In the quiet of her office, where she wore a windbreaker to fend off the fierce chill of the air-conditioning, Davis explained the sudden prominence of abortion politics in Texas. “It all goes back to redistricting,” she said. “Texas is a perfect example. Most states are not having conversations about issues in the middle anymore. When you have districts, like we have here, that are almost purely Republican, all political messaging is directed toward Republican primaries. They don’t have to be answerable to anyone outside their base. People like Perry love to talk about being anti-federal government and anti-Planned Parenthood. So you get a law that says we’re not going to take federal money unless none of it goes to Planned Parenthood.” The 2011 Texas law resulted in the loss of some forty million dollars in federal funds, about half of the state’s aid from Washington.

The 2013 fight over abortion has its roots in internecine Republican politics. In 2012, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, who controls the agenda in the Senate, was widely expected to win the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat. But Ted Cruz, a political outsider close to the Tea Party movement, portrayed Dewhurst as a closet moderate and roared to an overwhelming victory in the primary. (Cruz also won the general election with ease.) Dewhurst started the 2013 session needing to prove his conservative bona fides, which he did with an abortion bill. Perry, who recently announced that he would not run for reëlection as governor, and appears headed for a second Presidential bid, was happy to join Dewhurst in taking a stand.

But Dewhurst mismanaged the legislative clock in the special session, and SB 5 still hadn’t passed by the morning of June 25th. Shortly before noon, Wendy Davis took to the Senate floor, wearing a striped business suit and a pair of pink Mizuno Women’s Wave Rider 16 running shoes. Someone removed her chair, so that she couldn’t sit down. Senate video carried the filibuster online, and the nonprofit Texas Tribune Web site live-blogged it. Davis soon had a wide following on social media, with the hashtag #StandWithWendy. Young supporters, whom Planned Parenthood has actively targeted, rallied the more than four hundred thousand people who were following on Facebook that day, and tweeted through the hours, lamenting that the event wasn’t making all the cable networks. Then, in the early evening, @BarackObama tweeted, “Something special is happening in Austin tonight,” with a link to the live stream. The message was re-posted more than seventeen thousand times.

Cecile Richards arrived at the Capitol at around 5 P.M. and set up a command post at a makeshift podium in the middle of the rotunda. “It really was surreal,” she recalled. “You had all these people in the rotunda watching the live stream of the Senate Chamber on their phones.” As it became clear that Davis might talk long enough to end the session, Republicans in the chamber began raising objections, contending that she had forfeited the right to continue speaking by going off topic when she mentioned a Planned Parenthood budget and a Texas sonogram law; they even protested that a colleague had helped her into a back brace. Drawn by the spectacle, hundreds, then thousands, of people filled the rotunda and its interior balconies.

At around ten o’clock, Dewhurst gavelled an end to Davis’s filibuster. As Democrats challenged his decision, there was chaos, with the orange-clad crowd in the corridors chanting, “Let her speak!” State troopers began to corral demonstrators out of the chamber. Over the objections of the Democratic senators and the protests of the people in the halls, at fifteen minutes to midnight Dewhurst called for a vote on SB 5. By this time, thanks to Twitter, a hundred and fifty thousand viewers were watching the proceedings online. Republican senators gathered at the dais on the Senate floor, attempting to vote. They could hardly hear. A Democratic senator, Juan Hinojosa, said that he didn’t even know they were voting. The bill passed, but it was unclear whether it had passed before the midnight deadline. The original date stamp indicated that the bill passed after midnight, on June 26th. But someone changed the date to June 25th. As the hours dragged on, Republicans huddled and Democrats howled. Finally, at around 3 A.M., Dewhurst announced that the bill had failed to pass before midnight and therefore was not enacted. “This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “An unruly mob using Occupy Wall Street tactics has tried all day to derail legislation that has been intended to protect the lives and the safety of women and babies.”

In the rotunda, Richards hushed the crowd so that she could read aloud a text message from Davis: “The Lieutenant Governor has agreed that SB 5 is dead!” Amid the cheering, Richards noticed that the official portrait of Governor Ann Richards, who died in 2006, was behind the makeshift podium in the rotunda. “Mom was sort of looking over us all,” Cecile told me later. “I think we all felt like she was there.”

Richards had flown into Austin the day before the bus tour began, so that she could have lunch with her father, David Richards, who is now eighty and is, in some ways, nearly as big a legend in Texas as his late ex-wife. He and Ann were high-school sweethearts in Waco, and they married before they graduated from Baylor, in 1954. Ann had four children in quick succession, while Dave took on a leading role in the fledgling Progressive movement in Texas. Tall, bald, blunt, and plainspoken—“Can you imagine my dad running for office?” Cecile said with a laugh—Dave Richards built a law practice around civil-rights plaintiffs, labor unions, and alternative newspapers. In a typical passage from his memoir, “Once Upon a Time in Texas: A Liberal in the Lone Star State,” Richards writes, “By the time of the November 1960 general election, Dallas was already well on its way toward the right-wing lunacy that beset the city for so many years.” He won a series of landmark cases, including an important voting-rights lawsuit in the Supreme Court. The Richards’ homes, first in Dallas and then in Austin, were raucous crossroads for liberal politicians, journalists, and country singers.

“Cecile was the oldest, always the leader, the good student, the organizer,” Ellen Richards, the youngest of the four Richards children, told me. (The two Richards brothers practice law in a firm with Dave, in Austin; Ellen works in health care, also in Austin.) “She got our dad’s passion for social justice, but she also got our mom’s leadership skills,” Ellen said. When Cecile went off to Brown, in the mid-seventies, Ann was little known outside Austin, where she was a county commissioner. She was elected treasurer, her first statewide office, in 1982. Two years later, Dave and Ann divorced.

Cecile’s activism didn’t abate at Brown. “I missed my graduation, because I was protesting against nuclear power—or maybe it was against apartheid,” she told me. She then went to work as a labor organizer, first with garment workers in the Rio Grande Valley and then with hotel workers in New Orleans, where she met her future husband, Kirk Adams, who is now an official with the Service Employees International Union. They have three children. Lily, the oldest, is the press secretary for Tim Kaine, the Democratic senator from Virginia.

For several years after their marriage, Cecile and her husband were itinerant union organizers, running campaigns for nursing-home workers in East Texas and janitors in Los Angeles. In 1990, they moved to Austin to help Ann Richards campaign for governor. “That was back in the days when families actually saddled up and got together and ran campaigns,” Cecile told me. After Ann won, the couple remained in Austin for the duration of her term. In the Republican landslide of 1994, Ann was defeated by George W. Bush—a race that still holds lessons for Cecile. “To me, the awakening about Mom’s loss was that it wasn’t really about her and George Bush so much as it was about this enormous organizing effort on the extreme right that had now become about politics,” Cecile said. “It wasn’t about religion—it was about hard-nosed politics.” The right found messages, like family values and gun rights, that resonated with voters, and pushed them relentlessly. Cecile came to view this development with perverse admiration. “I came out of labor, right? I mean, those are my people,” she told me. “And I remember doing plant gates at Beaumont, and the reaction at plant gates at that time was that Ann Richards was just going to take away their guns. It was really amazing.”