Interview with Dr. Zillah Eisenstein

Eisenstein, Zillah R. ; McKiernan, Stephen

Dr. Zillah Eisenstein is a scholar, political activist and Emerita Professor of Political Science at Ithaca College. Her work focuses primarily on political struggles for social justice. She was able to document issues such as the rise of neoliberalism (both within the U.S. and across the globe), the growth of imperial and militarist globalization, injustices of racial laws, diseases and affirmative action in the U.S.

2010-05-26

In copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

86:35

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Zillah Eisenstein
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 26 May 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:03):
Testing one, two. Could you give me a little bit about your background, your growing up years, and what it was like to grow up... The influences that were a force in your life that maybe helped you in your career path? And also, when you are talking about this, I am always asking people about their college experiences. Was there something during their undergraduate years that had an influence on you that... Where you changed and went in a certain direction in your life?

ZE (00:00:38):
Well, my growing up years were enormously influenced by being the daughter of people who had been in the Communist Party and whose whole life was committed to civil rights activity. So, I had three sisters and we just grew up. Saturday mornings, you went and picketed Woolworths. I mean, that was...

SM (00:01:04):
So you learned that as a little girl, then?

ZE (00:01:06):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, my politics is from the womb.

SM (00:01:12):
Right.

ZE (00:01:13):
So in some ways just giving... As I was walking down here, I just thought, "Well, maybe I should just talk about my parents rather than myself." You know?

SM (00:01:26):
Talk about your parents, because...

ZE (00:01:28):
But I will just say just quickly, and then you can kind of do what you want with it. But my mother actually is the woman that... The way we were. You know?

SM (00:01:37):
Oh, yes.

ZE (00:01:39):
Okay. Well, it is based on her. Her name was Fanny Price. And I always forget his name, but the guy who wrote and produced the film, mom used to always say, "We were told that," and mom said, "Do not be silly." My mother went to Cornell, she went to the ACT School. She was completely poor, she got the [inaudible] scholarship. That is how she went to school. It was like the ritual story that was always told to us as children about work hard to get your intellect, and then you will go forth with whatever you want to do. But they did that as communists, not as liberals. But anyhow, when he wrote his book, the guy, whatever his name is, in the book finally, it came out I think maybe eight years ago, he says, "The woman who I was mesmerized by in my days at Cornell was Fanny Price." And-

SM (00:02:39):
The person, Barbara Streisand...

ZE (00:02:41):
Yeah.

SM (00:02:41):
Wow.

ZE (00:02:42):
I mean, my mother was really annoyed, she did not like the film, she said that was not... But mom did. When she was here, she founded the Young Communist League at Cornell. And then, of course, I never really heard very much about this until I got my job at Ithaca College and came here. And then that first semester, I was feeling pretty lonely here. It was kind of strange. And they came up for a weekend and she said, "Come on, let me take you on Cornell's campus and I will show you where I gave the first young communist [inaudible] speech." And it was on Bailey Hall and stuff like that.

SM (00:03:20):
Oh, my God.

ZE (00:03:20):
So anyhow, that is my roots and my sister's roots. I mean Sarah, who was Roz's friend, we both did... We did civil rights activism at a very you age. My two youngest sisters, when my father along with Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, the three of them are taught at Atlanta University. Well, no, Staughton was, I think at Morehouse. My dad was at AU, which was the graduate center for the Black colleges. And then Zinn was at Spelman. But there was a picket. I stayed home to study for my SATs, my sisters Julia and Gia, who were very young at the time, like seven and nine, I think. Anyhow, all of them were arrested. And Staughton Lynd came to get me to go help find them because my sisters had been separated from my parents and taken to juvenile detention. So anyhow, that just gives you a flavor. I mean, our life was very difficult and intense and rich as children. But there was a lot of anti-communism, we often were ostracized for that and it was not your typical upbringing. I mean, my father and mother lost their jobs pretty regularly because, still, of the leftovers of the hounding of people out of jobs. And so we grew up just everywhere. I mean, we lived everywhere.

SM (00:05:13):
What was it like? Because we are talking about the boomer generation, but a lot of people I am interviewing, one third of them are not boomers, they just lived during that time. So it has become much more than just a boomer thing. But when you look at that period after World War II, which is the red diaper babies and the pressures put on people who were affiliated with the Communist Party through the late (19)40s and the (19)50s, even into the early (19)60s, what was it like living in America at that time, being the child or of parents who were communists? And how did you get along with your peers?

ZE (00:05:48):
Well, I mean, it was very difficult. If you were kind of found out, oftentimes you were found out though, in weird ways. I mean, you would say something in a class discussion and someone would yell, "You are a communist." Like if you said something about equality or whatever. I mean, it is not like you walked around... Nobody walked around saying, "My parents were in the party." You would have to be out of your mind. But at the same time, there was such a vigorous social community that was part of the civil rights movement. That really was the way that an awful lot of communists... I mean, my parents joined the Communist Party primarily because of their stance against racism. And that is really what...

SM (00:06:37):
Yeah. Like Paul Robeson.

ZE (00:06:38):
Yeah. Well, I mean most US Communists, it was the place, if you were truly anti-racist, you would be a communist. Although most of the time people think communism meaning the economics... My parents were economic communists as well, but... But even the way that we were brought up, nobody had private money in our household. Nobody. And it has to do with how my own family functions now. But anyway, so that is that. Then I go to college. College already is the Vietnam War period. I do remember I had a job in the kitchens to help pay for school. And I remember waking up one morning and there was a picket line outside the cafeteria. And again, it was just kind of this memory bank. I did not know what it stood for but I knew I could not cross the picket line. That is just how I was brought up. So I remember going back to my dorm and then trying to find out what it was. And I was a student worker, but this was at Ohio University. Most of the people really were Appalachian poor and I worked with women, uneducated. They were at poverty wages, so was I, but I was a student, so it was not comparable. You know?

SM (00:08:16):
So you were at the Athens campus for your undergraduate degree?

ZE (00:08:18):
Yeah.

SM (00:08:19):
What was your major there?

ZE (00:08:21):
Political Science.

SM (00:08:23):
And what years were you there?

ZE (00:08:23):
I was there (19)64 to (19)68.

SM (00:08:27):
Unbelievable, my first job was at Ohio University.

ZE (00:08:31):
Oh, yeah?

SM (00:08:31):
Yeah, I started in (19)72. I went to Ohio State Grad School, in (19)72 got my master's degree. Then I worked at the Ohio University of Lancaster campus as Assistant Director of Student Affairs. And I know it was one of the most liberal schools in the state of Ohio at the time. And what really got me when I got there was the fact that they had purged many, many students out of that school. And they went from a campus of 18-5 to 13-5 in (19)72. And what saved Ohio University, were the branch campuses, which was at Lancaster. I think they had one at... Oh God, [inaudible]. Well, they had three branch campuses. We had 2000 students, so it had really helped them and they did not go under. After Kent State, I guess all hell broke loose.

ZE (00:09:20):
Yeah.

SM (00:09:21):
And I had some unbelievable experiences of being in that conservative community in Lancaster.

ZE (00:09:26):
Yeah.

SM (00:09:27):
But I lived in Columbus, I commuted. But...

ZE (00:09:30):
Well, so anyhow.

SM (00:09:31):
Yeah.

ZE (00:09:34):
So that actually, the politics there about the strike, became... I became very involved in the class issues that existed in Athens and worked and was trusted very deeply by many of the real workers as opposed to student workers. And then I was pretty active in anti-war stuff.

SM (00:10:02):
Did you have Dr. Hunt for any of your classes? Ron Hunt? He was a professor for the science labs.

ZE (00:10:07):
No.

SM (00:10:12):
Was there any generation gap with your parents? Because obviously they influenced you and you had the same values in terms...

ZE (00:10:18):
No. There were not...

SM (00:10:19):
You did not really have any generation gap issues because you were...

ZE (00:10:22):
No, I mean we were a real community because of the hostility in which our family existed. But later in my life, when I became a graduate student and was doing my PhD in feminist theory and was also becoming very active in the women's movement, as a socialist feminist but still in the women's movement, I had enormous conflicts with my father who really believed that communism was sufficient, you did not need an autonomous women's movement. So the politics, the political struggles that we went through were within progressive politics, they were not your normal left, right, or whatever.

SM (00:11:09):
I know that Dr. Johnnetta Cole, who I really know...

ZE (00:11:11):
Oh, sure. I know her.

SM (00:11:12):
...I am a big fan of hers. Her very first book, I think, was Sister President. And in that book, I remember reading years ago that she had a conflict there when she was in college because she was first of all, an African American. And second, well, she knew she was a female too, but there was a lot of pressure where she was going to school that you concentrated on race first and gender second.

ZE (00:11:36):
Right? Yeah.

SM (00:11:37):
Did you see a lot of that within the African American community during the times you were at... (19)64 to (19)68 in your PhD, that in the women's issues, that it was more dominated by white...

ZE (00:11:51):
A lot of them were. I mean, the mainstream women's movement, clearly white dominated. I became very involved in the early parts... When was it? I think it was maybe around (19)76 actually. Angela Davis, me, and Bell Hooks, the three of us did a big event at Haverford College. Hortense Spillers was the provost there then, and it was called Racism and the Women's Movement. Clearly, that was just huge conflicts that existed because the assumption about the whiteness of women or even the language that Blacks and women, Blacks are men, women are white. And then of course, Black women would say, "And we are just supposed to be brave." Okay?

SM (00:12:40):
Right.

ZE (00:12:42):
That is my whole life. I mean, all of my books, everything is about this question. So it is like I cannot really do it quick.

SM (00:12:53):
That is what is great about the interview process. We had asked questions I never expected to ask. We had JL Chestnut, the great lawyer who wrote Black and Selma on our campus many years back, 1990s, mid 1990s. We had the Black student union in that room. And the question I am asking is this, he started his lecture to talk about Selma and he looked over in the room and he says... Looked at the African American women and said, "I am very proud of you. You are doing great things." And then he looked at the men and he went after them. And it was almost as if the African American female in mid-1990s was very successful in life, whereas the black male is still having major issues because... Be in prisons and everything. And obviously, these males were going to be successful because they were in college and the... But they were a little shocked by it, and it was a great learning lesson. And to me, when you are talking about women's issues, that African-American women in the mid-(19)90s compared to African-American men in the mid (19)90s, obviously they were way ahead. In this man's eyes.

ZE (00:14:03):
Yeah. But I mean, we cannot... There is not time to...

SM (00:14:05):
Right.

ZE (00:14:08):
That is just also post-Reganism, it is the whole restructuring of the penal system. There is a whole new Jim Crow here and Jane Crow as well. So, I mean a lot of it is structural transformations and repositioning of women's labor, and particularly Black women's labor in the whole global system. I mean late (19)90s already. So the idea that you blame black men or that black men are the way that Cosby talks about it, or even Skip Gates, it is really, I think of incredibly retro politic. What you were asking is about black women, did they see a hierarchy of relationships between gender and race? And Barbara Smith, a well-known black feminist that I often have done stints with years ago. One time she was asked by a kid in the audience, which has been more difficult for you being black or being a woman? And Barbara said, "I am always both. So cannot answer that."

SM (00:15:21):
Wow. How has the relationship between men and women changed since 1946? Now, this is a broad question here, but we are looking at the boomer generation and I am trying to see what the women of the boomer generation, can you describe some of the changes that have taken place since 1946 with respect to some of the laws that were not in the books at that period after World War II, maybe even the activism, the movements, the creation of organizations, the sexual revolution of just some of the things that kind of define the women that were not born until after World War II?

ZE (00:16:08):
Well, again, I mean, I just actually started writing a new talk for this keynote that I am doing in Australia in about four weeks. And the question really is, for me, you need new feminisms just always need new politics because the structures of power are always changing. So on the one hand, it looks like everything has changed and everything has changed and nothing has changed. And both of those things are simultaneously true, I think. So mean, again, my answer would be different if we talked just even a year ago, but today, majority of women in the labor force, there are more women in the labor force in the US right now than there are men, first time ever historically. So the fact that there was in the early (19)70s through the (19)80s, enormous access to abortion. Right now, there is much less access to abortion. There are something like 80 percent of counties have no federally funded clinics at all. I have a daughter in medical school right now. In most medical schools, abortion is not being taught. Legally, totally the same. Okay. Roe v Wade, (19)73.

SM (00:17:36):
(19)73, yep.

ZE (00:17:37):
All right. But then there have been, and I did a whole book about this. There have been a series of about six different huge decisions that have whittled away at abortion, particularly for younger women, and that you need more consent, etcetera, from parents, doctors, etcetera. But the biggest issue right now is that although, and this is what I would say is abortion remains legal. So women in the US have the right to abortion, but they get to choose to have an abortion, but they do not get to have one. In other words, the access. And that is really. As we have become a much more unequal society since World War II. I mean post-World War II, it was a bit of a boom. And then we have been moving to now where we are one of the most economically unequal, I think one of the top five countries in the world. And what is his name? Jude, what is his first name? He has been writing all this stuff in the New York review of books. He was actually saying that inequality is much more devastating a problem for a society than even poverty is meaning the extremes of wealth and poverty.

SM (00:19:00):
And women still only make, and was it 80 percent of what a man's salary is?

ZE (00:19:07):
Anywhere between.72 to.77 cents on the dollar. But then of course, you still have sexual ghettos in the labor force, then you have, where you have women in the labor force in areas that did not used to be the case. You are still.77 cents to the dollar. So the sexual hierarchy of the labor force exists. But again, change. Well, 1971, you have a law that says sexual harassment on the job is illegal, did not exist before (19)71. You have all kinds of, again, laws that have changed the ability to bring charges of rape. You have even date rape law. I mean, all of that is new. Yeah, okay. A lot of the domestic violence law, new. And that all comes from technically a radical feminism that argued that the personal is political. And therefore that really is, I think, just one of the most revolutionary ideas of the last century. That idea has transformed politics every which way, including Bill Clinton and his penis. So...

SM (00:20:45):
What do you think of, I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly, and she was very nice, and we got her on her campus. She is a distinguished lawyer and she has not changed one iota from the Phyllis Schlafly from the (19)50s in terms of a couple of things she said. "The troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running the universities, and they run the departments." And she was, I think, referring to women's studies and some of the other areas. And then she said she was wanted to run for political office, but she asked her husband, her husband said, "Please do not run." And so she did not run because she was one to please her husband. That was the most important thing, was pleasing her husband and not pleasing her.

ZE (00:21:30):
Oh, I mean, I have written on her. I spoke with her one night. She was disgusting. She comes out and she says, I want to thank, I forget his name, for letting me be here. And when I stood up, I said, I want, I am really happy to say I did not have to thank anyone for being here.

SM (00:21:48):
The second wave is what happened in the late (19)60s of feminism. One of the things that I have noticed in all the interviews is the amount of sexism that was really prevalent in just about all the movements. The anti-war movement was well known for being sexist in the civil rights movement too. In fact, I remember we had a program once where we had a speaker that said of Dr. King, were alive today and be embarrassed when he was talking about not having very many women. There were Dorothy Heights. You look at 1963 in the march on white, you see Dorothy Height over the right and Mahalia Jackson singing, but very few females. And even in the Native American movement there was sexism, in the gay and lesbian movement there was there is sexism. I could not believe it. It is prevalent in all these central movements. Was that the major thrust as to why women left some of those movements and really started that second wave was because of the sexism and the movements of the late (19)50s and (19)60s?

ZE (00:22:49):
Well, I mean, clearly, I mean, there is just many, many different ideas about that. But on the whole, for women who were political activists, many of them did feel as though they needed to really make their own autonomous space. And there was even a big difference between saying that they were not separatists, they believed in coalition, but that they really needed autonomy to be able to give voice to themselves within larger communities. And I am a little on the young cusp here in that, I mean, I was very involved in the anti-war movement, but really it was not sexism that took me in that movement that took me to the women's movement. It was actually the intellectual work I was doing. And also given my own upbringing in terms of communism and realizing that there was a system of patriarchy and masculinist privilege that no politics theorizes or addresses. And even today, what is so interesting is the minute you talk about anything that is related to sex or gender, none of the normal political categories work. So you can have right-wingers and even feminists coming together on particular issues because the issue's related to the body. And it has no place in any political theory.

SM (00:24:47):
I remember that going back to the movie, The Way We Were. I remember the scene where she is out there speaking, and of course people were throwing all these words to toward Barbara Streisand, but it was like they were negative, so to speak. And of course, Robert Redford was fascinated by her in the end, but because she was so different.

ZE (00:25:10):
Right, exactly. Well, that is what this guy says about my mom.

SM (00:25:15):
What I said here, the describe the second wave of what were the forces that made it happen and describe the boomer women and the roles they played. One of the things that is been interesting in the people I have talked to is in respect to the Civil Rights Movement, they said, this is not a boomer movement. The Civil Rights Movement was already well established, and the youngest boomers were probably 18 years old when all these things were happening. Although they did Freedom Summer in (19)64, we all know about the white students, predominantly Jewish students who went down with African American students. And so you cannot deny that. And that many of the people of the free speech movement had the experiences of being there and Freedom Summer, even. Abbie Hoffman and some of the hippies were down there at that time, but they were a little older than the boomers. They were like the pre-boomers. And then the other thing in development on the women's studies on college campuses, would you say that is a big plus that boomer women have...

ZE (00:26:15):
So what are you defining as boomer women kind of starting when?

SM (00:26:20):
Boomers are born between 1946 and 1964. But I have had issues just about everybody has the issue with, they do not like the term boomers. They do not like defining generations. And many of them do not even like Tom Brokaw. Greatest generation, come on. They do not like these generational things. They talk about events, they talk about periods, not about generations. But when we are defining that young boomer women of the (19)60s and the (19)70s and right into the Reagan period there...

ZE (00:27:00):
Well, I guess to me, it would make more sense to actually call those particular women. They were feminists at that time. So the most significant movement of my lifetime, for me, was the women's movement. It nurtured me, it gave me strength, it made me very brave. And that is where I got my sustenance. I was in an all-male program, all male professors for my PhD, and I was doing work, it was actually on the relationship between Marxism and feminism and political science, which was for most of my professional life, an enormously male dominated field, when my husband would sometimes go with me to the national meetings, he would say, "This is worse than lawyers." I mean, it is like all men. And now that is changed some, but I did not care. I was fascinated by political theory. It still fascinates me. But I am a political theorist who is an activist as well. I do not think theory, if theory cannot be used, it is not, to me, theory. Theory has to really articulate the presence and movement of your own being. So it is not something that is foreign and disparate. And that is, of course, how I try to get my students to think about it. So the point here though is that these feminists did, many of them fought very hard for women's studies. Now, I would argue that a lot of women's studies programs today no longer have the clarity of politics that they had initially. And I was part of some of the earliest fights at the University of Massachusetts, actually. Some people wanted to call it women's studies and others, including myself, wanted to call it feminist studies. And there was a huge debate about whether women, I women itself is a term that already authorizes a system. And what we were saying is, we do not want to be part of the university as it exists, as feminists. We want to change the university, we want to change the base of knowledge, we want there to be new things to be studied. And there has been, I think that the struggle no longer exists, but through the (19)80s and early (19)90s, it was a fabulous struggle on college campuses, I think. About really whether you wanted to be mainstreamed as a women's studies program or feminist studies or gender studies as it is called more often now, or whether you really wanted to be a dissident location in the university. In other words, that you were trying to... That there is just a contradiction in terms that you cannot really create the kind of knowledge base that you want. Meaning here, again, if the personal is political that no academic discipline is set up without the parameters of those really the borders between those realms in economics, it would have to be that the family is an economic unit, not that the economy exists outside of. So the point here was that it was just huge conflict and that the conflict was good and that, you know, you really wanted to bring that conflict onto your campus. That does not exist today.

SM (00:31:20):
But where would you put that political correctness? Would that be part of that debate too? The PC thing that was so big in the Chronicle higher education that was books have been written out.

ZE (00:31:30):
Well, the PC thing, I think, was just really, it was a right wing part of progressive politics, and it was just a way of trying to, again, be able to contain and authorize as though there are only certain answers are acceptable. Whereas I remember a few times in my own classroom where someone would say something and say, "Well, I do not know if this is politically correct." And I said, "No, actually there is no correct. That is the point here." Now think, okay, but the idea that you want to take when people are trying to get you to think openly and then you come back with what the old stuff, which is just to say that there is only one way to think. So to me, that was not even interesting.

SM (00:32:36):
But what you are talking on basically about this debate over women's studies is like the (19)60s, the debate over the war in Vietnam, the movements and all the issues within the movements, it is a continuation, which is a sign of activism. And activism is continuing. Whereas some people are saying that a lot of those people just went off to make a lot of money, raise their families, and they realized at a certain point that idealism goes by the wayside. Do you believe a lot of people within that generation continue today to believe in the ideals that they had is when they were young? Because one of the critiques of that period is that, it was a period, and it was a unique time, not a unique generation, but a unique and different time that allowed them to have the freedoms that today's students do not have. because they have to work. And so...

ZE (00:33:33):
Oh, that is just bullshit.

SM (00:33:34):
Yeah. But how do you feel about your generation or the boomers?

ZE (00:33:40):
Well, again, the people that I who had been involved with, then none of them went off to make a lot of money. Are there people of the boomer generation who were completely self-centered? Yeah, but that is part of the problem with this phrase, boomer generation. Okay. So I mean, the point here is that you just, I mean, it is kind of a false construction. The boomer generation is just these people who by accident, happen to share a historical moment. Okay. But that accidental or random sharing gives them nothing in common other than the shared historical moment. Yeah. So if you want to say that historical moment was one of opportunity, etcetera, that existed, but simultaneously with that was existing struggles against the Vietnam War, struggles against racism, and then the real struggles against patriarchy and sexism. But those are not...

SM (00:35:01):
You raised a good point. If you were pressed, and only if you would not even do it if you were not pressed. But if you were pressed and you do not want to use that term boomer, would there be another term? The other terms that have come out is that the Woodstock generation, the Vietnam generation, the protest generation, the movement generation, knowing that when, another thing is one of the criticisms of the generation of (19)74 to (19)78, I do not even know the exact numbers here, is that only really five percent to 15 percent, depending on whatever person you are talking to or book you have read, were involved in any sort of activism. Anyways, the 85 percent to 90 percent, 95 percent people just went on with their lives and were influenced by the times. But we were not out there protesting, and we were talking both conservative and liberals here now were not inbound in any of the movements, but we were still talking about a large number. If we were talking 74 million, even 5 percent to 15 percent is a large number. So yeah, you raise a really good point here, because so many of the people I have talked to cannot stand these terms.

ZE (00:36:15):
Who, well, I mean, can understand. I think that one can take a term and use it and say that the term itself is, it is important because it creates a continuity of your thought, but that at the same time that continuity is false or I do not like false. The continuity is much more complex than unity. There is no unity here, although there might be continuity. And then the real issue is that within the boomer generation, if you want to give that as the, or Vietnam, I would call them movements, Vietnam, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, that there were movements and that some people were in multiple movements who also happen to exist in this period called or identified as the boomer generation. But that really, on some level, the problem with the term boomer is the idea that was these were the ones who actually made it, right? But in a lot these movements, nobody was interested in making it.

SM (00:37:43):
Do you remember that moment where you have already mentioned how important the women's movement was in shaping you, inspiring you, being the force that drove you in your life. Do you remember the moment when you left the anti-war movement or any of the other movements and said, "This is the movement that I most identify with?"

ZE (00:38:04):
No, because I have always been more, I mean, because the civil rights movement is like when I was five. And I mean, even the work that I do, I have always worked with more black feminists than white feminists. And it is so much of the work that I am recognized for, and the rest of the world is the intersections of political struggles. So when I went to Bosnia or Cuba, I mean, it is always because I refuse to... It is not the problem with seeing the women's movement, even as a singular movement, okay, it is made up of just cacophonous differences.

SM (00:39:00):
Worldwide. Yeah, global. Look, that is the question I have later on. I will ask it now. And that is, when did the women's movement become global? Because when you talk about the second wave, you know, read the first wave, you talk about Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and then you about the period in the early part of the 20th century, and then the suffrage movement. And then you have the second wave movement of the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, but it was the United States movement. It seemed like the only person that seemed to be global was Eleanor Roosevelt who worked...

ZE (00:39:41):
But there were movements everywhere. I mean, and my newest in my book, Against Empire, one of the problems here is the idea that feminism is western and feminism is the United States. There were Egyptian feminists doing incredible things in the 19th century, you know, you have feminisms everywhere. The idea that now there are some countries that they have not used that term feminism, they will talk about women's movements. That is a much more encompassing concept. But that really what you are, if I can be so bold, what you are really saying is when you say, when did feminism become global? It is really...

SM (00:40:37):
It has always been?

ZE (00:40:38):
Yeah. When did the United States begin to recognize, when did the West begin to recognize other feminisms across the globe? All right. And even a lot of people talk about global feminism, and that is a way that they try to, it really means the women's movement in the US across the globe. And in my writing, I always talk about feminisms across the globe rather than global feminism. But if what you are also asking, early 1970s is really the beginning of the global economy. I mean, the modern global economy, and again, working with women of color, given the slave trade, okay, capitalism has always been global, so you got to be careful even about what, but the new modern, cyber, global, early 1970s. And is it interesting that, of course, that is when you start to have much more publicness and public viewing of the feminisms across the globe.

SM (00:41:47):
Where does Eleanor Roosevelt come into this? Because Eleanor, she was such an exception of a First Lady. To me, FDR was racist in some respects. And well, she put him in his place many times and she protected her husband. But obviously we all know about the incident at the Lincoln Memorial with Marian Anderson and her quitting the daughters American Revolution, the Declaration of Human Rights that she was found in the United Nations. She seemed to be in the 1950s, a female that was so at the forefront of everything. I find it interesting also, it is just a commentary here that the three people that had the biggest FBI records in American history are Martin Luther King Jr. Eleanor Roosevelt, and John Lennon. Eleanor Roosevelt? They must have worried about her because she was saying things that... Does she play in your thoughts, does she play any role at all in terms of an inspiration to those that found she died in 1962?

ZE (00:42:53):
Well, I think she was an inspiration to what you would call, I mean, of course, Blanche Cook, who...

SM (00:42:58):
Oh yes.

ZE (00:42:58):
She thinks...

SM (00:42:58):
Cook, yes.

ZE (00:43:02):
Me? No, she was not an inspiration for me and personally. And politically, I think that she is an inspiration within a kind of notion of liberal feminism.

SM (00:43:15):
I got to turn...

ZE (00:43:21):
And I do use these terms pretty technically, but liberal feminism here, and I mean that very much in terms of women who basically did believe that women should be given the same chances as men in our capitalist society. There was no criticism of capitalism as needing a system of patriarchy that could never give women equality. And Eleanor Roosevelt, on the whole, she was a liberal feminist, and liberal feminism is imperial. And it is used to, I mean, in my most recent political and intellectual work, I have really argued the way that feminism has been ill used by the United States to justify the wars, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the idea here of women's rights and fighting against the Taliban, etcetera, etcetera. Whereas the United States does not care about women's rights, not there or here.

SM (00:44:33):
Wow.

ZE (00:44:36):
But the argument, again, though, I am at this point in my life, I am uncompromising in the importance of the politics of every different form of feminism on this globe. And how could you not think that this is not the most central political struggle when everybody just, they need to wrap up, women not let you see their face need to [inaudible] their bodies to why is it that we have a medical plan? The one thing that could not be agreed on was abortion politics, East/West Germany, when they are trying to come together and unify, the only thing they could not agree on for a united constitution was abortion rights. Hello. So the point here, all right, and this has just been in really recent stuff with all of the issues around immigration, and the silence always is about the female in those dialogues.

SM (00:45:50):
I find it interesting too, my niece had a baby and she is finding all kinds of issues because of the fact that where she works, they have no place for privacy and this is an un... I have now read that this is a problem all over the country. When they want to nurse their child at work, there is no place for privacy they have to do in the lady's room. And then there is also the thing about the three month of the six weeks or three months, everybody agrees it should be three months of leave. And then it is, well, there has been a lot.

ZE (00:46:26):
But all I am saying is, how could anyone, right now, with more women in the labor force than men, how could anybody not think that there should be a daycare plan in this country? Yet, not a word. Now, my thing is the more silent something is, the more important it is politically. The noise...

SM (00:46:48):
Why are not there more people like you? Because of the fact we are talking about, okay, I am overuse this term. We are talking about boomer women who were in the late (19)60s, early (19)70s, got involved in the women's movement. Many of them gone on to become corporate leaders and so forth. Where are, are the women who we are talking about...

ZE (00:47:08):
Those are your boomers who, or someone like Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice. I mean, the point here is, and we have not even gone there, that part of when you asked what has changed, and I said, well, everything has and nothing. So, just the fact that Hillary Clinton is flying around the Secretary of State. But also what is interesting is that she lost her campaign because she could not get it right. She really just screwed herself royally, I think by running as his wife. And that just was not going to do it. She either had to run as her own self and maybe she could have won that way.

SM (00:47:56):
Some people even said if she had divorced him after his presidency that she may have won. I read that.

ZE (00:48:01):
Well, no, but she wanted it every which way. But what is interesting is that in the end here, she was radicalized by the people who did support her in the end, which were older white women. That is who supported her. They were probably a lot of your boomer people actually. All right. But everybody else hung her out to dry. So is not it interesting that now that she is Secretary of State, she and Obama have said that women's rights have to be central to the US foreign policy. So I am just, now that is new and different. Okay. That is never been said before. Okay. Now whether that means anything is just something totally different.

SM (00:48:53):
The great writers of that period, obviously you are really into books and reading and ideas. The free speech movement, to me, I think it is one of the greatest things that ever happened in higher ed. I, that is my degrees and Mario Samuel and Bettina Abigail and all those people, I just love them because it was about ideas. The university is supposed to be about ideas and debate. And so have we gone back in the university, the university, I interviewed Arthur Chickering, who was the great educator education identity, and he was surprised that I asked him to be interviewed, but he is retired now. And he said the biggest problem today on university campuses that he is really upset with is we have gone back to corporate control of universities. And when you look at the free speech movement back in the (19)64-(19)65 of Berkeley, that was one of the reasons they were attacking the university. It was what Clark Kerr was saying about the multi diversity, the corporate takeover. And he said the knowledge factory, just that term factory turned students off. Seems like we are going back to that again.

ZE (00:50:05):
Oh yeah.

SM (00:50:06):
And I think that might be part of the problem with the attacks on women's studies, black studies, gay and lesbian studies, is that whenever there is a threat to the bottom line, things seem to disappear. Are you worried what is happening on universities today? What I am getting at is that the lot of the people that are running today's universities are those boomers that experienced what we went through in college, but now they are running universities and they are using the experiences maybe in not so good a good way or whatever.

ZE (00:50:41):
Oh, I think that the university system in this country is in total crisis, total ethical, political, financial.

SM (00:50:54):
I am sensing the corporate takeover again. Decisions being made...

ZE (00:50:58):
Well, yeah, I mean there is...

SM (00:51:00):
Especially in that tough economic times too.

ZE (00:51:02):
Well, but I think also what is being done is that the tough economic times is also being used to justify political shifts that, and I mean, I said that straight out to our provost. I said, "Look, if you want to make changes, say what you want, those changes. But do not say that it is for the economic crisis because what you are trying to do here has nothing to do with the economic crisis."

SM (00:51:30):
I think there is the fear of controversy again, and whenever there is controversy, but debate is controversy.

ZE (00:51:37):
But the other thing that is also difficult is that so many of the junior people now, they really, they have been educated and have moved through and become professionals, and all they know is neoliberalism.

SM (00:51:55):
How important, what I was getting at here was the books, the writers of the period when you were in undergrad and graduate school, the Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, certainly Gloria Steinem and what she did, the political powerhouse of Bella Abzug. She was from New York and I was from New York. So they were powerful voices, very powerful voices. And Mauricia, I am going to actually be interviewing Susan Brown Miller in a couple of weeks in New York City, and I heard she had some issues with Betty Friedan or debating him or something, but she was also in that group who was also in Freedom Summer and also wrote a book, a children's book on Shirley Chisholm. And it was really involved. Were there any influences? Were any of those people in Kate Millett?

ZE (00:52:48):
Yeah. No, these are not my people.

SM (00:52:50):
Those are not your people.

ZE (00:52:52):
I knew them. I worked with some of them. Bella Abzug actually asked me to, when Carter was president, he held a forum in, actually it was in Texas, and it was, what do women want? And Bella Abzug called me and asked if I would come to the meeting and I said, "No, I will not come." And she said, "Why not?" And I said, "Well, that bullshit. They know what we want. We are supposed to tell them and they are going to give us what we want? No, I will not come." So she actually talked to some other people and they called me about that. And they said, Zillah, go and try to get them to think in the terms that you are talking about. And I said, straight out, "The work I have done is I have tried to get Marxist to become feminists. I do not know how to talk to liberals, why they should become feminists." And so they said, "Well, do it. Try to do it." So I said, "Okay." And that was the beginning of a whole new, I mean, actually the politics that I have done, it is not like I sit in a cubby hole and think about it. That was the next stage of my life. I mean, my earliest work when I was in my 20s was Marxism and feminism, given what I came out of then this was happening in our country, the Betty Friedan's, etcetera, which I just thought, "Okay." But look, who was she writing about? She was writing about white middle class women in the suburbs. Okay. That is not really interesting to me. I mean, definitely not what the age I was, the politics I came from, get a life. So anyhow, so the next stage really was, so why should liberals? And I still remember I was on a run and I thought, "Okay, so what would you say to someone like that? Okay, you want equality with men. Okay, now, okay, as a Marxist sealer, what would you say? Well, which men do you want equality with? Everyone of who you want equality with rich men, right? Rich white men. But how about the working class man? You want equality with him, well we already kind of got that." But anyhow, and then out of that politics came a book that made me pretty well known in a lot of... It is called The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism. People there were so open to becoming radicalized as feminists. And therefore, my whole argument was in that stage of my life that if you become a radical feminist, you cannot remain liberal.

SM (00:55:49):
Wow.

ZE (00:55:50):
Okay. It is just a conflict in terms.

SM (00:55:53):
What is a liberal feminist?

ZE (00:55:54):
A liberal feminist is someone who believes that you can attain equality and freedom for women like men in capitalist, patriarchal society.

SM (00:56:07):
Is that Gloria Steinem? Is that what...

ZE (00:56:08):
Mm-hmm.

SM (00:56:08):
That is And Ms. Magazine and Mary Tom and all that group?

ZE (00:56:12):
Yeah. Although it is interesting. I mean, Ms. just recently, I mean, I have been doing this work for, what, 35 years? Just recently has really started to say, "Zillah, will you do a block for us?"

SM (00:56:24):
Oh wow.

ZE (00:56:25):
So, things change. And politics does get more com, but Gloria Steinem?

SM (00:56:37):
I think another one was Caroline Bird. You, she wrote some books too.


ZE (00:56:40):
I do not know that.

SM (00:56:41):
Yeah, I think we have already gone over this. Where have the women made the greatest gains? I think we have already talked. Where is there still needs, where are the needs still today? What is the goal? We are talking global here now, we are not talking to the United States. What this book is about is mostly about the US. Although I am interviewing a professor at Harvard who teaches Vietnamese history when I am up there, and I am going to talk about boomer generation from the Vietnamese perspective, 3 million that died, which now only the people that survive will make up only 15 percent of the Vietnamese population. But I can really now try to get the other side of those who died. And where do you see, I will say this country, and where do you see the world in terms of things that women need that still have not been achieved? Is there one thing you would like to see in your lifetime that would happened?

ZE (00:57:55):
No, I mean, if we are, let us just talk about the United States. There is horrible poverty among women in this country. Horrible poverty right now. And there is also less, I mean, when you ask that, what do women... I mean, first of all, I do not really think that there are particular things that women need, but so much of what women need as human beings, they share with men. So, I mean, I have always deeply argued and believed that when people talk about women, you know, you think you are talking about something specific. And when you are talking about men and human, you are talking about the universal and the general. Well, if we look historically, what has happened is that we say that we are talking universally, and we would never get to the specific needs of what women need in terms of what makes us particular, like abortion, like reproductive rights, like prenatal care. I mean, the things that are particular to women. Well, the truth is, if we actually met women's needs, all of their needs, economic, sexual, racial, etcetera, well then everyone's needs would be met. Got to flip it. In other words, the more specific you get here, the more universal and human you become. So when you asked me what is it that women need? Well, what we need is we need a different economic system that does not racially profile, sexually profile, and exploit on that basis. People need to have what they need as human beings. And that does mean food, shelter, clothing, education, dreams, hopes. We are so far away from that in our country right now.

SM (00:59:56):
Do you feel though that universities are, that professors are sometimes still part of the problem? Because I have actually asked a couple of my fellow students to go into a class where they are talking about poverty, and the professor will always say, "There is the poor, there is the middle income, and there is the rich. And then raise your hand." Why does the professor always have to say that there will always be the poor, the middle class, the rich, and they one actually did. And basically tellable history has shown that there is always poor. So he did not get, it is forever. Itis part of the human condition. It will always be, maybe we need to be asking the question that it does not always have to be. That there is the ultimate, but we still we are always striving for something.

ZE (01:00:54):
But I just, at this particular moment that I think that our society has become, for your boomers, driven, isolated, competitive, and selfish.

SM (01:01:10):
How about the criticism of the women's movement, and this may be a right-wing thing, but it is all about identity politics. When the movements took place in the late (19)60s, we are not just talking about the women or all the movement, Civil Rights, the environmental movement, the gay legend, everything. It seemed to be, there seemed to be a unity. Now, whenever there was a rally, a women's issues event, you would see the anti-war people there. You would see the Civil Rights people there. You would see the, they would all be there. Now when you see protests, you see a single issue. It is kind of like the criticism is that it is identity politics now. It is not the, it is single issue, it is women's issues, it is Native American issues. Native American issues are not going to be at an anti-war rallying. Whereas in the late (19)60s, a lot of the movements were together. There was more of a sense of togetherness. And now there seems to be a separateness. You see it on college campuses where self-segregation is very common amongst college students. And when you ask the people who run the Affirmative Action Office or multicultural affairs, who I am very close to, they will say, "Steve, it is their choice. It is a different time. It is their choice. They still believe in working together, but they like to close their doors. They like to be around people of their own kind." When we were hearing that back in the (19)60s. So where has the progress been made? So I am, what I am getting at is, has identity politics really hurt each of the causes that we are talking about here? That when you talk about women's issues around the world, I think you can really identify if it is the United States. But when you are talking about what is going on with the way women are treated in the Middle East, I mean, I cannot even really identify with that. That is just plain wrong. And I would like to see groups coming together again that identify with a certain cause, but then they also care about this cause and so they are going to be over there fighting so that when you have the issues you are talking about that you have the environmental movement saying the what is happening to women here effect directly affects the environment, civil rights, Native American, gay and lesbian rights, you name it, they are all together.

ZE (01:03:43):
Well, I do think though, that there are, at this point, through some of the environmental work going on and related to actually issues around food and sustainability, that there is more and more, I think there is kind of less identity politics than there was for sure in the (19)90s. But I also think that what we are seeing is the incompleteness of some of what started to happen with what got called as identity politics, specifying particular needs within the larger community, which clearly needed to happen given that the specific needs were not being articulated. Then just as you are ready for some of that to really start to build interesting coalitions, you also have some of the most right-wing politics in this country that really starts to destroy the possibility of some of that unification. And so I think that oftentimes that term identity politics confuses the who really is at the helm here and really how the politics emerged. And I think that identity politics did, I mean, if we are going to use that phrase that it became pretty conservative, but that a lot of the conservatism of it was not about the identity politics or the particular politics, but really had to do with the way that then they were re splintered by the Reagan period, by the Bush administrations that really were, and even Clinton, I mean, Clinton was pretty bad on a lot of these issues.

SM (01:05:53):
See, when you had the Three-Mile Island situation, there was a perfect example over the environmental movement in the women's world should be united because it was affecting children and their futures. The same thing on the tragedy down in the Gulf right now. I see that directly as a women's issue. Why are you saying the women's issues? Because that is, we are talking about food, we are talking about reproduction, we are talking about a lot of issues here. I mean, the environment in the women's movement to me, seem like a great mix in so many different areas because it is about the future of the human race.

ZE (01:06:26):
Well, I mean, in Africa, most of the leaders of the environmental movement are women and women's activists.

SM (01:06:35):
It is interesting that one of the questions I have asked everyone is the blame game that is often that I got to be unbiased here and saying it, but that when Newt Gingrich, I asked him to be interviewed. And, of course, I have asked him twice to the interview and he said, "No." But in (19)94, when he came into power, he along with other Republicans or conservatives, make comments that [inaudible 01:07:00] another one in many of his books, that a lot of the problems we have in the world today and in society today goes right back to that (19)60s and that (19)60s generation, that is a term they do not call them the boomers, the (19)60s, generation, (19)70s, that the sexual revolution, the drug culture, the breakup of the family, the divorce rate, the lack of respect for authority, the beginning of the isms, it is all about me, me, me, me, and not about we, we, we. And then Dr. King was always talking about, we-we. He always preached we, but they are very critical of everybody that was involved in that timeframe. And how do you respond when you hear, even Mike Huckabee has this TV show, I will not even watch it. There is a constant little jabs in there. I do not dislike him as a human being, but I do not like the jabs. And certainly even John McCain, when he was running for president or when Hillary was running before she had to drop out, he made comments about her too, being within that generation, even though he was a close friend of her. Those little snide remarks. And we knew what he was saying. How do you respond to people like McCain, Huckabee, Gingrich, who is a boomer, and George Will, and people like that. I know they probably sue me if I put them in. So that is part of the question. And so.

ZE (01:08:34):
You mean about their...

SM (01:08:34):
How do you respond when they say that the reasons why we have problems in our society, the breakup of the family, which could be a women's issue, lack of respect for authority, the marriage does not mean that much. A lot of them do not believe in same sex marriage either the man and a woman, either it is like Beck, the Beck Show or O'Reilly or Hannity and Home Hannity, that group. They are powerful influences on the conservative side, Rush Limbaugh being another. And when people listen to them, oftentimes they believe itis fact what they are saying. They have that much of an influence over people's thinking.

ZE (01:09:20):
Well, their depictions, I think are just totally faulty. They are historically inaccurate and they are politically pretty naive. I do not see the so much of what it is that they are saying as valid. And again, the whole issue of the me generation and the self-centeredness, of course, people said that about feminism from the start. It was the idea that women were selfish about their own needs and not concerned enough about family needs and children.

SM (01:10:15):
If you were asked, and this is again a very general question, but you have known a lot of boomers in your life. You have probably taught boomers and you have had friends who are boomers. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Can you generalize? We are talking about a generation now that might be different than the World War II generation that is certainly different than millennials of today that are on college campuses. And certainly that Generation X group, which really despising boomers, we had programs on them. Were those born from (19)65 to about (19)80. They did not like boomers.

ZE (01:10:56):
Well, again, I mean, for me, given what we have kind of covered today, to me, the boomer generation is really, it was one of the last periods of successful and multiple political movements in this country. I think the richness of anyone living in this particular boomer generation is that they have been nurtured by the sense of possibility that can exist through collective action. And I think that in the post boomer period, that has not existed in the same way. The anti-Iraq war stuff, it never got mobilized at the level of the Vietnam War. Now there are real reasons for that. There was a draft, it was a whole different economy. The way that we were at war with people so disconnected from that war at this moment. But to me, the roots that I have in the movements I was a part of have enriched me exponentially.

SM (01:12:34):
Who are some of the people that, you mentioned [inaudible], but who are some of the people that your parents or your brothers or your sisters and brothers and you actually worked with or met during the time of your activism prior to getting your PhD?

ZE (01:12:53):
Well, when I was little, [inaudible] was a friend of my father's, and then there were just lots of people in, I was really such a kid. I mean, I do not know all the names of... Many of them were famous people at the time when I was really young. Our house was always filled with activists. I mean the people like Martin Luther King, that whole generation, I do not know who, I mean Julian, I think it was Julian Bond actually, who was the lawyer for my parents when they tried to take us away from my parents because of the time when Gia and Julian were in detention. They were challenged in the courts for being... It does not make sense. I would need to be more careful about people's names for...

SM (01:14:10):
Well, I know Julian, so I interviewed him early on in my project.

ZE (01:14:17):
I am pretty sure he was the lawyer who, and then people in Atlanta, like Asa Yancey, and they were part of the Civil rights movement. Of course, in terms of my own life, Angela Davis, Jeanette Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Barbara Smith. I mean, these are all people, again, very well known in certain arenas.

SM (01:14:49):
Do you remember also some of the specific protests you were at? Some people were in 1967 at the Pentagon when they levitated the Pentagon or some people were at People's Park Berkeley in (19)69.

ZE (01:15:06):
The first one I remember is 1971, and it was the first all-women’s March against the Pentagon for the Vietnam War. And actually in my house, I have framed one of the incredible posters, I carried it then. But that I remember as kind of really a first kind of autonomously, meaning as myself, as opposed to just my parents, my sisters, stuff like that.

SM (01:15:41):
See how we are doing here, we still good. One of the questions I have been asking two things. The issue of trust and the issue of healing. We took a group of students, I have said this, that I have asked this question to every single person we have interviewed, 170. But it was partially because the students came up with a question. In 1995, we took a group of students to Washington to meet Senator Edmond Musky, and that was part of our leadership on the road programs. And he had just gotten out of the hospital. I did not know that when he arrived, but he had been ill. And the question was this, due to all the divisions that took part in the (19)60s and early (19)70s, divisions between black and white, male and female, those who supported the war, those who were against the war, those who supported the troops, those who did not at all, with all the assassinations that took place during that timeframe in (19)68 and the riots and the cities and the burnings and all these things that the current generation of students that I was bringing had only read about the history books. Do you think this was the beginning of another civil war? Did we come close to another civil war where the divisions, and secondly, do you feel that this generation, this boomer generation, is going to go to its grave comparable to the Civil War generation not truly healing from the war and all the divisions that took place? It was a broad question. It is about healing. I will tell you what Senator Musky said after you respond. But do you think, and then this is why I am going to be meeting with Robert J Lifton because I want to get his thoughts on the psyche and his thoughts on not just those who were in the war and protested the war, but the whole generation. Do you think there is an issue of healing here that even the divisions that you have had as you have gotten older, something really still stirs you when you are going to go to your grave really upset with like Susan Brown Miller, she was upset with, she had the division between her and Betty Friedan. I do not know. I do not know. I will soon find out what that song, but I read about it. So I heard it was pretty intense.

ZE (01:18:06):
Well, I do not know. I think that that question is maybe works better for people who had an identity and a political life during the Vietnam War and do not feel like they do anymore. I mean, for me, you heal and you re heal and you are scarred again and you heal again. And so, I mean, I have been through the stuff with the Bosnian war, particularly with women. I have been very involved with the Afghan and Iraq wars. So Vietnam was very significant at one moment in my life. But that is in the past. And I live in the present. And I think we have to remake our present all the time. So I do not know, life is, I have had a lot of pain in my life that has nothing to do with politics. I have lost my sisters to cancer when they were very young. I have struggled myself with cancer. I have a fabulous daughter who I [inaudible] the world that she is entering. So I mean to me, I do not get to not heal. I have had to heal.

SM (01:19:40):
That is brilliant what you just said because Senator Musky, I think the students are hoping that he would talk about 1968 because of the convention and all. He did not even mention it. It was to me, the whole question we were asking was about that. He said that we have not healed as a nation in the issue of race. And then he went, as we saw back in when he said he could not run for president, where he might show a tear in his eye. Well, he did show it. We had this on tape. He did not answer for about a minute. The students are looking at each other. What did we just do here? And we saw the tear. He said, "I have just spent the time in the hospital. I have been very sick." And he died sick within six months after this. And he said that, "I just saw the Ken Burns series and touched my life. 430,000 men died in that war. The south almost lost an entire generation. Now that is hard to heal from." And so he said, "The issue of race." And then he went on explain Why?

ZE (01:20:55):
Yeah, but I mean for me, what is going on in Rwanda, the way that people have had to repair themselves, the incredible atrocities in the Congo right now, I mean as a woman on this earth. But the point here is that you just do, I mean, do not know.

SM (01:21:29):
The other, just a good question of trust because a lot of the things that I have read state that this generation as a whole did not really trust a lot of people. And of course I can remember that experience as a college student where not trust. A lot of the people in this generation and particularly in the new left, did not trust anyone who was in a position of authority or responsibility, whether it be a university president, a United States Congressman or President, even a rabbi or a minister or a corporate leader. Anyone, you just cannot trust your leaders. And a lot of it was because they had witnessed political leaders lying, whether it be the Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate, other experiences. Do you see this as an issue within, even in the women's movement, the issue of trust that eventually, I remember what a professor said in my Psych 101 at Binghamton University once. He said, "If you cannot trust other people, you are never going to be a success in life." So there comes a point when you have got to trust others. And I do not know what your thought on thoughts are on the issue of trust, if that is an issue within the generation.

ZE (01:22:47):
Well, again, it is a made-up issue. I mean, do not trust anyone over 30. I mean clearly, all of that. For me, given my own childhood, just generational stuff, just has not really been much of an issue. And the question of I believe in people. I believe deeply in people. And if that means trust, I mean, fine. But I just think that the greatest challenge is as that the burdens that are created in this world that if you have no other choice but to believe that you can make an imprint and a difference. And that also my own, again, in my own life, people have always been there to help me through. And in my most recent book that is, it is about the Obama election. I mean...

SM (01:24:18):
When's that coming out?

ZE (01:24:20):
It is just out. It is called, The Audacity of Races and Genders. And then the subtitle is, A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Election. But there is one, it is made of 25 frames just, and it kind of goes all over the map, all over the globe, all over personal. And I actually, I was diagnosed with a rare and difficult form of cancer. And I had had surgery and then was coming through chemotherapy. And the election was, I mean this was during the primaries and there was this real tension that was developing between Obama and Clinton. And it was the issue here of he was a black man. She was a woman. He was black. She was a woman. And once again, in a lot of circles, the discussion was that feminism was going to get pitted against race. So several people who were working in the Obama campaign and friends of mine from who knew them etcetera, said, "Will you write something on this?" And I wrote this piece, which is in the book, it is called Hillary is White. And with the internet the way it is, it just went viral and it was translated into a gazillion languages, went throughout Africa. I mean, it was just unbelievable. And it was that into the campaign into, but I was really up.

(End of Interview)

2010-05-26

Stephen McKiernan

Zillah R. Eisenstein

86:35

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

Scholars; Political activists--United States; College teachers; Eisenstein, Zillah R.--Interviews

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