By Jenny Kunter, Nov. 5 2014, Salon.com

I was at the Texas Capitol on June 25, 2013. I waited for hours to get into the Senate gallery so I could see Wendy Davis stand on the floor in her hot pink sneakers, doing her best to protect the rights of the thousands of women who were watching her from above, rooting for her from the rotunda and depending on her from the farthest-flung reaches of the state. In what was literally the 11th hour, state guards shut the doors to the viewing gallery and locked them from inside. I was at the very front of the line and would have been the next person allowed entry.

I wasn’t, though, so I stayed in the hallway with the other people dressed in orange, huddled around a stranger’s phone and trying to glean from the Internet what all the yelling inside was about. It’s difficult to describe what it felt like to listen to a chorus of people screaming “let her speak” from just outside the Senate chamber that night, or what it felt like to be quite literally shut out of my government — to be shut out of the process by which a predominantly male Legislature ostentatiously attempted to strip Texas women of our rights. It was exhausting.