Unknown Speaker  00:07
Quindlen whom my next sentence was going to be whom I suspect most of you feel that you know quite well already. You may have met her during her first job as a young reporter for the New York Post, or perhaps encountered her a few years after her graduation from Barnard when she one more plug and then I think that might be it for the day. When she moved to the New York Times, from Nice. From 1981, you learned her point of view of happenings about New York. In the times column of that name. You got to know Anna even better starting in 1986. When her new and unique column life in the 30s first appeared. There she wrote about what at first glance seem to be herself. But what was so often really about us, about women with mothers, women with mines, women with families, friends, kids worries happiness. You've gotten to know her a bit differently since 1989, through the syndicated op ed column, public and private, for which she has received the Pulitzer Prize. A collection of these essays has just been published by Random House under the title thinking out loud. revisiting these columns, as I have done this week, puts one again in awe of Anna's unerring feel for the humane and for the wisdom of her passionate anger against injustice on scales small and large. Many of us seek out and as column knowing we can count on its sanity and smarts and compassion. Whether writing about the war in the Gulf, or the war in Bensonhurst and Anita Hill or aids are condemning violence against women and discrimination against gays and lesbians. And a Quinlan fulfills her mission for her goal, as she puts it, is not to make readers think like me, but to make them think it's my great pleasure to present Anna Quinlan.

Unknown Speaker  02:34
This is a college so evolved that 20 years ago, it chose to one qualified seniors to be teaching assistants in a political science course called modern political movements. One was me and the other was a woman who organized this conference and just introduced me and I think you should give a round of applause to Leslie Kalman.

Unknown Speaker  03:08
Least she told me she was unqualified. Now I know she was lying. 20 years ago today is the Beatles once saying I was a junior at Barnard. At the time, no woman had ever been a desk head at the New York Times. No woman had ever been an assistant managing editor at the New York Times. And of course, no woman had ever been an executive editor at the New York Times. The paper didn't use MS on second reference, which was hardly odd. At that time, very few organizations or publications used it. There had never been a woman Justice of the United States Supreme Court. There had never been a woman rabbi or a woman Episcopal Bishop. There was no Emily's list, and there was no women's campaign font. There were no girls in Little League. Most Wall Street law firms had never had a woman and partner. Most hospitals had never had a female surgical resident. Great Britain had never had a woman prime minister. The woman known as Jane Roe that year had a baby. The woman known as Hillary Rodham was still talked about at Wellesley College as someone who might one day be president.

Unknown Speaker  04:43
And maybe she still will. There were 12 women in the House of Representatives. There were no women in the United States Senate. I could never have imagined how different the world would be 20 years later, I could never have imagined that we would come to take for granted women cops and firefighters, women rabbis and ministers, women senators and women judges, women partners and women's surgeons, women editors, and women columnists. I could never have imagined that trickle down feminism would become so pervasive that some of the things we thought of as utopian or idealistic 20 years ago today, would become part of the culture so that last week, when I was visiting a junior high school in Queens, one beleaguered boy would rise to his feet and begin to question, okay, I know the girls can do anything boys can but he really thought it was nothing. What he was saying he thought it was a truism, a universally accepted fact. girls can do anything boys can. I heard the greatest social revolution in the history of the 20th century in America, encapsulated in that offhand beginning? Okay, I know girls can do anything boys can but Well, here's the but for all of us, my friends, and all of you already know it. There is still sex discrimination. There are still disparate pay scales, there are still rape and sexual harassment and disproportionate violence against women. There are still too few of us on the High Court, in the Senate, and state legislatures in precinct houses in law firms, and on the masthead at the New York Times. The modern feminist movement over the last 20 years was a dialectic. We started out with a thesis, the thesis of woman as wife and mother. What Roseanne Barr calls domestic goddess what Betty for Dan calls The Feminine Mystique. And we fashioned an antithesis and not to be coy about it. It was too often a kind of false man's life, complete with those little floppy tie things with our suits and almost did us in.

Unknown Speaker  07:18
Lately, we've approached a synthesis, a balance. Once we entered men's arenas in sufficient numbers, we could share their dirty little secret. And that is that work, influence power position with no countervailing forces, no intimacy, no family, no sense of connection to other people, is for many of us no kind of life at all. Speaking personally, I can tell you that no one has ever enjoyed the bully pulpit of the op ed page as much as I have, or worked harder to put it to better use as a voice for the voiceless. But my work is enriched and my voice is strengthened by the fact that half of my work day is spent in childcare, a choice that I made freely despite the fact that some of my sisters saw it as anti feminist, because part of our synthesis has been a recognition of a crucial truth. That while parity and equality are critical, as important, is recognizing and not fearing the admissions of the ways in which we are inclined to make different choices, different life decisions than many of our male counterparts. This is a synthesis time for me to and for the business in which I work. When I started there, 20 years ago, there were very, very few women reporters. Almost all the reporters who were female worked in something called the woman section, which consisted largely of recipes, sewing patterns, engagement announcements, and either Dear Abby or inlanders, there was very little first person material, very little of that kind of story we now casually call lifestyle, and very little that seemed to reflect the real lives of women. We had become accustomed to a simple fact. Men did things and women didn't. And newspapers are about people doing things. And then suddenly all hell broke loose. It broke loose in the culture first, as we all know, the lives of women began to change dramatically. We began to do things to and we began to say that the things we have always done, the creating and the nurturing of family and friends are more important than anyone has ever reflected. We were accepted to law firms. We joined the Rabbinate, we made news, the first woman vice presidential candidate, the first woman Episcopal bishop, and we made families too. But all hell was breaking loose at newspapers to people don't usually believe that when I say it, because for the last 15 years, I've worked for the New York Times, a place where people don't believe heck breaks loose very often. But consider this when I was assigned to write about women's issues for the paper in 1978, about domestic abuse and cohabitation, and childcare and birth control, because we all accepted that those were women's issues, even though there seemed to be a lot of men hanging around them. I was assigned to cover those things for the Style section, not the national desk. I realized how very much that had changed one day in December when I picked up the newspaper. And every single story on page one had been written by a woman except for one that had been written by an African American male. Michael career followed a kind of a dialectic to just like the movement. For a long time, my stories were fairly sex blind. Without a byline, you couldn't have told the difference between am Rosenthal and am Quinlan. That was my thesis, and I think the thesis of most of my colleagues have both genders. But in 1983, I began a column that was the antithesis of that, a column that by its very name, announced my age, and then proceeded to announce among other things, that I was flat chested as a teenager, that my mother died when I was 19, and that they used forceps to get my first baby out. Above everything, it was a column written by a woman. I don't think you could have read a single one of my life in the 30s columns and thought the writer was male. And the readership seemed to follow suit. The Mail on that column ran about 90% 10% female male. And the most controversial column that I wrote during those three years, probably attest to how bitter the Gender Wars had become in this country. The column is called Women are just better.

Unknown Speaker  12:14
My favorite news story so far this year was the one saying that in England, scientists are working on a way to allow men to have babies. I buy tickets to that. I'd be happy to stand next to any man I know in one of those labor rooms the size of a Volkswagen trunk, and whisper, No dear, you don't really need the Demerol. Just relax and do your second stage breathing. It puts me in mind of an old angry feminist slogan. If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. I think this is specious. If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be inexpensive too. I can almost hear some of you out there thinking that I do not like men. This isn't true. I have been married for some years to a man. And I hope that someday our two sons will grow up to be men. All three of my brothers are men, as is my father. Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men. There I've said it. It is my dirty little secret. We're not supposed to say it because in the old days men used to say that women were superior. What they meant was that we were too wonderful to enter courtrooms enjoy sex or worry our minds about money. Obviously, this is not what I mean at all. The other day a very wise friend of mine asked, Have you ever noticed that what passes is a terrific man would only be an adequate woman

Unknown Speaker  14:11
a Roman Candle went off in my head. She was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean.

Unknown Speaker  14:26
What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love. The ability to finish my sentences for me when I am solving a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me. And the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone. The inherent superiority of women came to mind just the other day when I was reading about sanitation workers. New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage which makes sense to me since as I've discovered a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage bij there was a story about the hiring of these female sanitation workers. And I was struck by the fact that I could have written that story without ever leaving my living room, a reflection not upon the quality of the reporting, but the predictability of the male sanitation workers response. The story started by describing the event. And then the two women who were just your average working women trying to make a buck and get by, there was something about all the maneuvering that had to take place before they could be hired. And then there were the obligatory quotes from male sanitation workers about how women were incapable of doing the job. There were similar to quotes I have read over the years suggesting that women are not fit to be rabbis combat soldiers, astronauts, firefighters, judges, iron workers, and President of the United States. Chief among them was a comment from one sanitation worker who said it just wasn't our kind of job that women were cut out to do dishes and men were cut out to do yard work. As a woman who has done dishes, yard work, and tossed a fair number of hefty bags, I was peeved. more so because I would fight for the right of any laid off sanitation man to work, for example, at the gift rep counter at Macy's. Even though any woman knows men are hormonally incapable of wrapping packages or tying bows. I simply can't think of any jobs anymore that women can't do. Come to think of it. I can't think of any job women don't do. I know lots of men who are full time lawyers, doctors, editors and the like. And I know lots of women who are full time lawyers, and part time interior decorators, pastry chefs, Algebra teachers, and garbage slingers. Women are the glue that holds our day to day world together. Maybe the sanitation workers who talk about the SEC's division of duties are talking about girls just like the girls that married dear old dad. Now lots of women know that if they don't carry the garbage bag to the curb, it's not going to get carried, either because they're single, or their husband is working a second shift, or he's staying at the office until midnight, or he just left them. I keep hearing that there's a new breed of men out there who don't talk about helping a woman. So they're doing you a favor, and who do you seriously consider leaving the office if a child comes down with a fever at school, rather than assuming that you will leave yours. But from what I've seen, there aren't enough of those men to qualify as a breed only as a subgroup. This all sounds angry. It is, after a lifetime spent with winds of sexual change buffeting me this way, in that, it still makes me angry to read the same dumb quotes with the same dumb stereotypes that I was reading when I was 18. It makes me angry to realize that after so much change, very little is different. It makes me angry to think these two female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co workers think they can handle and then they will go home and do another job. Most of their co workers don't want.

Unknown Speaker  18:18
That column, of course, appeared first in the home section of the New York Times. And then I moved to the Op Ed page, public and private despite what many of the readers seem to think and desire was never meant to be life in the 30s to the third child. I imagined it is bringing together the reporter I'd been and the first person I'd become to try to raise some questions about social and political issues. But it also came at a perfect time in the newspaper business and the development of the culture. To say something that I've long wanted to say that sometimes we feel a different way. The first 20 years of the woman's movement had so much to do with parity equality with the narrowing of differences. And then suddenly, in recent years, I heard women everywhere saying, I feel differently about leaving the kids to go to work than my male colleagues do. I feel differently about war than my male friends. I feel differently about rape and Bosnia than male public officials. I feel differently about abortion than any guy could ever feel. And hearing that over and over seemed to me to be a license to do something in an editorial page column that The New York Times had not really done before. And that was to make gender not the most important part of the columnist persona as it wasn't life in the 30s. But a critical part of the persona nonetheless. It was a good time in the life of the paper to do this. There are many more women in editorial positions and many more women are poor. murders. And because of them and because of the way that all hell has broken loose in the culture, there's more coverage everywhere in the paper about more things, that for lack of a better term, we sometimes still call women's issues. From the scientific evidence on IUDs to the dearth of roles for actresses from Penelope leach to Susan Faludi. There are simply more stories about people of our gender, and issues that we can relate to our lives. And it's rare any longer I'll tell you for newspaper editors to dismiss a story because it's a woman's story. In a time of shrinking profits for newspapers, in a country where we mourn the passing of so many of them. Good newspapers have to try to be all things to all people and all people includes us. But what I found out early on was that there was some body of thought that my gender should stay out of my new job. Or to put it colloquially that I should downplay the woman thing. friend suggested I would get pigeonholed as a woman

Unknown Speaker  21:10
and not be taken seriously. And one young male reporter asked me once whether it was really necessary for me to wear my gender on my sleeve.

Unknown Speaker  21:21
I almost told them where my gender really was. But the answer in 1993 is yes. Because what is the message to all of our readers? If I hesitate to write too much about abortion, but other columnists? Feel free to write week after week about campaign financing? What is the message if I downplay child care? While other columnists play up defense policy? Why don't we make writing about defense mainstream and writing about children somehow collateral? What message do we send when we say it is suspect to be emotional, and correct to be cerebral? Why in short, do we denigrate those matters and those attributes which we think of, for whatever reason, as female, and by the way, if women columnists do not write about abortion, birth control, childcare, domestic abuse, or the feminization of poverty in America? Well, those things get written about it all. In the beginning, we wanted parity, we still do, we still don't have it, we still have to fight for it. But as time went by, we realized something crucial to our goals and our futures. And that is that we were not in a battle to allow men to live imitation men's lives. We knew that we could reshape institutions, structures, power struggles, even world events, not just so women could participate, but so that our ways of working, dealing negotiating living would be vastly improved by the special gifts that we bring to the table. Those of us who began to run businesses realize quickly that the hierarchical management style used by most companies is essentially flawed. And then it was those managers who work by consensus, who polled workers on how to run the workplace who gained power by ceding power to those below them who were terribly loyal as a result, that it was those managers who would succeed and that many men were not inclined ever to become those kinds of managers. We realized that the ethos presents equals productivity was a fraud. And that the long hours some workers kept, were merely a macho expression of indispensability. Those of us who entered medicine realize that it often served patients poorly, because of a doctor patient relationship based on power and paternalism. We did not need nor want to be paternalistic. And paternalistic is a completely different thing altogether. Those of us in the newspaper business realize that there's much more to the story than who, what, when, where, and why. The small moments, the telling details, the psychology, all those things we'd been discussing on the phone with our friends for many years. They told the truth too. And so when one of us who happened to be me, took over a column in this country's most powerful paper, the beneficiary of dozens of women who worked hard, did better, and finally filed a class action suit. I knew one thing about that column before I ever wrote the first word that I was going to use it to stand up on my hind legs and say, ain't I a woman? Oh, boys, you bet I am. This summer, the Center for the American women and politics at Rutgers released a study showing think that women politicians have a different agenda than their male counterparts. regardless of party or ideology, they are more likely to bring ordinary people into the process to ensure the government business takes place in public settings, and to be responsive to groups outside the traditional circles of power. That same survey show that female elected officials were more likely to interest themselves in women's rights, child care, health care and family concerns, women's issues, maybe that's what they used to call them. They also happened to be the cutting edge issues of our times. And by default, we happen to be the experts. We have not just changed the face of the workplace, we have changed its soul. We have not simply made things fairer, or more representative. We have made them better. So now it's time to share the wealth. It's time to share the wealth with our daughters to reach out to younger women who are confused by the gap between their imagined work lives and their imagined home lives. By the gap between message this the society now sends about their ability to be and do anything, and about the way they so often see themselves portrayed as bimbos, wars and idiots on television and in the movies. The other day, I heard lesley stahl of 60 minutes make an observation that I considered particularly apt in this context. She said that she's generally found that her women friends of a certain age, have a serenity and a kind of centeredness that her male friends of the same age lack. She has a drink with one of her old guy pals, she says, and so often she hears about disappointments, about a schism between his 20 Something ambitions, and his 50 Something accomplishments. He had ideas of what he would do, and be ideas about the heights, he would scale. His dreams and expectations have fallen short. And he traded in a family life for those dreams. But our dreams and expectations were often truncated by the then narrower boundaries of gender. Occasionally, someone asked me if it 20, I fully expected at 40, to be an op ed page columnist at the New York Times.

Unknown Speaker  27:23
And I have to laugh. Because if in 1973, I had dreamt of this or dreamed of any other position of power and influence at the newspaper of record, I would have been a person so foolish that I would never have deserved such a job. I hoped I would find a newspaper job that would include covering the city, not just covering parties, or fashion or Deb boss. And so those of us, and there's so many of us who have accomplished something in our chosen fields, have unlike many of our disappointed male counterparts, going farther than we ever expected. This will not be true of our daughters, they will have great expectations. And no matter how much more we change the world between 1993 and 2013, some of those expectations will likely be dashed. And to serve those great expectations, I come to another group with whom we must share the wealth of what we learned about the proper uses of power of what we've learned about you main management and medicine, of what we've learned about combining home and family. We must share the wealth with our sons and with all other men as well. Because if the next stage of this great social revolution does not bring the hearts and minds of men along, the most troubling problems we have faced in the last two decades will still be very much with us. I can almost hear some of you thinking not again. Again, we have to take care of them. Again, we have to educate them again, we have to overcome their congenital deafness. Again, we have to make up for their inadequacies. What about us? This is a good complaint. I agree. But here is the critical issue. The people who are going to run our corporations who are going to assault women on the streets, who are going to teach our college students in most places except for this one, who are going to adjudicate our cases who are going to occupy the Oval Office and who are going to occupy our homes and our offices are going to be for the foreseeable future, largely male. If they continue not to get it. We will never get what we deserve. Because when a Senator who is allegedly good on women's issues is accused of sexually harassing almost two dozen women. When boys who have come of age and and developed completely during this Great Rebirth of feminism are convicted of assaulting a retarded young woman and treating her like an inflatable doll. When a study of household chores tells us that most women in America one, not the right to have a job, but the right to have to when they get paid for another one they don't, then we know that while we have changed laws and institutions over the last 20 years, we have often not changed the basic way men and women see one another. And that is, in many ways a more difficult battle. I never mean to suggest that I am buying into the myth currently abroad in the land, that the white man is a beleaguered species. Anyone who has walked through an office lately, or attended a faculty meeting or looked at the residence in a hospital, knows that white men are still managing to make a very good go of it. But the revolution that will really revolutionize every part of our lives, includes all of us. Childcare has become a burning issue for many of us in some measure, because women are solely responsible for both its provision and its perimeters. These children have fathers too many of them, often you would never know it. The glass ceiling has become a burning issue for so many of us because male managers are still using old standards to hire and promote. They are not misogynist all.

Unknown Speaker  31:24
They have just gotten accustomed to hiring those who remind them of themselves when young. Distress stress of handling two jobs at once has become such a burning issue for so many of us, because some of our partners will not share and domestic responsibilities and some of our professional partners have yet to learn from us the rewards of family life and the value of reasonable working hours. We say no more tail hooks. But that will not happen unless the minds of men change. We say no more Glen ridges. But that will not happen unless the minds of men change. We say no more Lakewood spur policies. But that will not happen unless the minds of men change. And because of our special skills, accomplishments, and knowledge gained not only in the last 20 years, but all of our lives. We are the best people to teach them what they need to know to try to surmount the congenital deafness. The consciousness raising groups of 20 years ago, produced a great social upheaval, but it often seems to me that we raise the consciousness of the wrong set of people. For 20 years, we have been walking city streets with keys clenched between our fingers and self defense against street assailants changing our behavior, making ourselves responsible for our own safety. Instead, we must search for ways to change a society it still makes it commonplace to raise and nurture rapists.

Unknown Speaker  33:11
Even America's homophobia seems so much a product of a population in which women have grown and changed, and men have not. So many of the fears about gay men in the military focus on a sense of men as inevitable sexual predators. But it is not we women who have reason to understand the predatory who assume that this is inevitable. It is other men. And not only gay men, but our lesbian sisters get hurt in the process. And we must also acknowledge the good guys, the men who so often feel shut out of our journey and are struggling with their own. Sisterhood is powerful. We have friendships connections, a self-consciousness that often seems far beyond the can of our male friends or colleagues or mates. We have learned so much about ourselves, and about how good the world can be if we stop seeing life as a duel and begin to see it as a square dance. Are we big enough to share that knowledge on at least one level we have to be and that is the commitment to raise feminist sons. Because surely God will strike me dead if she looks down and watches me raise two little princes to make work for whoever their partners may be. Two little boys with the same old closed up emotions, two sons becoming men who will objectify and humiliate a newer version of my younger self. I cannot do that. I must bring those particular men along they want so badly right now to come. The eldest one is permanently disgruntled about Take Our Daughters to work day on Wednesday. Why not the sons he said? Why was he being left behind as though he was unworthy or bad? And while I explained to him in detail the work of Carol Gilligan how the world would treat the feisty nine year old girls who are as friends so that they would shut down and shut up by age 14. He was both incredulous and determined not to bear the weight of past wrongdoing. He would never do that. He said, he believed that women could do everything. In fact, he added he believed women could do more than men, because I both wrote my column and took care of him and his siblings. It was a backhanded compliment. I could see him one day, marrying a woman who did everything to while perhaps he repeated all the old patterns, we have come so far, we operate in a culture that often takes for granted the participation of women in virtually every field. We have moved past the point at which we are elated at the Year of the Woman, to the point at which we feel free to complain that a single year is an insulting concept. We've moved past the point at which we demand power to the point at which we insist on using that power in our own ways, to the things we think are praiseworthy, not in ways merely mimic our male counterparts. We have moved past the point at which we want false men's lives, to the point at which we believe deep in our hearts, that if men really wanted more satisfying lives, they would try to live more like us. For 20 years, we sought equality with men. Now we need to persuade men to move up to being equal with us. And they would some of them I truly believe if they knew how it has taken many of us 20 years to become our true selves. Today, I feel proud to write a column that unabashedly relies on the things I have learned as a member of an oppressed majority. I feel free in a way that I suspect my male colleagues do not to make my biography, my destiny in the gray pages of the New York Times. It's been a long, strange trip as a Grateful Dead one saying, and I've worked hard to become that person. But it's a trip goes on. I can't just take my daughter. I have three children, not one. The men have to come along for the ride. When I was thinking about making this speech, I talk to a close friend of mine, who is the president of what may be America's most distinguished women's college. And I asked her if by saying this, I could be perceived as a mushy minded, moderate.

Unknown Speaker  37:55
And she said yes. But what the hell. We can say that men are the enemies and will often be true, whether one of them is shutting out one of our colleagues in the boardroom, or climbing in a bedroom window with a knife. But if we are to move forward, we have to make friends and influence people, people who are male, and some who have a strong willingness to do the right thing for the sake of their daughters, their sisters, their wives, their friends, or for the sake of the thing itself. I'm often asked about my favorite column. I usually say it's whatever one I'm writing next. But the truth is that one of my favorites was written on my daughter's second birthday. It's called the glass half empty. My daughter is two years old today. She is something like me only better. Or at least that is what I like to think. If personalities had color, hers would be read. Little by little in the 20 years between my 18th birthday and her second one. I had learned how to live in the world. The fact that women were now making 67 cents for every dollar a man makes. Well it was better than 1970 wasn't, wasn't it when we were only making 59 cents. The constant stories about the under representation of women on the tenure track in the film, industry and government everywhere had become commonplace. The rape cases, the sexual harassment stories, the demeaning comments, life goes on. Where's your sense of humor? Learning to live in the world men seen the glass half full. And Richards was elected governor of Texas instead of a good old boy who said that if rape was inevitable, you should relax and enjoy it. The police chief of Euston is a pregnant woman who has a level this is my job. Look at a maternity uniform with stars on the shoulder. There are so many opportunities unheard of when I was Growing up, and then I had a daughter and suddenly I saw the glass half empty. And all the rage I thought had cooled. All those How dare you treat us like this days. All of it comes back when I look at her, and especially when I hear her say to her brothers, me too. When I look at my son's it is within reason to imagine all the world's doors open to them. Little by little, some will close as their individual capabilities and limitations emerge. But no one is likely to look at them and Mater. I'm not sure a man is right for a job at this level. Doesn't have a lot of family responsibilities. Every time a woman looks at her daughter and thinks she can be anything she knows in her heart from experience, that it's a lie. Looking at this little girl, I see it all the old familiar ways of a world that still loves Barbie. Girls aren't good at math dear. He needs money more than you sweetheart. He's got a family to support. Honey, this diaper sturdy. It is like looking through telescope. Over the years, I learned to look through the end that showed things small and manageable. This is called a sense of proportion. And then I turned the telescope around and all the little tableaus rushed at me, vivid is ever, that's called reality. We soothe ourselves with the gains that have been made. There are many role models, role models, or women who exist and are photographed often to make other women feel better about the fact that there aren't really enough of us anywhere except in the lowest paying jobs. A newspaper editor said to me not long ago, with no hint of self consciousness. I'd love to run your column. But we already run Ellen Goodman. Not only was there a quota, there was a quota of one.

Unknown Speaker  42:00
My daughter is ready to leap into the world as a life where chicken soup and she had delighted noodle. The work of Professor Carol Gilligan of Harvard suggests that sometime after the age of 11, this will change that even this lively little girl will pull back shrink, that her constant refrain will become I don't know. Professor Gilligan says a culture sends a message. Keep quiet and notice the absence of women and say nothing. A smart 13 year old said to me last week, boys don't like it if you answer too much in class. Maybe someday, years from now, my daughter will come home and say, Mother a college my professor acted as if my studies we're an amusing hobby. And it works. The man who runs my department puts his hand on my leg and to compete with the man who's in the running for my promotion, who makes more than I do. I can't take time to have a relationship. But he has a wife and two children. And I'm smarter and it doesn't make any difference. And some guy tried to jump me after our date last night. And what am I supposed to say to her? I know you'll get used to it. No. Today is her second birthday and she has made me see fresh this two tiered world. A world that despite all the nonsense about post feminism continues to offer less respect and less opportunity for women than it does for men. My friends and I have learned to live with it. But my little girl deserves better. She has given me my anger back and I intend to use it well. This is her gift to me today. Some birthday, I will return it to her because she is going to need it. I can't confine my anger to the little girl or she will have good reason to keep it burning the whole rest of her life. She too is I so sadly predict, will live amidst men who just don't get it, who ranged from those whose parents are affected whose children are effectively cared for by a single parent, because they are incapable of finding a balance between work and home in their own lives. To those whose female employees live in fear because the boss sees women predominantly as people to be found old or humiliated, people who should be made to pay for asking for freedom that they should have had as a matter of human rights. I don't want my boys to be those people. And I don't want my daughter to live among them. The power we have in the world now to do things and to do good as well as nowhere near enough. But so many of the women I meet from high school girls, to secretaries to poor women working in factories to wealthy women undertaking great philanthropies have an extraordinary power right in here. For 20 years we held ourselves like this to feel and understand and know ourselves. That was identity. For 20 years we went went like this demanding parity. And now we must go like this, for our son sakes to share all that we have learned that will be the 21st century. For so many years in a condescending way, they called us their better half. What we all know now is that it's true. And that knowledge and that truth means now that perhaps we can afford to be magnanimous. Thank you very much

Unknown Speaker  45:44
you've actually gotten even smarter than you were as a senior at Barnard. Well, we have listened. We have thought. We have talked we have argued, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to party