Representative Ayanna Pressley and former Brookline, Massachusetts, selectwoman Jesse Mermell can’t pinpoint the exact moment they met. They’ve been best friends for so long now that their lives seem like they’ve always been intertwined. But after running in concentric social circles in early-aughts Boston, both seem to remember one night circa 2004, when Mermell was executive director of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus and Pressley served as constituency director for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
“It was one of those conversations that start with both of you standing by the copy machine, and then you wander into the office and you’re both sitting down, and then it’s 11 o’clock at night, and you’ve been talking all night,” Mermell recalled. Her father had aggressive prostate cancer while Pressley’s mother was fighting leukemia. Both women are nervous fliers who appreciate a fine baked good, and both came to Boston with big, progressive goals of “getting shit done,” as Mermell put it.
“You just have those conversations where someone goes from being a friend to family,” Mermell told Vogue in a recent phone conversation. “She’s been my family ever since.”
Despite their different backgrounds, Mermell, a white woman from rural Pennsylvania, and Pressley, a Black woman from Chicago, bonded over breaking into the sometimes tribal, patriarchal Boston political sphere—Pressley as a Boston city councilor and Mermell as the communications director for Governor Deval Patrick and a vice president at Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.
“We came here not knowing a soul, and we found a sisterhood along the way,” Pressley told Vogue. “Jesse was my maid of honor at my wedding. She was the only other person, save for a doctor, that was in the room with me when my mother took her final breath on this earth. We have been there, for and with each other, during our greatest professional victories and during our hardest personal trials.”
The next victory they’re striving for: getting Mermell elected to Congress. Following in her surrogate sister’s footsteps, Mermell is running in the crowded Democratic primary on September 1 to replace outgoing Representative Joe Kennedy in Massachusetts’s 4th district. Last week, Mermell got a boost when former Obama speechwriter Dave Cavell dropped out of the nine-way race and endorsed her. Two key super PACs followed, in what many see as an effort to rally around Mermell to beat Jake Auchincloss, a former Republican with a controversial past, including support for flying the Confederate flag and voting no on a 2017 Newton City Council resolution calling for President Trump’s impeachment.
Of course, Mermell already had Pressley’s early endorsement: “The simplest way to say it is that I don’t have to guess about Jesse,” Pressley told me. “She always goes above and beyond.”
Mermell said she learned from Pressley to ignore those who said she should “wait her turn” to run. “There are so many women and people of color and LGBTQ+ community members who are just saying, ‘Screw it—I am claiming my space,’” Mermell said. “It absolutely seeps into you and makes you feel like, ‘I’m going to put on my big-girl pants and put myself out there because I deserve to be in this space just as much as anyone.’”
Mermell had an influential matriarch: her late grandmother, Rhoda Mermell, who served as the chief nurse of an evacuation hospital in World War II. “She got back from the war, and the expectation was that she would get married and never work outside the home again...and that’s what happened,” Mermell said. “My theory is that she was convinced she had to do everything in her power to never let that happen to me.” When Jesse was a girl, the elder Mermell arranged for her to shadow the mayor of Middletown, N.Y., for a day. Trailing the mayor, watching her preside over boardroom meetings, “I remember a slow-motion video of my head exploding,” Mermell said. “‘Holy shit, you mean a girl can do that?’”
Pressley and Mermell’s friendship and their political fights are inextricably linked: As a Boston city councilor, Pressley invited Mermell, then at Planned Parenthood, to the table in her effort to bring comprehensive, medically accurate sex ed to Boston public schools. “That table started out big, and over time it became smaller and smaller,” Pressley said. “Jesse never missed a meeting.”
During Pressley’s 2018 congressional run, Mermell joked that she was the “unpaid director of candidate mental health and wellness,” making time in the frenzied final days of the campaign to shop for dresses and accessories for her best friend to wear on election night. The two share a passion for reproductive justice: Mermell, who has won endorsements from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, joined Pressley on a recent Zoom call to voice their collective support for the Roe Act, an effort to codify the right to safe, legal abortion in Massachusetts. Mermell publicly tells the story of an aunt who had an abortion in her early twenties and was able to go on to the Peace Corps, teaching at a university, and, later, motherhood.
“My aunt had the opportunity to make those choices,” Mermell said, “and that’s exactly what every person should be able to do with their body.”
While there’s long been reverence for male political friendships (think: Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham; Teddy Kennedy and Chris Dodd), Pressley and Mermell could become the first nationally known female best friends in the House of Representatives. In contrast to the Old Boys’ Club, activist Barbara Lee “would call it ‘the new girls network,’” Pressley said. “We never could have anticipated just how literal that would be.”
As one of a record number of women elected to the most diverse Congress ever in 2018 and a member of the Squad, Pressley knows firsthand the power of female friendship in Washington. In the face of attacks from President Trump, the Squad has strength in numbers. Contrary to popular belief, Pressley says the women of Congress don’t treat their alliances any more sentimentally than the men. “People go to poetic imaginings of us having slumber parties and gorging on ice cream at the end of a tough day,” Pressley said. “This is about power. This is about growing a voting bloc. This is about strategy.”
Pressley has no doubt that Mermell would prove a valuable addition to that bloc, voting with her to repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the woman—a key racial-justice issue, Pressley said, in which women of color are disproportionately denied abortion care. Mermell said she continually aspires to be an ally, and the two have been having candid conversations about race throughout their friendship.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the trust that she has placed in me, understanding that oftentimes white women don’t warrant that trust,” Mermell said.
In the final weeks of Mermell’s primary run, both she and Pressley are remembering Pressley’s late mother, Sandra. When Pressley was holed up in the hospital with her mom before her death in 2011, “Jesse came every day,” Pressley said, adding that her mother considered Mermell another daughter. “Jesse was single, and my mother kept trying to play matchmaker with different doctors. We would see the nurses’ faces perplexed when my mother would say to the doctor, ‘I want you to meet my daughter.’”
That Sandra was not physically present to see Pressley’s election to Congress nor Mermell’s candidacy is a source of sadness for both. “I have moments when I’m watching Jesse on the stump, and I just know how immensely proud my mother would be,” Pressley said. There is a long pause on the phone line between us before she says: “We’re going to work hard to make sure that she also has the title and the responsibility and the humbling role of being a congresswoman.”