Unknown Speaker 00:00 I welcome you this morning to the ever so slightly postponed better than ever. I'll be at a tribal windy and damp 22nd, the scholar and the feminist conference. Thank you. Allow me first introduce to you the President of Barnard College, Judy Shapiro came to Barnard in 1994, after a distinguished career as an anthropologist, first at the University of Chicago and then bring more and after eight years as provost at Bryn Mawr. Her field research has taken her to lowland South America and to the North American Great Basin, and she has written numerous articles tackling theoretical questions of gender differentiation. In short, she has been for many years both a scholar and a feminist. It's my pleasure to introduce students, Shapiro, Judas. Unknown Speaker 00:51 Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to welcome you to Barnard and would like to thank you for bearing with us when we had to postpone the conference. Needless to say, we are all very, very happy that the strike of our UAW local 2110 has been resolved in a way that satisfactory to all parties. And we hope also that this settlement marks the beginning of a different working relationship between the union and the college. I'd particularly like to thank our guest panelists, most of whom, all of whom, I guess, rearrange their busy schedules in order to be with us again today. And of course, to thank Leslie Kalman director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, for her fine efforts to organize this conference not once, but twice. Today's gathering provides us with a timely, and very welcome opportunity to explore important issues concerning women, children, and families, with prominent academics, writers, political activists, and other experts from our various feminist perspectives. Since the days of the suffragists, Barnard has been a place for women to gather and discuss political issues of the day. We remain particularly committed to this project in an election year, when women seem to be considerably less pleased with the status quo than at least according to the polls, men seem to be and are demanding change. This is something that the political pundits are now taking seriously, since they've they've realized that women have turned out to vote in higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980. Now, it's it's kind of interesting to look at the campaign 96 websites of Clinton and dole. Dole devotes a page to a listing of where he quote stands on women's issues. But you have to be advised the list is so short, if you blink, you might miss it. A Clinton meanwhile, focuses on how we can quote, strengthen our families and, quote, cherish our children. But he spends his time or more of it anyway talking about the chips, rather than about, for example, the welfare reform bill that he just signed, and how many people particularly children it will put into poverty. Now while these websites pay a kind of passing homage to the women's vote, you only need to look at the number of women in political office to understand why issues that have been primarily of concern to women are not at the forefront of political life. In 1966, women hold only 10.6% of the 535 seats in the 100 and fourth US Congress. Of these only 26.8% Are women of color. You might want to keep in mind that this is a record all time high. The number of women and statewide elected executive posts has dropped from 83 to 83. From the record high of 84, which was set in 1995. Only one woman serves as governor, and the proportion of women in state legislatures hold steady at 20.8. It's also interesting to remember that while the gender gap has been quite evident in every presidential election since 1980, in off year elections, we find that it's mostly higher income white women and men who are voting while poor women and women of color are turning out at much lower rates. And in this context, it's very gratifying to see so many Barnard students who have been extremely active in voter registration throughout the fall, as they've helped to register large numbers of low income voters, particularly women throughout New York City. In a recent Leadership Conference on Women, on women, the economy and the elections Susan Carroll at the Center for Women in Politics at Rutgers University, made the following point quote, There is no simple x planation or single underlying cause for the gender gap, rather different issues and different explanations seem to be key for explaining the behavior of different subgroups of women. And the challenge strategically, is to figure out what matters most and how to appeal to different subgroups of women. And a quote Professor Carroll concludes, by stating that if we're able to explore what issues are important to each of these subgroups, then we might begin to understand how different groups of women can come together to constitute something called, quote, the women's vote. Unknown Speaker 05:36 If that is indeed a project that people wish to pursue, not everybody perhaps does. Today's conference fits into that kind of project by exploring family issues and family values, from our perspectives, our various perspectives, we might someday see such things as child care, child support, health care, and the relationship between work and family, get the attention they deserve. And it's to that end that we work together. Welcome to Barnard. Unknown Speaker 06:15 Thank you, Shapiro. Unknown Speaker 06:18 Earlier, I told you who I was, but I failed to mention is that I'm also one of America's latest scapegoats. And frankly, I'm just a little tired of being the scourge of society. It's not just me, of course, probably lots of you get to be the scourge of society to for in this era in which certain families are valued and other families are vilified. Many of us find ourselves suddenly a lot more threatening to some folks than we ever could have imagined. It seems that as far as many Americans are concerned, it's not poverty and inadequate minimum wage or joblessness that causes problems in America. It's not overcrowded and underfunded schools. It's not a paucity of safe housing or quality childcare or affordable health care why it's not even the Russians anymore. Know the threat to America is us women, especially if we're not attached to some man. All of us who by divorce or by design, or single mothers get to join the destroyers of society club. Others who can step right up are all of us whose sexual habits and identity don't quite match up with those prescribed by certain men. Say, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Pat Boone, the list goes on petrodollars, okay, the other Pat's are out. Also, all of us who have ever received certain government assistance or labeled society destroyers, you need not worry if the interest on your mortgage is tax deductible. Or if you have tax deferred IRAs, no, those things put you in the perfectly happy to be middle class thank you club, receiving socially approved forms of government assistance for you and your family. But receiving food stamps or a to families with dependent children in the old days, makes you a society destroyer. And if you are a member of your family, say a parent was born in another country and hasn't renounced that citizenship. Your family is increasingly not valued, but scapegoated. That's family values in America today. And for a lot of us, that's a problem. So too, are the suggested solutions. It's not that our policymakers don't have solutions to the crisis and family values created by women running around loose or single women and their children being poor. One of them is simply to make sure that every woman is in some way attached to some man, find the father's hold on to those husbands. Don't let the lesbians marry each other. It all reminds me of a piece I read years ago by Woody Allen. Okay, he's not our favorite family values guy, but bear with me. It was a satiric account of how nervous it makes people that there are some folks in New York City who walk around talking to themselves. He suggested that the way to handle the problem was just to pair these folks up, put them together so that as they walked down the street talking to themselves, it appears that they are having a perfectly normal conversation. This way, the tourists would feel much more comfortable. Unknown Speaker 09:18 Well, various prescriptions we hear from government are not intended to be satirical, but seem to me to have just about the same level of thoughtfulness. We hear a lot about forcing women to identify biological fathers, anything to avoid allowing a caretaking mother to have claims on the greater community for help. Whatever you do, don't ask the community to do it. Just find some man to do it. But don't ask too closely about some man. His job opportunities, his educational opportunities, or his possible history of violence against women or children. Just suggests that if a woman doesn't want to be tied to some man, then she is to blame for all of society's ills. Well, With the political rise of the Christian right, with one of the fastest growing groups in America being the Promise Keepers, a group of men determined to take back the power they have allegedly lost to women. And perhaps most importantly, as Judas Shapiro alluded to, with both political parties resolutely avoiding intelligent discussion about hard social issues, I figured we needed to talk back about our families, and strongly articulate some social and political alternatives to the family values that we are being told should govern us here this morning to start us off on today's quest, our four eminent scholar feminists. Paula Edelbrock, is a nationally known legal advocate for lesbian and gay individuals, couples and families. Her writings and speeches often put her in the midst of debate, not only about the need to further the rights of gays and lesbians, but about the best strategies for doing so. Ms. Edelbrock, is presently the Legislative Council and primary lobbyist for the Empire State pride organization, which works on behalf of gay and lesbian political interests in New York. Prior to this, she has been the legal director for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the public policy director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. She's also an adjunct professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, and practices law here in New York with the firm of TRICARE reform and Zimmerman. Given this busy schedule, I'm particularly grateful to her for making time for us here today. Coming next, after Paula it'll brick is Bonnie Thornton dill, who's traveled here today from the University of Maryland, where she is Professor of Women's Studies and Sociology. Prior to her joining the faculty at Maryland, she was at the University of Memphis, where she founded and directed the Memphis State Center for Research on Women. Under her leadership, the center gained national prominence for its outstanding work on the interconnections of race, class and gender. Have her own research focuses on African American women work and families. She's a widely published scholar in such journals as signs, feminist studies and the Journal of family history. Together with Maxine Buck Xin, who unfortunately could not be with us today, Professor dill co edited the outstanding Temple University Press volume, women of color in US society. This is not her first trip to Barnard, we were trying to figure it out. She was here at the scholar and the feminist number five, or six or seven, and I hope it's not her last. I'm delighted to welcome her here. Martha Feinman is the more East Timor professor of law at Columbia University. In her former incarnation as a professor at the University of Wisconsin law school, Professor Fineman developed the feminism and legal theory project. That project is now alive and well at Columbia, with her professor Feynman ghosts, so go west feminism and legal theory. From it have come a number of published collections co edited by Martha Feinman that are truly at the cutting edge of feminist legal theory. They include one volume entitled The public nature of private violence, and another with the title that I most envy, a Columbia University Press volume entitled mothers in Law. Professor Fineman is additionally the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is quite successfully excited and provoked my students, keeping them arguing purposefully for an entire class period and thereby relieving me of any need to lecture. I love this book. It's called the neutered mother, the sexual family and other 20th century tragedies and I highly recommended Kapha Paulette is well known to many of us as associate editor of The Nation magazine, and as the author of it's always engaging by monthly column subject to debate. Whether discussing the assault on welfare mothers are on reproductive rights, or in recently announcing her intention to refrain from voting for Bill Clinton in the upcoming election. Katha Pollitt can be counted on to stimulate political controversy. If you need a quick fix consulter collected essays published in 1994, reasonable creatures, essays on women and feminism. Katha Pollitt is also a poet and literary critic, and the winner of numerous fellowships and prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for her first collection of poems and Arctic traveller, since she has sometimes graced Barnards English department as an adjunct associate professor, I'm delighted to welcome Katha Pollitt back to Barnard. Let's begin with Paula Edelbrock. Unknown Speaker 14:28 feel like we should join a reading group with some of the writings of people up here. Thank you very much, to President Shapiro and to Leslie Kalman for inviting me here to this conference. It's a conference I've known about for many, many years and have always been, I'm always relieved to find that there are institutions within feminism that still survive after so many years as as conferences and workshops and academic environments allow us to survive in our thinking in our in our work. So I guess I want to say initially, that the reason that there was a major homophobe Fest in Iowa in February, including the presidential candidates, the Republican presidential candidates who gathered at the urging of the Christian coalition to demonstrate their sincere desire to defend the institution of marriage, and their sincere desire to make sure that two people who love and care about one another shall never get married, if they are people of the same gender, that those kinds of exhibitions, I think, give me sometimes a little bit of hope. They give me hope, because they have to come out of the woodwork in order to respond to what is the inevitable. The inevitable, I think is a another shift, another historic shift in the very definition of family that has them very, very worried. And I want to focus on a couple of aspects of that shift. Not only does the issue of lesbian and gay marriage, foretell something of a shift, and you wouldn't have presidential Republican nominees out there talking about this, if they didn't fear that change was in the midst, and in fact, changes in the midst. But in fact, to me a much more important shift. And I think even a refocus and a going back to how family has always been defined, has occurred as well, in the last 15 or 20 years. I'm here to talk about these shifts, primarily from a lesbian and gay community perspective, and from the perspective of how we look at family how lesbians and gay men fit into this. Family Values debate and, and fear, I think, and how it is from a gay and lesbian community perspective, I would proceed forward on this. Unknown Speaker 17:08 lesbians and gay men like many, like many that Lesley mentioned, like many that Jews Shapiro mentioned, are one of the lightning rods in American society. Right now. We represent unbridled sexuality, we represent bad role modeling for children, we represent the possibilities that children could possibly grow up with to mothers, and without any man inside or identifiable. For those children. We represent, I think, a lot of people's fear, sometimes about family formation. And the very reason that family is formed, many of them are concerned about the fall of marriage. And indeed, though many of them go so far as to say there's going to be a fall of Western civilization as we know it, if gay and lesbian couples are allowed to marry. Now, you know, through all of this, you know, they have, you know, responded to a decision in Hawaii that was made back in 1993, for the very first time in United States judicial history. And certainly the very first time even in the world, a State High Court Supreme Court ruled that the laws banning same sex marriage have a constitutional flaw, and that they discriminate on the basis of sex, because a woman can marry a man but she cannot marry a woman, according to the Hawaii Supreme Court, constituting a constitutional flaw. Now, this decision has led to the most incredible reaction in state legislatures and in the US Congress. And in the midst of a presidential year, which I couldn't agree more is sort of bereft of any discussion of real issues. I mean, those debates were just a riot. You know, I was so glad I have to say in the town hall debate that a couple of gay people clearly snuck in there. And, you know, the President was clearly like, how did they get in here, when somebody stood up and asked about the employment non discrimination act? You know, these are totally devoid of any real discussion of the issues. But needless to say, Congress loves that kind of thing. And so what they did was to prepare against this onslaught of marriage. You know, mind you, the Supreme Court made an initial ruling, it will be a couple of years in Hawaii before we actually know whether the state of Hawaii will allow gay people to marry. What's the issue there? Well, under our federal constitutional system, we have something called Full Faith and Credit. And that means if you get married in the state of New York and you decide you and your spouse to travel to New Jersey for vacation, you do not need to get in your car, stop at the New Jersey border, remarry in order to be recognized and then continue on. Full Faith and Credit allows that the law Have one state shall be recognized by the laws of another state. Driver's Licenses are the same thing, all those things that you don't need to change or re register every time you travel from state to state. Well, the Congress in its infinite wisdom has decided that it was going to try to stop the border crossings of lesbians and gay men should marriage become available in Hawaii. Because inevitably, what it would mean is a bunch of New Yorkers and a bunch of people from New Jersey and everywhere else, the entire country is going to shift as people run to California to get on boats and planes and everything else to go to Hawaii to get married. And then they're all going to come back home. And the question is going to be what are all these states who didn't want to do this thing anyhow going to do with these marriages from Hawaii, these legal marriages from Hawaii, these are not fake marriages. These are not secondary. They were like real marriages. Unknown Speaker 20:52 And so states are beginning to put up the Border Patrol and passing laws by saying, No, we shall not recognize your legal marriages from another state if you're a same sex couple. Now, the Congress decided to do the same thing. They decided instead of going through what you know, is sort of timely and often unsuccessful process of actually amending the constitution appropriately. To do this, they decided to simply pass a statute amending the United States Constitution that would also allow the Border Patrol's to be put up by the states, and would also for the very first time the United States Congress, this bill passed, and the President signed it by the way in September. For the very first time the US government has defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Now federal government has always deferred to state government definitions of of marriage, for immigration purposes, for social security purposes, for all of the reasons that we look to marriage to define family. But what's more interesting about what happened in this is not even so much what they did, but who the some of the sponsors of these bills are now this bill in Congress was called the Defense of Marriage Act. Okay. Senator Kennedy calls it the defense of bigotry act. And this is why we like Senator Kennedy to still stay there in the US Senate. But Defense of Marriage Act now two of the congressional sponsors, one was Congressman bar from Georgia. Now Congressman bar has been married three times. So clearly as an interest in defending marriage. And as a colleague of mine questioned him on a national like crossfire show, she just leaned over and said to him, now, Congressman Barr, I'm confused exactly which of your three marriages are you defending with this law? Unknown Speaker 22:33 Another congressman, another congressional sponsor of this bill, the Defense of Marriage Act is actually under investigation, because he and his wife had been found lying about the actual date of their marriage. Why? Well, his wife had continued collecting veterans benefits on her dead husband from the federal government, which of course would terminate if her new marriage were revealed to the government. So these people who are defending marriage, you know, in order to keep to same sex, or same sex couples out of the club is, as Lesley would call it, have a bit of a hypocrisy problem on their own hand. But what I want to get to here, you know, so that's the bigger debate, I mean, the threat of gay marriage, the threat that gay and lesbian individuals might be able to have their relationships recognized by the government. And I want to just say before moving on to what my criticism of marriage is, that this comes from this desire comes from a very deep rooted sense in our cultural and legal history, that marriage really does form the ultimate badge of citizenship. How do we tell people in this country that they are full citizens, we allow them to marry, we did not allow slaves to marry. We did not allow people of color to marry white people until just 29 years ago, when the Supreme Court struck down that practice and Loving versus Virginia, we tell people that they are full citizens by allowing them to marry now much of the history of that is based on white supremacy. Much of the history is based on the fact that Africans in Americans in this country were not full citizens, even under the Constitution. But it is a very potent way in which we tell people that they have full rights in our society. And that forms the primary motivation among many lesbians and gay men to seek marriage above things like domestic partnerships and other efforts that the gay and lesbian community has undertaken to provide for the second motivation for marriage which is to get the benefits and the legal recognition, the hundreds, if not 1000s, of laws and policies that pepper our culture, that provide that if you fit a certain family form, then you can get the Social Security benefits you can be defined as family you can get the access to the hospital room, if your family member is ill, you can get health care better If it's from your employer, there are many, many economic fundamental economic benefits that are attached to the definition of family that uses marriage as a centerpiece. Now, I am something of a critic of seeking only marriage rights for a cup for many reasons. First of all, I really feel fundamentally that the problem with the way we provide social support and economic support to families in this country is not because gay and lesbian people cannot marry. But because our very vision of family our view of family is so narrowly constricted, that we don't even see the many families that are out there. And that from a social policy perspective, we should be advocating for changes in laws and changes in policies that provide support to family structures that actually exist. And that move us away from a morality driven, often religiously driven vision of family that takes one particular form. Now, many of you probably know that there is nothing particularly new or radical about this. In fact, this is the history of most cultures that looks at a broader view of family. In the post world war two era where we narrowed down into the Levittown kind of vision of nuclear family, we built smaller houses, so all that could fit in there would be the parents and the children. And of course, birth control became available eventually. So there were fewer children. And so we really needed smaller houses, no room for the grandparents, no room for the uncles, no room for the cousins, no room for the extended families that have always existed. That's a glitch of history that doesn't really reflect much of where we are in the society. And so the vision, supposedly, of our opponents of returning to traditional family values, is not one that goes back very far into our history. It is going back to a 40s and 50s model of family of nuclear family that was relatively unique, and that we have a much broader history and desire in our culture to see different kinds of families recognized. I was down at the New School on Thursday speaking lecturing in a class, they're taught by a writer named Eleanor Bader, who is a wonderful, progressive feminist teacher and writer in her own right. And she had warned me about these students, I was to talk about gay marriage, and she had warned me about her freshman and sophomore students at the new school that they were, you know, mostly these, you know, privileged, young, you know, people from the suburbs, or whatever. And she didn't know how they'd react to this stuff. When I started the discussion by, you know, asking all of them, well, who has a family? And they sort of looked like, you know, what are you talking about? You know, so they all raise their hands, of course, and I said, Well, who was in your family? And as we went through and defined, you know, we saw what Absolutely, if we were sitting in any room anywhere, particularly in New York City would be the composite of family. Two of the women in the class, had parents who had never married, one of them said they'd been together 26 years, their family, like what's the big deal, and they were stunned to find the vulnerability that their family would face should a real travesty arise. And I've speak as a lawyer because we always think of travesties that arise in people's lives if they were not legally recognized. And then the typical couple of students with step parents and you know, talking a little bit about how step parents you have no legal or biological relationship with step parents. So under the law, you really have a non relationship there. You know, one guy throughout the the dog was part of the family. And so we had an interesting discussion about what that meant, and what family meant and you know, caretaking and whatever, and, and it really was this composite, and I wanted to take these people on Larry King, you know, with, you know, Dole and Clinton there and say, These are the people we are talking about. And this is not some odd, you know, configuration here. But I think we sometimes get lost in that. And sometimes I find my frustration with the lesbian and gay movement is one in which we are looking at marriage as the panacea for homophobia as the cure all as that thing that will make us full citizens without recognizing what I think is our concurrent responsibility as a movement to contribute to the greater social vision of what a family is, and that our family structures have provided a very, very useful and potent way of challenging the definition of family, domestic partnership, this concept that recognizes unmarried relationships, it was something that basically was carved out and named and identified and advocated for by lesbians and gay men, predominantly, and initially in the workplace environment, when people started looking at these workplace policies, and seeing that gee, you know, My coworker who does the same job at the same pay and started the same day gets an extra pay check, that is health care for her husband and her children that I don't get for my partner and possibly my children. Why? Because the policy says only spouses only married employees are entitled to those kinds of benefits. So we began questioning those policies. And to say to them, Look, we cannot marry lesbians and gay men cannot marry. And furthermore, there are many unmarried heterosexual couples, employees and your workforce who are taking care of their partners and their families as well. Shouldn't our better social policy be to make sure that all people get health care, and that we not divide between those who are married and those who are not. And we took that effort into many different forums. Here in New York State, for instance, there was a challenge several years ago, to a rent control policy and involved in the gay couple who had lived in a rent control apartment for 10 years. The man who was the named tenant in the apartment died of HIV. His partner then was faced with an eviction notice from the landlord, the landlord said, the law says that only surviving family members can remain in rent controlled apartments after the death of the tenant. And the guy said, Well, I am a family member. We've lived here for 10 years, I'm his partner, we shared everything together. I'm family, we took that case all the way to the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, and one the Court of Appeals ruled that fictitious legal distinctions, which I can't believe the court would call marriage, a fictitious legal distinction, but they did. And I spread it around. That's what the Court of Appeals says, you know, should not make the difference between one who remains in a rent controlled apartment and one who does not, the court saw the injustice of throwing somebody out of their apartment based on the one factor that they were not married. This is the kind of struggle that I think many of us in the gay community are trying to continue, are trying to make sure has a voice outside of what I see as sort of the marriage hysteria, the kind of marriage will fix all marriage will do everything around family structures don't fit the marriage model. And we know that lesbians who are having children, with known donors who have some role in the child's life, but it's undefined, and we fight against a law that says you're either a father or You're not, there's no middle ground. There's no understanding that different parenting relationships exist in different kinds of families. And we're not the only ones. But our law recognizes only two parents, and only two parents of the opposite sex. Some of that is changing as well. We had a great victory here in New York and in several other states on an issue that we call Second parent adoption, a process whereby an unmarried partner may seek to adopt the child of the partner to in which they're living, you know, so if my partner has a biological child, and I'm helping to raise the child, I can go into court and seek what we call a second parent adoption. New York now allows that the big problem, the big obstacle was overcoming the presumption that only couples who are married should be allowed to have adoptions in those kinds of Ican those kinds of contexts. And in New York, the case involves both a lesbian couples seeking a second parent adoption, and an unmarried heterosexual couple who are raising the woman's child from a prior relationship. As a feminist and as somebody who struggles for a feminist voice in lesbian and gay advocacy, what I would put out and what I would hope for is much more of a joint effort among feminists to work on definition of family issues. To me, as I said, the issue of marriage should not be the sole definer of who a family is, we need to begin to look at how family structures really exist in our culture. What merit or demerit they have in different kinds of contexts. Finding some group of people, a family, for one context, like zoning laws or something doesn't mean all of a sudden, they have to be families for all contexts. But we need to, I think, to begin to reflect how women and children live and the choices that women sometimes make, because to me, the value of recognizing different family structures for women in general is very, very important. Many women who have been through divorce are not exactly wanting to enter into marriage anytime soon. But should they not build a family? Should they not build the support systems? How can they get the relationship that they may enter into recognized is still an open question. I know that there are many feminist scholars who have been quite reluctant, I think, to recognize or to really delve into this area, because there are many pitfalls. holes. Once we start opening definitions of families in very loose ways, I mean, there are all kinds of pitfalls we can find. But I do hope that out of gatherings like this and meetings like this, that those of us in the lesbian community who are working from a what we view as a feminist and more progressive vision have family that is not just centered on marriage can hook up with others who are concerned also about how we find more says respect for the choices women make with regard to family, thank you. Standards Unknown Speaker 35:43 sitters and standards today, and I'm going to be a standard for now. I want to talk today with you about actually share with you from a paper that I have done in connection in conjunction with Maxine Baca Zinn, who was mentioned earlier, the graduate student of mine at Maryland, Sandra Patton, on women race and family values. Unknown Speaker 36:15 Oh, sure, is that there's a way to do this. Is that better? Okay. I think this will work. We'll see. feminists have worked for the recognition of diverse forms of family and household arrangements. Yet, in the climate of backlash in the United States today, social critics lamenting the state of the American family often infer that feminism has been a major factor undermining the values that once had held families together and protected the interests of children. Feminism these critics suggest, emphasizes individual fulfillment and denigrates women's traditional role, thereby rupturing patterns of family life and caregiving, for which there are in the nature of things no substitute. As it is usually formulated, this argument includes two invariable features a fixed image of what constitutes a family and an equally static view of what feminism is. An example is the 1993 article by Barbara Defoe Whitehead in the Atlantic. With regard to family structure, she writes, the social arrangement that has proved most successful in ensuring the physical survival and promoting the social development of the child is the family unit of the biological mother and father. And to judge from the context this claim is presumed to hold true across time and across cultures. As for feminism, Miss Whitehead represents it exclusively as a movement which sought greater equality for women by steering them into the world of work outside the home, where their attainment of economic independence was expected to diminish the importance of marriage. In Gloria Steinem's memorable words Miss Whitehead writes, a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. With this gesture contemporary feminism in all, its diversity is reduced to a bumper sticker, just as family structure has been reduced to a single archetypal form dictated by biology. Well, in reality, however, we know that in the past two decades, a feminist thought present a complex and nuanced picture of the efforts of women, men and children to find personal satisfaction and to fulfill obligations within families. And though there is no single feminist perspective on families, it is fair to argue that feminism has been at the forefront of efforts to clarify our understanding of family life. Feminist thinkers as Barry Thorne points out have demonstrated that family forms are socially and historically constructed, not monolithic universals that exist for all times and all people, and that the social and legal arrangements governing family life are not the inevitable result of unambiguous differences between women and men. We have drawn attention to the contradictions within families between love and power between values of community and nurturance on the one hand, and self-realization on the other, and we have challenged society to move beyond the sense that individualism and community are polar opposites to create a synthesis in which both sets of needs are validated and often met. Thorne also points out that feminist thinkers and as activists have redefined housework as work and introduce such concepts as caring work to describe many of the unpaid and often unrecognized tasks that women perform for the benefit of others. Recently, and particularly in response to feminist scholarship by women of color, work that links gender and family to issues of race and ethnicity is increasing. However, however, even more of this work is needed in examining the family values debate, which, which has shifted from a general attack on feminism to a direct assault on poor single mothers and impoverished immigrants, particularly and most recently in the shape of welfare reform or as some of us prefer to call it welfare repeal. As several feminist scholars have pointed out, single mothers have been stereotyped and scapegoated for economic and social changes which are affecting families globally. However, drawing on a view of feminism as a form of female self indulgence and selfishness, the growth of poor single mother families is characterized by the right in personal and moral terms rather than in structural and economic ones. Unknown Speaker 41:23 The Association of poverty family structure and morality of course, is not new. According to Michael Katz. It accompanied the transition to capitalism and democracy in early 19th century America, justifying the mean spirited treatment of the poor and helping to ensure the supply of cheap labor in a market economy increasingly based on unbound wage labor. And as Mimi Abramovitz has pointed out, the has pointed out the rise of the market economy brought forward a new individualistic and moralistic explanation of poverty, which focused on the characteristics of the poor, locating the problem in the lack of labor discipline, lack of family discipline, and the provision of relief itself. The themes which Abramovitz and cats identify in the early 19th century arguments are represented again in the contemporary welfare reform discourse. Today, concerns about lack of labor discipline focus, primarily, but not exclusively at all upon men. For example, male unemployment is seen as the primary cause and its solution, the means of ending the rise of single mother families among low income black people. Women, on the other hand, bear the brunt of the critique for the lack of family discipline. The stereotypical image of the welfare queen who refuses to work and has babies, just so that she can get more resources from the state is the incentive for much of the widespread public support given to provisions in the Welfare Reform Act that seek to control women's fertility and reassert the values of proper family functioning and patriarchal governance over low income women. Placing these arguments in historical perspective illuminates how their emphasis on individual morality and personal choice masks the relationship between ideas and social structure. Let me elaborate briefly. Feminists are subject to criticism in part for our emphasis upon the social structure and the economy as producing diverse family forms. Those who argue for family values, on the other hand, are seen as emphasizing individual behaviors and personal responsibility. These latter arguments are constructed in such a way that social structure as a force which produces certain behaviors and reinforces certain values is essentially discredited and seen as part of a widespread failure of individual will have individuals to take responsibility for themselves. Yet, what the historical analysis shows is that these ideas are themselves social products, and that values are modified and even corrupted in their interaction with social structures. The emphasis then on personal values, masks the interests and needs of the state for a ready, willing and available workforce and for a patriarchal family structure which controls and directs the fertility, sexuality, child rearing and employment behavior of women. The interests of the state are only one of the things that have been subvert, masked in this way in the family value his argument, race is another. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham although it's less so than it used to be, it's but we can talk about that in the comments. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham uses the concept of meta language to describe the pervasiveness of race in social relations in the United States. Race, she says speaks about and lends meaning to a host of other terms and expressions to myriad aspects of life that would otherwise fall outside the referential domain of race. It blurs and disguises, suppresses and negates its own complex interplay with the very social relations it envelops. Unknown Speaker 45:49 feminist scholars have pointed out that race is encoded in the language of welfare repeal, and then the assault on single mothers families. It is both text and subtext in the family values discussion. The images of low income single mothers draw on long held stereotypes and controlling images of black women as breeders of Latinas as having too many children of both along with Native American Indians as bad mothers. While it is a classic process of scapegoating, the least powerful in times of economic crisis and social change, more than just stereotyping and scapegoating is at play here. And that's what I want to focus on for the remainder of my remarks. But first, I want to share just a brief biographical recollection with you. And I share it because it describes how my own racial consciousness and concerns were directed into Family Studies and Feminist scholarship some 25 years ago. But I share it now because it provides a frame for the questions I'm beginning to grapple with, and the ideas I want to share with you about them today. In the early 1970s, I decided to return to school to get a degree in sociology, because I wanted to find on to the characterizations, and misrepresentations of black families that were being put forth by people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his now infamous report the black family a case for national action. As part of that process, I became immersed in a literature that critiqued older normative definitions of family, and pointed out the ways family that did not conform to the white middle class ideal of a two parent nuclear household were ignored or stigmatized in popular discourse and scholarly writings at that time. Another major topic of discussion also at that time, and especially among black scholars, was a concern about being placed once again, in the position of reacting to attacks upon and distortions of our community, when many of us prefer to devote our energies to more proactive forms of scholarship. So when I began to prepare my remarks for this conference, with the subtitle a feminist response to Family Vet to the family values debate, I was struck by the deja vu potential of this experience. And this was striking me because despite contradictory data and compelling arguments over the years, the proponents of so called family values are successfully attempting to reassert the ideologies of the white, middle class, patriarchal family, and to use it once again as a measure against which all families should be judged. They have succeeded thus far in the new welfare repeal legislation. Well, given the fact that these ideologies and interpretations have reoccurred so quickly, in my own lifetime, I felt challenged to approach this discussion, not so much with new data and arguments to refute their perspectives, but instead to try to begin to understand the power and the appeal of these analyses. So this is some work that I am just beginning to do. And I hope you will indulge me a little bit as I share some of my insights with you in trying to answer a couple of questions. And the first question for me is to really examine what broader social narratives do these analyses tap into that make them so widely accepted and easily understood? And second, then what functions do they serve in our society? As I mentioned earlier, and And as I pointed out other feminist scholars, a number of whom are in this room this this morning, have pointed out, single mothers have been stereotyped and scapegoated for economic and social changes which are changing families globally. From the perspective of people on the right and in the center, from Charles Murray and Dan Quayle to Bill Clinton, Donna Shalala unfortunately, Patrick Moynihan, David Popa, no Jean l stain. Unknown Speaker 50:32 Barbara Defoe, Whitehead and others. The single parent family particularly as it arises from teen pregnancy, but not exclusively, is depicted as the scourge of contemporary society, the primary source of all social disruption and decay, the images of delinquency, crime, violence, abandonment, abuse, gangs, lack of love, freeloading, idleness and wanton an uncontrolled sexual appetites, which are all associated with single mothers on welfare are inscribed on the bodies of black women nationally, Hispanic women, especially on the west coast in the Mexican border states and Native American Indian women in the West. In fact, a major source of the power and appeal of welfare reform is its plan to discipline and control the behavior of black women, other women of color, and by example, quite women. But as I pointed out earlier, there is more than just stereotyping taking place here. These stereotypes exist are interpreted, understood and re inscribed within larger social and historic narratives. stories which reward good women, virgins and punish bad women hores stories which contrast good mothers, those who mother within the patriarchal structure of a white middle class nuclear family, with bad mothers, unmarried mothers, mothers who do not speak English mothers who reinforce and inculcate cultural values that conflict with the goals of capitalism and patriarchy, stories which contrast the deserving poor women, that is those who subscribe to the appropriate work and family ethics with the undeserving poor women. Those whose commitment to work is suspect and those who are members of subordinate racial groups. These narratives have a long history in US society. They are familiar and consistent with the dominant narrative of US history, and thus are easily re invoked. Old wine I mean, old bottles filled with not really new wine, but just a variety of old wines depending upon whatever is convenient in a given historical moment in a given region of the country, and in a particular social and economic issues or within the set of a particular social and economic issues. I want to briefly share two examples. Unknown Speaker 53:07 One, according to Victoria Bynum, it was common practice for courts in the antebellum south to remove children who were judged to be indigent, Ill raised illegitimate or a free black parentage from their parents and apprentice them in the homes of court court appointed masters, usually white men as contract labor. The rationale for removing these children was based upon the status of the mothers who were either poor and unmarried or free blacks. There were two issues of concern in these cases, and economic one that is to prevent these children from becoming Ward's of the state, and a social one, to regulate and control the behavior of women whose sexual and reproductive behavior occurred outside the realm of a family centered white, patriarchal social order. Because these women lacked either the protection or control of a white patriarch, their behavior was controlled by the state through the courts. A second example, in the conservative narrative, single parenthood is constructed as something associated with a general decline in morality since a nostalgic ly drawn mythic view of the 1950s. It is suggested that in the past, not just the 50s I think Newt Gingrich likes to talk about the Victorian era. single parenthood was discouraged by adherence to a strict moral code in which the nuclear family was the core, shotgun marriages and adoption worthy recognized responses to unexpected pregnancies. In reality, however, the social services available to pregnant single single women were strikingly dissimilar based on race. young white middle class women who got pregnant were typically sent to homes for unwed mothers, far away from their communities, where they were heavily counseled that giving up their children for adoption, and forgetting the experience was the only psychologically sound and acceptable thing to do. In contrast, African American women went virtually unserved in the child welfare system. During the 1950s African American women were excluded from most homes for unwed mothers on the basis of race, and there were very few all black homes. Because there were so many children of color in the foster care system waiting for adoptive homes. Black women were frequently turned away from adoption agencies, and pointed guests were towards welfare agencies. Thus, the stereotype of the black welfare mother was both drawn on and enforced by policies that limited African American women's access to social resources while maintaining the myth of white moral superiority. Well, if you look carefully at these two examples, and I'm sure you can come up with others and maybe even better ones, what you find is an interesting convergence of race and gender. Race is fundamental in each of these narratives. But the problems associated with racial deviance are extended to various groups of white women, specifically, white women who themselves deviate from socially approved norms of behavior. Drawing on these and other older narratives, single mothers today have been racialized. The taint of so called Black Family pathology has spread to white women. And that has increased the need to vilify this family form, and to reassert the superiority of the white middle class, patriarchal nuclear family. The racial dimensions of this agenda are barely encoded, as is clear in this quotation from Charles Murray's 1994 editorial, becoming white underclass where he says, As quoted in Judy Stasi, the brutal truth is that American society as a whole could survive when illegitimacy became epidemic within a comparatively small ethnic group. It cannot survive the same epidemic among whites. Unknown Speaker 58:07 I began my remarks by talking about the need for more in depth racial analysis on the part of feminist scholars. What I have tried to suggest in this brief analysis is that racialization and racial narratives underlie much of the attack on single mothers, as feminists our ability to address these issues and to provide alternative strategies strategies will be greatly enriched when we delve more deeply into and expose the meta language of race in the family values debate Thank you. Unknown Speaker 59:14 possibilities for humor here Unknown Speaker 59:30 I do have to stand because I am sick as you can probably hear, and standing will give me some energy I hope for this presentation and I apologize for the fact that I don't have my normal melodic tones today. Unknown Speaker 59:45 I, I want to talk about some of the concepts inherent in the family values debate and particularly the political aspect of it. Because of course, I believe in the power of words and concepts and the rhetoric about marriage and see Go motherhood has embedded in in a lot of assumptions that people hold. And although I'm going to be focusing mostly on some of the welfare discourse, what I have to say applies equally to the other production method of production producing single mothers and that is the institution of divorce. It seems to me that as a nation, this is one of our definitive moments. And we are making determinations about our social welfare system that have significant and widespread implications for the weakest and most defenseless Americans. It's widely understood that the safety net is being torn apart by the rhetoric of budget necessity, and professed American family values. Yet many of us feel powerless. We stand outside this debate. not complacent but paralyzed in disbelief as the our political leaders substitute market ideology for moral responsibility and sacrifice realities to symbol and myth and I put realities in quotes their academic and other researchers have produced a multitude of studies that question the premises behind solutions, such as putting a welfare mothers to work, and in studies that indicate that punitive measures designed to curtail reproduction, in fact, will not work. But these studies are not widely reported in the media, nor have they been persuasive to legislators. This particular set of reforms seems driven by ideology as uncomplicated by empirical studies, as it is resistant to appeals for caution and compromise in the name of compassion. There are powerful concepts at play in this discussion. Words such as dependency are thrown into discussions in order to cut off debate. There are rhetorical gauntlets, and they're understood as unambiguous and devastating challenges to the very idea of welfare. But dependency and analogous analogous stigmatizing words and phrases are not unambiguous misuse of such terms to neatly divide Americans into categories, such as the righteous, independent taxpayer, who is the owner of family values, and the quote, deviant undeserving dependent welfare recipient, who undermines those values, and threatens our very families persists. Such resort to stereotype should not be allowed to substitute, however, for a principal inquiry into what should be the nature and extent of state responsibility or collective responsibility for the economic and social well being of all citizens in this country. If we were to undertake that kind of inquiry, we would not be deluded about the things that unite us as human beings. And in my scholarship, I'm very interested in drawing bridges among communities. We should, for example, focus on the nature and extent of dependency and not be diluted by resort to simple solutions. In fact, I want to begin these remarks by talking about subsidy. And this has been mentioned a little bit already. But I want to pick up on the idea of the notion that we all are all are recipients of subsidy. The fact of subsidy is for families and other institutions is not remarkable. But the relevant question or important question is why we stigmatize some subsidies, but not others. Also relevant or relevant, perhaps to this inquiry is the role that the mythical idealized family performs in our society, in facilitating the myth of independence and self sufficiency, the need for no subsidy. This family serves on an ideological level as the alternative to the collective responsibility for dependencies. This family which is hierarchical and patriarchal is an abstraction which is central to the creation and maintenance of our unequal and unjust system of allocation of societal resources. So to me the place to begin a discussion about welfare, child poverty, reform and justice, is with the observation that we are all dependent on public subsidy in the United States. We all live subsidized lives. public subsidies come from the government in the form of direct assistance, such as the old aid to families with dependent children, but also in the form of indirect assistance in the form of tax exemptions, childcare deductions and other breaks for wage earning families. There are additional incentives or private subsidies that I think should be mentioned on taxed health care benefits and spending accounts for medical and childcare expenses. In through these things, workers Gain Compensation but do not pay taxes. And, and perhaps this is the most important thing that I want to mention in the context of subsidy within families, there is an entrenched but invisible type of subsidy. And this is the subsidy of uncompensated family labor. This labor, it seems to me has to be explicitly made a part of the public discussion about families and family values. It is a subsidy in that someone is providing time and energy at the cost of their individual economic well being. They're sacrificing market participation and career building skills. In order to undertake caretaking, caretaking work is taken for granted in this society. This labor which is overwhelmingly supplied by women working as mothers wives and daughters, is not considered in calculating the gross national product. The recipients of this type of subsidies, this invisible subsidy, who are incidentally husbands, parents, children, and ultimately the state are not taxed on the value they receive and do not consider themselves dependent on the donation of another's time and efforts. Significantly this labor substitutes for and relieves the necessity of collective responsibility for dependency in our society. In this discussion, it should be clear that I view dependency as both inevitable and universal. And in fact, in the neutral mother, I described different kinds of income tried to complicate the concept of dependency, which is what I'm going to do for just a minute or two now in the welfare debate, and in fact, in the debate about divorce and other areas, it becomes apparent that our society mythologize has concepts such as self sufficiency, independence and autonomy, and vilifies the concrete indications all around us with our poverty, that this idea is these ideals are unrealizable and not in realistic. And in fact, those members of society who manifest the realities of dependency because they're unable to retreat into the contrived social institutions such as the family are rendered deviant in political discourses, stigmatized and subjected to scorn for embodying the reality of dependency. I ask what would happen if we took this opportunity provided by the social crisis that we now find ourselves in the midst of took this opportunity to look at the dimensions of dependency, considering it as a complex, multifaceted and variable social phenomenon. And in doing this, undertaking this task, I want to assert that we begin with the recognition that dependency is inevitable and universal dependency is inevitable, and that it is associated with infancy and often accompanies old age, illness and many disabilities. And talking about inevitable dependency, therefore, is to characterize it as a natural part of all human experiences. dependency is universal and inevitable in our individual lives, and inherent in the human condition, we cannot remove it from society, all of us were dependent as children, and many of us will be dependent in the future either because of illness or age. In this sense, the dependency can be viewed as a biological concept or biologically based now in characterizing dependent, inevitable dependency in this way, I explicitly mean to exclude do not include psychological or economic dependencies as inevitable dependency. Although I realized that psychological and economic dependency might accompany the kind of biological category I'm drawing. If they are not, or I do not view them as inevitable, or universal and I want to limit the category, biological dependency or inevitable dependency is not considered at least hasn't been considered pathological in our society. And children are the most appealing example of biological dependence. They are the symbolic innocents who are perceived as having a legitimate claim to the resources of others, perhaps not to state resources, but to the resources of others. There's a near consensus in America that inevitable dependents are not to be punished, at least not directly. Although we seem willing to punish them in order to get to their mothers. Unknown Speaker 1:09:28 You could characterize inevitable dependence as the deserving poor. However, it seems to me there's a problem if we're willing to concede that inevitable dependents are deserving and have legitimate claims on resources. To whom may they turn or must they turn? And this question raises theoretical problems associated with the consequences of inevitable dependencies. caretakers are those who care for inevitable or biologic, biological dependence are themselves often different. And then on the resources of others to be able to provide that care. I call that type of dependency which is a second type of dependency, derivative dependency. This is the need for resources. There is no societal consensus that derivative dependence has dependents have a legitimate claim to social resources. And in fact, in the context of the welfare debates and the family value debates, and the attention that's directed to the increased rate of single motherhood, our society has explicitly rejected the notion that caretaking supplies a justification for the allocation of social resources. So dependent a derivative dependents are not viewed as a warranting of social resources. Yet, it seems to me to be a simple and irrefutable observation that caretakers need resources to perform their caretaking function, and that they're often dependent on others as a result of caretaking this derivative dependency is socially produced, defined and assigned in our society to the private family. dependency is privatized and we have foregoing the opportunity to articulate the notion of collective responsibility for children and other dependents. Our ideology of independence and autonomy funnels, derivative dependency and inevitable dependency also away from the state to the private nuclear family. This is a particular concern of course for feminists because in our society derivative dependency will not universal or inevitable is of course gendered. Caretakers within as well as well as without the family are typically women. Women are socially assigned their caretaking roles as wives and mothers and daughters within families. And they are overwhelmingly found in caretaking positions as the quote hired help receiving low wages and typically no social security or other benefits. Outside of the family. Women are societal caretakers, with the within the uncompensated sphere of the private family to continue to consider dependency a private matter and not compensate caretakers is then an injustice that has serious implications for all women and children. On a philosophical level, one could ask in what sense is the assignment of the burdens of inevitable and derivative dependencies to women? Just in what sense if this just at a minimum, if dependency is inevitable, and there is a larger societal societal obligation to care for dependents, then we must value caretaking and reward caretakers. Provisions for justly sharing our collective responsibility for the dependent and weak should not be the basis of the politicians Contract with America. The mean spirited measures that we've seen enacted into recent legislation. As an economic policy I note that fulfilling a societal obligation in a just manner caring for dependents would of necessity have some redistributive or market correcting consequences. If those who currently care for inevitable dependents at substantial cost to themselves were finally compensated, economic resources would be reallocated. Most of the movement would come would be from those who occupy stereotypical male or market positions to those who perform stereotypical female or caretaking roles. But it seems to me that there would also be significant significant implications for the existing economic disparity between the white community and communities of color on a rhetorical and political level. Instead of looking at dependency as natural and inevitable, and constructing just policies around it. Our policymakers and politicians resort to the rhetoric of failed institutions, such as traditional marriage, they also rely on the market to provide opportunities for maternal work. The solution that's most often offered for inevitable and derivative dependency, as was mentioned earlier, seems to be marriage, get married, stay married, if there's a refusal or an inability to marry the establishment of male economic responsibility through paternity proceedings and child support, as long as is offered as a backup. Maternal work, of course serves as a kind of failsafe measure. These solutions it seemed to me illustrate the way that myth has overtaken reality and contemporary policy debates in the welfare concern. It further illustrates why it is that women who deviate from the two parent family norm may be subjected to such stinging criticism and punished when possible through the deprivation of social support. A lot is at stake in this particular debate. Unknown Speaker 1:14:51 I assert in my work, although I won't go into it in a lot of detail now. The many ways in which it seems to me the evidence is overwhelming that matters. Rage as a policy as a social policy is a failure. And in fact, at the end of the neuter mother, I recommend that we abolish marriage as a legal category. Although, you know, thank you. Unknown Speaker 1:15:13 Although, as I always, always like to say, and perhaps I don't have to say it to this audience, abolishing marriage isn't legal category I do, because it seems as long as it operates as an institution with serious economic implications as it as it does have, that it's going to be used as social policy. But that means you can still get married in the field or you know, like exchange daisies, and you can still have, I mean, all of that. So I don't want take away marriage, I just want to make it have no legal consequences whatsoever. Anyway, I don't want to document all the ways, especially you, because I'm sure that most of you know the way that marriage has failed, its failed on an ideological level. It's failed on an institutional level, it's failed on an economic level. And it's probably failed on other levels that I'm not going to get into. But marriage nonetheless survives and flourishes in our political rhetoric. It seems to me that what's important in tackling the notion of family values and the policies that it produces, it produces the is that we must confront some of these assumptions about dependency and other things, we must confront the fact that substantial injustice is perpetuated when family policy is fashioned and formulated on myths and symbols that are no longer valid as an empirical matter, or are no longer desirable to many citizens on an ideological level. Policies that rely on the traditional nuclear family and marriage as the means to escape poverty and provide for inevitable and derivative dependency are wrong, they won't work. But even more importantly, they're wrong because they foster the assumption and maintain the assumption that the maintenance of intimacy that everything from contraception to responsibility for the day to day care of children is primarily a private task. The norm of marriage and the dominant idea of ideology surrounding that institution, obscures the nature and extent of dependency in American society. The idea idea and idealization of marriage in the family masked dependency and hides the costs of caretaking, it seems apparent that more than mere money or concern with poverty is that issue in the family policy debate. And this, incidentally, is why all of us all women and men who are concerned about these issues, must care about this, these debates. The real concern for many politicians is the imposition of their own morality, which entails the prevention of unmarried women having children and the curtailment of divorce. And these are parallel and complementary policies. The attacks on AFDC mothers are attacks on women who are unsupervised met by men in their intimate reproductive family lives. divorced women are also targets of marriage rhetoric as our middle class women who are not mothers. Women who choose abortion or birth control overbearing children also operate outside conventional morality and are attacked as a result. One burning desire that emerges in the family values debate is the need to discipline those women who do not conform to roles associated with a traditional family, but rather live outside of the hierarchical patriarchal family. The message is that responsible reproduction indeed responsible sexuality occurs only within the context of the traditional family. This is why in constructing the problems presented by as well as the solutions for the never married mother and the divorced mother, the physical absence of the male is considered central male presence in the form of economic support, accompanied by rights over children introduces discipline and control and makes the family complete in some mystical way. He is the social policy, the universal answer the means offered for resolving the problems of poverty and despair. It should be clear that the current form of the debate about single moms welfare and work is not about real reforms. It's not even about real problems, as we've already heard, expressed through potent symbols. The debates are really about gender, race and disciplining women who failed to confine themselves to the patriarchal family. Like the war on drugs. The War on Poverty, now recast as the war on welfare and the war on women has underlying passion has the underlying passion of a moral crusade, anger and accusation proclaiming the existence and extent of the evil evidenced by the deviation from traditional family norms. The noose tightens, as women and children are misperceived as appropriate targets of our fury and not as the victims of misguided social policies and the scapegoat One of the blind failings of our politicians, what we need is a rhetoric to address the that kind of moral passion. And I think we're just in the beginning stages of developing it. Thank you Unknown Speaker 1:20:19 Thank you. I think we're gonna take a 10 minute break. There are bathrooms in the back of the room and some fine Barnard women wearing goddess T shirts to point you the way there is coffee and tea and it looks like some muffins on either side of the room. Why don't we reconvene in 10 minutes for Katha Paulette, and for questions for our panelists.