“As I progressed and as these older firefighters retired and as individuals worked with me and saw that I could do the job and liked my management style, but as far as upper-management leadership, there was still that glass ceiling. I had made captain there [in Topeka, Kansas] and had applied numerous times for promotions into battalion chief, assistant chief type positions, and was passed over for individuals that were white males, with twenty-eight years on that had high school educations and that had really done nothing to prepare themselves for the position. I had spent $30,000 for my education, took all these extra classes, and really worked to prepare myself for that promotion and that advancement to be passed up time again. I didn’t want to sit around for another fifteen years waiting my turn to be chief, so I said, ‘You know what? It’s time to go.’”
Captain Richards picked up her life and moved west where she watched a progressive movement burn the edges of what had typically been a male-dominated field.
“I think in the fire service, they’re beginning to understand that your fire service organization needs to mirror your community and that kind of diversity. It’s not just the big six-foot-four, 200 pound guys, the bull in the china kind of thing, going in and kicking the doors. It’s much different now because of fire protection systems and we don’t have a lot of fires. I can get into smaller places, cubbyholes, up in attic spaces, and a lot of the calls are much more EMS-related. We still fight fires and women have to be up to that level to be strong enough, physically fit. For me, it’s always been the challenge of doing things a little bit differently. Women are much stronger in their legs, so how I lift things and I’m shorter, so how I may get a tool off may be very different from my male counterpart, but I get the job done. I think the big thing is that I know if somebody goes down inside, I know what to do to be able to drag them out. Whether I have to grab and pull instead of lifting them over my shoulder, I’m going to get that male counterpart out because I’ve trained and I’ve exercised and I have the physical capacity to do that. We go in and we fight fires and we have black snot coming out of our nose, you have to have that ability to do that.”
