And then I didn't say anything, I just let him think about that for a minute, and he came back and he said, āWell, I guess I'm a white guy, so it always kind of works out for me.ā And I was like, that level of consciousness is incredible, but that's still work that women need to do to make their labor visible.
We need to make our work visible to ourselves, to our families, and then to the spheres in which we wish to have influence, and right now, I am feeling incredibly visible in the Substack community, and it has meant more to me than I expected. I'm a published writer, I'm on St Lawrence press, I've written for magazines, but I really feel that with The Female Body Politic, I have found my purpose and passion. My focus has been singular and powerful, and that has been really seen and amplified much more quickly than I had expected.
It's extraordinary, and everyone should sign up! Do you have any daily wellness habits or practices that are meaningful to you?
I drink water all day. I put a little iodized salt in my water. I eat kimchi, like, first thing in the morning. I'm very passionate about local, organic food, so every week, me and my family go to the farmers market. We talk to the farmers, we look at the produce. We shop seasonally. We eat seasonally for the most part. I mean, like, you know, if I want to have brussel sprouts in summer, Iām not like, strict about it, but just making sure what we eat is sustainable, sustains me.
My husband and I have a running debate about how much we spend on fresh, organic produce. But Iām always like, listen, it's basically foundational healthcare, and it's protective against all kinds of other stuff as we age, so we just lean into it. On the other end of the spectrum, what is your favorite guilty pleasure treat?
A glass of wine. I'm not giving that up. I do not care. I'll drink a Cote Du Rhone on a date, for my basic table wine. But if it's a special occasion, it's a ChateauNeuf Du Pape.
Do you have a favorite power song that we can add to our Power Songs Playlist?
The song that really helped me transition from a place of not being in my power to being in my power was Katy Perry's āLove Meā and it's, āI'm going to love myself the way I want you to love me.ā
Iāll add it now. How does wisdom manifest through you at this stage of your life?
My books, I write biographies of women, and my practice is to read everything that they ever wrote, everything that they ever said, and a great deal of what was written about them, so that I can inhabit their universe, and speak from a place, not above or below, but adjacent to them, to have this real sense of empathy. I think that's where a lot of wisdom can be derived, by immersing oneself in an issue or a topic or a problem or a solution, and rather than trying to understand it from a God's eye perspective, understand it from a human perspective.
What would you say to a woman who does not feel visible in any sphere of her life? What advice would you give her?
I felt that way myself as a young woman, and I touched on this earlier, but the first thing that I would recommend she do is to is to make herself visible to herself, to announce to herself when she has done something when she is proud of an accomplishment, whether that's eating a good meal or, you know, doing a good project at work or at in school, or being kind to someone, or taking a shower. You know, I took a shower today. Once you make yourself, your worth, your value, visible to yourself, other people will start to see it without as much effort, but the most difficult thing is becoming visible to yourself.
It's interesting to hear you say this. In my day job, I'm an Executive speech and presentation coach, and I mostly work with very high-level, high-performing women. And I'm struck by the fact that so many of them, at least on paper, are undeniably accomplished. But when I ask them, āDo you feel accomplished?ā which is another way of saying, āDo you feel visible within your professional sphere?ā, generally, they say no.
I have learned over the years that there is a correlation, and it appears to be a pretty direct correlation, between the degree to which they actually feel visible and the degree to which they take time to celebrate their success. And so inevitably, when a woman tells me, āNo, I don't feel very successful,ā I always give them a little homework, which is to go and do a quick career assessment, and take yourself out for pizza and cake, or do something meaningful to celebrate your success. Itās amazing, it's actually transformative. Most of the time they come back and they tell me, āWow, I should have been doing this all along!ā
It's not about being self-congratulatory, right? It's about getting what you say you want, because [until] you recognize your own worth and value, you will never truly understand the totality of it, and how much you can do.
And I think that thing that you said about how becoming more visible to yourself renders you more visible to others is very true, and I feel thatās something that we can take with us through our whole life. I mean, I felt visible and visible in different ways at different ages. But I think this thing we're talking about is key to the whole process of aging for women. By the way, it's why I named the magazine Womancake, because around the world cake is a big part of celebrations, but as women age, we're viewed as less worthy of celebration. So I created this portmanteau to remind us to celebrate ourselves as we age.
Oh, that's wonderful. I love that!
Yay, thanks! Will you share an event from your life that created a distinct before and after experience, and what kind of wisdom you gained in hindsight from the after?
I always knew as a young woman I wanted to be a writer. I wrote short stories as a young girl. I was published in my 20s, but I just never believed in myself enough to think that I could be a writer, so I pursued every other career. I was a waitress and a restaurant manager. I worked in the arts, I wrote grants, I did this and that, but never what I wanted to do. When 2016 [the first Trump election] happened, it was this real memento mori moment for me [about] our freedom, our capacity to function in the world. Our dreams are finite, and if we want the things that we say we want, we have to do what it takes.
So that day I happened to be renting an apartment that my now-husband and I were going to be moving into, and I had to go into the real estate office. This was in New York, and the head of the residential department was there yelling at some guy, āYou voted for Trump!ā And then she says [to me], āGo away. I don't have an assistant. I need a new assistant. I can't deal with you right now.ā And I said, āI would be a great assistant.ā
At the time, I was working in the arts in a job that was like, cool on paper, but not what I wanted to do. So I got a job as her assistant. It was not particularly mentally taxing, [so] I applied for graduate school [and] got into graduate school at NYU. I started writing. I wrote for free. I wrote for very little. I wrote all the time. I worked 16 hours a day. One year after finishing my master's degree, I got a literary agent. Six months after that, I sold my first book, and it came out to rave reviews [from] Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly and others. I don't say that to be self-congratulatory, although I do congratulate myself, but more to say that once you give yourself permission to pursue your passion and purpose, doors will open to you in ways that are shocking.
I had a kind of similar experience in 2016 where I had to completely shift my mindset in a way that was very challenging. I had to go back and remember the advice that Iād been given by feminist mentors when I was very young about the progress of feminism, and of women's rights and gender equity through the ages, and to recognize that [up until then] we were living through a period of a lot of gains. But historically, womenās progress was, in fact, much more like two steps forward, one step back. In order to maintain the stamina to keep going, it's so important to understand it from a historical perspective, and as you mentioned in the beginning, to feel connected to a lineage that is so much bigger than us as individuals.
Okay, lastly, will you share a book, podcast, movie, or TV show that you're currently enjoying?
Oh my God, girl I am unabashedly re-watching āDawson's Creek.ā First of all, I think it's incredibly well written. I think that the creators of the show and the actors and all the crew, everybody brings together this teen drama that is really about the challenges that we face, not only growing up as adolescents, but throughout our entire lives. And they did it in a way that I don't think they get credit for. The last episode I watched was about teen suicide and how that relates to LGBTQ folks, and this was in 1999 [when] no one talked about this. At the same time, in that same episode, Joey's Dad is doing drugs again, and Dawson has to tell her, and so they break up. Like it is the American experience wrapped in a shiny bubble of a teen drama. And itās enjoyable as it is thought provoking.
I just finished Nadine Gordimerās, āA Guest of Honor.ā My thought process around literature, on the way that writing can function, was changed by that book. And then right now, I'm reading Joan Didionās, āWhere I Was Fromā, which is both a memoir and a history of California. And again, looking at the lineage of feminism to explain why things are the way that they are, and where we could go, this book, as Joan Didion often does, takes a look at how very few families affected the entire land water and political systems of California, and both how entrenched but also how fragile that is.
If you can understand why things are the way they are, you can actually change them more easily than it seems, because every Death Star has an area of weakness. And I think, just bringing it back to our own contemporary moment, looking at the incoming administration and the and [how] many people view it as a monolith that cannot be challenged, whereas I believe it is an incredibly shaky structure that can be decimated by a very few number of people who know what they are doing.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Great conversation. And I especially loved her method: "my practice is to read everything that they ever wrote, everything that they ever said, and a great deal of what was written about them, so that I can inhabit their universe, and speak from a place, not above or below, but adjacent to them, to have this real sense of empathy."
What a fascinating interview. I'm definitely going to get her book!