656. Every Girl Deserves a Happily Ever After: with Rep. Stacey Abrams and Princess Mabel van Oranje

[majestic music]

Sarah Wendell: Once upon a time, Princess Mabel van Oranje founded VOW for Girls, an organization dedicated to ending child marriage. One day Princess Mabel met Stacey Abrams, author and former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives. They hatched a plan to unite the romance community with VOW for Girls, which led to Every Girl Deserves Happily Ever After. Today, in episode number 656 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, Princess Mabel and Stacey Abrams are here to tell us all about it.

I want to make sure you are aware that we are talking about child marriage in the United States and around the world. We also talk about childbirth and childbirth trauma, domestic violence, and gender inequality. But we are also talking about inspiration, hope, and determination, so if you need a lift right now, you might find it here. I certainly did.

I’ll have links to everything that we are talking about in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast under episode 656.

I have a compliment this week – always my favorite.

To Hannah I.: I heard that Penzeys is going to name a spice blend after you because you are so delightful, so perfectly seasoned, and so good at bringing people together.

If you would like to support the show, or maybe you’d like a compliment of your very own, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Every pledge keeps me going, makes sure that every episode is accessible, thanks to a hand-compiled transcript by garlicknitter – hi, garlicknitter! – [hi! – gk] – and if you join the Patreon you get a truly lovely Discord, you get the full PDF scan of every issue of Romantic Times, many of which are not available digitally, and you keep the show going. If you would like to join, you know, patreon.com/SmartBitches. We would love to have you.

All right, are you ready to talk about VOW for Girls and how Every Girl Deserves Happily Ever After? Let’s do this. On with my podcast with Princess Mabel van Oranje and Stacey Abrams.

[majestic music]

Princess Mabel van Oranje: So my name is Mabel van Oranje, and I’m originally from the Netherlands. I live in London, and for about thirty years now I’ve been a human rights activist working to advance gender equality, justice, peace, and I’ve been an activist for, for a long, long time! And also happen to be a princess!

Representative Stacey Abrams: Well, I am Stacey Abrams. I am a writer, a political activist, occasional politician, and an entrepreneur.

Sarah: I’m so happy to have you both. Stacey, I know that you love romance. I know that you are a romance author. Can you tell us when you discovered romance? When did your affection for the genre begin?

Stacey: I’m the daughter not only of a librarian, but of an avid romance reader as well. So my older sister was allowed to start reading them before I was, and I always wanted to do what she did, and she always wanted to do what my mom did, so I don’t remember not wanting to read romance. I grew up in the era when your point of entry wasn’t the teen romances, it was Barbara Cartland – to age myself. [Laughs] And then it grew from there when I discovered that much like the Columbia House twelve CDs for, twelve tapes for a penny, you could do the Harlequin Romance series, and we loved them. And so I grew up on Harlequin and Silhouette, eventually graduating to the, the steamier versions when they started adding things like Special Edition after the name of. Yes, that’s when I knew I’d, I’d arrived and I was actually a teenager.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I often say that romance readers often find that the romance genre itself is a form of literary inheritance? So many of us are inheriting our interest in romance from other relatives, or in spite of other relatives trying to stop us from picking up romance.

Stacey: I’m, I was very lucky, because my mother was not only an avid reader, my great-aunt Jeannette I believe owned every romance novel ever printed in the United States or the UK.

Sarah: Whoa!

Stacey: She had stacks and stacks, and it wasn’t hoarding; it was collecting. Like, she, if you mentioned a book, she could tell you which area to go to, and she simply loved that form of storytelling, she loved the joy, and she encouraged us to love it too!

Sarah: I mean, I’ve been talking about romance for twenty years now – the site is twenty years old – and the thing that I love about it, and I actually wrote about it this week, is that the message of a happy ending is incredibly subversive and powerful: that you, exactly as you are, are deserving of love and happiness, and you don’t have to do anything to earn it. You don’t have to change yourself; you just have to evolve into a person who wants to be in this relationship.

Stacey: Exactly.

Sarah: I’m a big fan of all of that. Can I ask how you came up with the penname Selena Montgomery? I love your penname, and I’m so – I’m, I’m really nosy, and I apologize. It’s why I have a podcast!

Stacey: Well, look, I, I have one too now! And – Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams – but – thank you for letting me do a quick plug – but –

Sarah: Plug everything!

Stacey: Oh, thank you!

[Laughter]

Stacey: Available where you get your podcasts!

So Selena Montgomery was born during law school. I wanted to write a spy novel, and at the time publishers didn’t believe that women wrote or read spy novels. So I, I cur-, you know, I challenge anyone to think of a woman in espionage. And in addition it was that I wanted my characters to look like me, and having a Black face on this genre was even more subversive, or actually, it was just prohibited, and I thought, I know I’ve read women spies, and it was romance! And so I decided I was going to tell the same story; I was going to kill the same people. I would just let my spies fall in love, and they would get to look like me, because it was important to me for my first novel to reflect the universality of my experience as well.

But I was in law school as a tax, I was becoming a tax lawyer, and I, I did my master’s degree in tax policy, so I was also publishing in tax policy. I know everyone on this call has read my, you know, groundbreaking treatise “Operational Dissonance: The Unrelated Business Income Tax Exemption.” I –

Sarah: I’m looking it up right now and adding it to my TBR.

Mabel: Yes. Yeah!

Stacey: So I was publishing those at the exact same time, and you can write romance under a pseudonym; you cannot write tax policy under a pseudonym.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Stacey: But more importantly, Google was just starting –

Sarah: Ooh!

Stacey: – and I realized no one was going to read romance by Alan Greenspan. So I had to come up with a pseudonym! And I, it was three in the morning, I was watching an A&E biography of Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Samantha on Bewitched –

Sarah: I love her.

Stacey: Oh my God, wasn’t she amazing?

Sarah: Oh my gosh! So great!

Stacey: Yeah, and she did one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes. And her evil cousin on Bewitched was Serena. I didn’t like my Rs, but I was imagining signing my books, and so I was like, Ooh! I love my Ls, so I became Selena Montgomery, and thus Selena Montgomery was born!

Sarah: That is amazing! I’m so excited to know this and, like, tell the whole universe, ‘cause that’s incredible!

Stacey: Thank you!

Sarah: Now, how did you meet Princess Mabel and learn about VOW?

Stacey: I serve on the board of the National Democratic Institute, and our mission, although it’s taken a bit of a beating in the last few weeks in terms of people understanding, is to do good around the world. To make certain that no matter where you are born, we are part of a global family, and one of the most amazing opportunities I had was to participate in a forum called Women Deliver. It’s a triennial conference of women from around the world coming together to solve the world’s problems, and then men show up and, you know, that’s a whole other conversation. But – [laughs] – I was on a panel with this extraordinary woman who was lifting up the issue of child marriage, and she was so articulate and thoughtful and passionate about it, but with such a clear-eyed objective that I stalked her afterwards. So we were in the same green room, and then we ended up at the airport together, and it looked like an accident. She just thought we just kept running into each other, but you, you know, as an avid reader, you know, sometimes you have to make the, the meet-cute happen yourself? And so I got to meet her and have a conversation. I didn’t know she was a princess; I just thought she was really smart and that she was doing work that I thought was important, and that is how I met Princess Mabel!

Sarah: How did you learn about VOW? Did you learn about it at that conference, or was this part of stalking her around the airport? It’s a good thing you write suspense, ‘cause I’m sure your stalking techniques are top.

Stacey: Thank you very much.

Sarah: You’re very welcome.

Stacey: [Laughs] We actually ran into each other – so we were on the panel together, and I learned about VOW while we were on the panel –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Stacey: – but we ended up having a conversation at the airport, and I will let Princess Mabel take it from there!

Sarah: Please!

Mabel: Well, you know, Sarah, to, to start and to explain what VOW is all about and why we’re so incredibly excited to work with Stacey, and with the whole romance industry now, I guess I have to start with, with the issue of child marriage, which has been keeping me busy for fifteen years or so right now. And for me it started when I had the honor of being the first CEO of a group called The Elders. This is a group that was set up by Nelson Mandela, and it brought together twelve iconic statesmen and –women: people like President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary General. I mean, you could compare it a little bit with, like, the all-star soccer team, but then of politicians. You know, these amazing leaders, and I had the privilege to be their first CEO. It was a bit like, you know, standing as the manager on the sideline of the, the soccer field and then encouraging them to, to work together as a team. And, and one of the things they agreed on very, very quickly, and this was in 2009, was that they wanted to work on inequality between men and women, because they felt that this is one of the, if not one of the, the biggest injustice in the 21st century, and also they felt very strongly that if you want, if you want to lift people out of poverty, which in the end serves all of us well, when people are not poor, women have a critical role to play.

So they said, Let’s work on this issue, and they tasked me with, with finding a particular subject matter in this very broad field of gender issues that wasn’t necessarily getting the attention that it deserved, and where their moral authority could really help to make a difference. Anyway, long story short, we ended up coming across the issue of child marriage, which strangely enough, the two words say it all: child and marriage. We all know that this is not okay. But what at the time was not at all known, because it was getting almost no attention, is that this is, this is happening to twelve million girls a year. Imagine, that’s a girl every three seconds. Oof! So one girl – [three-second pause] – another one – [three-second pause] – and it goes on and on and on! And this is not just an, a big human rights abuse, but this is also in a way, to put it very simply, this is stupid. Because we know that girls who end up in marriage and are pulled out of school will never earn, you know, the money that they could if they stayed in school, and therefore they’re much more likely to stay stuck in poverty, as well as their, their families. We also all know that having children who themselves still have the bodies of children becoming pregnant, because they’re child brides, it’s not just a terrible thing, but it is also going to lead to much more health challenges or even, you know, early death. Similarly, child brides are much more likely to, to become the victims of domestic violence. As, I mean, I don’t think anybody wants this for their, for their children. And so what we realized is we need to do something about this.

And we know that change is possible. We know that if you send money in small amounts to, to villages in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in the places where child marriage mostly happens, real change can happen, and entire communities can decide that what looked like, you know, a normal thing to do, to marry their, their daughters off – either they did it because of, of legacy, you know, traditional issues, or they did it because there are no alternatives – you can then change that and get communities to say, Of course we don’t do this any longer.

And so discovering all this made me realize I need to do something about it. I cannot stand the, the, the thought that where you are born is going to define what happens with you in your life. In fact, very early on, I, and as I was starting this work, I went to northern Ethiopia and I met a group of young girls who had been married as children and – young women, actually – and I asked the, the young person next to me, How old were you when you got married? And she said, I don’t really know because I don’t know my age, because I don’t have a birth certificate. Because in many places in the world, when girls are born they’re considered less important than boys, and so their birth is not registered. But in this case the girl said, I don’t know my exact age, but I must have been between five and seven when I got married.

Sarah: Oh, good God!

Mabel: And this really hit me, and I realized my daughters at the time were five and six years old, and if they had been born there, they could have been child brides. And that made me determined to make sure that, that geography will not define your destiny and that it will not limit your opportunity. And that’s why I believe that we all need to do whatever we can to try to end child marriage.

Sarah: Wow.

Mabel: Yeah.

Sarah: My, my, my insides are sort of rocked at those statistics, the ages of these children. Like, wow.

You, you mentioned that sending a little bit of money to different communities means that this doesn’t happen as much. Does that mean that the, the basis for a lot of the child marriages that are happening is financial?

Mabel: No, it is often happening either because of tradition – people don’t know any better and don’t realize that this is harmful?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mabel: I mean, don’t forget, this happens to, mainly to people who live in faraway places, rural, poor places, who do not – we are all used to having mobile phones. There’s still something like 1.2 billion people who, in the world, who don’t have access to that kind of technology, so they’re often ignorant. Or they don’t have access to secondary education, or they don’t know how to prevent pregnancy and therefore once the boys in the village start playing with the girls in the village, these girls end up pregnant without wanting to be pregnant, but then forced into marriages. So there are a whole host of reasons why this happens –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mabel: – and therefore you also need to understand what is driving the issue in order to be able to tackle it, and knowing who in a particular community holds the power of change. So this is not something where we, you know, can bombard in from, from outside, but we really have to interest local people to do this.

But most importantly, and taking it back to what we were talking about, this is, in the end, an issue where, which is all about gender inequality.

Sarah: Yes.

Mabel: The, the belief that girls are less important than boys. So often I’ve heard parents say, Girls are a burden; we need to get rid of them as quickly as we can. And that’s not, I think, because fathers and mothers don’t love their daughters, but that is because of the, the, the societies they grow up in.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mabel: And what, what VOW for Girl is, is all about is trying to mobilize support, and I’ll talk more, more about it, but the big idea behind it is that, the idea that every girl should have the right to be the protagonist of her own story. That every girl should get an opportunity, regardless of where she’s born, to live the life that she wants to live. And that every girl should decide whether she wants to get married, with whom she wants to get married –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Mabel: – and when she wants to get married. And that it shouldn’t be up to outsiders to decide that for her.

Stacey: Child marriage happens in the US. This is not a foreign phenomenon; this is a global phenomenon. And in the United States, between 2000 and 2018 three hundred thousand minors were in child marriage, some as young as ten years old. There are two states in the US, California and New Mexico, where there is no, there’s no floor for how young you can be when you get married. There are only twelve states that have outlawed child marriage, which means in most of the US child marriage happens. Whether you’re in the US or elsewhere, girls are at risk for child marriage. I sit in a legislature, or I used to, where this wasn’t an issue that was raised, but I will tell you Georgia is one of the states that has yet to outlaw child marriage. It is true in most states in this country that child marriage is legal.

Mabel: And that is, if I can add to what Stacey was just saying, you know how crazy this is? We do not trust young people with a vote until they’re eighteen years old because we think they’re not wise enough to vote. We do not trust them to drink until they’re even older. We don’t trust them to buy a house or sign other legal contracts until they’re eighteen years old. And yet, as Stacey was pointing out, we make it possible that girls get married off before they’re allowed to do any of these other things, even though marriage has a much bigger consequence for their lives! And then, if they become the victims of violence at the hands of their husbands and they want to go to a safe house, often they are told, I’m sorry, you’re a minor. You cannot enter the safe house unless your husband signs you in. The man who’s actually beating them up.

Sarah: Do you know, Stacey, if legislation has been proposed in different places? Is this an active legislative issue, or is that part of what you’re trying to accomplish?

Stacey: It is! It’s an active legislative issue, and I, I haven’t focused on this – I, I want to make sure we keep the attention focused on what VOW for Girls is doing – but I do want to encourage every person listening, if you want to make a difference, please ask your legislature. But I will tell you, in Wyoming, Republican lawmakers circulated a letter to constituents that argued that preventing child marriage could discourage teen parents from being able to raise their children under one roof. This is a few years ago. We know that in West Virginia and in Missouri, when people have sought to push legislation, those limits were pushed back! And so one of our opportunities, in addition to the extraordinary work of VOW for Girls, is for every person, every romance fan in the US to ask your legislator, Democrat or Republican or Independent, if they will introduce legislation to ban child marriage in their states, because until we have state laws that prevent it, child marriage is a reality here in the States, in the United States.

Sarah: I have been calling my representatives nearly every day since January 20th, so I will add that to my list! That is not a problem.

Stacey: There you go!

Sarah: The list is about five pages, but it’s going to go on there. We have a few things to talk about with the legislators, don’t we? [Laughs]

Stacey: We do.

Mabel: Sarah, I, I could imagine that some of the people who are listening to this are saying now like, Oh my gosh, this is such a big problem.

Sarah: Yeah.

Mabel: The numbers are so big; the consequences are so dire; it’s happening all over, even in the US; and that they feel like, oh, this, you know, is – should I really focus on this? And, and let me tell you: yes. Because I’ve seen, in the fifteen years that I’ve been working on this issue, that change is possible, and I’ve seen, for example, the projects that, that VOW for Girls is supporting. Projects where, for example, girls can go, after they go to school, into girls clubs, where they learn about their rights, where they learn, where they make products for menstrual hygiene so that they, you know, don’t have to stay at home when, when they have their periods. Places where they learn about the fact that child marriage is not a healthy thing and where they build friendships, and when, then, one of them, of these girls finds out that she’s at risk of being married off, the other girls go together, they maybe encourage the teacher to go to talk to the parents and help the girls to stay out of marriage. I’ve met girls who, because they learnt that child marriage is, is not a, a good thing, girls who learned that they have a right to education convince their parents to keep them in school. I’ve seen projects where, you know, boys get educated about pregnancy and, and about, you know, how you can prevent pregnancy, and thereby you, girls don’t end up in an involuntary pregnancy and therefore forced to get married. I’ve seen projects where, again, for little money, working with local people who understand the, the local, the local traditions, etc., sit down with the fathers and help the fathers understand that what the fathers think is the right thing to do is actually a harmful thing to do. And so, for example, in Senegal there’s now eight thousand villages that have said, Look, we do not longer do child marriage.

So that change is really, really happening, and the size of the, the project size, the cost is not very big. The only thing is, we want to reach many, many countries, so we want to, to VOW for Girls, and this is where VOW for Girls comes in, we want to make people aware that this is happening, and we want to make it easy for people who say, Look, I want to make a contribution; I want to help to make sure that the girl can, in the same way that I can live my life and make my own life choices, I want to help to make sure that girls elsewhere in the world can also do so.

And that’s where the whole idea of VOW for Girls is all, all about, and we, we partially work with people who are getting married or who are celebrating wedding anniversaries and help them to turn these moments where they celebrate love, to turn them into easy fundraisers to make sure that girls elsewhere can also celebrate love on their own terms. We encourage people, you know, when they have a, a birthday and they don’t really know what they want to get, or they want to do some good, to, to donate to VOW, and we realize that obviously, maybe not my generation, but the generation, you know, the millenials and definitely Gen Zed, the, the generation of my daughters, they are much more, much keener on doing the right thing and to having, you know, more meaningful or more ethical weddings, to have more meaningful birthday presents, and so, so we’re, so it’s kind of where it all comes from!

And then I meet Stacey, and Stacey, I have been admiring her from afar because, you know, as I mentioned, I’ve been a human rights activist for a long time, and Stacey is one of my, my, I guess you call it she-roes. And, and so we are on the panel in Rwanda, you know, and then we, we had the opportunity to talk, and Stacey very kindly said, Look, I think the, the idea behind VOW is, is brilliant; I think tackling child marriage is so important; let me know if I can help! And so the VOW team came up with a few suggestions of what she could do, and then Stacey, in her, her wonderful way, with that amazing, creative mind of hers said, This is all very good, but, you know, I have a better idea! And we were like, Oh, okay. She says –

Stacey: It’s just a different way; not better, different. [Laughs]

Mabel: Well, anyway, says, she says, In my spare time – and we’re like, Whoa, Stacey has spare time?

[Laughter]

Mabel: She said, In my spare time I write romance novels! Why don’t we combine, you know, the romance fiction industry with the issue of, of VOW for Girls so that we can make sure that every girl anywhere in the world can have an Happily Ever After? Not just the girls in the, in the novels, in the, the romance fiction, but, but, you know, all the girls that we are trying to reach with VOW for Girls. So that’s where it all started!

Sarah: I love that! I think it’s brilliant. And I know you’d already partnered with the wedding industry to make it a prominent part of people’s wedding planning. This is, this is even better because who’s not reading a book that’s not here and not right now at this time? Like, we’re all reading to get away from things at the moment.

So I know that the romance community – because I’m in it – is loud and large and activist and extremely, extremely smart. How does Every Girl Deserves a Happily Ever After work with bookshops and publishers and authors right now? What are some of the things that you’ve been doing? And I, I said this to Princess Mabel earlier, but the swag, the merch?

Stacey: Isn’t it amazing?

Sarah: Oh my gosh, it’s so great!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Oh my goodness! It is incredible! That, I’m so impressed with your art direction? It’s incredible; I love it!

Stacey: One, it was making sure that we are doing what you just said, which is spreading the word – no pun intended. So using the extraordinary activism of romance writers, of romance readers, of publishers, I was very happy to connect VOW with my, one of my publishers. Berkley Books has been just an extraordinary partner in this, and The Ripped Bodice, the bookstore for romance, they’ve been friends for years; they’ve been incredible activist. And then it grew from there! And a big part of it is – and this goes to Mabel’s earlier point about just not being overwhelmed by the problem? – romance readers, we believe in not only Happily Ever After, but we believe in overcoming, you know, incredible odds. Like, we know that if you, if you do the work, you can get to the other side, and love is waiting for you, and we know that if you can get to the other side of this issue, whether you’re doing it here or abroad, that Happily Ever After is waiting for these girls.

Mabel: Now that we have this amazing coalition, you know, with the raising of awareness, we’re also encouraging people to donate. So some of the authors who are participating have said, Look, I’ll do a matched donation, and for every of my readers who donates to VOW, I’ll match that, which I think is wonderful. As Stacey said and, and Sarah, you know, there’s the merch, you know, the, the, the sweatshirts and everything that people are buying. Then some of the bookstores have done fundraisers around this, activities to, to increase visibility. I believe that some of the publishers as well have helped to kind of catalyze more funding around this issue, and if it depends on me, this is only the beginning. We, we saw, and, and thanks to a lot of the, the social media attention and also the, the more traditional media attention to this issue, we saw people who said like, Yeah, this is great. This year I am not going to buy, you know, more red roses for my love or, you know, more chocolates; I’m actually going to make a donation to VOW. That’s much more meaningful to me. And so this campaign is still in full force, but my impression is that it’s, it’s really, like you both said, you know, the, the, the community around romance fiction is just an amazingly vibrant and, I think, also quite fierce community, and, and so I suspect that the outcomes of this, this campaign are going to be really quite impressive and that next year we’re going to do it again, but even bigger.

Sarah: Oh, I, if it’s an annual thing, I’m so excited. This reminds me of a few years ago, there was a campaign to ask for donations to the Fistula Foundation for Mother’s Day, because fistulas mostly happen to women after childbirth, and the stories that I have gotten through those donations, ‘cause, you know, a really good charity will explain to you exactly what your money did. So what are some of the success stories that you’ve found the most exciting?

Mabel: I find the most exciting when I meet parents who tell me, Look, I regret that my oldest daughter got married when she was fifteen, but at that time I didn’t know. I didn’t know that this was not a good thing to do, and for my younger daughters I decided they will stay in school and we only marry them off when they’re old, you know, when they’re older, when they’re eighteen. That, I think, when you hear parents say that and you see how happy they are that they’re now able to do this for their daughters and that they realize how harmful child marriage was, that’s a success. I also, you know, I get really excited when I see girls talking about that the fact that they now know that they’re equally important as their brothers are, that they all have the same rights. I get really excited when I see girls who proudly show me their diplomas, that they have managed to, you know, to stay in school and finish school. I think of girls who I met who, in Zimbabwe, two girls who were married off before the age of eighteen, who went to the constitutional court of Zimbabwe – imagine that: two young, young women doing that –

Sarah: Oof!

Mabel: – and got a court ruling that said, Look, this is not okay. Zimbabwe needs to make eighteen the minimum age of marriage and implement that as well, because in some cases there are the laws, but they’re not happening. And so I see all these success stories, you know. I think of the boys I met in India who, who realized that it wasn’t cool that their sisters were being married off at such a long, young age, and so they went across I don’t know how many houses and I don’t know how many communities to gather signatures from men in the villages to agree that child marriage should be abolished in their villages.

And so you see all these things happening, and you realize, first of all, that we can all make a difference. And our leadership comes in so many, in so many shapes and forms. It’s not just the formal leaders, you know, in the formal positions. No, we can all be leaders, and we can all make a difference. And then to see that in action and to realize that, that, that a lot of that work gets empowered because, you know, we send small amounts of money to, to these communities, to these projects, is just, it’s just wonderful. And it makes me that I can’t stop. It makes me keep to kind of do this and, and work with, with amazing people like the boys and the girls and the parents I was talking about, but also with, with Stacey and also, you know, very grateful, Sarah, to you for, for highlighting this issue and to all your listeners for hopefully gearing into action and, and become a changemaker as well on this issue.

Sarah: Stacey, did you want to add something? You look like you wanted to jump in.

Stacey: Oh, just many times just to say Amen or Yay.

Sarah: Yeah, also.

Mabel: [Laughs]

Stacey: Yeah, I, I think that part of the opportunity in this campaign, as a romance writer, it is important to me for us to tell the story.

Sarah: Yes.

Stacey: To let people know that girls deserve a Happily Ever After, and we can make it so. We can be the fairy godmothers, we can be the matchmakers, but we’re matching them with their future instead of with a spouse. Too, it is that small amounts of action, investment, and belief aggregate, and so to your point about the fact that you’re calling your legislator – like, look, I, and I want to clarify, you know, it’s not just California and New Mexico; it’s also Mississippi and Oklahoma that have no minimum age – across this country and around this world, we can be overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, or we can be invigorated by the opportunity for change, and I always choose the latter. I choose to see that everything, everywhere, all at once is a great title for a film; it is a terrible mission statement. But we can all do something somewhere soon, and that that has to be our mission, and when I think about the work that you do from your podcast, making possible those of us who love romance to proudly love romance. I mean, a lot of us, we put our names on our books and our faces, but it’s also being willing to talk about the hard things, talk about the verboten, talk about the things that make us uncomfortable, because the only way we get to right is to get through that discomfort, and so I’m just excited, because what Princess Mabel is doing, what VOW for Girls is doing, what we can all do is fix the things that feel broken. It’s not going to happen overnight, but no true love story ever does.

Sarah: No. I used to live in New Jersey, so I used to vote for Cory Booker on the regular, and I remember Senator Booker saying that:

>> Don’t let your inability to do everything undermine your determination to do something.

Stacey: Yes.

Sarah: You can’t solve everything, but you can do this one thing. So I googled very quietly: child marriage was banned where I am in Maryland in 2022!

Stacey: Yes.

Sarah: What?!

Mabel: Very recent, yeah.

Stacey: That’s what I’m saying!

Sarah: Holy cow!

Stacey: Yeah.

Mabel: Yeah.

Sarah: So I, I know that I am in a state where only, it’s, the minimum age is eighteen. At seventeen there’s requirements for you to achieve marriage that has to be approved by a court and all of these other things. And, like I said, I call my reps all the time. I’m sure they get me on caller ID and are like, Oh, it’s her again.

Stacey: So I would say it’s not just calling your state reps. They, they’re the ones who can take the action, but I want to encourage folks to be broader in our imagination.

Sarah: That’s what I wanted to ask you about: what can, what can readers and listeners do to help you?

Stacey: Call your school board member, because it’s their kids, it’s the people they have responsibility for, who are being forced into marriage. So call your school board member and say, Have you called your state representative? Have you called the people that are in power with you and talked to them about this issue? Call your mayor and your city council. Ask them to say that they don’t want their city to be home to child marriage! So it’s not just about – I mean, what I love about Princess Mabel’s stories – it’s not just about national action; it’s about changing a village, changing a community. We’ve got, look, we elect, like, people every day for every other job. All of the people who need your vote need to hear your voice. And this is a small thing, but we tend to segregate and isolate different pots of power? It’s all the same thing, because your school board member, your county commissioner, your city council member, your mayor, your state legislator, your governor, all of those folks have a voice, and if we tell them all that we’re watching how they behave on this issue, they will start to do something, because they are terrified. I, I like to say that sometimes politicians are like fifteen-year-old girls – having been one, I can say this – they respond to money, peer pressure, and attention, and now is the time to show them the attention for us to invest in the girls and for us to put pressure on each other to make this place better.

Mabel: Amen! I agree with that. What is very important to say as well is that the United States is a place where we’ve seen that child marriage can be ended by making sure that the laws get in place that say eighteen is the minimum age of marriage, no exceptions. And that’s why it’s so important to do what Stacey was saying: call, making all these, all these calls. Unfortunately, in many other places in the world – and those are the places where the vast majority of child marriages are happening – the rule of law is not as solid as it is in the United States. For example, India, where three million girls get married every year, there’s been a law for more than a hundred years that says eighteen is the minimum age of marriage for girls. But it just gets completely ignored, and it is in those places where the kinds of, of projects, the kinds of interventions that I was mentioning earlier, making sure that girls can, can stay in secondary schooling, making sure that girls don’t become pregnant, making sure girls find out about their rights, helping the parents understand that this is not a smart thing to do, that those interventions make it, make a difference. So, so I, I would encourage everybody who wants to become an, an, a partner in ending this crime, I would encourage you on the one hand, do what Stacey was recommending vis-á-vis your own, you know, your own laws in the United States, but then also help to make sure that this stops happening in other places. Including in Latin America, where one out of every four girls is in a, in a marriage or in a de facto marriage called an union before the age of eighteen.

And some of the things, like, you might think, Oh, this is not related to, to other things, but for example, if you, if you end up in an early marriage, you’re very likely to start having babies when you’re quite young, which increases the chances that throughout your lifetime you have many more babies than, than maybe, you know, most people in the United States would have. For example, in Niger, which is in Africa, that has the highest rate of child marriage, three out of every four girls is married by the age of eighteen, but oh, women in Niger on average have seven children. And the more young children there are, the harder it becomes to find employment opportunities for all of them, the more pressure there is on people to start migrating. And we all know that migration has become, whatever you think about it, it has become a very hot political potato. And, and so people might not realize that ending child marriage might also have a positive impact on, on migration flows.

Sarah: I love how one issue is connected to literally all the issues every single time. Nothing exists in a vacuum; nothing is in its own silo. We’re all interconnected that way.

Mabel: To add to that, you can really measure child marriage. I mean, it has been done for a long time! But you know that if, if the child marriage rates go down – and in the last ten years we have seen them come down in, in many places in the world – when child marriage rates go down, we know that a lot of other good things happen, because we know then that, you know, there, there’re less early, early pregnancies; we know more girls are staying in school; we know that there will be less violence against, against child brides. So it’s a, it’s a very nice way of, of making concrete change happen.

Sarah: And it also presents an opportunity to double-check yourself. Like, what is happening that I don’t know about that is, should be an easy win? This should be a very obvious win. It also reminds me of how only recently have we begun talking about the danger of having a baby on your body, how much trauma and how dangerous it is to have a baby! Like, it’s really not safe, and the, the more we talk about these issues, the more it’s, the more it’s more conscious what, when we’re actually making action to include this aspect of it in the other things that people are activists about.

Stacey: Exactly.

Sarah: I think this is so incredible, and I’m so excited that you came to talk to me about it. Thank you.

I always end with two questions. Unless you have more that you would like to say. I am – I, seriously, y’all could just talk about anything and I’d be like, Yeah, mm-hmm, yeah, okay.

I always ask what books are you reading that you might want to tell people about? I am fundamentally books podcast, but the nice thing about being in charge of it is I can talk about whatever I want, ‘cause it’s my show!

Stacey: Given that we’re in a bit of a complicated time –

Sarah: Oh!

Stacey: – I like – I know; you may not have noticed, but yes.

Sarah: Little bit!

Stacey: So I tend to read multiple books at once. So the romance novel that I’m rereading is actually one of my favorites by Nora Roberts, because I find her comfortable, and it’s like getting a warm hug from someone who believes in everything.

Sarah: And you’re never going to run out of books ever.

Stacey: Ever!

Sarah: Ever!

Stacey: Ever. [Laughs] So I’m making my way through, if you, if you remember like the late ‘90s, they repackaged all of her books and this series with these beautiful flower covers, so I’m making my way through that day by day. ‘Cause it, you know, it takes a day to read it.

And then I’m reading a book called Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times by Rebecca Homkes. [Laughs] I don’t know, it just seemed like something to read.

Sarah: It, it seems appropriate.

Stacey: Exactly.

Sarah: It, it did strike me while we were talking that what is happening in the States right now is very much a compression of a lot of people’s rights, and especially women, from reproduction to child marriage to education to – just basically compressing people back into very narrow roles that may not serve them, and not only is supporting VOW for Girls a way of fighting back against that, here is a thing you can do: this is your call to action.

Stacey: Exactly.

Sarah: There, there is a lot that we can do, but that specificity – I mean, I always tell my kids, Motivation comes after you start? You don’t gather the motivation and then start? Motivation comes after you start something. That’s, that’s when it shows up. You keep waiting for it; it’s not going to show up until you put your shoes on and basically go to the door. So this is more motivation to keep going and fighting back in very specific, tangible ways.

Stacey: Absolutely!

Mabel: Sarah, I think we should not forget that as humans we often tend to overestimate what we can achieve in the short term and underestimate what we can achieve in the long term.

Sarah: So true.

Mabel: And, and given all the uncertainties and given some of, of the developments in the world in the last, in the last – [laughs] – weeks –

Sarah: [Laughs] Last twenty-four hours.

Mabel: …it’s important not to, not to lose sight of what we’re really working towards. And, and yes, we need to react to what is happening right now, but we also need to be smart and make sure that in the long term we preserve things like gender equality, because that’s our right.

Sarah: Yes.

Mabel: Anyway, I finished reading recently Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which I really loved. It’s in, in medieval Florence, in Italy. Beautiful story, I thought, and very much about the power of women. I just finished Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, which I found heartbreakingly beautiful. And, and I have right now, I picked up actually, on my bedside table are finally Stacey’s books, and, and I picked up, two days ago, in a bookstore – sometimes, you know, when I find that things become overwhelming I, I like to go to poetry, and I picked up a booklet by, I think it’s a Danish author called Tove Ditlevsen, and it’s, is now translated into English, and it’s called There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die.

Stacey: Oh, that’s beautiful.

Mabel: Which I think is an amazing title, and some of the poems are really, really great, I think. So yeah.

Sarah: That circles back to what I said, Stacey, before you signed on; I was telling Princess Mabel that my inner thirteen-year-old is not calm right now? Like, I’m trying to be an adult, but inside, my inner thirteen-year-old is, like, having a meltdown of great excitement? There is really always a little girl in you that will not die. And always will love that one song from middle school, and yeah.

Stacey: Absolutely!

Sarah: That never goes away.

Stacey: Well, it was in middle school that I took my first stab at writing a romance novel. I only made it halfway through because then he decided he didn’t like me, he liked my friend, and it just seemed too tragic to write the end of it. But I would also like to tell folks, because my publisher would be very upset if I were remiss, my, there’s a rerelease of my novel Power of Persuasion, which is a romance novel I wrote in twenty, twenty, in 2001, but it was about AI, and the premise – and this has nothing to do with Princess Mabel – but the premise is that – and my heroine, who’s an orphan, falls in love with a guy who finds out he’s a king, and they have to stave off disaster, save their island nation, and, you know, live happily ever after.

Sarah: Well, if you want to write a sequel, I think you have some lived experience that you can contact with?

Stacey: You know? You know? [Laughs]

Mabel: Amazing!

Sarah: Where can people find you if you wish to be found on the internet? It’s okay if you don’t. And how can people connect with VOW for Girls and the Happily Ever After project?

Mabel: VOW for Girls has its website: vowforgirls.org. Very simple and, you know, VOW, we have said it multiple times, it’s like to take a vow. So vowforgirls.org. That’s where you can find how you can help; that’s where you can find stories about the girls who, who have been helped; and yeah, I guess that’s the most important one.

And otherwise, people who are interested in, in my, me personally more and want to follow some of the work I do can find me on, on, what is it, LinkedIn and on Instagram.

Stacey: And then you can find everything you want to know about me at staceyabrams.com. All the stuff I do in the civic space and the storytelling space, trying to solve problems, but always, always, always trying to make sure we’re doing more good.

[outro]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you to Princess Mabel and Stacey Abrams for connecting with me to talk about Every Girl Deserves Happily Ever After, and if you would like to find out right now, vowforgirls.org.

I will also have links to all of the books and places on the internet that we talked about, including Princess Mabel’s Instagram – key information – Stacey Abrams’ paper, yale.edu on tax law – everyone should read it – and, of course, Vow for Girls and other links that we discussed.

I want to point out two things – no, three things. I’m going to point out three things:

Number one: I mentioned that the state that I am in, Maryland, outlawed child marriage in 2022. In the District of Columbia, Mayor Muriel Bowser – they don’t have a governor – signed a bill championed by Councilmember Brooke Pinto to end child marriage in the District of Columbia. This was signed on the 24th of January, 2025. So if you are thinking, what is something I can do right now? You can find out if child marriage is outlawed in your state and then start calling people.

Now, this is really important fact-checking; this is probably the most important fact-checking I am attempting in my long history of podcasting: Stacey Abrams mentioned that she was reading a Nora Roberts with flowers on the cover. Much to my dismay, there are two Nora Roberts series that have been recovered with flowers. The Concannon Sisters trilogy, also known as the Born In trilogy, have flowers on them, starting with Born in Fire, as does the In the Garden trilogy, starting with Blue Dahlia. So I will link to them both, and I will try very, very hard to find out which one is the one. But if you haven’t read the Born In trilogy, let me give you a hot tip: if you’ve read the In Death series, the hero of Born in Fire is like proto-Roarke. It’s like an early version of Roarke, I promise, and number two, Born in Ice, is one of my all-time favorite Nora Roberts novels. I will find out which of the flowered Nora Roberts we are talking about here.

And most importantly, all of the books that we mentioned and VOW for Girls are in the show notes; definitely check them out.

I end every week with a bad joke. I love them, they’re terrible, and I share them with you! Are you ready?

What brand of underwear do scientists wear?

Give up? What brand of underwear do scientists wear?

Kelvin Klein.

[Laughs] Kelvin! You know my family is going to groan so hard, and I’m so excited!

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week.

And as always, in the words of my favorite podcast Friendshipping, thank you for listening; you’re welcome for talking.

[majestic music]