Interview with Bernice Sandler

Sandler, Bernice Resnick ; McKiernan, Stephen

Bernice Sandler is an educator, consultant, and women's rights activist, best known for being instrumental in the creation of Title IX. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work on women’s rights and was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame And the National Women's Hall of Fame. Dr. Sandler currently acts as a Senior Scholar at the Women’s Research and Education Institute in Washington, DC Sandler received her Master's degree of Clinical and School Psychology from the City College of New York and her Ed.D. from the University of Maryland in Counseling and Personnel Services.

2010-10-12

In copyright

2018-03-29

McKiernan Interviews

191:46

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Bernice Sandler
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 12 October 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:04):
Testing one, two. I got two of these. And this is my better one.

BS (00:00:09):
Okay.

SM (00:00:11):
I have to check on them to make sure the better-

BS (00:00:13):
They should be in different places when you get one.

SM (00:00:14):
Yep.

BS (00:00:14):
Because-

SM (00:00:18):
I think the last 50 I have made two copies.

BS (00:00:20):
Two copies, yeah. Well, that is a good start, but you have got to get them digitalized. Okay.

SM (00:00:26):
Here we go. My first question is, could you tell me a little bit about your growing up years? Who were your role models? Did you have female role models when you were a lot younger? Or men who you admired, who treated women properly when you were younger? Like your high school years and-

BS (00:00:49):
Yeah. I grew up during the depression. I was a young child during the depression, so there was not a lot of money. My mother and her whole family are very strong people. I mean, people who know me are always surprised when I say I was known in the extended family of my mother's as the shy, quiet, passive one.

SM (00:01:10):
Oh wow.

BS (00:01:11):
And grew up with that image, which I did not get rid of until by the end of my undergraduate education. I was beginning to think maybe that was not what I was, but comparatively that is what I was. So there were lots of strong women and strong men, and my mother was a good role model. She did some work during the depression, but was always ambivalent about work because you only worked if your husband did not have enough money. And that was true during the depression. There was not enough money. So she was ambivalent about working, but she liked working. And she had worked before she was married. And one day when she was older, she really threw me a loop. We were talking about, I do not know what, and she said if she had to do it over, she would have been a stockbroker. And I was just so surprised. And she was a very bright woman, one of the first in her family to finish high school. But my parents knew I was going to college before I did. I knew I was going to college before I knew what high school was. I mean, I was identified as a very bright child and sometimes in families, one kid's the bright kid, one kid's a pretty kid.

SM (00:02:22):
And that is in Brooklyn?

BS (00:02:24):
This is in Brooklyn? Flatbush, New York.

SM (00:02:26):
Yeah.

BS (00:02:27):
Yeah. Fairly good school systems. And went to a very good high school, Erasmus Hall High School, which in those days was producing one of the highest amounts of PhDs from high schools other than Bronx High School of Science, and I think in Brooklyn Tech. So it was a really good school academically. So I mean, I just knew I was going to college. This was not an option. And I finished high school at 16 and wanted to work, and my mother said, "No, you are going to college."

SM (00:02:52):
That is early.

BS (00:02:54):
And yeah, well, they did that in New York. If you were smart, they would skip. I mean, scads of people skipped that were my age when I graduated. You skipped where there were rapid classes. You could take rapid advanced classes and whatnot. My father was always very respectful towards women. It was a different time though, and he certainly did not do any of the housework or help in any substantial ways. But he was certainly respectful of women. He was not power driven in his relationships with women.

SM (00:03:28):
Did your teachers treat you differently than they treated the male students? Because in other words, during that period in the forties and (19)50s and early (19)60s, a lot of women became teachers and they were secretaries and librarians.

BS (00:03:46):
Yes, I was a secretary after I had my master's degree. I had a master's degree in clinical psychology and worked as a secretary twice.

SM (00:03:57):
But were there people that did not seem... You have been very outspoken about that, that men were really pushed and women were not in those times?

BS (00:04:10):
Absolutely.

SM (00:04:11):
Particularly after World War II.

BS (00:04:15):
Yeah. Let me just go back.

SM (00:04:19):
I would just check these. You can go ahead-

BS (00:04:19):
If it is working. I would hate to do the whole interview with-

SM (00:04:24):
Well, I got two of them. That is helpful too.

BS (00:04:30):
Yeah. We did not have a word for discrimination or differential treatment. This is just the way it was. It is only as an adult as we have developed the use of the word sex discrimination that I and lots of women look back and say, "oh my God, I never noticed that." For example, there were three things I wanted to do as a child in school, and I never got to do them. And one was I wanted to be the crossing guard, only in my school-

SM (00:04:56):
Oh yeah.

BS (00:04:57):
Only boys could be the crossing guards. And what I did not realize is I ran for a few years before my knees gave out is one of the first things I bought was a red sash for night running, which I did not really need, but it is what future forcing guards wore. Not when I was wanting to be one, but that is what they wore like now. And I bought this fashion and I loved wearing it when I ran. And I did not make that connection.

SM (00:05:23):
Now was this the mid (19)50s or late (19)50s?

BS (00:05:25):
I was running in the (19)70s.

SM (00:05:27):
Okay.

BS (00:05:28):
Yeah. I also wanted to run the slide projector. This was the big audiovisual technology of the day. And only boys were allowed to do it. And one of the-

SM (00:05:39):
But the school would only allow boys to do it?

BS (00:05:41):
The teachers would only call on boys to do it because they are smarter with mechanical things. I guess just boys did it. I mean, you did not ask. This is the way life was.

SM (00:05:49):
Right.

BS (00:05:51):
It is like the sun is shining. You do not say, "why is the sun shining?" It just is kind of thing. And again, I did something and I did not realize it. One of the first things I did when I started making money was buying my own slide projector and screen. And the third one is the boys. This is in the time of inkwells, and not everybody will know what an inkwell is, but it is before ball point pens and your desk got a little hole in it. And this little tiny-

SM (00:06:18):
I remember that.

BS (00:06:19):
Inkwell fit in there, and someone had to put ink in the inkwell for you. And only boys could do that. They could get to go to the basement of the school, which was off limits. I mean, I never saw the basement in that school. Only boys got to do it. They would go downstairs. They would fill a big bottle up with ink, and then they would pour the ink into everybody's inkwell. And I remember I wanted to do that. I wanted to see what the basement looked like. And I knew I could pour as well as anybody else. But you had no word for it. So this is the way it is.

SM (00:06:49):
And this is the way... When you are talking about the boomer generation, those born from 1946 to 1964, in elementary school, they all had that-

BS (00:07:01):
They had similar experiences.

SM (00:07:03):
Mm-hmm.

BS (00:07:04):
They had similar experiences. My daughter, this would have been in the early (19)60s in Ann Arbor, was in first grade and was bored stiff because she had already learned to read. And I complained to the teacher. I said, "She is really coming home and saying she is bored." And the teacher says, "What are you worried about? She is only going to get married." So these are coming. And if you do not have a word for it, you do not say that is discrimination against girls. You say that is a stupid teacher. Even if she is married, you still want her to learn and be intelligent. So you have no word for it until the women's movement begins in the early (19)60s. But I had not noticed that, and this would have been in the early (19)60s, just as the women's movement is beginning. So these things happened to girls. When I went to school during the World War II in high school, everybody had to take a war course. Some sort of course related to the war. Because it is a big war. And you probably will be working after high school or college. Who knows if the war will be finished. And so I got to take physics. Otherwise, I never would have taken physics. Now, I did not understand very much of a course. And the teacher did not teach it very well. All the girls got A's. I did not deserve an A. It is the only A that was ever undeserved. But I got an A. I did not understand most of it except about leathers, which I found interesting. But we were such outsiders in the class that the teacher treated us differently. The teacher, the guy, did not expect us to know physics.

SM (00:08:45):
Is not it interesting? This is a question later on, but I will say it now. But when you think of the 1950s and being in elementary school, and then the front edge boomer started junior high school in 1959 and 1960, that was when they started seventh grade. Here you have this situation that women have been kind of not treated properly or discriminating in the areas of science, math, and technology. Yet most of the teachers that were in elementary school, I do not ever remember a male teacher. I do not know but our whole elementary school had nothing but female teacher.

BS (00:09:31):
We had one male science teacher. When you think of the message that this gives to boys and girls, only boys, males, do science. In high school, some of the science and math teachers were in economics. There were not as many women, but there were a good number of women. It was the depression ending. And many men went into teaching, at least in New York City because it was a well-paying job if you could get one. And you got tenure. You know, did not get fired so fast. So you had a lot of very bright people who were teaching. And you had more men probably at that time because of the depression. I have not thought of that to just now, but that makes sense. And I did have some brilliant teachers. I mean, I knew they were brilliant because they was so much smarter than anybody else I had ever met in my life.

SM (00:10:15):
What about the female teachers of the 1950s? I remember I went to Utica. I lived in Utica. I remember Cortland State was sending out teachers galore.

BS (00:10:25):
Yeah.

SM (00:10:26):
SUNY Cortland.

BS (00:10:27):
It was a teachers college.

SM (00:10:27):
Yeah, it is a teacher's college. They were sending them out. And I can remember I went to partner school in Cortland for a little while. And it was all females. No men. But the men were in the administration.

BS (00:10:38):
Yes. Yeah.

SM (00:10:38):
Dr. Silverman ran the school. But I found it interesting where elementary school female teachers told to not inspire their female students here-

BS (00:10:48):
No-no-no. You did not have to tell anybody.

SM (00:10:50):
Okay.

BS (00:10:51):
You did not have to tell anybody. Everybody knows girls grow up to be married and they had better be married or they will have a terrible life. They will be spinsters. And the best thing is marry somebody who makes a good living.

SM (00:11:03):
Right.

BS (00:11:03):
Because one, you do not have to work. Because you might lose your husband through divorce or death and have to work. But nobody talks about that.

SM (00:11:10):
Right.

BS (00:11:12):
But this is what is in the air. This is what you breathe. You go to the movies and that is what you see with the exception of Catharine Hepburn. And every young girl like me growing up adored Catharine Hepburn. We do not know what and we did not realize why, but she was doing interesting stuff. We could go back and see those pictures. There is a good deal of ambivalence in her roles. And she tries to make her husband happy by cooking. And she does not do that and whatnot. So you could see she was damaged because she has been working. She does not even know how to cook. I mean, there is a very mixed message that you get there.

SM (00:11:48):
You received your PhD at the University of Maryland in 1969.

BS (00:11:53):
Yeah. It is an EdD.

SM (00:11:54):
Yeah.

BS (00:11:54):
Not a PhD.

SM (00:11:55):
What were the years you were an undergrad at Brooklyn College and then in your master's program at CUNY?

BS (00:12:03):
Yeah.

SM (00:12:03):
What were they like with respect to women in society and the inequities of women that may have been faced after World War II? What was it like even at Maryland in 1969?

BS (00:12:14):
Well, there were lots of things that happened. I know a lot about Maryland because I was there and I got elected to the Alumni Hall of Fame a few months ago.

SM (00:12:25):
Congratulations. I saw that back.

BS (00:12:28):
Yes. And I did two classes yesterday for them. And so I have done a lot of thinking and reminded myself of some of the experiences. So I will start with the University of Maryland. Because this is my doctoral works. And this is most recent from either 1964 or 1965. I am not sure when I started and I finished in 1969. The first thing that happened is I applied for admissions to the psych department because that is my real field that I started with. And I cannot get to talk to any professor. Nobody will talk to me at all. And this is a small department. I cannot get anybody to talk. So I do not know what is going on. It is very unusual, I think, because usually you can call and say, "Can I speak to one of the professors to ask about the program and what it is like?" Secretaries would not let me do that. Fortunately, I go to a party and the head of the admissions committee is there. So we now have something in common. And I start to talk to him. I said, "I have been applying and I have not been able to talk to anybody." And he explains it. He says, " well, we do not take too many women, especially older women." I am in my thirties, my late thirties at this point. And so again, I think this is weird. You do not have a name for it. You do not have a name. You do not see a pattern. Just what are they saying there? So I have this big conversation about him and I asked him who his best students were? Because I thought this out earlier. And he says, "the veterans." I said, "Well, I am like the veterans. I have been out for a while taking care of my kids. And I am highly motivated just like the veterans." So I sell him essentially, and he lets me in. Okay. He was right. They do not have too many women. There were about 20 men and about five women in that accepted group. So that is the first thing that happens. Second thing that happens is I do not like this department. Because it is mostly animal psychology. The few women that I know that are there in that department, we joke. I remember this is we are standing in the hallway near the lady's room and one of us, I do not remember who says, "One day we are going to come to this building and the lady's room is going to be gone." That is a joke. Now, we did not have a name for what we were sensing. We were sensing, and we did not talk about experiences, but we just knew that this place was not good on women. So I transferred over to the psych department, to the counseling department, which is a much more hospitable place to women. At least half the students are women. And they do not have any trouble accepting me at all, except a number of things happened. My advisor says in class, he says, "Women should not be professionals." Now he is teaching graduate courses.

SM (00:15:17):
What year is this?

BS (00:15:18):
This would have been 1966.

SM (00:15:19):
Unbelievable.

BS (00:15:19):
1965. Not unbelievable. Not unbelievable.

SM (00:15:24):
Well, I know. But I know it was happening with all the movements at that time.

BS (00:15:31):
And people realize that something is wrong. Well, he is realizing there is something wrong with the movements because women should not be professionals. He says this in a class half full of women who are going there for their master's or doctoral degrees. Do you think anybody challenged him? Of course not. Somebody said, "well, why not?" And he said, "Because doctors would be able to put their profession first and their family second." And any other thing that women would be in, they would put their family first and therefore they should not be professionals.

SM (00:16:03):
It is kind of like what Phyllis Schack was thinking, yeah.

BS (00:16:05):
Yeah, okay. But he was in the department. He has got a doctorate. He went to Case Western Reserve, which is a good school. He has got his credential and he says things like that. So that is not so good. I decided conflict, he was my advisor. So I have to go to him with a thesis subject and ask if I can develop a plan to do a thesis on my subject. So I raised the subject. I am thinking young women make vocational decisions later than young men, partly because I do not know if this is still true. It was true then partly because they did not know if they would get married and where they would be and what they would be doing. So they push those, maybe I will get married next week. And people get married in college, whatever. And even in high school in those days. And so I thought, and I say, "I would really like to do some work in this area." And I tell him what I am interested in. And he looks at me with a shocked, stunned expression. And he says, "research on women. That is not real research. No. Find another topic." End of conversation. Now that is pretty harsh. Did I call it discrimination? No. I paid him. Nutty guy. I did not even make the connection between the two remarks about women should not be professionals. So that happened. And then I get my degree, and I am teaching. I have been teaching in the department for a while, and the department has a big expansion. And they do not even consider me. And they are hiring new doctoral people who just got their doctorate when I did, but they do not even think of it. So I go and I ask one of the professors I am friendly with and I say, "Hey, you know what? What is going on here? How come they did not even think of me?" And I know I am a good teacher and all of that. And he says and he meant it as a nice, I mean, he was not angry or sarcastic. And he says, "Let us face it, Money. You come on too strong for a woman." Too strong for a woman. I go home and I cry. Never should have participated in my classes, never should have opened my mouth. And then husband was really very good on this issue. And he said, "Are there strong men in the department?" I said, "Yeah, all the guys are strong." He said, "Then it is not you. It is discrimination."

SM (00:18:32):
Wow.

BS (00:18:32):
Discrimination. I am not even sure I believe this, but I was fortunate. I had two more bad experiences within the next two or three months. One was, let me finish this part. Okay, we can go back. One was, I went to an interview for a research position, which I was well qualified for. And the guy spent the entire hour not talking about my qualifications or what I would be doing, but why he did not want to hire women with children. And I am saying, "This is logical." I am saying, "But my kids are in high school." He said, "Yeah, but women want to stay home when their kids are sick." I said, "I have healthy kids. I do not stay home if they have a cold." I do not stay home for that. And the whole interview was around this. So well, I saw this was something wrong. At least it did not look logical. And then I had another experience where I went to an employment agency and the guy looks at my application, he says, "Oh, you are not a professional. You are a housewife who went back to school." This was the doctorate kind of thing. So the three things really got me thinking. And at that point I got interested, but I had never put all those other things together. There was another incident at Maryland, which I thought of recently. Oh, because I was talking to them and I was relating it, and I cannot remember, maybe it will come to me. But there was a third incident on women's issues. Well, there were no women in the department but one. And years later, I realized they would have one woman come for two years or three years, would not give her a tenure and she would leave. She would leave if you do not get tenure, then they would hire another woman. So the other thing, this was interesting, and I did not figure this out so much later, is the graduating class for the doctorate had about five men, and I think six women. Very close, something like that. And all of the men got offers from all over the country to teach in various places. And I cannot figure this out for anything. So how did people know that this guy is graduating? Well now when I think about it, I know what happened. Either the guy went to one of the professors and said, "Do you know of any job openings? I am looking, anyone I should write to or contact?" Or professor heard of a job and said, "Hey, Jim-"

SM (00:21:04):
Recommended him.

BS (00:21:06):
"I got a job for you. You got to call this guy right away." So another thing happened, and I mean, I had never seen the pattern. This is what is so interesting.

SM (00:21:13):
Everything is coming together.

BS (00:21:16):
If you do not have a word for it, each thing is an individual experience. There is a really nice fellowship that they give in this department for people who want to teach. And that is what I want to do is be a college professor. So I will apply for it and I do not get it. So I give it to one of the guys I know, and I know enough about graduate school where I know if you do not get some of the goodies, you better ask because they may not want you to get a degree. And if that is where I am, then I need to know this now rather than spending all my time and money on it. So I ask again, one of the professors that I like, and I say, "I am just curious why it went to Gary rather than to me." It is like, do I do something wrong or whatever, however I put it. And he says, "Oh, no. No." He says, "We did give it to Gary because he is married" and I stupidly say, "I am married too." I did not even get the message. The message is that Gary supports a wife and therefore needs this money. I am married, so therefore I do not need it. This is the reasoning that is going on. Now, if they were doing it on the basis of need, and I did not figure this out till much later. Once they to do it on the basis of need, then they should ask. There is nothing in the grant criteria that says put in something about whether you need the money and how much money you make and whatnot. So they do not know how much money my husband makes or whether we owe money or are supporting older parent. They have no idea. And similarly with Gary, they do not know whether his wife even works or if he needs the money. Maybe he came from a rich family. I mean, I do not know. But they never asked. But that was the unridden criteria.

SM (00:22:52):
The assumptions.

BS (00:22:53):
The assumptions, yeah. Yeah. So this is pervasive. This is throughout the whole culture. It is there and nobody is noticing it. When Betty Ford's book comes out, she is not talking about discrimination incidentally, she is talking about unhappy middle-class housewife housewives. And she was absolutely right to identify that group. And she never mentions the word discrimination in her book. I went back and reread it to find out. But what she does is she gives women permission to complain about the state of being a woman, that being a housewife is not so fulfilling as the myth was. And so that becomes very important to a lot of people. Now she is not the beginning of the women's movement. Women's movement begins much earlier. And I do not know if President Kennedy appointed a commission on women in 1960.

SM (00:23:46):
And I know you were involved with Lyn and Johnson's and is-

BS (00:23:51):
I am not involved with that commission.

SM (00:23:54):
But not yet. But you were on the-

BS (00:23:57):
Later I was on John Ford and Carter. That is the National Advisory Council on Women's Educational Programs. That is later. But this early stuff, when things happen like this to you, you do not have a word and you do not make connections. You do not say, "Ah, this is just what happened before." Some people do make the connection, and some of those are very angry people. Some of them are bitter. Some of them have worked alongside men and seen incompetence. People go up ahead of them and they at least see the discrimination. But the other thing that has struck me, and this is with the group of people you are talking about. The younger people is because you look at women in college now. They do not see any discrimination. All the problems are solved, and they get out into the work world and they are in their thirties or forties. They begin to notice the guys they went to school with are doing a lot better than they are. Even if they do not have any children. The guys tend to be doing better. I mean, the women are still not making the money, but they do not notice this when they are in college. And why do not they notice it in college? Because this is the last meritocracy they will be in. This is the last bastion of equality for girls. This is the closest for girls and young women school. This is the closest they will ever come to equality now. It is all downhill when they leave. Now they do not believe this and they have not heard it that way. And maybe someday, if I get the idea up, I will write an article about this, but college is a meritocracy. You write a good paper. If you are an A student, you may get a B if the teacher's not as fair as you think, but she is not going to give you an F or a D. And similar, if you are a D student, they are not going to give you an A.

SM (00:25:48):
You should have seen the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer this two or three days ago. On Sunday's paper, it was about the fact that there are more female students than male students in college. And they went to 20 different schools in the Philadelphia area ranging from Lincoln University, which is an African American school.

BS (00:26:06):
I know that.

SM (00:26:06):
Which has very few, I think it is almost 70 percent women. And I know Delaware, they were really at the University of Delaware and they were at Penn and other schools. And it is like men are fewer than women. And of course a lot of men go to the military or choose vocational. But it is now becoming a concern to undergraduate universities because the women are saying, "If there is too many women at this school, I do not want to go to that school because I want to go to a school where there are more men."

BS (00:26:37):
Maybe. If they notice. They do not always know. They do not always know.

SM (00:26:37):
Yeah. And then guys would love to be in all kinds of-

BS (00:26:37):
That is right. They do not mind.

SM (00:26:42):
Yeah. But now the universities are worried that white men or that men are going to be-

BS (00:26:58):
Okay. Let me tell you what the story is. Because the American Council on Education has been following this. What is going on with guys that they are not going to college? It is not true for upper class or middle-class boys. Those young men are going to college and they are doing well in college. Many of them. And that is not where the problem is. The problem is primarily with poor working people and people of color. Those are the ones where the disparities between men and women are much greater. What are the reasons for this? Not sure. Not sure. One of them, one theory is that they can get better paying jobs after college. They do not need to go to college. There are good jobs in construction before the recession. There are good jobs in construction and in factories which pay well, and therefore they do not need it. Other possibilities, our culture is such that boys end up as a group with less better. That is not the word, less better. With less study skills. They are study skills like handing in your homework and doing it on time. Girls have much better study skills. That is why they get higher grades.

SM (00:28:14):
Yeah. I kind of broke it down here that, what was it like? I asked this to other people. Susan Brown Miller and others too. It is just not so much in higher education as just in society as a whole. When you look at that period, 1946 to 1960, I think you have described it perfectly.

BS (00:28:34):
Yeah. It is there and nobody notices it.

SM (00:28:34):
And then you get the 1961, Kennedy comes in. Then you get the 1961 to 1970. You have got the (19)60s, what was it? And then you got the 1971 to 1980 before Reagan comes in. And a lot of people say, "Well, some people told me there was more happening in the (19)70s than there was in the (19)60s."

BS (00:28:51):
There was a lot happening during that time.

SM (00:28:54):
So those two decades, where were boomer women?

BS (00:28:58):
The (19)60s, first of all, you have women working during World War II. Middle poor women have always worked incidentally. And when people say women should stay home and take care of their kids, they are not talking about poor women. They are talking about middle class women. But during World War II, middle class white women are working. You need them. You need them in the workforce. You really do not need these campaigns that they talk about, Rosie the Riveter kind of thing. Those women, they are quite happy to work. They are husbands are away or their boyfriends are away. It is adventuresome to work. You have more independence. You make money. So you do not have any trouble recruiting these women to work. And they are willing to do men's jobs, which always happens in the war. They do men's jobs. So that is what is happening in World War II. World War II ends. A lot of women are pushed out. The veterans are coming. They get tenure in a job. If they were working before the war, they get tenure for the whole war. So they have more tenure, more experience, more seniority. Tenure is not the right word.

SM (00:30:03):
What about the G.I. Bill though? The G.I. Bill was for World War II. Where were the women in the G.I. Bill?

BS (00:30:09):
Well, it covered women who were in the war, but that was a small quota. You did not have that many women, but those women got the G.I. Bill as well. But what happens with the G.I. Bill is you are keeping a lot of women out of college because you are letting all these guys in and there is a flood of them. People are putting beds and gymnasiums to let these guys in. I mean, they deserve it. They have fought in the war, and you should let them in. But at the same time, you are not going to have a drop of women go into colleges, and nobody cares about that. I remember trying to transfer from Brooklyn College to another college. My folks had made enough money during the war and they could afford to send me to a state college. And so a friend of mine had the same idea too. We both wanted to get away from home. We were teenagers, and so we applied to a whole bunch of state colleges. We only got applications from two. All the others said, "due to the influx of the G. I.'s, we do not accept transfer students anymore." And they also accepted lesser admissions.

SM (00:31:06):
Wow.

BS (00:31:06):
Yeah. I just realized that recently. Again, I have been teaching a course. So I have been going for-

SM (00:31:12):
There is a brand-new book on the G.I. Bill. It just came up.

BS (00:31:15):
Yeah, I heard about it. Absolutely.

SM (00:31:16):
I bought it and I got to read it.

BS (00:31:18):
Absolutely great. It made a whole bunch of guys who would not go to college. It put them into the middle class. And we should be doing that again, I think. But we are not with the new G.I. Bill is not as good as that one was in terms of paying for housing allowances and money to live on and so forth and so on. But anyway, what is happening after World War II? Some of the women are pushed out. Some of them liked working and remained in the workforce. And this is what in one sense, the discontent that women feel comes from the middle class. Women who are at home and the middle-class women who are working because now they begin to see the discrimination. ...working because now they begin to see the discrimination, now when someone says, "We are just not going to promote you, because you are a woman, now they, at least, begin to see it. It is also the time of the civil rights movement and for the first time, I think, people ... Many people understand what has been going on with race. They do not understand everything but they begin to see it somewhat differently, and you hear stories of, "They do not even hire Negroes" or, "I applied for a job and they said we do not hire colored folk." It does not take too much of a leap, if you are in the workforce, "Yeah, they told me I was a woman and they would not hire me." There is a connection here somewhere. Just like you had abolition as an entry into suffrage for many women, the civil rights movement does this for a lot of women, as they begin to say, "What is going on? Wait, there is a connection here."

SM (00:32:55):
Yeah, because the... From all the readings that I have done and people that I have spoken to in the interview process is that the sexism that was rampant, not only in society but also within the movement, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement.

BS (00:33:10):
And the civil rights movement. You have a lot of women [inaudible].

SM (00:33:13):
Yeah. Even gay and lesbian movement, they told me that that is rampant.

BS (00:33:18):
Yeah. Yeah. The civil rights movement is the only one that is going on at that point, and it does push... There are a number of things that push the civil rights movement, and one of these young women who were [inaudible] women's movement, the women's movements, there is one group of these people who are very active participants in anti-Vietnam demonstrations and in terms of civil rights activism. That is one group. The other group is the dissatisfied people from Betty Friedan, reading Betty Friedan's book.

SM (00:33:54):
Right. [inaudible].

BS (00:33:56):
That is another group. There is another whole group of people who are maybe professionals and/or working, not always professionals but they are seeing discrimination on the job and that is another group, and then there is a group of lawyers, very small, we are talking under 100 people, including later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg later, because she becomes a justice, I [inaudible] justice, she was there at the beginning, figuring out what cases to bring to the Supreme Court and change the laws. People who were interested in the laws and changing them are not quite the same people who were active in the civil rights movement. Now they may have been sympathetic, many of them were very sympathetic, but the activists who were down in the south, those are the younger women and some of them go back to law school, some of those women who started [inaudible], they go back to law school and they understand something about women's issues, and they are looking at things in these laws, and they are working on that. They are not always successful but they are working on it. Plus, there are some more members in the Congress, not a lot of women in the Congress but enough who will pass a law, who will push on a law to get a law changed or enacted, and that begins to make a difference. In the (19)70s, what you have is you have a bunch... You get the beginnings of some good Supreme Court decisions, some are not so good, but you begin to get more cases coming up in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court does not have any theory... I mean, there is so few cases on women in the history that... I do not know the new laws but, first, you get 1963, the Equal Pay Act, which does not apply to administrators, executives or professionals. This is the first civil rights employment act, and it is only for equal pay. That is (19)63. (19)64 comes a great big Civil Rights Act happens and what happens? It is all for Blacks, except for the employment section, which says race, color, national origin, and religion. Okay? That is how the bill is introduced. Okay? The National Women's Party, which you may never have heard of [inaudible]. Okay. The National... This is the Equal Rights Amendment. The National Women's Rights Party comes right out of the women's party, National Women's Party. Their offices are here in Washington and they have an old pre-Civil War mansion [inaudible].

SM (00:36:30):
Oh, wow.

BS (00:36:30):
Yeah. But Alice Paul, who heads that up, has been going to the Congress every year since 1923, and saying here is the equal rights amendment and would you introduce it? She never gets anybody to introduce it but she does get people who sponsor it. She sees VII of the Civil Rights Act, which says no discrimination on employment based on race, color, religion, national origin, and she sends a letter to every member of the Congress and, remember, this is before Xeroxes. You are talking 1963 probably, maybe (19)64. She sends saying, "White women and Christian women", and there is a little bit of racism here too, "Are not going to get hired. They do not have anyone to protect them." She says it better than I am saying it but, essentially, she is saying everybody is going to be protected in this bill except white women. Well, some of the women who were in the Congress, like Representative Martha Griffiths from Michigan, she realizes that what the National Women's Party is saying is absolutely right and she picks up on it, and she does. There is this thing where she says if an employment situation is all-white and a white woman wants to apply, they do not have to hire her, because she is not protected on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. But if an African American, I think she used the word Negro, at that point, we were still using [inaudible], "But if a Negro woman comes, she is protected. They cannot discriminate against her if she applies." But Howard Smith, senator from Virginia, who is shepherding this and doing stuff with the civil rights bill, he realized that... Are we okay?

SM (00:38:14):
Yeah. We are doing fine.

BS (00:38:15):
Okay. He realizes if he adds sex to this bill, nobody is going to vote for it, because, I mean, it is so silly to have something that is going to protect women in employment, that a lot of people will just say, "Ha-ha, we cannot have that happen" kind of thing, and so he, theoretically, he is the one who added sex and he admitted to Martha Griffiths, she says he told her years later that he put it in as a joke, because some people said maybe he really cared about women, because he always sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment. You have women in the Congress and you get sex discrimination into the employment bill, it exempts teachers, it exempts women faculty, and it exempts women students in the whole bill. It will only cover women, it will only cover in employment and teachers are not covered, anyone involved in education is not covered by VII of the civil rights act until much later. But this is the first major bill, you have two, Equal Rights Amendment and [inaudible]... Am I telling you more than you want to know?

SM (00:39:29):
Actually, no. This is good, because these are things that are happening when boomers are growing up, and so we are dealing with a lot of parents of the boomers, who you have been talking about, and the boomers...

BS (00:39:41):
Yeah. My kids knew what was going on. Yeah.

SM (00:39:43):
The boomers in the (19)50s, obviously, were seeing things either consciously or subconsciously between...

BS (00:39:48):
They are hearing things.

SM (00:39:49):
...between father and mother over a lot of issues, whether it be to go to work or childcare or all the other things that... Not everybody stayed at home. A lot of perceptions are that they did. A lot of them did not. I knew neighbors who were librarians, teachers.

BS (00:40:07):
Yes. Middle class white women were beginning to work.

SM (00:40:09):
Secretaries at banks and things like that but a lot of them were living at home.

BS (00:40:15):
Yeah. A lot of them were living at home and a lot of people who went to work would justify it as I need to save money for my kids or I have a sick kid, so I have to work, or whatever. They had a reason. There were few that said, "I just would love being at work" because you are not supposed to like it that much. Some did say it. At any rate, in the (19)60s, you begin to get legislation and this one is important, because employment is important and the government does not do very much about it but people from inside the government and people outside the government are putting pressure on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to do what the law says that it should do is to look at sex discrimination as well as the other kinds. A good friend of mine, Sonia Fuentes, Sonia Pressman Fuentes, worked inside the commission. She was there I think their first- or second-woman attorney, and she presses very hard, and eventually, they do have to look at sex discrimination. They are getting a lot of complaints from women on sex discrimination. The other thing that is happened as a result of the Kennedy Commission, which Kennedy agrees to because Mrs. Roosevelt came and asked him to, that was the strategy, we knew no one... Everyone knew, people involved on that, I was not, they knew that he could say know to Eleanor Roosevelt, so he says yes to this commission in 1960. The [inaudible] is not until (19)63. You know things are bubbling somewhere.

SM (00:41:46):
That important meeting they had at Hyde Park in the home there... She brought that up at the meeting to support him I believe for the run of the presidency.

BS (00:41:58):
Yes. She was a strong supporter of him, and so he owed her something politically.

SM (00:42:02):
Yeah, because she was against him, originally, she was a Stephenson person, and she did not like his dad. She could not stand his father.

BS (00:42:08):
Right. Well, yes, his father was [inaudible] but she was also a person [inaudible] that point. I mean, she was so loved and respected by so many people, and he could not have said no to her. She was the widow but she had on her own, she had her own credentials, and so forth.

SM (00:42:27):
Oh, yes.

BS (00:42:27):
He says yes to this commission, which begins to document some of the inequities. Nobody has ever documented them. Suffrage people have but they did that before 1920, and they stopped documenting and whatnot but the commission has staff and it has people who begin to get quite interested in women's issues, and Kennedy had some interest in it, because he put five cabinet members on this commission, including his brother Bobby. I mean, I suspect the women pressed for that.

SM (00:42:59):
When you look at the... [inaudible] any particular issue that when you look at the presidents that have been... The boomers are now reaching the age of 64 and the youngest is 49.

BS (00:43:09):
Yeah. My kids are boomers.

SM (00:43:12):
There is no spring chickens anymore in the boomer generation.

BS (00:43:14):
That is right. They are all middle aged and up.

SM (00:43:17):
Thing is the presidents started with Truman and they go to Obama and of all... You have talked about the commission here. I know the experience with President Ford and Carter that you had...

BS (00:43:28):
That is right. There was a Women's Educational Equity Act, which the government agrees to spend some money on women's educational issues, and they even setup an advisory committee, a council, and I was on that advisory [inaudible].

SM (00:43:40):
You were also something to do with LBJ, because you were on the very first... You were appointed for some position in the first... I have it here someplace.

BS (00:43:53):
Lyndon Johnson, I think.

SM (00:43:53):
You were the first person appointed as a staff member to a Congressional committee to work on women's issues.

BS (00:43:59):
That is true. That is different.

SM (00:44:00):
And that was something linked to Johnson's ... He had given some sort of directive.

BS (00:44:04):
No. No. This is before ... No. No. This had nothing to do with Johnson. What happens and you looked at my stuff, so you have probably seen how I got involved in Title IX, after my experiences at Maryland, I find out that there is no law for prohibiting sex discrimination against women in education.

SM (00:44:26):
Wow.

BS (00:44:27):
I figure, well, I believe in bibliotherapy, now I am [inaudible] and books most of the time, but I think I will read up on what African Americans did in the civil rights movements and maybe there will be something there that women could do. I was not even thinking of myself at this point, being involved, but I was just curious and I knew there was a problem and I am basically a problem solver in some ways or try to be. I ended up filing charges against all these universities, charges of sex discrimination, and it is an executive order, so it is an administrative charge, you do not need to be a lawyer, and I had some very good help from inside the office of Federal Contracting Clients, a guy named Vincent Macaluso, told me what to do. I had no idea what to do, and he told me... He wrote the first complaint. Yeah. I mean, he really was one of these insiders, and there are a lot of people like that. Those of us on the outside, what did we know? I mean, they told us what we should do a lot of the time. [inaudible] worked behind the scenes with us but I belonged to the Women's Equity Action League, which was setup, because Elizabeth Boy, in Ohio, an attorney, who was a NOW member, was very worried that NOW is going to look too radical for middle class people. She was really worried about that, she cares about women's issues desperately, and here they were talking about abortion, which was not a household word at those times. I mean, there was a time before this issue became that women would whisper the word. I mean, if you would talk, "Did you hear that someone had an abortion?" There was nobody in the room but you would be whispering as if there were. I mean, you could not use that word aloud. You could not say rape without... I mean, rape was as bad a word as fuck. You just did not say those words aloud. It was a totally different time, and the women's issues ... I think this is what makes it different for the boomers, they have a whole bunch of words for things that their mothers could not have talked about at one point, like the word sex discrimination or abortion or... I remember once, my cousin had an abortion and my mother did not know I was in the house and she was talking to my aunt about it, how it went, and whatnot, and she did not realize I was there and she was so upset that I knew. I was I think a college graduate by that point, but it was like a secret, a dirty secret. The boomers have all these words or they learn them while they were growing up, some of them, they learn them while they were growing up but they were not as strange as they were to some of us as we got involved. You do have... What begins to happen in the (19)60s, this awareness in the political sense to these are growing, not only for Women's Educational Equity Act, which is a grant program essentially, go through the Congress fairly easily, the Equal Rights Amendment is reintroduced. Senator Birch Bayh, who was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is holding a hearing on the subcommittee for constitutional amendments. There is a woman named Wilma Scott Heide, who is president of NOW, and a former nurse and a sociologist, or whatever, she jumps up in the middle of the hearing, now, this is, again, the Vietnam War, people are doing all kinds of crazy things. She is at a Congressional hearing and she says, "When are you going to hold a hearing on the Equal Rights Amendment, Senator?" Or words to that effect.

SM (00:47:50):
Right.

BS (00:47:51):
He says, yes, he will hold a hearing. There has never been a hearing on this Congressional amendment, which had been introduced many, many [inaudible].

SM (00:47:59):
Why did it fail? I know a lot of people put a lot of the credit on Phyllis Schlafly, because she worked so hard to defeat it herself.

BS (00:48:07):
She did. She did, but we suspect she had some help and some money. One theory is that the insurance companies were piling money on. We do not know if this is true or not. It is a theory because they had gender life insurance policies, gender health insurance policies, which are now cannot do that anymore but were in existence as of a few weeks ago, so if you had employment and you had mostly women in your establishment, you paid a higher amount than if you had mostly men. If you got your insurance independently, because you are a professional solo practitioner and you do not have from anyplace else, you paid more if you were a woman than if you were a man. The Equal Rights Amendment is now coming up and it comes up in... It passes in the Senate and we lose at the state level, and I do not know if people would agree with me but this is what I would say, because many of us in the women's movements, many of us were inexperienced politically. I am one of them. Did not know a thing about politics before I got involved. I had been a challenger for one election, which meant I just checked the records behind the table. Period. I read, I gave money to the NCAAP but that was the extent of my political participation. I believed in a bunch of things and I voted but did I know anything political? Not in the slightest kind of thing. We had been so successful in getting things through the Congress that we thought it would be the same thing. We were not organized at the state levels, and we just... We did not have the capability at the state level that we had at the federal level. At the federal level, you had already coalitions of various women's groups, you were working with various Black groups. It was too early for the Hispanics. They were not organized yet, but the African Americans and the women's groups are working together. They realize they have some commonalities in their learning from each other. At the state level, we did not have any organization to speak of. There is the beginning of the state commissions on women... [inaudible] Equal Rights Amendment passed in (19)72, (19)73?

SM (00:50:42):
I know, I was... My boss was involved in it. I do not know if you ever knew Betty Menson, Elizabeth Menson.

BS (00:50:46):
No.

SM (00:50:48):
She was at Ohio University. She was a suffragist. She was my first boss. She was really involved in Ohio, and I remember next door, I am the assistant director of student affairs, she is the director, I remember the vote coming in from Columbus.

BS (00:51:01):
[inaudible].

SM (00:51:05):
It did not pass in Columbus, and she was...

BS (00:51:06):
Heartsick.

SM (00:51:07):
I think she cried. She had to go to the ladies room.

BS (00:51:12):
Yeah.

SM (00:51:12):
She had put two years of her life into it.

BS (00:51:15):
Yeah. Yeah. People worked hard. There was no question about it but we did not have I think enough organizational structure, probably because we were new and we did not have the bodies or the money. I mean, to have 50 states well-organized requires something [inaudible].

SM (00:51:33):
I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly and, of course, David Horowitz.

BS (00:51:36):
Oh, did you?

SM (00:51:36):
David Horowitz said the same thing, and that is that the women... Well, the universities are now run by the radicals of the (19)60s and they run all the programs, which is [inaudible] women's studies, gay studies, Asian studies, and Black studies, environmental studies, Latino studies, Native American studies, they are all the radicals from the (19)60s who are now running all those programs in the universities, and David Horowitz is adamant about it. [inaudible] talking about it again. Your thoughts on that?

BS (00:52:20):
Well, we do not quite follow the medieval curriculum with which we started, and that knowledge expands. We did not talk much about climate. It does not matter what side of the climate thing you are in, in what I am going to say, because we did not talk about climate. It was not the issue. 50 years ago, this was not an academic area worth looking at or maybe 100 years ago. I do not know how far. I do not know enough about that issue. It is the one that becomes more important, and now is an issue. It is an issue at whatever side you are on. Something is going on in our climate, we do not know why, we worry about getting rid of oil. We will not find enough oil and there is a finite amount and so forth, so it is an issue we have to study. The environment is an issue. Women's studies, we have looked at history and we have found there are a lot of things about women, which were not taught at all. It is a scholarly area like anything else. It is not political. It is very scholarly. It is very boring sometimes, because it is so scholarly but there are... It is now you look at a book, take literary criticism, I was thinking it was this just this morning, because I was thinking of Kate Millett's book, which talks about...

SM (00:53:43):
Sexual Politics?

BS (00:53:44):
Sexual Politics. She talks about Norman Mailer, she talks about Milton and there is a third author and I cannot remember who it is. I would have to pull the book off the shelf. This occurred to me this morning is I hated Norman Mailer's book. I could see it was a good book, but I hated it.

SM (00:53:59):
Which one?

BS (00:54:00):
The Naked and the Dead, his first one. I can see this guy is writing stuff that, whatever, Milton, I hated Milton but I did not know why either. Okay? I hated Milton but I could see this man is a beautiful writer, so there must be something wrong with me. Everybody says this is a terrific book and I do not like it and the same with Milton, this is revered poet... Okay. I have no idea. I really think I do not have good literary taste and I read Kate Millett's book and she points out Mailer is a tremendous sexist. He is. He hates women. His subsequent life in terms of he has beaten women occasionally and so forth and so on, confirms that and that is why I did not like the book but I had no word for it. Milton is terribly anti-female. He does not like women. If you go back and read Milton, you would see it but they never mentioned this in school. Now if you read Milton, they mention that he has an anti-female [inaudible].

SM (00:55:02):
How about the Beat writers because the Beat writers, the Kerouac, Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder, Furlan Getty, the list goes on and on.

BS (00:55:17):
I do not know enough about them.

SM (00:55:18):
Were they more... Were they sexist?

BS (00:55:18):
I do not know enough about them to comment.

SM (00:55:19):
I know they did [inaudible].

BS (00:55:21):
Some of them were. Some of them were.

SM (00:55:21):
Right.

BS (00:55:24):
Some of them were but I am responding to your question earlier in terms of university. If you were looking at Milton, you look at Milton differently. The same is true... I am teaching this class and I looked at colonial women and what they were doing during the war. I mean, the first Declaration of Independence was printed by a woman. Why? Because the men are at war, so the women are taking over... They were working on whatever the husband's business was. They were doing all kinds of things during the war. There are women who are helping to shape the thoughts of the men who write the Constitution. These are brilliant women whose fathers probably taught them what they needed to know, and they were... Like Mercy Warren is writing Ben Franklin and whatever, I am not sure if it was Ben Franklin but men like that and then discussing the ideas that end up in the Constitution. I do not remember learning anything about that at all. You have a new lens to look at things. We have never... In history, the only immigrant thing I ever remember is that there are a lot of Jews coming over around the turn of the century and there were Irish where they said no Irish or dogs allowed. That was the extent that we knew of immigrant populations. Now you think of immigration now and how it was taught, that is how it was taught before. Immigration is a huge problem. No matter where you are on which side.

SM (00:56:58):
I just got back from Harpers Ferry two weekends ago, [inaudible] place to go and John Brown and they were talking about... I remember we went on a tour and in the tour of the town, African Americans were held in much higher esteem than the Irish.

BS (00:57:15):
Probably. Yeah. The Irish were held in very low esteem. See, but you need to study that and that is why we have these groups. Native American, what did we learn about that as a child? They were brave people who rode horses and murdered other people.

SM (00:57:32):
Scalped people.

BS (00:57:33):
Yeah. I mean, they did terrible things and that is about all. If you look at Indian culture, the British when they began negotiating with the Indians, this is well before the revolution, are surprised because the men come with their women. They have women leaders. The British cannot understand why they have to negotiate with women and men. I mean, that is fantastic. When you think of that, what does this mean? This is why you have women's studies, because women's studies as well as Native American studies, had a different way of looking at women and, historically, this is of great important. What does this tell us? Phyllis Schlafly?

SM (00:58:14):
Yeah. I think the period from 1980 on, of course, Reagan was the era of backlash, many people believe.

BS (00:58:22):
Yeah.

SM (00:58:22):
Of the (19)80s and then you have got Bill Clinton in the (19)90s and then you have got George Bush the second, and now Obama, so the last 30 years, boomers have gone from the thirties to the (19)60s now in terms of age, and where are boomer women? Overall, I should question you later on [inaudible] but when you look at boomer women, we are talking about a generation of 74 million boomers.

BS (00:58:56):
That is a lot of people.

SM (00:58:58):
Of which probably over half are female, what is your opinion of that generation? Have you seen a lot of boomer women going off and doing what you were doing? Some of these leaders were from another generation, and so where are... Maybe Susan Brownmiller, she is actually a little bit older...

BS (00:59:23):
She is a little older too.

SM (00:59:23):
Yeah. What are your thoughts on the boomer women? In terms of they were involved in the movements, there is no question about that.

BS (00:59:31):
As young women.

SM (00:59:32):
Yeah. As young women.

BS (00:59:40):
Some of them were not. I am thinking how to phrase this. I am thinking of college women and what I hear is in the here and now and there is not much support for women's issues. But that was also true in the (19)60s and the (19)70s. There was not that much support. It was a time of activism, so there were some of the active women, the people who were active and got active on women's issues, but we did not have most of the college population. We did not have them on the women's issues. We had some people on it and some nice people are sympathetic and they do not do anything about it until you can move them and, certainly, a sexual harassment and sexual assault became an issue, people got involved in that but even then, we did not have half the college population. You might be able to rally them on one particular issue, a professor is very sexist, says terrible things in class, so you may be able to get some people to do something but they are not that active.

SM (01:00:43):
I came up with this theory and I have been mentioning it with probably the last 40 people that I have interviewed and most... Well, there are three adjectives that truly describe the boomer generation, male, female, Black, white, gay, straight, whatever, the whole group is that this generation grew up in the late (19)40s and (19)50s and the frontrunners, the generation itself was a very quiet generation in the early years, they were a very fearful generation and they feared a lot, because they say the McCarthy hearings as the young kids, and the concept was that if you speak up, you pay a serious price for speaking up. Of course, we had the Cold War too, and then they were very naïve. Most kids are naïve to begin with.

BS (01:01:30):
Yes. Yes.

SM (01:01:32):
They were naïve, and I think television did not help any, because you saw very few African Americans on TV except for Amos and Andy in the early (19)50s, which was slapstick. You saw Nat King Cole in the middle (19)50s and he was out for six weeks and his show was canceled.

BS (01:01:50):
And very few women... I mean, you have women who were silly like ... What was the one who was married to the musician? The one who is very funny. Lucy.

SM (01:02:00):
Yeah.

BS (01:02:00):
Lucy.

SM (01:02:05):
We had I Love Lucy but then you had the Eve Arden Show, you had Our Miss Brooks, you had Gracie Allen, you had Ozzie and Harriet. You had [inaudible].

BS (01:02:18):
...of the silly white...

SM (01:02:20):
Father Knows Best.

BS (01:02:22):
Yeah.

SM (01:02:22):
Donna Reed Show.

BS (01:02:26):
Yeah. These are all the stereotypes.

SM (01:02:26):
Leave It To Beaver.

BS (01:02:26):
These are all the stereotypes of women at home, and not being very smart.

SM (01:02:29):
There was Mama, the early (19)50s, Mama and that show and there were a couple other ones too but Gale Storm and I forget her show... Remember Gale Storm?

BS (01:02:42):
[inaudible].

SM (01:02:45):
Yeah.

BS (01:02:46):
My own daughters saw... One was born in 1954 and one in 1956 and what is different for them from my generation is they make choices about marriage and children, so that when they were in their early thirties, they both informed me... Well, one of them informs me that I will probably never get married and even if I did, I would never have a child, and the other one at that point did not seem to have prospects for marriage and says she might have a baby without marriage. Now I do not know how many people have that point of view. I want to tell you they have goth changed their minds. Both are married and one has got one child and one has two children. But it was a choice. This would not have been possible in their mother's generation. Almost everybody felt they had to get married. The big tragedy of your life would be maybe nobody will want to marry me, which seems like it was more matter of luck than what you did or if you were born beautiful, you did not have to worry as much or whatever, and you could read books and articles on how to ensnare men, a lot of things like that, and they would sometimes even use that word but there was not a choice, and nor could I have said I do not want to have...

BS (01:04:03):
...but there was not the choice, nor could I have said I do not want to have any children. I could have said I want two because most people, middle class people, knew about birth control by this time, so you can limit your family and that is acceptable to limit your family. But these women are marrying later than their mothers. In the (19)50s, the birth rate, people married earlier than they have ever married in their life. They were marrying at around 20, which on average-

SM (01:04:30):
My mom was 19.

BS (01:04:31):
Yeah. They were married-

SM (01:04:33):
She finished two years of college at 19.

BS (01:04:38):
Right. They were marrying earlier. Comes to the boomer generation, they were thinking, well, I do not know if I want to get married. This is revolutionary because throughout history, the only way a woman could really survive is to be married to someone who is going to provide some things for her. Now, she still has to work for it, whether it is killing the pig years and years ago or-

SM (01:04:58):
Did you hear this? And I heard this a lot, particularly in the (19)70s, late (19)70s, that boomer couples that were married said "Oh, I do not want to have kids. Maybe we will never have kids because I do not want to bring them into this world that is so dangerous that they may not live to adulthood."

BS (01:05:17):
Some of them say that, but some of them say "I just do not want kids. It is a lot of work. I do not want to do it." I think that is new. I remember being stunned at what my kids were saying and stunned that they had even thought of this. And after a while I realized what was important is I have a happy life and you can have a happy life single and an unhappy life single, and a happy life married and an unhappy life married, so I got very used to the idea of what they were saying. But they were able to make a choice, and I think for a lot of young women, marriage became a choice. Now it is still is. Women do want to get married, the majority of them apparently, but still, it is felt more like a choice. It is not like you absolutely have to get married. I mean, people will say bad things about you.

SM (01:06:11):
Some of the students at Westchester University, some of them have not gotten married. They go on and become doctors and lawyers and very top professionals. They just said they just cannot find the right guy. They just cannot find the right guy.

BS (01:06:22):
Well, and they probably cannot. Their standards are different. They are not looking for an economic handout. There are other things that count, and I think the standards have gotten higher for marriages.

SM (01:06:33):
Would you say that one of the lessons of the boomer generation for both men and women of all colors, religions, sexual orientation, and certainly even political background, is that nothing happens in a positive way without a battle?

BS (01:06:52):
Without a what?

SM (01:06:52):
Without a battle. You have to fight for things. You have to fight for equality in higher education. Equality comes when others demand it via protest or laws being passed. Is that what some of the (19)60s was about, civil rights?

BS (01:07:07):
For some people, but most young people were not involved in civil rights. Most young people were not involved in women's issues.

SM (01:07:13):
Well, 10 percent of the boomers, they are saying anywhere between 5 and 15 percent, probably it was more around eight or 9 percent were involved in activism. One out of 10. Yeah.

BS (01:07:27):
Okay, so one out of 10. And then there is probably another two or three out of 10 who are vaguely supportive to some degree, but not doing anything. And probably that is true for most movements. I do not think these movements were that different. One of my classes consists [inaudible] talk about suffrage, and so I really read a lot about suffrage. And it seems like all kinds of things are happening. I mean, there is hundreds of campaigns, statewide, nationwide and whatnot, but I still say, well, how many women, what was the percentage of women that were really involved? And I doubt if it was very high.

SM (01:08:07):
And the media likes to go for the sensational. And so they will go to Woodstock and they will show the nude women or men in the water and the mud. And every person I have talked to and who were there said they just sat with their blanket-

BS (01:08:27):
Oh really?

SM (01:08:27):
...And watched it, but they were taking drugs. That was definitely a key. But they were not sliding in mud and around walking around nude.

BS (01:08:36):
I think where the big changes come is that, one, you have increased sexuality, and that women are making choices about their lives. And the relationships between men and women are changing, some ways for the better, some ways I am not so sure, I do not know. But certainly the relationships begin to change.

SM (01:09:01):
You are very important in so many different areas. And I think you have talked about campus climate as a term you kind of were instrumental in bringing into the thinking of higher education many years back. Please define in your own way the definition of a campus climate means, and what were the campus climates? And I am really concentrating on women here, because you have already talked about the (19)50s, but I am talking about being a female student in the (19)50s. All I can remember is that Cortland State is panty raids. That is all I remember, and I was a little boy, but I heard about panty raids.

BS (01:09:46):
That is right.

SM (01:09:47):
And sitting in washing machines or goldfish or whatever, it was ridiculous. But what was the campus climate for women in the (19)50s, (19)60s, (19)70s, (19)80s, (19)90s and today?

BS (01:09:59):
There are two definitions of the climate. One is the overall sense of the campus, the feelings and behaviors that go around concerning women and men and women and men's relationships and women's relationships to having a career and whatnot, and I think that is what you are asking me.

SM (01:10:19):
Yes.

BS (01:10:20):
The other definition is specific behaviors, subtle unnoticed behaviors, ways in which women are treated differently and not only by men, but by women too. Women get less eye contact. People pay less attention when women are talking. They are writing on a piece of paper, looking out the window, giving men full attention. Women are less often to be called by name. Women get less feedback, they get less praise, they get less criticism. They do hear sexist remarks. Men hear much less of that. I have a list somewhere of about 50 different behaviors, ways in which women are treated differently, and that is the very specific behaviors which are typically unnoticed.

SM (01:11:06):
[inaudible]

BS (01:11:10):
But you are talking about the atmosphere.

SM (01:11:12):
What is interesting to me, and I am interviewing Dr. Cohen who wrote a book on Mario Savio when I got back in California, and free speech movement was one of my areas. And I think it is important, but people try to lessen its importance by saying it was a (19)64 and (19)65 and the anti-war movement was really (19)66, (19)67, (19)68, so they tried to lessen the in impact. But the free speech movement was very important, and women, to me, were really equal in it. Because if you look at the free speech movement and Mario Savio, [inaudible] Bettina Aptheker, you had Mario Savio's future wife, [inaudible] Goldberg, and the one that was a state rep. Very powerful women, very powerful men, and it was about ideas and the fact that the university is supposed to be about ideas. It is not supposed to be about the corporate takeover of a university. And to me that means an awful lot, and women were really involved in the (19)60s in this, at least they were at Berkeley. And I know they were at my campus my undergraduate years and at Ohio State too. I guess what I am asking here is how important was the free speech movement with respect to its impact on the women's movement?

BS (01:12:36):
I have never heard anybody raise that question before, which makes me think it probably did not have much of an impact because it did not contribute to the ideology. Women were talking about having equal rights with men, and to the extent that men had the right to free speech, women should have a right to free speech. Free speech comes up a little bit when women, maybe more than a little bit, when women are beginning to protest on campuses. There is a lot of activity going on, partly because these are professional women. They have gone away from the stereotype of women, unlike teachers in K through 12. So you have women who have really fled the stereotype. They have gone in a different direction. They are highly trained and they have also seen a lot of discrimination. And they suspect they are being paid less, and they are right, and they suspect a lot of things going on. So they become involved in terms of how do you make change? And you get women asking for commissions on the status of women on various campuses. It would not surprise me, and I am guessing, if half or more of the colleges had some commissions. If they did not have commissions, a committee, either commission or a committee. But if they did not have either of them, there was still pockets of activity so that women would rally around a particular thing. And women were questioning the relationships between men and women and employment and body issues like abortion and sexual harassment and stuff, and these things come up. Now, I put out a newsletter from (19)70 till about 1995 and watched anything that had to do with women's issues on campus. And my sources were, one, a lot of people called me for information or would tell me something, but as a college association where I worked, we got materials from colleges all over the country, so we saw a lot of college newspapers and newsletters and things like that, and we also read women's publications to also pick up information. That whole set of things, which ranged from (19)70 to I think (19)95, we ended up with the last one, cover issues that were important to women that somehow made it into something official, before the web, this starts. And I do not remember any discussion anywhere about the free speech. Now, I am not at the radical edge. I am with those of us looking [inaudible] and we would like men to act a little better and believe in equality of the relationship and stuff, but I am not way over here where people are talking about overturning things and-

SM (01:15:35):
Yeah. Well Carol Haney, [inaudible] said that the problem with the women's movement is that the women's movement denied radical feminists a place at the table. And she was very strong on that.

BS (01:15:47):
Hard to deny.

SM (01:15:48):
And actually, she is the one responsible for the word "The personal is political" because she wrote the essay.

BS (01:15:58):
Oh, she was the one.

SM (01:16:00):
She was the one.

BS (01:16:00):
Oh, [inaudible]

SM (01:16:00):
So she was talking about that too, although she did not feel comfortable with being interviewed, I could tell. But I asked, a couple people persuaded her to be interviewed by me, so it was a pretty good interview. In terms of... This is your interview, but I believe that the free speech movement has some uniqueness to it because there were strong women in that event, but if you look at the Columbia protest at Mark Rudd’s book, it was a very male-dominated protest at Columbia.

BS (01:16:34):
Yeah, because men and women work together, and you see still today, the men tend to take over and the women become quieter. I mean, people say women do not talk, women do not speak out in meetings.

SM (01:16:47):
Well, Mario was the voice.

BS (01:16:48):
No, but women are supposed to talk a lot, but if you put men and women together, they do not talk a lot. They do not talk as much as men in many groups. If you go to a dinner party, I am always fascinated, the men are quite often talking, doing the talking. The women occasionally add something, but the men are doing more of the talking, and this is what happens in these other movements. Now you do get some strong people and that is good, but some of them drop out because they are not being listened to. I do not see its importance, at least in terms of the campus, that there may have been here are some people who are active for work on free speech issues, and here are some who are working on women's issues. And maybe on a particular campus, maybe they work together for something.

SM (01:17:36):
I know that Ronald Regan despised them, and his coming to power was based on two things: fighting the students, making sure there is law and order on university campuses, which he did through the free speech movement and also People's Park in (19)69. I interviewed at [inaudible]. He was in charge of the People's Park thing. Then he could not stand the welfare statement and he was going to fight that anyway he could. Just your comments here on these. I thought Sputnik was very important in (19)57 because when you talk about the issue of women not having access or being involved in math, science and technology, and then you have Sputnik in 1957 where the country demands that we get our act together education-wise with respect to the Russians. That to me could have... I put a negative down here for women because women probably did not become top scientist at that time.

BS (01:18:45):
No, it was very hard to become a top scientist. There were schools where you could not take a course in chemistry if you were a female, or if you were allowed to take the course, you could not major in chemistry. Or if they had a home etc. part department, women took chemistry and home etc., but not in the real departments. This is men's work and it still is a lot of that. There are not many women astrophysicists. And there are people like Summers, former president of Harvard.

SM (01:19:15):
Yeah, Larry Summers.

BS (01:19:17):
Yeah. He believes women just naturally are not that good at science.

SM (01:19:21):
That got him in trouble at Harvard. He had to leave really, because-

BS (01:19:25):
Of course he had to leave, and that was partly because of that. I mean, he was an arrogant person, so it was not-

SM (01:19:30):
[inaudible] even made comments on him, a former president.

BS (01:19:33):
Yeah, but Summers left, and also, he did not get the cabinet post he wanted. He wanted to be Secretary of Treasury and he did not get it because the women's groups would have exploded.

SM (01:19:46):
He is back at Harvard though.

BS (01:19:48):
Yeah. Well, he is back at Harvard without his presidency.

SM (01:19:51):
He is a professor.

BS (01:19:51):
But I think it is instructive. I mean, here is a man who is obviously well-educated, obviously has met lots of talented women, and yet still believes that they are naturally not as interested in science and all the other stuff.

SM (01:20:06):
And he is a boomer.

BS (01:20:08):
That is right.

SM (01:20:08):
He is a boomer.

BS (01:20:09):
He is a boomer. So not everybody has taken on these beliefs. There is still substantial number of people and a lot of conservative women. I mean, the conservative women talk about the family.

SM (01:20:22):
I think a lot of people around universities today are afraid of the return of activism on college campuses, and many of them are the boomers that probably did not like the activism when they were there. Some of these other ones here. McCarthy seemed to have been very big negative because of fear, and so forth. But the real positive people for, and I just listed these, [inaudible] Freedom Summer, students going to [inaudible] and voter registration drives, Rosa Parks, people like Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson-

BS (01:20:59):
Margaret Mead was mixed [inaudible]

SM (01:21:02):
She was what?

BS (01:21:06):
I think she had mixed views on women and with the women's movement, but I am not an expert on Margaret Mead.

SM (01:21:09):
I think we have already had that question. I am getting here... One of the biggest developments in the (19)50s, (19)60s and (19)70s was the rise of colleges and universities and community colleges. Numbers rose in attendance. The importance of higher learning was growing leaps and bounds, and boomer parents and boomer kids took advantage. Universities had no gender equality until-

BS (01:21:35):
1972.

SM (01:21:36):
1972 was passed for schools receiving federal funds. Why did it take that long, if they knew in the early (19)60s the importance of education for their youth, to get ahead in this world?

BS (01:21:52):
It is important, and women need to... There is still a lot then. They need to be good parents, so you have to teach them how to be good parents, so it is good for them to have an education. There are a lot of people who believe that is what you need to do for women. But there is also a lot of sexism. Some of it is historic, but it is in the culture. Women do not need an education. You get people like Elizabeth Dole, and I have heard this from numerous women lawyers who got into Harvard or Yale who had very small numbers. They are not taking 20 women, they are taking two or six or 12. I have never heard of a quota as high as 20. It has always been single or teens. But she and other women are told by other men "You are taking a job away from a guy. Why are you here? You are keeping a guy from becoming a lawyer." And they say this, I mean, they say it aloud to the women, and I have heard that story at least six or seven times.

SM (01:22:52):
That is the thing, is to say after the Civil War, African Americans when they moved north, you were taking jobs-

BS (01:22:56):
"They are taking jobs away from white..." Exactly.

SM (01:22:58):
And we knew there was prejudice in the north too.

BS (01:23:02):
Exactly. But the prejudice... Not the prejudice. It is bad behaviors continue. It is not just attitudes, but the behaviors. Because men are more worthwhile, they need the jobs more. I mean, this is their beliefs. Men are all going to be working, and some of these women are going to get married and quit to raise their children, as well they should, I am sure some people said. It also happens that nobody's keeping records. Nobody is looking or examining the status of women on campus or almost any other place. You have the women's bureau in the government which keep some data, but usually they compare some women with other women, not always comparing women to men. And you have from after the commission, which ends in (19)63 of (19)64 after Kennedy died, he was assassinated, and the commission gives its report. And then spans, you get some commissions at the state level, and you have a citizen's advisory council on the rights and responsibilities of women with a staff of one or two people, one professional, I think, and one secretary maybe, but that is all the government is doing. So nobody knows what is going on. When the American Council on Education, which is the big elephants in the room of-

SM (01:24:23):
ACE.

BS (01:24:26):
ACE, they are the one that all the presidents belong to. This is the lobbying group. This is the one that controls, makes pronouncements, does research, but it is big. It is powerful. Some of the others are also powerful, but not like ACE. I am on this committee, this is before I was on the committee staff, but I am helping put the hearings together for Title IX. And when you put hearings together, you invite people to come testify who can be on either side because you want it to be a good bill. And if you have people from either side, they will find what is wrong from their point of view, and you can decide whether you want to change the bill or not. I mean, that is the part of the real purpose of hearings, not to mention they will support the bill or whatever. And so they call the American Council on Education lobbyists and they say "Hey, we have this bill that is going to prohibit sex discrimination. Are you interested in testifying?" And he said, "Of course not". He said... and this is again almost a quote. He said "There is no sex discrimination against women. And besides, it is not a problem. I do not see it as discrimination. It all makes sense. It is rational. We wanted to give a woman a degree in graduate school if she is going to quit when she gets married." If you believe that, that is not discrimination. That makes rational sense. And a lot of what is happening makes rational sense. I mean, why should the University of Michigan, who would have $2.3 million budget in the early (19)70s, annual budget for its varsity sports team, why should it pay anything for women's sports? They are not interested. They just do not care, so the women sell apples at football games. Everybody knows this. It is public. It is not hidden. Everybody knows they are selling apples to pay for their uniforms and their equipment and transportation. Not everybody knows that their coaches are volunteers and do not get paid like the male coaches. That is more hidden. But there is a lot of visible stuff like this, and it all has a reason. "Well, football is more important than the other stuff", we hear this today too, but everything seems to be rational. "We do not want too many women in graduate school. They are taking jobs from guys". If you ask people what was going on, then they would have a reason, and therefore they did not see it as discrimination. And until the women's movement begins, and this is an early late (19)60s, like (19)68, (19)69, you have no studies on the status of women in higher education. Literally no one has any idea what is going on. I had no idea what is going on. I did not think Title IX was that important because I did not know how bad things were. And Chicago sets up an official committee to look at the status of women, and you have Columbia Women's Liberation Group, which looks at the status of women. That is not an official committee, but looks at the status of women at Columbia. And you have me, because I am going to testify and file all these charges... Not I am going to testify. You have me who is going to file all these charges against the universities who secretly going to departments at the University of Maryland and showing them the list of faculty and saying, how many are men and how many are women? And I just say, I am just doing some research, so I need to know the gender. I did not use the word gender. I need to know [inaudible] female. So mine is a very simple study, how many at each rank and whatnot of a few departments. That is it. That is all the studies that have been done by 1970 in terms of on the campus, which means nobody looked at athletics. We looked primarily at rank and the [inaudible] rank of a few of the women, and a few other data that you could get. But they are not... I mean, they are the first studies there. If you looked at them now, you would say, my God, they did not ask about this. They did not ask about this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then comes an explosion of studies. I mean, they just explode and they are all over the place.

SM (01:28:40):
Did a lot of boomer women who were in undergraduate school in the late (19)60s, say through 1975, take the experiences of the movements and say "I want to be on this committee and that committee to make sure women were-"

BS (01:28:54):
No, nobody wants to be on a committee to work hard. A few do, and the communities committees are best when you have a number of people who are willing to work hard. If you have served on committees, you know a lot of people are not working hard.

SM (01:29:06):
What are the overall gains that women have made since World War II, and what are some of the failures in your opinion?

BS (01:29:13):
Between when and when? World War II?

SM (01:29:16):
From World War II on, the time that boomers have been alive, which is 64 years, what have been the main gains and what have been the main failures?

BS (01:29:25):
I think... Okay, gains. One, we have a word for sex discrimination, and it is a conceptual, it is not just a word. And it is not a single issue. It is not like suffrage, which is a single issue, and if we get suffrage all, the world will be a better place. But now we know we are talking about many issues, and people can be involved in only one little part of this. Maybe there is a caucus and women on political science and that is the only thing they care about, which is fine, but they are active and they are thinking about this. This is unlike suffrage this time. This is what is different. This includes everything. There is a women's issue to almost a whole bunch of things. I once heard of a conference on women on transportation, and I am saying, what is this about? Where is the women's issue here? Well, the women's issue is if you have women in the suburbs and only one car and no public transportation, women can only get jobs which are near their husband. That is how you are going to get to work, and there is a whole bunch of things that go beyond that. So this is, I think, a huge difference. You now have a conceptual framework in which you can look at women's issues in almost any area, which makes it very different. It is global. It is not even limited to the United States. It is worldwide, and it is probably the only thing that can probably save the planet, because it is a movement which talks about equality and respect. Relationships between men and women, this is all at one end of the continuum, and at the other end, it is laws and how governments maintain themselves. That is a major-major-major difference. We also get is women working. Women working is no longer a rarity. And we are now beginning to get men, it is about a quarter of the marriages in which women make more money than the men, and some men are not threatened now by a wife who makes more money. Both my daughters are married to men who make less money to them, although with the recession, that is changed. But what I am saying is that this is no longer that unusual. And some men are beginning to understand the economic value of a wife who makes a lot of money. One, it is insurance for you if you lose your job. It is a lot better to have one salary than no salary and so forth, and you are going to have a much nicer life if she makes a good living. So that, that is a major change. The relationships between men and women have in some ways gotten better, in some ways gotten worse. Certainly the laws have been improved enormously. We have the best set of laws probably in the world concerning education. We have laws that just prohibit discrimination in a whole bunch of things. One of the things that happened in the late (19)60s and (19)70s when Bella Abzug was in the Congress is every time that bill came up, that was going to include money going to it, she would put in something that said, no sex discrimination will be allowed in this program, because Title IX only covers federally funded education programs. It does not cover road building. Now, there are other things that may cover it, but they will Bella Abzug is shoving this clause and gets people... [inaudible] nobody fights it, because whatever. So you get not just Bella doing this, but you do get a series of laws, laws like Title VII, you get Title IX, you get a whole bunch of things like that. Professional schools begin to open to women. That is a direct result of Edith Green's Title IX and an earlier law so that you get rid of the quotas, and suddenly women are becoming like half of the medical profession, 80 percent.

SM (01:33:26):
Over.

BS (01:33:28):
80 percent of the veterinarians. Cornell Veterinary School used to let two women in per year.

SM (01:33:35):
Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where I worked for four years.

BS (01:33:39):
That is a good school.

SM (01:33:39):
...Had no women in the medical school in 1965. None. Now they are over half the class.

BS (01:33:46):
Yeah. Yeah. That is a huge thing. Women working and women getting an education is now acceptable. That is again, a huge change in the way in which we perceive women and their role. And although there is still a lot of worry about kids who are left in daycare and so forth. If another study comes out and says "Working mothers do not harm children", and that was the heading on an article within the last year on a study that was reported on in the Washington Post. And you could see what they were still saying underneath, "We really think it may harm them, and here is a study that says it does not". But otherwise you would not write that way, "Working mothers are not harming their children", whatever.

SM (01:34:30):
Were there any failures?

BS (01:34:32):
Any failures? Oh, failures, yes. We are still not included in the Constitution of the United States. We have not won that battle, and we are not protected educationally. For example, if Title IX... You know what the Congress giveth, the Congress could taketh, and we do not have any constitutional protections in terms of education. Some other things. The court... Scalia just in September made a statement at a law school in California, and he says he does not believe a 14th amendment applies to women. Now, he is against sex discrimination, but the 14th Amendment does not apply to women. He is an originalist and he does not believe that, and there are a number of people who believe that he is right. And under the Constitution, this is why people wanted the Equal Rights Amendment because it would say equality of rights, et cetera, cannot be bridged on the basis of sex, and that would be very clear. Right now, if you use a constitutional argument for women to not be discriminated against, Scalia is going to vote no, there is no constitutional protection. None.

SM (01:35:48):
But now we got Sotomayor in there.

BS (01:35:48):
We got Sotomayor, but we do not have the votes. And Ruth Ginsburg is not going to live forever, and you have got young men who are going to stay there for a long time. Granted, we have three, which is progress, but we do not have five, and we have enough people there who are-

BS (01:36:03):
...and we have enough people there who are still going to do, can do some real danger in terms of women's issues. If you think that women are not protected by the Constitution, this is pretty scary. If you think, if the Tea Party wins or whatever-

SM (01:36:17):
And equal pay for equal work is still an issue.

BS (01:36:18):
Still an issue, still an issue. Yeah. Women still make less money than men. What has happened is the glass ceiling has gone up higher. So women, excuse me, women can... some of them can reach a little bit higher than they did, but they are still not equal to men. They are still... Now, the progress we have made, I think in 1960 women were earning 60 percent of what men made, which is exactly what the Bible recommends. A man was worth is 50 shekels. A woman was worth is 30 shekels. So there had not been much progress between Biblical times-

SM (01:36:55):
The Bible says that?

BS (01:36:55):
Yes, it says that. Yes, it does. That is the Word. And if you look at many, many wage scales, that is what women were earning. Now we are up to about 77 percent, so that is a huge gain from 60 to about 77 percent. But we have not gotten to what would be equity. We have not gotten there.

SM (01:37:19):
This may be somewhat repetitive, but what are the overall thoughts on the women's movement since the late (19)60s? Some say it was always a mainstream movement. Now, some of my commentaries are from people that I have interviewed. Some say it was always a mainstream movement. Some say that the radical feminists were excluded. That was just the one person. Some say what was once a movement that was united with other movements, I brought this up, has now become more insular and special interests. Not linked to other movements like the anti-war, civil rights, gay and lesbian rights, and then of course the Native American, Asian, and Chicano rights. And this is a criticism of a lot of the movements today, that outside of the event that just happened a week ago here in Washington, which people seem to come from all different liberal perspectives, but that is rare. An anti-war protest, it is just the anti-war movement. You do not see the women's movement there. You do not see the Native American movement. They used to be together in the (19)60s and early (19)70s. Their posters were all there. They were all united. They worked together. They were called to be part of a unified effort.

BS (01:38:35):
I do not know what the informal relationships were. What I do know is that women care about these issues, but maybe not all women do any more than all women care about women's issues. What I do know is in terms of politics, in terms of the law, in terms of policies in the Washington area, this is where I live, in terms of in the Washington area where politics is our main business here, those groups do work together. The women's movement has been very active in terms of gay and lesbian rights, extraordinarily active. I think I mentioned to you, the Title IX people. I have been talking about this with too many people, so I do not know if I said it here or not, but Title IX applies to some of the bullying that is going on.

SM (01:39:28):
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

BS (01:39:29):
Did I mention this before?

SM (01:39:30):
I think you get over the phone, yeah.

BS (01:39:32):
Oh, okay. Okay. But the bullying, because I was talking to someone else who was gay this morning, my hairdresser, we were talking about the suicide of that young man.

SM (01:39:40):
Oh yeah.

BS (01:39:42):
That probably was a violation of Title IX, which nobody has mentioned. And I am working hard to get people to take that into account, but I have been very unsuccessful. But on the gay and lesbian issues, I think the women's movement had been particularly involved on a number of issues. And the Title IX issue is one of these. I raised it at a meeting of all women with the director of the Office for Civil Rights earlier. Not this particular incident, but these kinds of incidents. And raised one of the young girl who had, although that was not a gay issue, but bullying. The young girl that killed herself in Massachusetts, I think. The Irish child?

SM (01:40:26):
Oh, yes-yes.

BS (01:40:26):
Yeah-yeah. Okay. And-

SM (01:40:26):
Double checking. Still going.

BS (01:40:34):
Okay. Okay. And I said that is that is a violation of Title IX, what happened to that child. And she said, "We called that school system the next day. We are there." But they would do the same if it was a gay person as well. And I think particularly on the gay and lesbian issue, the women's groups have been there and are there. I think that is an important one. They are there also for those other groups. Are they involved in the way people would like them to be? That works both ways. And I think within the women's movement, there are Chicanos, Chicanas, there are Hispanic-

SM (01:41:15):
And Asian Americans.

BS (01:41:16):
The Asian Americans. Some of them are there and they provide linkages. And there are some women in the women's movements who belong to those particular groups. But I think sometimes people expect more maybe from other groups. I do not know. Or they do not know. All I know is in Washington, these groups work together. You talk about amending any particular law or a new policy that is coming out, and all these people are there and they are meeting together and they are working as a coalition. Does not mean they agree on everything, but they put pressure on as a group. What happens locally, I do not know enough about, but I know that ideologically speaking, the women's movement is with these other groups. And they do mention them continually. You go to a meeting and someone says, "I am hearing all the data about men and women. How come I am not hearing anything about Native American women?" And then someone says, "We could not get that data from the Labor Department," or whatever. Either they would not release it or they did not have it because they said it was too small a group so they did not collect it. But those questions get raised. When I go to meetings, I hear those questions.

SM (01:42:30):
Think about Donna Harris, is one of the most vocal for Native American women. That is why I-

BS (01:42:35):
Yes. And she was very active in women's issues when she was in Washington.

SM (01:42:38):
So I would like to interview her. I interviewed her husband, Senator Harris, former.

BS (01:42:42):
Yeah. She is a good woman.

SM (01:42:44):
Was second-wave, was that a direct result of sexism in the anti-war and civil rights and other movements in the late (19)60s? Would you say that second-wave came about because of the sexism within the movement? As a direct result of it?

BS (01:43:01):
Within the civil rights movement and the others?

SM (01:43:02):
Yes.

BS (01:43:06):
It is one part of the movement. There are different historical reasons which attract different peoples. Betty Friedan's book, as I said earlier, attracts middle-aged women who are married and sitting at home and unhappy vaguely. So there is a whole group of those. Then there is these young activists who were active in the civil rights movement and in SNCC and running down south and whatnot, and experience sexism because they are beginning to hear about sex discrimination so they begin to see it. They did not see it earlier, but now they begin to see it. And then you have other people who have been involved for legal reasons. I got involved because I thought it was immoral that sex discrimination was not illegal. That is where I started. And people come in movements for different reasons. But these are the strands. There is this people who care about policies and laws, which are critical.

SM (01:44:01):
Is the big difference between second-wave feminism and third-wave feminism is third-wave is more... it is not about working together. It is about what is good for me. I have heard the story. It is real... it is like, what is in it for me? And kind of that is third-wave. But second-wave, like any of the movements, was if you even heard the term, what is in it for me? That is not, as Randy Shaw says, activists do not think that way. It is what is in it for us.

BS (01:44:34):
Yeah. I do not hear so much, what is in it for me? I have never heard that. With second-wave feminists, they tend to think a lot of the problems are solved. And they are, I think, more concerned with body issues like sexual harassment, sexual assault, and abortion perhaps, and getting interested in employment. They are less interested in the laws because they do not think that is a problem. And there still are problems with the laws. Not as great as before. But we still have some problems. Problems. But they are not as discontented. We have made a lot of progress. So you do not have this... we do not have the horror stories anymore. And I think this is an important point. I say this facetiously, but we do not have a horror story. And one of the reasons we were able to get Title IX through, not only because people were not watching, but those people who were watching, you could say, and I used to quote this, this is my favorite figure from pre-war days. Pre-war, feels like it was [inaudible], from pre-Title IX days. In a period in the early 1960s in the state of Virginia, there were 21,000 women who were rejected for admissions to state colleges and universities.

SM (01:45:46):
In what year, again?

BS (01:45:47):
In the early (19)60s. I do not know the exact time period. I do not know if it is one year or three years. Probably not more. Somewhere... It is 21,000 are rejected. Now, during the same time period, how many men do you think were rejected by the state of Virginia?

SM (01:46:01):
Zero.

BS (01:46:02):
You are right. You are the only one who has ever gotten it right, probably because you read my stuff and it is in there.

SM (01:46:07):
No, but I can believe it. But I can... it is also-

BS (01:46:10):
That is what we gained.

SM (01:46:11):
Senator Byrd was the senator, the powerful senator at that time.

BS (01:46:16):
Byrd is from West Virginia.

SM (01:46:17):
Oh, yeah. Well, and this is Virginia you are talking about.

BS (01:46:19):
This is Virginia.

SM (01:46:19):
Oh, okay.

BS (01:46:20):
This is the state of Virginia. Okay. That is what life was like before. Now you tell that to anybody, and I use it as an example because it is a stunning example, people go like, " This is a horror story." And I would throw that figure around all the time because it was true and it was a horror story. I cannot say that now. I can say it as an example of history, but those stories are gone. That is the progress we have made. A lot of the horror stories are gone. Now, we get horror stories still with sexual harassment and sexual assault and with bullying, sexual bullying, and whatnot. But the employment ones, most of them are sexual harassment. We do not get... If you were looking at admissions, it looks like women are doing better than men in admissions to college. And not having the horror stories makes it very hard to attract people and to convince people that there is still a problem. And that is what part of what the problem is with the third-wave feminist. They tend to be younger. They are younger, and they think most of the problems are solved. And from comparing where we were, they are, but they are not all solved. Women are still making less money. Women are still not getting promoted as much. Not as many women make good salaries. Women who are not married and are single mothers, this is a terrible problem. So there are a lot of problems we have not solved, but their feeling is we have solved the major things.

SM (01:47:51):
Do you think that, this may be a dumb question, but-

BS (01:47:54):
There is no dumb question.

SM (01:47:55):
Okay. Well, are men more now part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem?

BS (01:48:04):
Yes-yes-yes, no-no-no. Depending which men and which. What I think has happened, and I have no data to back this up so it is strictly intuitive... That is the wrong word. It is my analysis. That is better than intuitive. Analysis has different associations, whether it has been an intuition. It is not my intuition I am thinking about this, is I think that in some areas of men and women's relationships, it is almost a bimodal distribution, which is rare in life. Is that we have lots of men who are better than their fathers ever were, and certainly better than their grandfathers were in terms of relationships, in a loving relationship, whether it is marriage or not. But there have been huge differences in that for a lot of men. On the other hand, there are a lot of men who I think are even worse than their father, maybe worse than their fathers. If you look at rape and forms of sexual assault, some of it is increased reporting, but is it all in increased reporting? I have a feeling that for young people, particularly with pornography on the web, the easy access into it, and when I was growing up, if somebody had a picture like that, it was one picture that would be passed around to-

SM (01:49:33):
Playboy.

BS (01:49:35):
Yeah-yeah. Playboy. Yeah. Playboy is tame compared to that. But there are a number of men whose relationships with women may even have gotten worse than their fathers, and particularly in terms of sexual assault. There were, I think, eight women taken to the hospital the other day from this college. Forgot what college it was. They think they were given a drug called rohypnol, which is the roofie.

SM (01:50:00):
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

BS (01:50:04):
Yeah. And now granted, college boys, there has always been a part of them that some of them have done... But I do not know, but it just seems to me some of them are worse in the way, in their attitudes towards women. Because before at least you had some... you did have anger towards women and everything, but you have had, even though men may have been involved in a powerful relationship that was somewhat protective of women. And I think there is a lot of anger towards women, if you look at domestic, wife battering and things like that. But I am not sure. I do not know of anybody who has done a... You have to have a pre and post, and I do not know how you could measure the past. But certainly there are a group of young men in our country, and I am not talking here about political attitudes, but whose attitudes towards sexual assault and taking advantage. I hear the stories of women being raped on campus. I hear a lot of them. And we do not have adequate figures from before to compare. So I may be just seeing what is there. Who knows?

SM (01:51:13):
Right. I have a question that I have asked everyone, and that is... There is two things. There is the issue of healing and the issue of trust. The question dealing with healing was something that I took a group of students to Washington, DC in (19)95 to meet Senator Muskie. And this was before he died. I do not know if you ever had a chance to meet him, but-

BS (01:51:36):
No, I did not, but I respected him enormously.

SM (01:51:40):
He had just gotten out of the hospital. We organized the trip because of our linkage with Gaylord Nelson, because we had brought Gaylord Nelson to our campus twice and he set these up. The students came up with this question, and it was based on a film they saw of 1968 with all the divisions, the convention, and the assassinations and the burnings of the cities, and you name it. Due to all the divisions, this is the question, due to other divisions in America, particularly affecting the boomer generation, do you feel that the boomer generation itself, those men and women from all backgrounds and ethnic groups and orientations, are going to go to their graves, similar to the Civil War generation, not truly healing because the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, those who did not. And they thought the Senator Muskie was going to talk about (19)68, where the cops kept beating over the heads. And were we close to a second civil war and all that other stuff, they wanted his response. And the perception is, I brought this question and the students discussed it and then I have gone to Gettysburg four times a year to understand the impact that war has. And so they have a statue over there of the last person who died who was a part of the Civil War. In 1924, he died. So I said, is the boomer generation, does this generation of 74 million have a problem with healing from all these tremendous divisions? They are going to go to their graves bitter, not liking people. And do you think we have a problem in America dealing with the issue of healing? And boomer generation.

BS (01:53:30):
The boomer generation. No, because I think most of them did not really care that much about a lot of the issues you are making, you are talking about. I think they were not that involved. And I think people grow and change. I think if one looks at the differences in relationships between Blacks and whites, sure, there is a lot of bad things going on. But in lots of schools, there is a lot of good things going on. People have friends, friendships now. This has happened with boys and girls. There are more friendships now. Both of my grandsons have had women who are friends. Not dates, not sexual partners, but this is my friend.

SM (01:54:14):
Oh, yeah. That is a big trend now.

BS (01:54:15):
Yeah. Would have been impossible when I was in school. Either you dated boys, or if you talk to any boys you were not dating, it was the boy's friends of whom you dated. But otherwise, you had very little to do with boys. Having a friendship with a boy was extraordinarily rare. And this is not rare anymore. That is healing. That is a change.

SM (01:54:32):
Good point.

BS (01:54:33):
Yeah. That is a change. And I think the same thing is happening with Blacks and whites. You have a lot of Blacks and whites who are friends. Now, you still have hatred. For various groups, sure, that is still there. But this is very different. I am old enough to remember when I worked in a Black settlement house when I was very young as a teenager. My mother was hysterical because it was not safe. I never worried about it. And I had a wonderful experience. And then the woman who headed this settlement house had a party for the volunteers and my mother would not let me go. You do not go to Black people's houses. And my mother was not anti-Black. She was a civil rights person all the way, but the social distance was enormous. And the social distance between Blacks and whites and between men and women, I had not thought of it that way. Between men and women, the social distance has diminished. That is...

SM (01:55:29):
That is good.

BS (01:55:30):
Now granted, that is the younger part of it, but you see changes. I see changes in the people I grew up with or the people my age, how we have all changed, and I think this has happened with the boomers too, is they have changed. They have moved on. I do not meet a lot of people who are bitter, but then I meet a lot of people who-

SM (01:55:52):
Somebody said I should have clarified this by saying those who went to Vietnam and those who did not, and-

BS (01:55:58):
Well, Vietnam, yeah. That bitterness is there.

SM (01:56:00):
...the bitterness, and the Wall, what has the Wall played in that healing? Let me tell you that Senator Muskie did not even respond to 1968, made no mention of it. He responded by saying we have not healed since the Civil War on the issue of race, and the issue of race. And then he went on to say he had just seen the Ken Burns series, and it had touched him because he had been in the hospital. 430,000 men died, almost an entire generation of the South was wiped out.

BS (01:56:30):
Huge-huge.

SM (01:56:31):
And very few men were even there to be fathers. I could not believe. So that is the way he responded. But certainly if I had changed that around to those who served in Vietnam, the 3 million, and then those who were the anti-war movement, that might be a little bit different.

BS (01:56:48):
That is different. And being white and middle class, I did not know many people who had children or relatives or friends in Vietnam. I am the generation slightly before. I really did not... I am trying to think if I knew anyone who served in Vietnam. Now, I cared about the war and I thought it was a stupid war and so forth. But I am just thinking, I do not know anybody so I cannot say I know people are bitter. But I read about them in the newspapers and they have a right to be bitter.

SM (01:57:19):
Yeah, and the Wall... You have been to the Wall, have not you?

BS (01:57:21):
Yes.

SM (01:57:23):
When you went to the Wall for the first time, what was your reaction?

BS (01:57:27):
Such a sadness. Such a sadness. So many wasted lines. And I think a lot of people feel that. It is also artistically and ethically so good to see the names being honored, which you do not really... you see it occasionally in very small towns. There will be a Civil War memorial and the list of boys, and they were boys often, who were killed in the Civil War business. But it is a memorial the size of the ceiling, and there is 25 names on it [inaudible]. But when you see it for the whole country, just...

SM (01:58:03):
And of course, you have to think about the 3 million that died in Vietnam too. When you think of-

BS (01:58:08):
Civilians.

SM (01:58:08):
Yes.

BS (01:58:09):
It is a terrible-terrible-terrible time.

SM (01:58:13):
Unbelievable.

BS (01:58:17):
But I think it is very hard to live being bitter. And even those Vietnam veterans, many, when you talk to them, they sound bitter, but they all also have lives. They are not sitting in a corner being bitter. They have married, they work. They are not bitter in their lives. Well, they are bitter about Vietnam, and I think that is a very different question. They may not ever heal from Vietnam. That is a wound that continually festers. But they are in relatively good shape. And I hope that will happen with the veterans of this war. These wars.

SM (01:59:01):
Post-traumatic stress disorders are rampant in this group.

BS (01:59:04):
Rampant, absolutely rampant because they keep fighting. They fight, they go home, and then they come back and they fight some more. And that is not the way we used to fight wars.

SM (01:59:13):
The other quality was trust and that is, that is a quality that many people have labeled the movement generation as a generation that does not trust because a lot of leaders lied to them, whether it be Watergate or Gulf of Tonkin, or even Eisenhower, U2. Remember, on college campuses in the (19)60s, no one trusted anybody in positions of responsibility, no matter who they were.

BS (01:59:35):
We are seeing that again with the Tea Party.

SM (01:59:37):
Yeah.

BS (01:59:38):
And I do not think those are boomers, are they?

SM (01:59:40):
No-no. Well-

BS (01:59:41):
So maybe the edge of the boomers?

SM (01:59:43):
Yeah, they are more working class, I think though too. I am not sure. I do not know if anybody has done the study. I am sure there is a lot of college educated people in that group, but I think it was more working class.

BS (01:59:55):
Yeah. But they are angry and they do not trust the government.

SM (01:59:57):
Yeah. Right.

BS (01:59:57):
There is a lot of division.

SM (01:59:58):
Do you think that is a good quality to have? You were a psychology major.

BS (02:00:04):
Yeah. But years and years ago. Yeah. I think a healthy skepticism is nice. A blanket distrust is closer to paranoia. But-

SM (02:00:14):
In political science, we learn that... when you learn political science, that the healthier the nation is when the citizens do not trust their government because-

BS (02:00:24):
Then they are watching you.

SM (02:00:24):
...you are accountable.

BS (02:00:34):
Yeah. I was going to say something and now I have forgotten what it was. Oh dear. Brilliant statements.

SM (02:00:34):
Well, think about it-

BS (02:00:38):
Oh, I know. What I was going to say is I recently read a book about Lincoln. And the partisanship around Lincoln between the Republicans and the Democrats, I do not know if they were Democrats then, but between the two parties was awful, unbelievably bad. And I had forgotten whatever I knew or did not know before, but it reminded me of a lot of the current stuff that we are hearing. There was anger and hatred and lack of trust and disrespect, and the partisanship was incredible. And I think we have forgotten that is our history to some degree. Now, it is not always good for the nation. I worry about the Tea Party and stuff like that, but it is not unusual. Democracy is just very messy.

SM (02:01:29):
Yeah.

BS (02:01:30):
Very messy.

SM (02:01:33):
Even when Jackson was alive. Oh my God. People hated Jackson. Some people-

BS (02:01:38):
That is right. Some people still hate Jackson.

SM (02:01:40):
Some people believe that the... I cannot believe people are writing this, because the first six presidents, there was disagreements between Hamilton and Jefferson.

BS (02:01:51):
That is right. There were-

SM (02:01:53):
Very strong differences. And Aaron Burr, obviously.

BS (02:01:56):
Yes. Yeah-yeah-yeah.

SM (02:01:57):
But they say that the way we treat each other, the way we talk to each other, all started with Jackson and I do not understand.

BS (02:02:08):
They were dueling with each other. My God, they were shooting each other.

SM (02:02:12):
They were making fun of his wife. That is what they were trying to do there.

BS (02:02:15):
They made fun of a lot of people.

SM (02:02:18):
I have just got just a couple more questions then, we are done here. What do you think of what is going on with women in the military? I know that you... Yeah, I-

BS (02:02:30):
The sexual assault or in terms of women in the military in general?

SM (02:02:33):
I was curious when you went before Congress in those congressional hearings and the congresswoman that you worked with, Congresswoman-

BS (02:02:40):
Green.

SM (02:02:41):
...Green.

BS (02:02:42):
Green. Yeah.

SM (02:02:42):
How were you treated as women? Because when Diane Carlson Evans went to Congress to try to get the Women's Memorial, some of them swore at her. And did you ever have that?

BS (02:02:55):
No, I did not have that. Well, I was fairly insulated. I was just... It is true I was working on women's issues, but most of the time I was in an office.

SM (02:03:03):
Oh, okay.

BS (02:03:05):
But I do remember when I first started on the staff, one of the men walked me to some other office because I probably could not find it or something or other. And I come from New York, and I walk with a strong, fast stride, and it is a longer stride. I am walking firmly. And he looked at me and he said, "Oh my God, you even walk like a man."

SM (02:03:28):
Who said that?

BS (02:03:29):
One of the staff members.

SM (02:03:30):
Oh my gosh.

BS (02:03:31):
Yeah. Well, talking about women and talking about changing things, it is pretty scary. Nobody wants to change unless you are uncomfortable. And this guy, he is just feeling uncomfortable, but not in a way where he wants to change or anything, because even just walking that way... The other thing is that pantsuits were just coming in and I was just beginning to wear them, and I was not allowed to wear them to work. Edith Green would not allow them. And the first woman who wore one on the floor of the House of Representatives was former governor Ella Grasso, or maybe she became governor later, from Connecticut. And she wore pantsuits, and the men made comments which are in the-

SM (02:04:08):
Hillary wore them.

BS (02:04:09):
Yeah, but that is much later. Here, we are talking about the early (19)70s. Women do not wear pantsuits in official places. And I think a woman wore a pantsuit before the Supreme Court then was chastised by one of the justices. And women wear dresses when they go before the Supreme Court, as far as I know now, still.

SM (02:04:27):
Two areas, and that is women in the military. Compare women in the military during the Vietnam War, and most of them were nurses, and women in the military now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where is the-

BS (02:04:40):
I think a couple of things have happened is women are technically not allowed to go in combat, and that assumes that there is a line where people are fighting for almost hand to hand combat. That is not how this war is being fought. It is just not how it is being fought. You are driving someplace, from one place to another, and you are attacked. Now you have two choices. Say, " Oh, I am a woman. I do not hold a gun. I do not do any of those things." But fortunately, they have issued you a gun, so you are going to use it. So women are doing combat and nobody is really looking at it because there is a law that says women are not supposed to be in combat. They fly planes. They fly helicopters. There was one woman during the Kuwait War, I think, who was captured, pilot. I think also a physician was captured. So there is a lot more combat...

SM (02:05:28):
I will let that one go to equipment.

BS (02:05:35):
The number of women [inaudible] a quote. They would rather have a non-high school student, male, who is a juvenile delinquent, then take more educated women, high school graduates, or even college graduate. There is a quote on the number of women. That is gone up slowly. I do not know what it is now, 15 percent or something, whatever. But ever since the Kuwait War, there has been a change. Every politician or commentator on the news now never talks about the men in our armed forces. The men and women in our armed forces, whether they are a Democrat, a Tea Party person, a Republican, does not matter where they are from the political spectrum, and that is, again, a symbol of a huge change. Big, big change.

SM (02:06:25):
This has all happened in the lives of boomers and boomer women.

BS (02:06:29):
Yes. This is everybody. This is everybody. We now will get soldiers, now, we are not drafting anybody, and it would be legal to just draft men. We would have a lawsuit about it, and the Supreme Court would have to find out if it was discrimination not to draft women. I think it would be. But nobody is suggesting that. It is probably one of the, I do not know for sure, nobody is suggesting a draft anyway. But our attitude towards women in the military has changed somewhat. However, those women in the military, and here is a statistic for you, they are more likely to be sexually assaulted than to die in the war.

SM (02:07:07):
Yeah. I know we-

BS (02:07:08):
Or to even be injured in the war.

SM (02:07:09):
We brought, we had a student affairs before I left. We brought this issue up at a summer retreat, and Dennis Traister, an Iraq veteran, came back and talked about it, and it is an embarrassment. And he did not do it, but he knows this is happening, and it is really having a terrible image on the veterans returning. Because it is almost, when you think about it, if it is so rampant, and it supposedly is, then... And then of course, when Vietnam vets came back, they were looked upon as baby killers. And even though the majority did not kill babies, a lot of people would say that oh, many of them did. It is a lot more rampant than you think it was. It is not just all only [inaudible].

BS (02:07:57):
But it is against the policy now.

SM (02:07:58):
Yeah.

BS (02:07:59):
I do not know if it was against the policy then. It is against the policy now.

SM (02:08:00):
Yeah. No, it was not, but still, there was a...

BS (02:08:03):
Against policy then it-

SM (02:08:03):
Yeah.

BS (02:08:03):
It is not against the policy now.

SM (02:08:03):
No, it was not, but still, there was a conduct code.

BS (02:08:04):
Yeah. But it is a real problem for women. On the other hand it is... I was watching an interview of a soldier who was like a platoon leader or whatever. And he was saying..." And he was not talking about women's issues. He said, "The men and women in my platoon, they are fantastic." And this is a small unit. And the women generally have proved themselves to be quite good. I mean, you really got to love the military. You have to want to go into it. But they are there and they help. And to the extent that more and more of wars will be run by computers. Or lots of parts of the war...

SM (02:08:47):
Right.

BS (02:08:49):
Even when you have the ground stuff that goes on in Afghanistan and Iraq, you still need people to do computers. You now fly a plane by sitting somewhere in the West. You fly these drones over in Iraq.

SM (02:09:01):
Well, you talked about the fact that women were not involved in math, science and technology.

BS (02:09:06):
That is right.

SM (02:09:07):
Now we are talking about the Bill Gates and the Steve Jobs now.

BS (02:09:10):
Yeah.

SM (02:09:10):
Where are the women... Are women equal now in say, Silicon Valley?

BS (02:09:14):
No.

SM (02:09:14):
And the-

BS (02:09:15):
No, they are not.

SM (02:09:16):
No.

BS (02:09:16):
They are not. They do not run Silicon Valley. When computers first started, you had women who were systems analysts because it was a new field and it had no sex roles in it. And then as the field gets bigger and more solidified and older, you get sex roles emerging. So that men are better in computers than women. This was not true at the beginning. There were women who were inventing computer languages and whatnot. At the beginning it was different. There were no sex roles. This is all brand new. So you cannot say, "Only women do this." Or, "I am more comfortable if men do it." You do not have that now. You have much more differentiation. And indeed, computer technology is one of the places in terms of people majoring in it. The number of women has dropped in the last few years. [inaudible]

SM (02:10:02):
So this is an area now where Boomer men probably have failed in terms of women have not been encouraged to be...

BS (02:10:10):
I... Yeah.

SM (02:10:11):
Bill Gates works closely with his wife on philanthropy.

BS (02:10:14):
Oh, yes.

SM (02:10:15):
But he sold everything.

BS (02:10:16):
Yeah.

SM (02:10:16):
He does not oversee anything anymore. But Steve Jobs is all the time up there. And there is others besides those two.

BS (02:10:23):
Yeah.

SM (02:10:24):
Just quick responses and then this is it.

BS (02:10:27):
Okay.

SM (02:10:27):
These are just at the very end. I always... I had written down here yesterday, I saw Rush, I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about the National Organization for Women and he called them Nags N-A-G-S.

BS (02:10:42):
Yeah.

SM (02:10:43):
And he says they are a bunch of demi-Nazis. So he is still doing is his thing.

BS (02:10:51):
A lot of people are still upset with women. And if women stand up for their rights. There is a wonderful quote by Rebecca West who was a writer a number of years ago. I cannot remember anything she has written. But she says, "I do not understand why people call me a feminist when I get angry when they want me to act like a doormat." That is not quite a direct quote, but you got the sense of-

SM (02:11:15):
It is just a quick response...

BS (02:11:18):
Yeah.

SM (02:11:19):
Just a thought on any of, these are just major events.

BS (02:11:20):
Yeah.

SM (02:11:21):
Kent State and Jackson State.

BS (02:11:25):
Kent State, I remember. What, well I am trying. But Jackson State, something happened there but I am drawing an absolute blank.

SM (02:11:31):
That is where two African American students were killed 10 days later after protesting. And they-

BS (02:11:36):
In Mississippi?

SM (02:11:37):
Yes, yeah.

BS (02:11:37):
Jackson State. Okay, and I have been there. Yeah. I had forgotten that. I had forgotten that.

SM (02:11:42):
It was 1970, and it was a major event.

BS (02:11:45):
I am going to Kent State in December to speak there.

SM (02:11:49):
It is a good school.

BS (02:11:49):
It is a very good school and lots a good people there.

SM (02:11:50):
Great school.

BS (02:11:51):
So I have been thinking a little bit about what happened there. But I... This is history. Right now I think it would be very difficult to send troops to a college, to quiet things down.

SM (02:12:04):
Oh, yeah.

BS (02:12:04):
To send the National Guard out. But who knows what will happen? One hopes that they are better trained now.

SM (02:12:09):
Yeah.

BS (02:12:10):
And they probably are. That does not mean that you do not get people who do bad things.

SM (02:12:16):
I think, I hope presidents even... I think presidents should have learned about whether you invite these groups onto campus to begin with. Watergate.

BS (02:12:24):
Well, you see, but that is a free speech issue.

SM (02:12:26):
Yeah.

BS (02:12:27):
That is a free speech issue. And you cannot... It is very hard because there are lots of groups that really say bad things about other groups of people. And they do have a right to say them. In a state university. In a private university, you have no First Amendment rights.

SM (02:12:42):
Right.

BS (02:12:43):
And so you could say in a private university, "Sorry, we are just not letting the Tea Party people speak." Or, "We are not letting whatever."

SM (02:12:49):
Yeah, Villanova that a couple times.

BS (02:12:52):
Yeah, but if you are in a public institution, it is very hard legally to get rid of people You do not want to speak. You have to let them speak. Now, you may have to provide, may have come up with some rules and you may have to have a security force and you may have to do things like that.

SM (02:13:08):
Well, I do not think Villanova wanted David Horowitz there.

BS (02:13:10):
But David Horowitz still spoke there. Yeah, well he has a right to speak there.

SM (02:13:14):
Yeah.

BS (02:13:14):
And I think students would be right if they said, "You are not letting, you are only letting us hear people you like."

SM (02:13:19):
Yeah.

BS (02:13:19):
"We want to hear the other side." I would support their right.

SM (02:13:23):
Any thought that Watergate? Just quick thoughts?

BS (02:13:30):
Watergate was an awful experience for the United States. I have no question about that. But I will tell you a story about Watergate. At the time of Watergate, everybody in Washington is talking about it. Everybody is talking about, "Did you meet anybody?" You say, "Did you see the news this morning?" Or, "Did you see the article yesterday?" Or whatever. So it is big news. There is one place where it is not ever mentioned, and this is the Republican women in the White House who are meeting with a whole bunch of other women, mostly Democrats to work on women's issues. We come and we meet with Anne Armstrong and some of her female people. And we talk about various, whatever's going on, what we need, what we think the government ought to do and everything.

SM (02:14:18):
Yeah.

BS (02:14:19):
No one mentions Watergate.

SM (02:14:21):
Oh my God.

BS (02:14:22):
That is the only place... It was so obvious that no, everyone was being extraordinarily polite. And I think what was going on, I think symbolically this is interesting, is because what it showed... It has become harder now I think in some ways. But women who are very different in their backgrounds and their political beliefs can unite among some of the women's issues. And indeed they still do. If you look at women, you look at both in the United States and women's programs overseas, and I mean, not everybody is a Democrat. You know, do get people who, of different views who care about some of these issues.

SM (02:15:01):
Right.

BS (02:15:02):
And they work on some of these issues. [inaudible] And I think that instance, and I think the sadness that has happened is that the issue has changed enough. It is now mostly... But it is not only Democrats. There are some Republican women who care. And the popularity of someone like Sarah Palin is very interesting.

SM (02:15:28):
Yeah, I read a very good article on... What the heck was it... They think she is going to be the candidate. I do not think she is. I think it is going to be Romney. But-

BS (02:15:37):
Question is, can she get elected?

SM (02:15:39):
But Romney does not like her. I know that. They do not like-

BS (02:15:43):
No, anyone who is a real politician, does not like her.

SM (02:15:46):
Woodstock.

BS (02:15:47):
Woodstock, I kind of looked at Woodstock with some amusements and shock. Because I am of the generation before. I was delighted that my kids were not there. I know that area because I spent my summers in that area. The same postal, the zone.

SM (02:16:05):
Did you have a generation gap? Because that is-

BS (02:16:07):
I think it is... Yeah, there' is always a generation gap. I mean, you look at Roman writings and the young people are all, they like to rebel and they see, they want the world to be different than, well, they should want it to be different. And so there is a generation gap. You have some different values. When my kids were talking about choosing not to get married, I had to really think about that long and hard. And it took me a while to realize that their happiness was much more important than whether they got married. And if they felt they could be happier not being married then. That is what it needed to be. And I think on a lot of issues, that is what happens is you rethink your views and people change. I mean, that is the other thing that is really exciting about looking at history is you realize some things never changed, but some things do.

SM (02:16:55):
Look at Gloria Steinem. She did not get married until real late.

BS (02:16:59):
That is right. Yeah. And then the guy died, which was sad.

SM (02:17:03):
Oh, he did die?

BS (02:17:03):
Yeah, he died a few years after.

SM (02:17:04):
Oh.

BS (02:17:04):
I think it was less than five years. He had some dreadful illness.

SM (02:17:08):
Just hippies and yippies. I do not know what you thought of them.

BS (02:17:15):
Yeah. I think they served a purpose. People at the extremes help you in the middle, change your view. And you never quite go to those extremes. But you think about some of those things and the whole casualness in dress, it is partly because of the way the hippies dressed.

SM (02:17:32):
Do you think that the counterculture, which was a very popular word...

BS (02:17:37):
Yeah.

SM (02:17:37):
Were there women in the counterculture? There certainly were.

BS (02:17:38):
Certainly in communes that those two things have had an effect on women today in any way? I know in a lot of the communes, sexism got to be real issue that they had to deal with. I think there are always things on the fringe of society that have limited effects. But sometimes they have hidden effects. I mean, there is something appealing about people living together in a group that cooperates with each other. That is an old human ideal. And they were trying, and did not quite succeed beyond the few. And even those have changed. I do not know what the impact was.

SM (02:18:19):
The-

BS (02:18:20):
Excuse me. But sometimes the philosophical impact, the notion of what they were trying to do is appealing and makes one think of cooperation and cooperative societies, even though one would never live, perhaps... I mean, this is how I look at them.

SM (02:18:34):
I always looked at communes as drama out.

BS (02:18:37):
Yeah, well, some of them were, and they are all controversial and they are all different. But they were not as important as the media thought they were. And then this is, I think one of the problems is the media made some of these... Because we have mass media, and even though we did not have computers, then we had television. And so they have to fill that thing up 24 hours a day. And so anything that looks important gets tremendous coverage.

SM (02:19:04):
Attica and Wounded Knee.

BS (02:19:05):
Yeah.

SM (02:19:06):
Now Attica obviously was the terrible...

BS (02:19:08):
Yeah, the prison riot.

SM (02:19:08):
Yeah.

BS (02:19:08):
Yeah, and then Wounded Knee.

SM (02:19:11):
And then Wounded Knee was the Native American and then...

BS (02:19:12):
Yeah. I think Wounded Knee probably had more importance. Attica, you start off, I mean, after all they are "Prisoners." I am putting quotes around that. So you do not have the best... They are all bad people to some degree. So that colors what happens. On the other hand, you do not want them to be treated like animals.

SM (02:19:30):
Yeah.

BS (02:19:31):
So it probably had an impact on some prison reform. I do not know enough about prison reform to know what happened, but it would not surprise me. It certainly, I think was a shock to many people how badly prisoners were treated. And I am sure another set of people said that, "Well, they got exactly what they deserved. We should not be coddling them." But I think the American Indian movements had a different kind of impact because that had to do with history. And we have not treated Indians, well, Native Americans in our histories. I did not know anything about Indian culture at all until probably in the (19)50s. We took a trip to the West and I saw some Indian communities and I was absolutely stunned. I knew nothing about this.

SM (02:20:19):
If I hear one more time, people say gambling casinos or...

BS (02:20:23):
Oh, well...

SM (02:20:25):
Now they are getting good jobs because of the casinos.

BS (02:20:27):
Only some of them, only some of them, not for most of them.

SM (02:20:31):
These are some of-

BS (02:20:34):
But I think historically it becomes very interesting because it makes them now a disadvantaged group that we need to think about. They become part of America in a different way. And I think that was extraordinarily important because it got people interested in Native Americans. All we knew was that they found people and whatever. Defeated by Custer.

SM (02:20:55):
What did you think of the Students for Democratic Society and then the Weathermen that the violent group that came out of that group?

BS (02:21:02):
Yeah. Students for Democratic Society were in my college, Brooklyn College in the late forties when I went to college and I was thinking of joining. And my mother in her wisdom said, "Do not join." She said, "It is not going to be good for you in the future." She said, "Do not join. If you want to go to the Navy, go to the Navy, but do not join." It turned out to be very good advice.

SM (02:21:21):
Yeah.

BS (02:21:24):
Because it is not so good to lie on an FBI...

SM (02:21:26):
Yeah, that is right.

BS (02:21:28):
The FBI investigation and whatnot. So...

SM (02:21:31):
Yeah, going violent is, I have had different responses that one.

BS (02:21:37):
Yeah. Violence I think is a bad thing to do. The only time one should ever be violent is in self-defense.

SM (02:21:44):
These are personal-

BS (02:21:44):
Or in a war.

SM (02:21:45):
These are personalities. Just quick thoughts on the person. Tom Hayden.

BS (02:21:50):
Tom Hayden. See, I am not a Boomer, so he had a different effect on me. I thought he raised some good issues. I thought he was a little more radical than I was comfortable with. But he was raising interesting issues. And...

SM (02:22:04):
Jane Fonda.

BS (02:22:06):
Jane Fonda. I happened to like Jane Fonda. I think she was probably misled in terms of Vietnam to some degree. But she meant well and I liked her. But I have to tell you, that is colored by my feelings towards exercise and her feelings towards exercise. And she is female, too. So that may also make a difference...

SM (02:22:25):
The two guys that were the yippie, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. They were the ones that...

BS (02:22:31):
Oh God, yes. I do not know what I thought about them. They were not central to my consciousness. I do not think I liked them, but I certainly did not hate them. I mean, it never reached that level. But I do not think they reached me. But there was always something... They were criticizing parts of society sometimes that made sense.

SM (02:22:52):
Yeah.

BS (02:22:53):
And that part I think was good. But they again, they are not my generation.

SM (02:22:58):
David Harris.

BS (02:22:59):
I am not even sure who David Harris is, except with sounds familiar.

SM (02:23:04):
He married Joan Baez. He went off to jail for...

BS (02:23:05):
Oh God, yes-yes-yes.

SM (02:23:07):
Resisting the draft.

BS (02:23:08):
Yeah. But you see, I know so little about him. I do not-

SM (02:23:11):
Cesar Chavez.

BS (02:23:11):
Cesar Chavez, I liked, because he was really working directly with the underdogs, and he was really working for people who were being taken advantage of. And so he appealed to me. And I come from a family that was quite pro-union. I learned... We never went into a store that had a strike line, has a picket line in front of it.

SM (02:23:33):
Right.

BS (02:23:34):
...In front of it. And he was working for unionization of these poor people. So he had a bigger impact on me because he appeals to my old values.

SM (02:23:43):
How about NOW?

BS (02:23:45):
NOW?

SM (02:23:46):
National Organization for Women.

BS (02:23:52):
They had an enormous influence. They were the only organization for a long time. The small group that I joined was started by... I think I mentioned this earlier. So I had two classes yesterday. So I talked about some of the same things...

SM (02:24:07):
[inaudible]

BS (02:24:08):
I am not sure whether I said this yesterday, last night or this morning. But there were concerns that NOW was too radical for middle class women. And Elizabeth Boyer started the Women's Equity Action League, WEAL, which is what I filed under. WEAL, was filing those charges.

SM (02:24:25):
I have-

BS (02:24:25):
Because she worried that middle class women would be turned off by some of the activities of NOW. They held demonstrations.

SM (02:24:33):
Right.

BS (02:24:34):
At this point, I had never been in a demonstration or parade in my life. And so it seemed pretty not good for me, so I did not join NOW immediately. But this other organization looked like it was much more dignified. Betty Boyer was particularly concerned that the abortion issue would turn off a lot of women. And though she set up NOW so it did not take a stand either way on abortion. She was very pro-choice. But she set up the organization so that would not be something that could destroy the organization. Years later, they came up with a stance for pro-choice, but it was set up initially... And it was wonderful. There were a whole bunch of women like me. We would not join NOW because we would not march in a parade. Well, of course, I cannot tell you how many parades I marched in and rallies I have spoken at and whatnot. But WEAL became a place for stepping into the nice shallow water of the Women's Movement. And then you could expand. And then they died rather suddenly when they lost some funding a few years later.

SM (02:25:36):
At least the magazine keeps going strong though.

BS (02:25:38):
This magazine is still good. I still subscribe.

SM (02:25:40):
Now that they get good writers.

BS (02:25:43):
So yeah, they get good writers and they write about things nobody else is writing about.

SM (02:25:47):
Yeah. The Miss America Protest of (19)68. What did you think of that?

BS (02:25:54):
Oh, yeah. I liked that they did that. I watched Miss America every year.

SM (02:25:57):
That was Carol Hanish.

BS (02:25:57):
Was it?

SM (02:25:57):
Yeah.

BS (02:25:58):
Okay. Then you probably know that bras were never burned.

SM (02:26:00):
Yeah.

BS (02:26:01):
Okay. What I have heard, that part I know is true, that they were never burned. What I have heard, but I do not know if this is true, is that they tried to get a fire permit and could not get one. I do not know if that is real or not. But I-

SM (02:26:11):
I am not sure. I know they had a banner up...

BS (02:26:13):
I love the story.

SM (02:26:14):
Four of them had a banner.

BS (02:26:16):
Yeah. Now I thought it was a good idea. And I was someone who had watched every year. And they showed America what Miss America really was. And I thought it was absolutely lovely. Yeah.

SM (02:26:29):
And I-

BS (02:26:29):
I did not like the ideas of them throwing bras away.

SM (02:26:32):
Anita Bryant, I talking to her, another personality of that.

BS (02:26:36):
Yeah. I thought she was somewhat sad. She did not really... She really was certainly homophobic and anti-female and fortunately not terribly powerful and faded into obscurity fairly quickly, which was good.

SM (02:26:50):
Emmett Till, of course.

BS (02:26:51):
Emmett Till, yeah. Absolutely awful. Absolutely awful.

SM (02:26:55):
I just had a whole James Meredith...

BS (02:26:58):
Yeah.

SM (02:26:59):
And certainly the civil rights room with the big four.

BS (02:27:02):
These were great. These were-

SM (02:27:02):
Plus boycotts.

BS (02:27:03):
Yeah. Some of these were very, very brave people. I mean, they literally laid their lives on the line and some of them were killed. I do not know if I could do that. I probably could do it now because I am older and my kids do not need me. But as a middle-aged or young person, to do that I think requires incredible courage.

SM (02:27:23):
Yeah. It is like, I think it is Casey Hayden, Tom Hayden's first wife.

BS (02:27:28):
Yeah.

SM (02:27:30):
She said she would be in she' would interview with me, but she keeps delaying it.

BS (02:27:32):
Oh.

SM (02:27:32):
She does not do interviews anymore.

BS (02:27:35):
Oh.

SM (02:27:37):
But certainly the women who went south, those young women and men who went south.

BS (02:27:43):
Yeah, some of them were killed.

SM (02:27:43):
Yeah.

BS (02:27:43):
A woman from Michigan. Viola-

SM (02:27:45):
Viola Liuzzo.

BS (02:27:46):
Yeah.

SM (02:27:48):
Stonewall.

BS (02:27:49):
Stonewall-

SM (02:27:49):
1969.

BS (02:27:52):
I did not notice it very much at the time. I remember reading about it, but not thinking very much about it. But of course, it was the beginning of another movement. And something like that, it is interesting how movements physically start, because clearly these people were around before.

SM (02:28:10):
Oh, yeah.

BS (02:28:10):
But they were not... Now, they could coalesce. And I think this has happened with women's issues for individual women. There was not the defining moment. Everybody did not read Betty Friedan's book at the same time. And indeed there were people before Betty Friedan doing things on it. We do not have a defining moment as such. But I think for some movements you do have that. And for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, et cetera, that was a defining movement. And they could do that in part because the women's movement and the civil rights movement had said, "You have a right to feel this way. You have a right to be respected for what you are and for what you do." I mean, that is the message of the civil rights movement and the women's movement. Which lays the groundwork then for other movements to come up and say, "Yeah, we deserve respect. We have rights. Just like you have rights." And in general, they have been... The Women's Movement has had lesbians in it. Not... Can I tell you a story?

SM (02:29:13):
Yeah.

BS (02:29:18):
[inaudible] The first nationally sponsored conference of women is the Houston Conference in 1977. And so the government was not paying for us to come.

SM (02:29:27):
The first year in California.

BS (02:29:28):
Yeah. Oh, okay. All right.

SM (02:29:30):
Yeah.

BS (02:29:30):
So you can place it in time.

SM (02:29:31):
Yeah.

BS (02:29:32):
So the Women's Movement is gathering speed. We have gotten some laws passed and everything. And this is official. The government... We had congresswomen that are coming, and some of the first ladies are coming. I mean, there is some big, big deal. And they have lots of resolutions. And all the resolutions pass unanimously. We need no discrimination here and reform this and want to... Yes, everybody says unanimously. Now you know the resolutions in advance. And there is one on lesbianism. And I am thinking, politically, this is not a good idea. It is going to split people apart. It is going to turn people off. This is what I am thinking. So I asked someone whom I respect enormously, who runs the Women's National Center... What is this… This is the worst part of getting old you get mixed up on some these initials. This is the National Women's Law Center. That is it. National Women's Law Center. And she is someone I respect enormously. I mean, she is just terrific as a human being and intellectually and legally. So we are talking about this, and I say, "I just think this is a bad idea." I said, "It is going to cause political stuff and it is going to make the women look bad and everything." And she looks at me and she says, "Do you know there are lesbians in the Women's Movement?" I said, "Really? Who?" And she starts reeling off some names of women I have worked with whom I had never noticed.

SM (02:30:55):
Oh, wow.

BS (02:30:56):
Looking back, I could see the signs were there, but I myself knew so little about this. I had never met anyone I knew except one young man once...

SM (02:31:05):
Right.

BS (02:31:06):
Who apparently was gay, and everybody knew it, but it was a new idea for me. I said, "Really?" I remember the tone of voice, even. Yeah.

SM (02:31:15):
That was like I was in graduate school at Ohio State...

BS (02:31:17):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:17):
...In 1972, and we had our evening class...

BS (02:31:21):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:21):
And I know it was Dr. Johnson. And the class had 20 students, so they were about 10 males, 10 females.


BS (02:31:29):
Yeah.
SM (02:31:30):
And at the very end, we are talking about anti-war...

BS (02:31:35):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:36):
The war Vietnam, the protest movement, civil rights issues of African American women.

BS (02:31:40):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:40):
And Dr. Johnson said," I would like all 10 of the men to stay after."

BS (02:31:46):
Oh, wow.

SM (02:31:48):
I said, "What is this?"

BS (02:31:49):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:50):
"Why are we staying after?"

BS (02:31:51):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:51):
I would like you to... And then the women left.

BS (02:31:55):
Yeah.

SM (02:31:56):
And the guy that he said, "I would like you to meet the first person who is going after a PhD in gay studies in America." His name is Dr. Allen Herbst.

BS (02:32:12):
Oh my God.

SM (02:32:12):
And here he is. He came in.

BS (02:32:12):
Wow.

SM (02:32:12):
Dr. Johnson was…

BS (02:32:12):
Wow.

SM (02:32:12):
I guess he had just popped into the campus.

BS (02:32:15):
Something, yeah.

SM (02:32:18):
And Dr. Johnson... And we are looking, I guess I must have been pretty naive because I knew nothing about this stuff.

BS (02:32:22):
Well a lot of us were naive.

SM (02:32:25):
The thing is, we are talking about the anti-war movement and civil rights, and between black males and females...

BS (02:32:27):
That is right, this is-

SM (02:32:31):
All of a sudden...

BS (02:32:31):
This is real rights.

SM (02:32:32):
[inaudible] But it came out nowhere.

BS (02:32:35):
Yeah. It seemed like it came from nowhere because it was-

SM (02:32:37):
And we are sitting there, what the hell are we here for?

BS (02:32:39):
Yeah.

SM (02:32:40):
Yeah, it is great that he is getting a PhD, but...

BS (02:32:43):
Yeah, but what does this mean to me?

SM (02:32:44):
Yeah and Dr. Johnson never brought it up again in any of the courses.

BS (02:32:47):
Yeah.

SM (02:32:48):
But he said, you just got an opportunity to meet this guy. I never knew what happened to him.

BS (02:32:52):
Yeah. Well, it was a new issue. And they could build, just as women built on...

SM (02:32:57):
I think it was Minnesota, University of Minnesota.

BS (02:33:00):
Yeah.

SM (02:33:00):
I think that is where Sarah Evans is from.

BS (02:33:01):
Yeah.

SM (02:33:03):
Or was from. Almost done here.

BS (02:33:05):
Yeah. Okay.

SM (02:33:06):
Just a few more names and then we are done. I often wondered what the AIDS crisis, if women affected the women in any way, the Women's Movement, the AIDS crisis. Because I have interviewed a lot...

BS (02:33:19):
Yeah.

SM (02:33:19):
Gay and lesbian leaders.

BS (02:33:20):
Yeah.

SM (02:33:20):
I interviewed Malcolm Boyd.

BS (02:33:22):
Yeah.

SM (02:33:22):
I have interviewed Cleve Jones and Tori Osborne and others like that. And they said that, in fact, two of them started crying because Reagan could not even mention the term AIDS for many, many years.

BS (02:33:36):
Yeah, that is true, I had forgotten that.

SM (02:33:41):
And the men... And I guess the question is, not many women died, but the question is, yes, women did die.

BS (02:33:44):
They did. And they still do.

SM (02:33:45):
Yeah. And the question is, did the AIDS crisis have any effect on the Women's Movement? I know I am throwing things out here, but... Because it was devastating in (19)83-

BS (02:33:56):
It has an effect in that because of the Women's Movement, anything else that is going on, you could say, "Does this have an impact on women or on a specific group of women?" And women do begin to raise this because all the attention is on men as if only men had AIDS. And so women do begin to raise this. And the kind of things that you end up with is in Africa, you have to educate women how to prevent AIDS when they are having sexual intercourse.

SM (02:34:27):
Right.

BS (02:34:28):
Otherwise, AIDS will keep spreading. And if you cannot get the men to do it, you can get the women. And ideally, you aim at both. But this is what has happened in a lot of federal policy programs, a lot of non-profit programs. And just in people's thinking. There are people who will say, "Does this have an impact on women?" Or, "What is the impact on women? Do we need to do something different for women? Are we including women?" And so that kind of impact is not really written about, but it is there. And the programs, and now I am talking about not AIDS, but aid programs in undeveloped countries is... The realization now is if you do not help women, you do not help the country. You cannot do only-

SM (02:35:17):
India is another country, yeah.

BS (02:35:18):
That is right. Yeah. India, Africa.

SM (02:35:20):
Yeah.

BS (02:35:21):
And it is, again, the Women's Movement has sensitized a lot of people who would not say they are part of the Women's Movement, but they will ask that question. What are we doing? They are looking at education, for example. And it turns out in every country, men have more education than women. Does not matter whether you are talking about PhDs or basic literacy. So if you want to start educating people, you got to look at everybody, not just boys. And if you look at girls in Africa, they get raped on their way walking to school. So some of them do not go to school. Or they do not have sanitary napkins, so they do not come to school when they have their periods. So you begin to look at education as not just, we need more schools and more teachers. What do we do about these kids who are dying to go to school? They really want to go, they walk five miles and they know they could be raped on the way. And so what do you do? Give them bicycles? Some people do that so they can get away faster. But still... Do we need to provide transportation? But you look at it very differently. And that is the legacy I think, of the Women's Movement and why this movement will not die. There is an ideology that is-

SM (02:36:38):
It is global.

BS (02:36:38):
It is global.

SM (02:36:39):
When I interviewed Sherilyn Bunch, that is what she said.

BS (02:36:41):
Yeah.

SM (02:36:41):
It is global.

BS (02:36:41):
Yes. She was one of the first people to recognize that.

SM (02:36:45):
She also went to Hanoi.

BS (02:36:46):
Yeah.

SM (02:36:46):
During the Vietnam War.

BS (02:36:48):
I know, I know. But I remember when she started working at writing about this and thinking about, that is really weird to think of it as global. But she is absolutely right. It is a global movement. And people have to pay attention to it because there is no way we can solve the world's problems unless women are involved. I mean, if we get out of Afghanistan, the women there will die. They are not allowed to go to school. No. And their lives are terrible. And I would love us to get out tomorrow, but I am torn because I say if we are not protecting the women, it is very close to slavery.

SM (02:37:29):
[inaudible] Eleanor Roosevelt...

BS (02:37:35):
We do. Yeah.

SM (02:37:35):
The last few. This is just the... I will read all these all at once here.

BS (02:37:37):
No, read them one at a time.

SM (02:37:38):
Okay. Well, George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy. I just knew, they were big names back then.

BS (02:37:46):
Yeah, they were big names. And I liked the two of them, and supported the two of them. They worked to make society better in many, many ways. They wanted it to be more transparent and more effective democracy. And a lot of people thought they were very radical. I do not know if they were or not. I did not.

SM (02:38:01):
Bobby Kennedy is another one there.

BS (02:38:04):
Yeah. I liked Bobby Kennedy. He...

SM (02:38:08):
Daniel Ellsberg and those Pentagon Papers.

BS (02:38:11):
Brave man to do what he did.

SM (02:38:15):
Have you seen the movie?

BS (02:38:15):
No.

SM (02:38:15):
The Most dangerous man in America?

BS (02:38:16):
No. But to do what he did took tremendous bravery.

SM (02:38:20):
Well, his wife plays an important role in his life. The one that he married right around the Pentagon. Papers time his second wife.

BS (02:38:28):
Yeah. Oh, I did not know that.

SM (02:38:29):
Oh, yeah.

BS (02:38:29):
Yeah-

SM (02:38:30):
Crucially without her, I do not think he would be here today.

BS (02:38:34):
If you have educated, strong women, you end up with educated strong men.

SM (02:38:39):
Well, I think she is the one that...

BS (02:38:41):
Yeah.

SM (02:38:41):
I do not really think he would be here today if it was not for her.

BS (02:38:43):
Interesting. I did not know that. Thank you.

SM (02:38:45):
Yeah. You see how much they were a team.

BS (02:38:50):
Yeah. Are we recording?

SM (02:38:51):
Yeah. We are recording right here.

BS (02:38:52):
Oh, right here. I am sorry. I looked around-

SM (02:38:55):
Yeah, because I ran out.

BS (02:38:55):
Sorry. I looked beyond it.

SM (02:38:57):
The Spiro Agnew.

BS (02:39:02):
Oh God. I actually voted for Spiro Agnew for governor in my state because the guy, the Democrat who was running against him was a racist. An absolute racist. So a lot of Democrats... It is unusual for Democrats vote for Republicans.

SM (02:39:16):
Do not let the world know that.

BS (02:39:19):
No, but we had to do it. I mean, the guy would have been even worse than Spiro Agnew. I think he was not a good person. He was caught taking bribe money in the White House. And I mean...

SM (02:39:27):
Unbelievable.

BS (02:39:28):
This is not also a very smart person to do that.

SM (02:39:31):
He could have been president.

BS (02:39:32):
He could have been. He came very close. Yeah.

SM (02:39:36):
Some of the women, Gloria at Steinem.

BS (02:39:38):
I admire Gloria Steinem enormously. We did not have in the Women's Movement, a leader in the sense that one person says everything and we all follow. It is not that organized. But he has been a very thoughtful person throughout. She is a very decent human being. She is very soft-spoken, and people really like her for that because we, she is not quote, abrasive. Or she is going to turn off people. She is very- Quote abrasive or going to turn off people. You are a very attractive woman and so forth, and a very wise person.

SM (02:40:06):
I tried to interview her, I did not get a response back.

BS (02:40:10):
She is a very wise woman. She really understands so many of the implications of the women's movement. And her idea with MS was absolutely brilliant because we were at a time where there is nothing being written about women. Serious stuff about women, occasionally they might cover something like the Miss America contest, but there were not thoughtful articles. There was no place for women to go and read these things. They are just beginning in the 1970s.

SM (02:40:38):
I remember the controversy between her and Jimmy Brown, the football player. Mr. Macho, during the movement. Shere Hite.

BS (02:40:48):
Shere Hite, she was a reporter? Was she the one who had the abortion? Who am I thinking of?

SM (02:40:49):
Shere Hite wrote books on women's issues.

BS (02:40:57):
She wrote something on sexuality. I think, I do not remember, enough. I know. I do not remember enough about her.

SM (02:41:03):
Betty Friedan?

BS (02:41:05):
Betty Friedan made an enormous contribution with the Feminine Mystique, there is no question. She gave women permission, as I said before, to be angry at their lives and to examine their lives. She was also an incredibly difficult person to work with. She really was.

SM (02:41:25):
I know that when I interviewed Charles Kaiser, who wrote 1968, said " I disliked that woman because she was homophobic." That came out of nowhere.

BS (02:41:38):
She might have been homophobic, early on she might have been, I do not know. I do not think she was later on, but she was difficult to work with and that is enough said.

SM (02:41:44):
Susan Brownmiller.

BS (02:41:47):
I do not think I agreed with everything, but I always liked reading people's stuff, even if I disagreed because it would make me think about it and sharpen some of my own. She is good.

SM (02:42:00):
Yeah, she felt strongly that the pornography issue that she wanted to introduce into the Women's movement, they did not care that much about it, so never became a big issue with the women.

BS (02:42:11):
It is not so much that the women's movement did not care about it, the women's movement is very amorphous. It includes everybody who thinks they support women to some degree. And probably Sarah Palin would say, she certainly says poor women, whatever. But there is no place that people take a stand and it is like a thousand committees, all of which have some interest in some issues, and the way an issue gets worked on is if enough people want to work on it. And it is not that there was a vote taken and everybody said, we are not going to work on this issue, it is not relevant. That is not what happened. It is just that people were busy with other issues, which they felt were more important. But it is not that the movement turned it down in any official sense, there is no official women's movement. There are groups of people who coalesce around different issues and a lot of people belong to more than one group where they work together with more groups. In the pornographic issue did not catch on, a lot of issues did not catch on. Or a lot of issues caught on in a very small way. So we have a small group of people working on-

SM (02:43:30):
I have interviewed so many people that one of the interviewees said to me, they said "When they go into the now office, it disappoints them today as opposed to in the (19)70s and the (19)80s. Because all you see is literature on AIDS, literature on sexually transmitted diseases," and what was the other one? "Abortion. And that is all you see, it is like where are the issues, where is the political issues on women's health issues?"

BS (02:44:03):
Where issues, lots of people on women's Health.

SM (02:44:06):
And where is the one about the big issue that is really lacking now? Cause my niece has a little baby and it has not been addressed by anyone, is childcare. Not caring in the workforce. Having a room so a mom can go and breastfeed her child without having go in a lady's room.

BS (02:44:26):
It is not that people do not care and there are people who support it, but there are not enough of them. And the people with childcare and every westernized country has federalized childcare of one sort or another. France, they even have subsidized infant care. I mean, two weeks after your baby's born, you can drop your kid off and they will take care of it. And they do not do it because women are working. They do it because they think children need this kind of development. They get better care and more complex environments than when the mother's home with them. Because she is busy doing other things. She is cleaning, she is cooking, she is shopping and childcare center. They are thinking of the child all day long anyway. But we do not have it because Nixon vetoed bill that would have given it to us. So we do not have it. The people who need it the most are the ones who would be able to work on it if they did not have children at the time. When you have preschool children, you are incredibly busy. I watched my two daughters with their children and both were working. And how hard it was, God forbid the babysitter had a cold. I mean not even seriously ill, but has a cold for a few days. Who comes to take care of your child when you have to be in court that afternoon if you were an attorney or my daughter who is a teacher and has to find a substitute because yes, the kid's babysitter does not show or whatever, happens. And so then by the time they are a little freer, they do not need it as much. It was very hard to get a constituency on that issue. Everybody knows it is important. It is not that they do not care, but for anybody to work on any of these issues, you need some warm bodies. There is no official decision. I mean, now might have decided now would be happy to work on a lot of issues. If five people came in tomorrow and said, we would love to work on pornography, I am sure they would welcome. And they say, and we have a budget of $5,000, week and a half. We pulled some money and we want to write a book or a poster or whatever, or do some research. I do not think now would turn them away. If they, they would work out an agreement. They would not turn them away if they were against looking at that. If they do not have the staff, they do not have the time, they do not have the money. And you got to have that to work on issues. And so sometimes you pick out what is the most visible abortion is.

SM (02:46:47):
See you are, you are really saying something that is very important seems to be lost. And when people make general statements like the conservatives or the neocons that all the problems that America today can go back to the (19)60s and they blame it all on the drug culture, the sexual-

BS (02:47:07):
Well, they see those as the major problems.

SM (02:47:09):
That the word that comes up here is context. There is context to everything.

BS (02:47:15):
Yeah.

SM (02:47:16):
And you need to know that nothing is that simple. There is context. So the last ones are going to be Bella Abzug.

BS (02:47:30):
Loved her. Also, hard to work with, but I absolutely loved her because she continued to do good stuff. She bothered a lot of people because of her style before she got sex discrimination into every bill. And anytime we needed Bella Abzug to support anything, whether it was to get her room in the capitol for reception for something or other, or for her to sponsor a bill or to speak on the floor or to send out a letter to other people, she never said no. That I know of. She, maybe she did, but-

SM (02:47:58):
She was a civil rights lawyer.

BS (02:48:02):
She was a civil rights lawyer. And she knew politics or she understood.

SM (02:48:04):
She was sconce Borough boys, was not her. She-

BS (02:48:06):
Yeah. Yeah. She was involved early, early, early on. She was involved in civil rights and had a continued interest in civil rights.

SM (02:48:15):
See, I do not think a lot of people know that. It is context again. They know about her as a congresswoman. They do not know about before congress.

BS (02:48:21):
Unless you read a bibliography, you are not going to know that. I have forgotten that. But I know what I am, when read the bibliography, it came back to me. But when you and I were talking, I was not thinking of-

SM (02:48:29):
I know that everybody know that lived in New York said that a lot of people did not like her because she was very loud.

BS (02:48:39):
She was loud. She got things done.

SM (02:48:39):
But she was there for the people and she was on the streets. And she went and talked to the people.

BS (02:48:40):
Absolutely.

SM (02:48:41):
And many people said they would be walking down New York City and was Bella.

BS (02:48:45):
Yeah, she was always there. She was always there.

SM (02:48:49):
Jermaine Greer.

BS (02:48:51):
Yes.

SM (02:48:51):
Who has written some.

BS (02:48:52):
I read a book. I liked her book. Great. I am sure it had a bigger influence in Australia than here.

SM (02:48:59):
Robin Morgan.

BS (02:49:01):
Robin Morgan. Robin Morgan still writes. I like some of her writing, some I disagree with.

SM (02:49:07):
Susan Saluti.

BS (02:49:08):
Susan Saluti. She is backlash?

SM (02:49:12):
She is a more recent one.

BS (02:49:13):
Backlash book?

SM (02:49:15):
Yeah.

BS (02:49:15):
She is. She is good.

SM (02:49:16):
She is smarter than a whip.

BS (02:49:17):
She is smarter than a whip.

SM (02:49:17):
I have seen her on TV.

BS (02:49:19):
And the backlash is real. There is backlash. There are a lot of people who would like to see women go right back to the kitchen.

SM (02:49:24):
Katherine McKinnon.

BS (02:49:26):
She is also very good. She did a lot of good early, early thinking on sexual harassment and other legal issues.

SM (02:49:34):
I want to interview her, but she is too busy.

BS (02:49:35):
Yeah, she is busy. She is crazy.

SM (02:49:37):
And Carol Gilligan.

BS (02:49:39):
Carol. Carol Gilligan. And I have some problems with, because she believes strongly that women have different learning styles. And I am not sure that they do. Because I do not think it is true of all women, any more than I think it is true of all. Men have different one. I think it may be true for a lot of people. I am continually very concerned about what the Bush administration did by allowing single-sex classes and single-sex schools. They changed the regulation of Title ix, which was set up so we would have very few sexual segregation in schools. And the Bush people came up with a new regulation. So we now have more single sex schools than we have had before. And they are based largely on stereotypes and not on research. Now, I do not know if they are using Gilligan's research, but they could easily say they do say women need cooperative learning and so forth and so on. And I really think people need to learn how to be cooperative and learn how to be competitive, to have skills in both areas rather than in just one. So I admire some of her work and I agree with a lot of her work, but I am a little concerned about that.

SM (02:50:53):
I like Sarah Evans. I think her writing is unbelievable. I interviewed her.

BS (02:50:57):
Yeah. Who is Sarah Evans?

SM (02:50:59):
She wrote women's books on the women's movement. She is the University of Minnesota retired. She is a friend. She is with Rosalind Petchesky and Charlotte Bunch.

BS (02:51:11):
Charlotte Bunch.

SM (02:51:13):
And Rosalyn Baxandall, who was actually a friend of Carol

BS (02:51:24):
You know more than I do.

SM (02:51:26):
And of course Susan Sontag, she is not a, I do not know what you called it her, but she has a written great essays.

BS (02:51:35):
Yes-yes-yes.

SM (02:51:35):
She died recently. But.

BS (02:51:36):
She is good. You know what has happened, this is what I am thinking.

SM (02:51:44):
What?

BS (02:51:45):
I am remembering, my kids, when I first get interested in women's issues in the Washington Post, which we get every day at that time. There are no articles about women except fashion and keeping your husband happy and cooking and taking good care of children, housework. And when there is a real article about women and their lives and somewhere, my kids come running upstairs because they eat breakfast before me and they read paper records. They come running up to tell me. And because it is so rare. And at that point, I am buying books about women and I am saying to myself, I will buy every book that is published and I will have a nice library on women. And so I have this nice little library, but I got to stop because the amount of stuff that is been written about women, nobody could buy all the books. And even a library could not buy all the books that are published about women in a single year. That is just too much. Even a woman's library would not be buying every book.

SM (02:52:42):
Well, the book that would be really good to read is Sarah Evans. Habits of The Heart.

BS (02:52:47):
Habits of the Heart.

SM (02:52:48):
I just think she is a real good writer. And she just retired as a professor at the University of Minnesota. I did not think I was going to get her because she is retired, but she was in this group with Charlotte Bunch and Charlotte had recommended that you try to get ahold of her. So I did. And Rosalyn Baxandall is, she was the one that was with Carol Haney, two of the four people who put up the banner in 1968 in Atlantic City. Oh, I did not know that. She teaches at Old Westbury. SUNY Old Westbury.

BS (02:53:24):
Yeah.

SM (02:53:26):
Last two questions. Are universities afraid of activism today? Volunteerism is obviously very popular, has been for over 20, 25 years. And most students are involved in volunteer work required in fraternities and sororities and so forth. But I have gotten a sense from my experiences that universities do not like that term activism because it brings back memories. Memories-

BS (02:53:51):
Of the (19)60s.

SM (02:53:51):
The (19)60s.

BS (02:53:52):
Taking over.

SM (02:53:54):
Disruption of classes, a more radical type of a mentality. And that is my perception. And I am actually going to send my introduction and I will take the heat for it, but I was worked in higher education for 30 years.

BS (02:54:12):
I think it depends on your definition of activism. If to the extent that activism means kid state for students taking over the president's office, nobody wants that.

SM (02:54:22):
No.

BS (02:54:24):
And unless you define activism, because that is one form.

SM (02:54:27):
Well, that is the lesson that students of the (19)60s should be teaching students today is that you do not do that because it only hurts your message, hurts your cause.

BS (02:54:36):
Except every now and then they did pay attention. But it is not a long-range strategy. It is a one issue strategy one time. But if that is what you mean by activism, that worries colleges, nasty people can get hurt. It is against fire regulations. I mean, there are all kinds of worries about-

SM (02:54:57):
I think what I am referring to is the right of assembly. Again, the free speech will the right of assembly to speak, not disrupt classes. I think most students realize they do not want to disrupt classes, not disrupt classes, but the protest on the war in Iraq protest on anything you want to, and what has happened at universities today, they are designating these little spaces for people to, you can protest here. Well, if Mario Savio and the people were around from that era, you have got to be kidding me. I got to go in front of the, this particular, this little square is the only place I can, so there is some things happening here that are really fishy.

BS (02:55:42):
Yeah, I have not seen this. And my contact with most colleges is a one-time visit.

SM (02:55:48):
Right.

BS (02:55:49):
And I read the Chronicle.

SM (02:55:51):
I have not been reading that lately. I did for a while, but I am reading books now.

BS (02:55:56):
Well I, well, I get it because I am still working directly with colleges. And I think people generally, most of us like things as they are. And if you are dissatisfied, you want to shake up the boat and how much schools will tolerate this. On the other hand, academics are very protective of academic freedom and the freedom of speech. And you do get people who really upset other people coming to campus. I mean, you get Palestinians coming to campus and saying dreadful things and often untrue things, but they have a right to say what they have to say. And you have people opposed to the war or supporting the war. And schools cannot discourage that and take great pride. And they often are in a position where they have to allow people they totally disagree with, but you cannot keep them off campus. And they understand under the rubric of academic freedom, which only applies across to professors, but they understand the needed freedom of speech. Certainly. So I do not see the fear of activism. I think they do not want the (19)60s to come back with people breaking windows, climbing into offices, having bombs like in Minnesota, which killed people. Coburn died.

SM (02:57:16):
That was Wisconsin. Yeah.

BS (02:57:16):
Wisconsin, you are right. Was not Minnesota. I am sorry. I am from New York these middle states all somewhat similar, but I think people worry about that kind of thing and do not want that to return because there are real safety issues here.

SM (02:57:31):
We had activist days on our campus that our department started and we had Tom Hayden, Daniel Berrigan, we had Philip Berrigan, we had-

BS (02:57:42):
Yeah. Good people.

SM (02:57:42):
-Torie Osborn.

BS (02:57:43):
Shake people up.

SM (02:57:44):
We had Alice Kesler Harris and Morne Pretorius from South Africa. And we also did the readings of Howard Zen and I was asked to stop them.

BS (02:57:57):
Oh, to stop them?

SM (02:57:58):
Yeah. To stop the active state.

BS (02:58:01):
Well, I think you would still find some people who would ask you to do that. I do not think they are all gone and that they are all happy with-

SM (02:58:08):
I think they were worried that it was sending the wrong message or whatever it might be.

BS (02:58:13):
But they cannot stop you though.

SM (02:58:15):
Well, no. They-

BS (02:58:15):
They pay a price for it.

SM (02:58:17):
Well, but they told me as an administrator that since your department is doing them, and even though you are getting other departments to sponsor the speakers, reception is that you are in charge of them. And so you must end them. Yeah.

BS (02:58:32):
I think that would still happen to some degree, because you can use that if people work for you. The students do not work for the college and you cannot expel them for that reason. So they are still controlled, particularly the administrators for the faculty, it is easier for them to do what they want. Yeah, because they have tenure.

SM (02:58:49):
Yeah. Administrators is a little tough.

BS (02:58:53):
Yeah. Well, yeah. If not, you do not have tenure as an administrator, so they are really saying the subtext of what they said is either cut it out or leave.

SM (02:59:05):
They did not say that.

BS (02:59:06):
They do not say it. But that is the subtext.

SM (02:59:08):
And they were packed.

BS (02:59:09):
Yeah.

SM (02:59:09):
We were getting attendance like crazy.

BS (02:59:12):
Yeah. And you should. And college is supposed to be where we learn different things about different points of view.

SM (02:59:21):
The conservatives are Barry Goldwater obviously, and Bill Buckley were major conservatives for the (19)60s generation. But then you have today people like Anne Colter and Michelle Mulkin who are-

BS (02:59:34):
Yeah, we do have women commentators.

SM (02:59:36):
Yeah, commentators who are really popular on college campuses. And they are kind of like the Phyllis Schlafly's of yester year, so to speak. What are your thoughts on the conservatives? The conservatives overall? Just your thoughts on the them.

BS (02:59:51):
I am clearly not a conservative.

SM (02:59:53):
Yeah.

BS (02:59:53):
As you have probably noticed.

SM (02:59:55):
And these people are very critical of probably the women's movement.

BS (03:00:01):
Some of their, they tend to be more critical in terms of pro-choice issues. I do not think I have heard them say, "Let us get rid of Title IX." They may have concerns about men's athletics, but those are financial decisions, not legal issues. When schools get rid of a particular, they can choose to do whatever they want as long as they have equal equitable opportunities for men and women. And if they want to have a football team with over a hundred slots on it, you know, you have got to have, have proportional opportunities for women.

SM (03:00:36):
Right.

BS (03:00:41):
But I am just thinking with the abortion issue is an important one. None of these women are saying women should be staying home and not working. And I think many of them recognize they would not be where they were, where they are, if it were not for the women's movement. They may not understand some of the basic underlying tenets of the women's movement in terms of its egalitarianism and in terms of opportunities and in terms of being good on gay issues and looking at the plight of immigrant women and all of those things. Some of the political issues they may not side on all of them, but I am just thinking because I have not thought this through before.

SM (03:01:27):
Yeah. Bay Bucannon is in that group too. Bay Bucannon, Michelle Easton.

BS (03:01:33):
Michelle, I have seen.

SM (03:01:33):
Michelle is nice.

BS (03:01:36):
I have seen her and I have seen Walter.

SM (03:01:36):
And her husband. Ron Robinson is the Young America Foundation.

BS (03:01:39):
Yeah. But the abortion issue is a very powerful issue. But if you put that one aside, I do not think they are that much against women's issues. If you define women's issues as sexual harassment and equal opportunity and schools and in employment and things like that. I think they know that they would not have the jobs they have. I am sure they have-

SM (03:02:06):
They have issues with women's studies and things like that.

BS (03:02:09):
Women's studies. Yeah. Well, because they do not know the women's history.

SM (03:02:12):
This is it.

BS (03:02:13):
They do not know women's history.

SM (03:02:15):
But the presidents, again, I made reference to them, but those presidents between Truman, Obama, what of which presence do you feel have been most supportive of women's issues? Not only what may only have been through their-

BS (03:02:31):
Probably Clinton.

SM (03:02:33):
Not through their deeds, through their actions, through their legislation they pushed, maybe it was not passed, but that they truly cared about women.

BS (03:02:42):
I think Clinton probably cares the most. Carter seemed to be quite good on a number of these issues as well. Nixon was not very good, but he did not veto Title IX either. And he made some interesting decisions. The White House had some decisions that granted, he may have to stop paying attention to some of these decisions because of Watergate. But there was a decision made at the White House is should Title IX cover athletics? There is no mention of athletics, although it says it covers everything. But the White House had to make a decision in terms of the regulation, will it cover athletics or just say nothing? And they decided to cover athletics. And I met with someone, myself and another woman met with the person who was handling that, who fortunately just had a baby girl. But Nixon had the final say. I also filed charges under this executive order. The Nixon administration amended that order to include affirmative action. Affirmative action does not start with the Democrats. It starts with the Republicans. And in fact, this is a lovely story, the President of Columbia University is asked by the head of the office of Federal Contract Compliance, who is giving a speech or visiting with somehow, or he is talking to, this is the-

SM (03:04:03):
Current president. No-

BS (03:04:07):
No-no-no. This-

SM (03:04:07):
Is Grayson Kirk.

BS (03:04:08):
This is during the no-no-no-no-no. Nixon days. Nixon. Nixon. This is, I remember I am a Democrat, but this is Nixon. Yeah. Nixon makes a decision. So I am going to have to make that decision. Should they be doing affirmative action with colleges and universities? Because the executive order is set up by Johnson and his predecessors, because there are several, but get a little better over time is set up really for contractors. And when they are thinking contractors, they are thinking construction contracts, ship building contracts. They are not thinking of colleges having contracts. Was not intended for that. But it is not written that way. But the intent was to go after the construction jobs because that is where the blacks could get hired, hired. So there, now I come filing all these charges. I filed over 250 of them and probably one another, a hundred or so that others did. And the issue is, what do we do about colleges and universities? Do they get affirmative action requirements too? And Nixon's White House made the decision, "yes", fast forwards to Columbia University, president of Columbia University is talking to head of affirmative action or office facility. Oh, I got to find out who that was. I have it at home. But in any event-

SM (03:05:26):
The president?

BS (03:05:27):
The President of Columbia.

SM (03:05:27):
I think it is Grayson Kirk.


BS (03:05:29):
I am not sure I can find out, but I love the story. Does not matter who it is. Okay. And this person who is working for the government says, "So how are you doing, Mr. President of Columbia University, how you doing on affirmative action?" And he says, "We are doing just fine. We disappointed the first black and the first woman to our law school." And you know who that first woman was?

SM (03:05:56):
To Columbia? Well, it is not Hillary. She went to Yale.

BS (03:06:01):
No, it is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

SM (03:06:03):
Oh, really?

BS (03:06:04):
Yes. Is not that a fabulous story?

SM (03:06:07):
That is a great story. See, that is a magic moment. Yeah. That is one of those magic moments.

BS (03:06:12):
Oh, okay. Well if you use it, I will find out. The president and I have the quote posted.

SM (03:06:16):
Kirk may have left after that because he was pressured to leave because of the student protest.

BS (03:06:23):
It was an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg within the past year or so on the New York Times Magazine section. And I cut it out and I gave it to the guy at the office of Federal Contract Compliance, who gave me all the ideas of how I should file these things. And I sent it to him and I said, "Vince," his name is Vincent Macaluso. So I said, "Vince, you did this."

SM (03:06:46):
What do you think the lasting legacy will be of the boomer generation when, well, I mentioned that the civil war generation, that guy who was in 1924 was the last one who actually fought in the battle, any battle of the Civil War. What do you think the history books, the sociology books will say about this generation that grew up after World War ii, whether it be to the women boomers or the male boomers to the 74 million? Because they still have 20 years of life. They are only in 64.

BS (03:07:20):
Until their (19)80s.

SM (03:07:21):
So they still got a fourth of their life still ahead of them.

BS (03:07:24):
Yeah.

SM (03:07:26):
But do you think, when do you think? There we go.

BS (03:07:33):
Yeah, I would like to say that I really do not have a clue. I think they had an impact on loosening up society. Society was still dealing with a lot of rigidity from the past. And we still have some of those rigidities, but they did loosen up. They questioned a lot of things and people questioned, they heard the question raised, you have to think about it even if you do not do anything about it. And I think that may be part of their legacy. If they shook things up. They said, we do not like the way this is. We do not like the president of our college treats, whatever. And nobody maybe had ever thought of that before or noticed if before. And I think they were very good in raising new issues that people had not bought up. At least the radical part of the mover did. On a more superficial level they certainly got rid of the way people dressed. I watched in this building, which I came to in 1990, and I wore pantsuit every day. And everybody was dressed and men were dressed in suits and women were dressed very nicely. Now you go in the elevator and it is just a few men dressed in a suit. And they are the lawyers or the realtors. Everybody else was wearing jeans or I-

SM (03:08:56):
I saw a guy came in here. I think he was a lawyer from his, and he was in shorts. He just done a run around town. He had pony tail. He was sweating.

BS (03:09:01):
In this office or in the building?

SM (03:09:01):
No, I think it was on two floors up or one floor up.

BS (03:09:08):
Oh, okay. Yeah-yeah. No, they are like, it is perfectly acceptable to come that way to work. I mean, I get dressed if I am doing something really, I do not want to say this was not professional, but I am talking professional organization or I do not know what the word would be. But I felt comfortable enough. I said, if you no professional, I do not have to get dressed. That is a huge thing actually. I mean, it sounds like its superficial dress, but it tells you a lot about where this is what the society feels about how you announce yourself to other people. Because that is what clothing is. It says, look who I am. And people's way of dressing is more egalitarian. And to the extent that the civil rights movement was part of the boomers, not the only thing going on, but the boomers were a part of it. Not the civil rights were part of boomers with the other direction. And that women were part of the women's movement from the boomers. Some of the boomers were in the women's movement. I mean, and you can find other areas like that where the boomers had a lasting effect. The women, oncologists, this is the reason we were going talk about this. Young colleges were more organized in terms of women's issues than any place else in this society. Because you have a lot of young people who have time on their hands. And a lot of them, not all of them, are interested in social issues. And you could find discrimination very easily in the college. The women in Michigan becomes a public issue to some degree when they cannot take this course in juvenile delinquency because they will have to deal with male students. So that is very visible when you hear about this. And finally, once the lawyers get involved, they make an announcement it is time change that. So you have people who are very aware and are raising these issues, and there are enough issues to raise at that point. That very can become very visible once you notice them.

SM (03:11:03):
And those issues back in the (19)60s now when students do not have as much time, because they work.

BS (03:11:09):
That is right they work. Some of them work harder, they work physically, they have other jobs work.

SM (03:11:13):
And a lot of them did not work back when I was in school.

BS (03:11:16):
That is true. Yeah.

SM (03:11:17):
Any other thoughts? I know we have covered just about everything.

BS (03:11:20):
Well, yeah, I think we have covered enough.

SM (03:11:24):
Yeah.

BS (03:11:24):
But I realize I am not a- the boomer generation. My kids are.

SM (03:11:28):
One third of my interviewees have been boomers, but they-

(End of Interview)

2010-10-12

Stephen McKiernan

Bernice Resnick Sandler

191:46

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Women's rights—United States; Human rights workers; United States.--Education Amendments of 1972.--Title IX; Sandler, Bernice Resnick--Interviews

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