Fiona Hill

He himself had come from a really hardscrabble background and had risen up through education.

He'd even gone to Oxford and done

philosophy, politics, and economics.

And he basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really going to get ahead and go to elite institutions, look, you can get an education.

You don't have to be held back by your circumstances.

But if you do get an education, it's a privilege and you need to do something with it.

So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do?

Okay, an education is a qualification.

It's to do something.

Most people around me I knew didn't have careers.

I mean, my dad didn't really have a career.

He had jobs.

My mom thought of her nursing as a career, though, and it genuinely was.

And she was out there trying to help women

survive childbirth.

My mother had these horrific stories, you know, basically over the dining room table.

I wish she'd stop.

She'd leave out her nursing books.

And I tell you, if everyone had had my mom as a mother, there'd be no reproduction on the planet.

It was just these grim, horrific stories of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, oh my God, you know, what?