In New Class of Young Lawmakers, a Former Girl Scout Goes to the Statehouse

As a 17-year-old Girl Scout, Cassandra Levesque led a campaign to end child marriage in New Hampshire, and was brushed aside by a state legislator. He said he saw no need to change a law, more than 100 years old, “on the basis of a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project.”

Levesque’s first effort to raise the age of marriage failed. Rather than being deterred, Levesque decided to take her crusade a step further: She ran for the state Legislature herself, and won.

In doing so, Levesque (pronounced le-VECK), now 19 and a Democrat, became one of a group of young people across the country who were elected to office for the first time this year. Some said they were galvanized by opposition to President Donald Trump’s policies and a desire to push the Democratic Party to the left. Others were more focused on local issues, such as education, or said they sought to get other young people civically involved. Caleb Hanna, 19, was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates as a Republican, on a platform of investing more state funds in career and technical education. Kalan Haywood, 19 and a Democrat, was elected to the Wisconsin state Assembly. He has said that he wants to pass a law requiring high school students who are 18 or older to register to vote.

In Iowa, Zach Wahls, who as a teenager gave a speech that went viral before the state House of Representatives about growing up with two lesbian mothers, was elected at age 27 to the state Senate.

Meanwhile, in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, became the youngest woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, after defeating Rep. Joseph Crowley, the fourth-ranked House Democrat, in a primary in June.

Levesque, who is from Barrington, New Hampshire, became a Girl Scout when she was around 5 because her mother thought there were not enough children her age in the mobile home co-op where they lived with Levesque’s father and maternal grandmother.

In 2016, Levesque, with encouragement from her mother, who was her troop leader, began researching the issue of child marriage as part of a project for a Gold Award, the highest honor in the Girl Scouts. She said she was shocked to realize that girls as young as 13 and boys as young as 14 could marry under state law if they had parental consent and the approval of a judge. Having recently been 13 herself, she said she thought that it was crazy that girls in middle school, “with band posters and stuffed animals and Barbie dolls,” could get married.

“I thought, ‘OK, I need to change this,'” she said.

She approached a local state representative, Jacalyn Cilley, whom she had known since she was 8 (when Cilley gave her Brownie Girl Scout troop a tour of the Statehouse) with her research.

At first, Cilley, a Democrat, said she was sure Levesque had to be mistaken. When she realized Levesque was right, she said she was astonished — and thought that changing the law to raise the age would be an easy lift.

“How could anybody defend the practice of 13-year-olds getting married?” she said.

But a bill Cilley championed, which would have raised the minimum age for marriage, ran into a wall of opposition from her Republican colleagues. Among critics of the idea was Rep. David Bates, the lawmaker who dismissed Levesque as “a minor doing a Girl Scout project.” (Bates, who did not respond to a message left at his home, did not run for re-election this year.)

In March 2017, Republicans killed the bill, using a procedural move intended to keep it from being considered again for two years.

“It didn’t make me want to stop — it just made me want to push forward,” Levesque said. This year, with Levesque continuing to press the issue, Cilley and several of her colleagues passed a trio of bills which raised the minimum marriage age to 16 and gave judges more guidance about how to consider petitions for marriage licenses from people 17 and younger.

In the meantime, Levesque graduated from high school and went off to study photography at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, before deciding that a career in photography was not for her, and coming home. “I didn’t want to do wedding photos,” she said.

Two seats in the state House of Representatives for Barrington would soon be open, and local Democrats urged Levesque to run. She said she had hesitated at first. She worried about balancing political office with college classes and with her commitments as a leader of her own Girl Scout troop. Also, she did not know how she would get to Concord; she doesn’t have a driver’s license.

On the next-to-last day that she could file papers to run, she did.

In Concord, New Hampshire, Levesque will certainly stand out. As of 2015, the average age in the New Hampshire state Legislature was 66, making it the oldest state legislature in the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. One reason is that the state Legislature is essentially a volunteer job, with the legislators being paid only $100 per year plus mileage.

It is also mostly male: Just over a quarter of the New Hampshire legislators last year were women.

Levesque said that among the first things she wants to do is to pass a bill raising the minimum age to get married to 18, since that is the age when young people can sign contracts and get a divorce if they want to. She also wants to raise the minimum wage — New Hampshire currently does not have a state minimum wage, but goes by the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour — and focus on ways to attract more young people to New Hampshire.

Asked if she had a message for legislators who had once dismissed her, Levesque said that she knew she would encounter others like them.

“I will definitely figure out ways to navigate through it, and I will always stick to my gut and what I feel is right,” she said.