Interview with Dr. Sara M. Evans

Evans, Sara M. (Sara Margaret), 1943- ; McKiernan, Stephen

Dr. Sara M. Evans is a Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Minnesota. She has helped the university become a center for Women's History and Women's Studies, showing how women's lives impacted society. Dr. Evans earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Duke University and received her PhD from the University of North Carolina.

2010-08-16

In copyright

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

92:32

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Sara Evans
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: 16 August 2010
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(Start of Interview)

SM (00:00:04):
Testing one, two. All right, let me get going here. I have got my sheet free. The first question I have is, who were your role models growing up? The teachers or the parents, the leaders that helped you become the person you are? I follow that up, also, as part of the question that I asked Dr. Baxandall when I interviewed her up in Massachusetts about a week ago. If you were in a packed house of 500 female college students today, and one of the students stood up and asked you to name three or four events in your life that made you who you are, the person you are today, what would those events be? It is kind of a combination, two-part question.

SE (00:01:03):
Well, the role models, when I was a child, I certainly have to talk about my parents. Because my father was a Methodist minister in South Carolina, and my parents were the only white people I knew who thought segregation was wrong, and I grew up in the segregated South.

SM (00:01:32):
Oh, wow.

SE (00:01:33):
That is very fundamental to who I became. My mother told me when I was, I do not know, about second grade, "They are going to teach you in school that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, but it is." That is probably far and away the most important. I loved school. I had a number of teachers that I adored. I remember my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Holler, and I am not sure I can name any other one, but I had a number of teachers that I cared about very much. I always thought I wanted to be a teacher.

SM (00:02:32):
Right.

SE (00:02:32):
It is what I turned out to be. I wanted to teach every grade I was in except eighth grade and that is because, it is not because of the teachers, because the kids. I thought that that would be very hard.

SM (00:02:45):
Right.

SE (00:02:45):
I think I will stop at that for role models and-

SM (00:02:56):
Are there any specific-

SE (00:02:58):
Go ahead.

SM (00:03:00):
Events in your life besides the role models, who helped shape you?

SE (00:03:07):
Sure. There's no question that the civil rights movement changed the world I lived in and, certainly, changed my life. I can think all the way back to 1954 when I asked my students to think about some time when they became aware that history matters. And I say, 'I will tell you mine." I was on the playground and we were arguing about who should have won the war. Then, of course, I made them figure out what war and it is the Civil War. It is a playground in Columbia, South Carolina, and it is about 1954. The fact is, we were arguing about Brown versus the Board of Education.

SM (00:04:00):
Right.

SE (00:04:01):
That was what was really going on. So growing up in segregation in the (19)50s meant that the civil rights movement was both, was just a huge relief in a way and an opportunity to act on values I was raised with. I started college in 1962 and became active in the movement there in Durham, North Carolina, soon thereafter. I, also, another important event or experience was that in the summer of 1964, I went to Africa as a... It was after my sophomore year in college. There was a program called Operation Crossroads Africa. I do not think I had ever been out of the country. I went to Africa in an interracial group of college students, my first interracial experience, really, and laid bricks in a country that received its independence the summer that we were there, the little country of Malawi. We even got to be in the stadium and watched the British flag come down and the Malawi flag go up. That summer changed my view of the world because I saw the United States from outside. I discovered colonialism. I began to understand the impact of our country on the rest of the world. For several years, anyway, focused on African studies in my academic life. It framed when I began the next year to think about the war in Vietnam. I thought very differently about it because of having had that experience, so that was pretty fundamental.

SM (00:06:23):
I wrote this question up that I have asked probably the last 12 people I have interviewed. Since I am writing a book on the boomers, a lot of people have had a problem with defining the boomers.

SE (00:06:35):
Right.

SM (00:06:36):
Because the textbooks say it is anyone born between (19)46 and (19)64. But so many of the people that were the leaders of the anti-war movement were born between 1938 and 1945.

SE (00:06:52):
Right.

SM (00:06:52):
Many have told me, that I have interviewed have said, "Steve, you have got to think a little different here because the first half of the boomer generation, yes, they were really impacted. But a 10-year-old in the second half?" So I am just dealing with what higher ed defines as generations-

SE (00:07:13):
Right.

SM (00:07:13):
And what sociologists have been saying. But the question I am coming up with here deals with the (19)50s. I have a couple questions here. To boomers, and correct me if I am wrong, grew up very naïve. They learned that the meaning of fear stood for being quiet, obeying orders, do not question authority. So I came up with three qualities here that I feel defined boomers in the 1950s. The concept that there was fear, there was a sense of being quiet and there was a sense of being naive. Then the (19)60s and (19)70s came, it was just the opposite. There were lots of injustices and people spoke up. They challenged authority and certainly the students did. So they had to deal with these issues from the (19)50s that they grew up with. Whether it be the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War, the bomb, obviously, injustices in the South, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Am I on target here? I read your book, Personal Politics. It's one of the best books I have ever read, in fact.

SE (00:08:25):
Thank you.

SM (00:08:27):
I got it right in front of me. Actually, I destroyed it underlining it but I got to get another copy. It is a tremendous book.

SE (00:08:35):
Thank you.

SM (00:08:36):
But are those three qualities really what the boomer generation when they were young lived through in the (19)50s? I am not just talking white people. I am talking about African American, gay and straight, you name it.

SE (00:08:53):
Well, I think it is really hard to apply something like those qualities completely across the board. I was born in 1943, by the way, so I am in that earlier group. I always tell my students that the uptick in fertility took place a lot sooner than 1946. So I do not think the boomer generation should be counted just from (19)46, but that is a different issue. Fear. Let us talk about that one just a little bit. Certainly, I was aware that there was a danger of atomic war, for example. On the other hand, I think African Americans in the rural south lived in a kind of perpetual fear that is not really about the decade of the (19)50s. It is about centuries of suppression. So those things are very different and their links to time are somewhat different. On the other hand, I would say a lot of people think of the (19)50s as a time of tremendous optimism. Think about Happy Days, that movie, that TV series. A lot of Americans became middle class for the first time. We had been through a depression and then a war. Now people were beginning to have a life of material wealth and opportunities to seek higher education, to own automobiles or refrigerators, or use telephones, watch television. All of those things were becoming a part of ordinary American life, so there is an optimism in the 1950s that linked, also, to the Cold War ideology, "We are the best. We are the most wonderful. Look at us." The Cold War both had produced fear because of war. We had come out of a war and now war seemed threatened all the time. This sense of, "We are the best and we are only getting better and we will win." It was all modulated with that. The naivete of many in my generation was linked to that sense of well-being that gets shattered as we discover. I cannot say that I feel participating in this because I grew up in the segregated South, and I grew up knowing that something was deeply unjust about American society. But I think there were many in my generation in other parts of the country who did grow up with the sense that all is well and getting better, until they discovered that children go to bed hungry in this best of all possible societies. The civil rights movement brought segregation and the brutal suppression of segregation to their television screen. Then the Vietnam War, of course, brought others. Your themes are not, I would not say they are completely wrong but, like any stereotype, you need to push them a little bit because they are never going to fit perfectly.

SM (00:13:25):
The second wave is something you have written about in one of your latest books. What are the major second wave accomplishments, in your opinion? What are the failures or maybe things that were not achieved in the second wave, so far?

SE (00:13:46):
Well, the second wave, certainly, in many ways, created a revolution in American life. We can look at that on many dimensions. It made a lot of legal changes, of course, so that it is no longer legal to pay women less than men for the same work. It is no longer legal to advertise jobs as men only or women only. It is no longer legal for professional schools, medical schools, law schools, and graduate schools that have quotas and only admit 5 percent women. It is no longer legal to prevent women from serving on juries. That whole edifice of legal discrimination fell apart in the late (19)60s and in the 1970s, mostly in the early part of the 1970s. It is also no longer the case that women are expected to stay home through their adult lives and care for children and tend to the house. Now, that was never a reality for very large numbers of women no matter what. But it was a cultural ideal that was lived out mostly in the middle and upper middle classes. That the revolution of women's labor force participation was not caused by the women's movement, but it interacted with it. In some ways, it was a cause of the women's movement because all those women were running into barriers, discrimination, finding only dead-end jobs. Only women only work available to them. Younger women with higher education who sensed potential in themselves would be discouraged, or not admitted to school, or whatever, so there was an interactive effect there. But in the aftermath of that movement, women and men participate in the labor force on an almost equal basis in terms of numbers. There are many ways in which that movement did not... I think I want to credit it with creating a revolution and also notice that it is far from achieving the goals that it set for itself, which was genuine equality between men and women in American society. There are many ways in which it is far more equal than it used to be, but we still have, in many ways, a double standard. There is discrimination still but it's much more subtle, much more subtle. It is important that we had a woman run for president in 2008 who could have won. That is the first time. We have had women run for president many times but this was a new one. I think it is a real marker that Hillary could have won.

SM (00:17:41):
I think she is going to run again down the road.

SE (00:17:44):
She might, she might. We will see. There are a lot of built-in attitudes that I have been distressed to see the sort of casual sexism that was rampant in my childhood, some of that is back. I do not know if you look at movies and that sort of thing, they certainly are better than they used to, but there is still a lot of those themes are there. I think what we did not do was change the way society regards family. Even though families have changed, we offer no support for single-parent family. It is... When it was married couples raising children, women still do more than half, although, at least it is not 90 percent. But they still do more than half of the work of caring for children and families and households. Our labor force offers very few breaks for people who want combined meaningful work and child rearing. There are other countries, particularly in Europe, that have gone much further down this path. We do not offer paid childcare leave. We do not offer them for men, as well as women, except in some places six weeks. But that is not what we need. We make it very hard for people to deal with ill children. We create this competition between these two arenas that are both essential for the future of our society. So you have people hiring nannies that are... People with really high paying jobs, hiring nannies and hardly ever get to see their children. People with really low paying jobs find it very difficult to find decent childcare and children end up in not very healthy situations.

SM (00:20:26):
When you look at the, I am going to use the years the boomers have been alive, of course, they have been alive since 1946 through today, and the oldest is now 64 years old, and the youngest is 48 going on 49, so there are no spring chickens anymore within this generation. I think they finally realized that maybe, like a lot of generations, that they are mortal.

SE (00:20:53):
That may be what?

SM (00:20:56):
That they are mortal. That they-

SE (00:20:59):
Hello?

SM (00:20:59):
Are you still there? Can you hear me?

SE (00:21:05):
Hello? Are you there?

SM (00:21:06):
Yes, I am here.

SE (00:21:09):
I think I lost you for a second.

SM (00:21:11):
Can you still hear me?

SE (00:21:13):
Yes, I can.

SM (00:21:13):
Okay. Yeah.

SE (00:21:16):
You need to know that my telephone works through my wireless.

SM (00:21:21):
Okay.

SE (00:21:22):
Because I am in a very remote place, so every now and then it blinks out.

SM (00:21:26):
Okay. All right. I do have your number if it does disconnect us. What was it like, and you can just give a few examples or just explain it briefly. What was it like being a female during these different periods that boomers have been alive? You did a great job in your book, Personal Politics, about explaining about the young women who were being reared in the 1950s, seeing their moms go to work-

SE (00:21:59):
Right.

SM (00:22:01):
And so forth. So they saw some of the experiences that their mothers had to go through. It helped shape them, too, that it was not going to be easy for many of them.

SE (00:22:11):
Right.

SM (00:22:12):
But what was it like being a woman in the United States from 1946 to 1960? I am breaking these down according to timeframes, from that time at the end of World War II-

SE (00:22:24):
Right.

SM (00:22:25):
Until the time John Kennedy became president?

SE (00:22:28):
Okay, well, I am assuming you are asking me about my experience as opposed to-

SM (00:22:32):
Yes-yes.

SE (00:22:37):
I was born at the end of 1943, so I do not have a lot of memories of (19)46. But the main thing I would tell you is that I had a mother with a college degree and the passion of a scientist, who should have been a scientist, who never thought she had that choice. So I grew up aware of my mother's frustrated potential and anger and depression. I think that really did shape me in some important ways. I did not want to end up in that situation. When I read in 1963, this is outside your timeframe, but when I read Betty Friedan's book, a light bulb went on like, oh, I do not have to make that choice. But I think in the (19)50s, girls in the middle class, which I certainly was, the way we thought about our future was not, what are you going to be when you grow up? When I was really little, I was going to be a nurse because kids did ask that question.

SE (00:24:03):
I was going to be a nurse, because kids did ask that question or asked that question. But in high school, what I recall is conversations among girls about who would you like to marry? Would you like to be the wife of a lawyer, a doctor, a minister? Those kinds of... It was being the wife of and not being those, not having those professions ourselves, that was presented as how to think about yourself in the future.

SM (00:24:38):
How about that period? You already talked about Betty Friedan's book that came out in (19)63, but the period 1961 to 1970.

SE (00:24:49):
Well, that is when things got really revolutionary, and you almost have to talk about that year by year, because it is different year by year. Certainly this mobilization of women is beginning by the mid (19)60s, and with the presidential commissions on women and so forth. I read Betty Friedan in college because one of my professors told me to read it. And at that point, I decided along Betty Friedan's prescription that I could be several woman. I would have a career and I would have a family too and it would not even be hard. But it was in 1967 that I landed in a women's liberation group. And from that moment on, became a very active feminist, and saw the need to transform American society and the way it defined gender and gender roles.

SM (00:26:03):
How about that period, 1971 to 1980?

SE (00:26:10):
Well, again, I am really reluctant to just slap labels on decades like that, because they changed so much from beginning to end. The high point of the women's movement in terms of mobilization was the mid (19)70s, just in terms of sheer numbers and actions and so forth. The high point of legislative change was about 1972 to (19)74, in terms of legal transformations. I think young women, coming of age then, and you need to talk to them, because I was moving from my late twenties into my thirties at that point, in graduate school. But for younger women, I think there was a sense of, the sky is limit. Everything is opening up.

SM (00:27:13):
Then you get into that Ronald Reagan era, from (19)81 to (19)90.

SE (00:27:21):
Right. Well, and that was a time of tremendous backlash. The backlash got going in the (19)70s, the anti-ERA movement, for example. And I actually think it is important to remember that some women growing up in the (19)60s and in the (19)70s were living lives that were not so different from the women growing up in the (19)50s. There were places in America, from suburbs, from small towns, that were not touched as deeply or thoroughly or whatever. So changes, change always has a ragged quality to it. It is certainly far from uniform. And in the (19)80s, you have, on the one hand, Reagan and all the talk about family values and people openly saying that women should go back home and take care of the kids and be women again. And on the other hand, you have women entering all these professions in massive numbers, because now they have been able to go to medical school and law school and get MBAs in the (19)70s. And so the change is still going on and even Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court.

SM (00:28:56):
That is right. Then we get into the (19)90s, which is the time of Bill Clinton.

SE (00:29:04):
Right. And I think there is a resurgence of feminism in a new generation. In the early (19)90s, they called themselves the third wave. One of their leaders is Rebecca Walker, the daughter of Alice Walker.

SM (00:29:18):
We had her at our school.

SE (00:29:18):
You what?

SM (00:29:23):
We brought her to this university. She spoke at our school.

SE (00:29:27):
Oh, great. Yeah, she is quite charismatic. She is quite wonderful. And also, I think in the (19)80s and (19)90s, more and more women and men were discovering how hard it is to live these new lives and have families, and some of the pressure of that is beginning to be felt.

SM (00:29:56):
And then we-

SE (00:29:57):
But I would say by the (19)90s, the women's movement and younger generations were less divided by race. Not to say that race was not still really important, but Rebecca's a good example of a new language of talking about race that begins to be possible. I apologize for the fact that there is another phone here, a landline. Can I?

SM (00:30:27):
Yep.

SE (00:30:28):
Do you mind if I pick it up?

SM (00:30:29):
Nope, go ahead, just go ahead.

SE (00:30:31):
Okay.

SM (00:30:31):
All right. That is fine. All right.

SE (00:30:35):
Chuck, are you there? Are you on the phone? So I hang up? Good. Okay.

(00:30:44):
Okay. Sorry. I am in a very small cabin.

SM (00:30:47):
Okay. That is all right. Then we got the last 10 years, which is George Bush and now President Obama. Where was everything stand in that decade?

SE (00:31:01):
Well, when you say everything, what are you talking about? [inaudible] lose the thread here.

SM (00:31:09):
Well, what is it like being a female today, really?

SE (00:31:13):
Okay. Yes. Yes. Well, and I think for young women today, it is very confusing. They have an immense number of choices, and they know it. They also know that they are often very hard choices. In some ways, I feel like young women today feel something like that old pressure of family or career. They no longer have the illusion that it will be easy to do both. They expect they will do both, and they will have to do both, but they do not see it as something that is going to be a piece of cake.

SM (00:31:57):
I have two nieces that are going through it right now.

SE (00:32:00):
Yeah. No, I think it is very hard. On the one hand, the sky's the limit. On the other hand, you may not be able to ever get there.

SM (00:32:11):
Right. One of the things that is interested, and I have been asking each of my guests recently, is the difference between mainstream feminism and radical feminism. And it seems to me that oftentimes, when people define mainstream feminism, they say that is liberal. But that radical feminism is like the new left that led the anti-war movement in the (19)60s. And it seems to me that it is always the new left or the more extremes that gets things done. Your thoughts on the difference between the two and defining them?

SE (00:32:49):
Well, if you read, obviously, Personal Politics is about the origins of radical feminism. And I notice that liberal feminism is being created at the same moment, but I do not go into that. I am completely unwilling to say one does things more or better than the other. And the reason is, I think they need each other. I think this is true of many social movements, that when the radicals raise the questions in a far more fundamental way and set out to show the world how deep change is possible, the liberals who are saying things that in the previous context would have been considered wildly unthinkably radical, suddenly look moderate and are able to accomplish things. My last book, called Tidal Wave, which is a sequel to Personal Politics, covers from (19)68 into the beginnings of the 21st century. And I look at these two streams, I argue that, by the mid (19)70s, you really cannot draw a line between them easily. There is a spectrum, but not a bifurcation, but that they influenced each other enormously. The radicals, lots of people joined the more liberal organizations because they went looking for a radical movement and they could not find it because it was so decentralized, and they landed in the other movement, but they radicalized it. And I do think legal changes matter. I think it matters that we have an equal pay act and that we have Title IX, which [inaudible] in women's participation in sports. I think the Equal Credit Act matters. So the fact that we got, and Roe versus Wade, for goodness sake. But the person who argued Roe versus Wade came out of a consciousness raising group in Austin, Texas. It was part of the radical movement. But what she did was the way the liberal movement functioned.

SM (00:35:14):
That is Sarah Weddington, correct?

SE (00:35:17):
Exactly. So I am going to resist that either-or kind of question.

SM (00:35:27):
Okay. Yeah. One of the things that is very important, and my very first boss at Ohio University was one of the leaders of the ERA movement in Ohio. And I know Dr. Mensen was very disappointed when it did not pass. I remember being in the office next to her when the final vote came in and I think she was crying, and it is a long story, because she had worked two years on this. But why did it fail? And I also interviewed Phyllis Schlafly in Washington about four months ago. Yeah, I interviewed her for an hour, and I interviewed David Horowitz on the phone. And both of them have said this. They say that the troublemakers of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, which are probably the new left or whatever, now run the universities and they control what is taught. And they were making reference to women's studies, black studies, gay and lesbian studies, environmental studies, all the studies movements. Your thoughts on their criticism, the studies programs in the universities, whether there's truth to that. And secondly, why did the ERA fail?

SE (00:36:35):
Okay. Those are really two different questions. The ERA failed in part because the most important things it was going to accomplish were already accomplished in the legal changes that did take place in the (19)70s. And so on one level, in the end, it was not as devastating to lose it as it would have been 20 years earlier when all that discriminatory stuff was still on the books. But it also failed, I think, because people found change in gender roles very frightening. And people like Phyllis Schlafly played on those ears. And it was similar to how frightening voting, the idea of women voting was in the 19th century. And all of that change which was happening to people and they were participating in it, was also scary, and I think there was a lot of demagoguery, and Phyllis Schlafly was the leader of it, talking about why should people be worried about single sex bathrooms, we're going to say, or they made up things that they said the law would do, but they also said women might have to participate in combat in the armed forces. Well, we have got that and we do not have the ERA. The ERA was not going to make it happen, but it was happening and people were not easy about that. And I think there were also women in more traditional roles, and there's a very good book on this by Jane De Hart and Don Mathews about the Equal Rights Amendment in North Carolina. And what they found were that women who were opposed, it was not only men who were opposed, for sure, but women who were opposed shared a deep distrust of men with the people who advocated it and said, "We need legal equality, because you cannot trust them to treat us right no matter what." But they were in traditional roles and still very dependent on men. And their fear was that if men are not forced to play their traditional roles, they will abandon them. And their fear was that if women and men are treated equally in the public arena, in the workplace, and everywhere else, men will say, "I will not support my family. You have got to go out and work." Or they will get divorced and refuse to pay alimony. Or they will simply abandon their family. And their view was really that men have to be coerced to take care of their families, and women are vulnerable, and they were afraid that equality would mean that women would be abandoned, so. And that is really about how deeply uneasy some of these changes made many people feel. So that is one question. Now, remind me again of what your other one was, because-

SM (00:40:15):
Well, the other one was just-

SE (00:40:17):
Oh, about the studies sequence.

SM (00:40:19):
Yeah, Phyllis Schlafly basically said the troublemakers of the (19)60s and (19)70s now run the university's studies programs.

SE (00:40:30):
Well, that is a right wing attack that is... I could name a number of writers who have made those charges. It certainly is true that the social movements of the (19)60s and (19)70s ask questions that could not be answered within the framework of traditional discipline. And there's an intellectual transformation that follows from that. I have been very involved in women's studies. I wrote women's history and taught women's history. When I was in school, there was no such thing as women's history. And you did not learn about women in any class that you took, because they were considered to be outside of history. So asking the question about where are the women and what are they doing was an intellectual transformation. The same thing with black history. When I was in school, I was taught very little about what life was like for slaves. In fact, in South Carolina, it was assumed that slaves were probably pretty happy. But even in college, we did not know anything about what life was like for enslaved people. But when people started asking about that, there's an amazing amount there to be covered about how enslaved people created a culture from many parts of Africa, speaking different languages, created African American culture and music and religion and family structures and so forth. So I think those studies programs, in fact, were very, very important in bringing previously unthought about and fundamental issues into our intellectual discourse. It's simply not... It is true that a lot of us... I was an activist in the women's movement. I wanted to know, what shoulders do we stand on? Have people like us, i.e. females, ever changed history the way we want to do it, or is it true that women never have made any history? And I felt we needed to know our history, not romanticized, but just to know, as part of the movement. And that drove me into graduate school. And lots of people like me did that. But the implication that our scholarship is purely ideological, that we do not in fact do real research and hold ourselves to rigorous standards, is the right-wing position, that I think is wrong and dangerous. And if you want to say environmental studies, then you are discounting all the environmental science of the last half century. And those are the same people who say there is no global warming, if they want to say environmental studies is a left-wing plot.

SM (00:44:08):
One of the other points, and I had an hour with her, she was at the CPAC conference, and she was very tired, so I think I got a really quality 30 minutes from her, even though she was there for an hour. And we talked a little bit about whether women in the (19)50s, the parents of boomer women, were fulfilled or were unfulfilled as mothers and housewives, and many not even working. And it was her belief that many were fulfilled, that being a mother and taking care of kids was the duty. And so for the women's movement to say that there is a lot of unfulfilled women who never had a chance to speak their thoughts, just raise the kids and so forth, any thoughts on that?

SE (00:45:02):
Well, I had a mother who was not fulfilled, so that was my personal experience, a group of one. I suggest that you read a book by Elaine Tyler May called Homeward Bound.

SM (00:45:16):
Homeward Bound.

SE (00:45:18):
Yes. A very, very important book about the family in the Cold War era and she has data on this that is really important, and I think anecdotally, you will get people telling you everything. Based on what I know from Elaine May's work and other scholars, I would say, and then packing back to my own experience, I would say, in the first place, of course there were some women who were happy doing that, but that does not tell you that they were all happy doing that. The flood, if you go and read the letters written to Betty Friedan after The Feminine Mystique came out, you would be deluged with thousands and thousands of women writing to say to her, "Thank you, thank you, thank you. I did not think anybody else felt this way." And if you look at the numbers of women who go to graduate school, once the barriers are lifted, and the number of women in the (19)60s, there was a big movement in the (19)60s to create opportunities for women to return to college. And that was very, very successful, called the Continuing Education for Women movement. Huge numbers of women wanted to go back, finish degrees and find something else to do with their lives. Maybe they enjoyed staying home, but then they wanted to do something else. And finally, I have to say for Phyllis Schlafly, so why did she have a career? Her own life does not fit that.

SM (00:47:07):
Yeah, I have heard that before. She has been a lawyer, created the Eagle Forum and speaks all over the country, and-

SE (00:47:15):
Right, so she said women should have a role that she never chose to have.

SM (00:47:22):
One of the things about the second wave movement, I remember reading Johnetta Cole's book, several years back, Sister President, that she wrote about her experiences. And this leads me into this question, has the second wave of the women's movement been all inclusive with respect to women of color, women with different sexual orientations? Because I have read quite a bit from other authors that, even Johnetta Cole said, there was pressure within the African-American community to identify as a black person first and then as a woman second, and then she identified with both, but it was very-

SM (00:48:03):
And then she identified with both, but it was very difficult for...

SE (00:48:08):
Well, I think that is true, and I would ask you to please read Tidal Wave because that is a major theme of Tidal Wave. My history of the Second Wave, and it's a functioning part of timing. The Women's Movement started at the same time that the Black Power Movement was in full force. And what seems to me is when you tell this story, on the one hand you have to notice black women and women of color were always there. They started women's groups within all those other movements, which were pretty separated in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. But there were women's liberation committees that raised issues within the Latino movement, with the Chicano movement and the Asian American movement and the Black movement. There were separate organizations, often of women of color, raising very similar issues and often in very similar ways and similar language. But it was a time of such racial polarization that it was very difficult for women to talk across racial minds successfully. And there was tremendous pressure within each of those groups to identify first with their group and then secondly with your gender. So that was true. I would say that the liberal wing of the Women's Movement was more successful, even there, it was not easy, but there were women of color in the leadership from the beginning of the National Organization for Women and of the National Women's Political Caucus. So it is important to notice that, and I discussed it in some detail in Tidal Wave.

SM (00:50:18):
Do you also include the Native American women?

SE (00:50:22):
Yes.

SM (00:50:25):
When did the (19)60s begin, in your opinion? And when did it end? And what do you feel was the watershed moment? This is just you personally.

SE (00:50:35):
Well, I would begin it with the sit-ins in 1960, although it is not hard to push it back to the Montgomery bus boycott since the marker for me is really civil rights. And I am not quite sure how to end it. I would push it well into the (19)70s. But even then, when you try to create a category like that, the early (19)60s and the late (19)60s, (19)70s are also very different times. The early years, the Civil Rights Movement, the Kennedy years, the creation of the Peace Corps, and then the Anti-War Movement and the race riots that happened, and the increasing violence and turmoil is a very different era.

SM (00:51:37):
Did The Beats have an influence on women?

SE (00:51:42):
The Beatniks in the (19)50s?

SM (00:51:44):
Yes, The Beats, because many people have told me they believe that the (19)60s began with the beats because they were anti-authoritarian. They lived their lives. They did not care what other people thought.

SE (00:51:58):
Oh, I think so. I was not living where they were very permanent. But I am sure that is true. They were extremely sexist, and at the same time, they were very anti-authoritarian and into breaking all the rules. So they are forerunners of the new left. They are very... Are you there?

SM (00:52:28):
Yes. I am here.

SE (00:52:28):
They are very sort of nihilistic and they represent some of that side of the (19)50s that says the world is going to blow itself up and recognizing that racism is rampant and so forth, and not feeling very hopeful that any of that can be changed. And the New Left comes along, picks up on a lot of those themes, but says, "Well, hey, we can change it."

SM (00:53:06):
I know that one person I interviewed said that he identified Neil Cassidy. He is the number one Beat because all the books that were written were basically studies about him. And of course, he became one of the Mary Pranksters. But his attitude toward women was basically conquests.

SE (00:53:29):
Right. And that is why I have trouble with a lot of those folks.

SM (00:53:35):
One of the well-known facts that you bring up in your book, Personal Politics, but also, it has been historically documented, is that the sexism that was rampant in the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement drove many of the New Left women that were affiliated with those groups into the Women's Movement in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s. So now I have some questions that are directly related to your book, Personal Politics. The people who have studied post-World War II activism know that sexism was rampant in the movements I just mentioned. My question is, how bad was it?

SE (00:54:13):
Well, I would say it was not as bad as in the rest of American society. And I think it is really important to notice that the Women's Movement did not happen in a place where women were treated much worse than they had ever been treated. But rather in a movement that advocated equality but did not treat women equally. And it is that contradiction that women ran into. But they had opportunities to do things, to change history, to go to jail, to stand up for what they believed, to risk their lives, to teach in Freedom School, to take on responsibility for organizing communities. And I think it is the later part of the New Left Act, it became a really massive movement that some of the sexism of the counterculture was much more raw, [inaudible] but the New Left offered women an opportunity to grow and develop leadership. And it also periodically reenacted the sexism that was fundamental to American culture. No surprise. It is not that they were worse, it was that they had not completely transcended everything they had been raised with. And the contradiction is what drove women to name it and act on it.

SM (00:55:48):
You do a tremendous job in this book. I have read the Free Speech Movement. There is a lot of books on that. And a lot of the students that were involved in that movement, were also in Freedom Summer in (19)64, and many of them were even in down south in the (19)61 (19)62 period. And I have interviewed at least six people who were involved in Freedom Summer and male and female. But can you explain, I know, but this is for the people they are going to read this, how important was the student non-violent coordinating committee with respect to not only the Civil Rights movement, but the Women's Movement? And you also in the book do a great job in one section of talking not only about the SNCC, but you talk about the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress on Racial Equality. These are all major groups that were linked to that movement in the (19)50s and (19)60s and beyond. And you talk a little bit about the sexism within those organizations where women were, and you talk a little bit about that.

SE (00:57:00):
Well, I am not going to be able to tell you any more than I already wrote, but the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was one of the most innovative and radical parts of the Civil Rights Movement. It was on the ground and the scariest parts of the South all over the place. And it often does not get its due when civil rights stories are being told. And the focus is on the big leader, Martin Luther King. It was the place where women found the most equality within the Civil Rights Movement, where they learned the most leadership capacities. And it was the organization that gave women an ideology about living out your value in your daily life. That the idea of the beloved community that we were going to enact among ourselves, the values we were trying to bring about in society. And, it really was fundamental to the origins of the Women's Liberation Movement. It gave them a set of ideas, a deeply egalitarian ideology. It gave them a set of strategies and tactics, consciousness raising, and the technique traces directly back to the way people talked to each other in SNCC and spoke from their hearts and tried to reach consensus and not leave anybody behind. So I think that organization was really fundamentally important.

SM (00:59:00):
What is interesting here also is when you look at the March on Washington 1963 with Dr. King, and you see the background of all the people around him. The only females you see are Dorothy Height, who is over to the right. And I know Mahalia Jackson, she sang, but it was all Men. So there is a perception out there, and I think you really correct it in your book that women, they were really secondary in the Civil Rights movement. They just were not there. And-

SE (00:59:44):
A lot of research since then to show, if you look at the Civil Rights Movement on the ground, the things I said that I wrote when I was writing that in the mid to late (19)70s, there is a huge amount more detail about it available now. Because in local communities, women were the leaders. They were towering figures. And SNCC offered role models of older women who risked their lives for what they believed in. And it was in the local communities, those women, they called the Mamas that were so powerful. And if you look at SCLC, what you get is a hierarchical organization in which the top leaders are all black ministers. But there were people like Dorothy Height who is pretty wonderful.

SM (01:00:46):
You talk about the major role played by white women in the South, and certainly African American women as well to end segregation. And they were involved in voting registration drives and so forth. Could you talk a little bit about what it was like being a white woman during Freedom Summer or any of the voter registration drives throughout the early (19)60s down there? Because I do not think a lot of people realize it, many of these people came back to college campuses and actually were the leaders, and several of them were as the Free Speech Movement. Just talk about-

SE (01:01:20):
So like Joe Freeman, for example?

SM (01:01:27):
Yes. Just your thoughts on the women that were involved in with SNCC.

SE (01:01:35):
Well, again, this makes me uncomfortable because I have written it all, and I would love you to quote from my book too.

SM (01:01:43):
Well, yes, I have got quotes that I am going to bring up here next, but I-

SE (01:01:50):
But I do think for many white women, it was stepping outside of the roles that they were expected to fulfill way outside. And when they went south, they found themselves in a movement where there were these powerful black women who became role models, who taught them a different way to be women and a more assertive and self-respecting way to be women. It was for both [inaudible].

SM (01:02:29):
With me. All right.

SE (01:02:34):
And I do not have a whole lot longer, so. I know you planned 90 minutes.

SM (01:02:43):
We got 27 minutes.

SE (01:02:45):
I will try. Anyway, I would say for middle class college kids, black and white, male and female, going into the Southern Civil Rights Movement was a searing experience and [inaudible] and committed them, no matter what happened next, to be engaged with making the world a better place. I doubt many students came out of that experience and went back to their old lives as if nothing had happened. For black students, of course, it would have all sorts of other transforming dimensions. But for white students and for white women, it was such a step outside of their traditional roles that many of them came back to their campuses and were prepared. They felt able to lead. They were prepared to question authority. They were prepared to take public stands. And so the students who went south show up in the leadership of the New Left all over the country and the Anti-War Movement, and then the Women's Movement, and they became the leadership.

SM (01:04:23):
I have two quotes here from the book which are excellent. The first quote is, "These women recognize from the very beginning of their involvement in the movement that they, like their male associates, were at war with their own culture." And the second one is the, "Thus within a movement, young white women have the necessary to forge a new sense of themselves to redefine the meaning of being a woman quite apart from the [inaudible] image they had inherited." And then the third-

SE (01:05:01):
Do not agree with that.

SM (01:05:03):
... One I have here is, "The next generation daughters of the (19)50s grew up with a knowledge that they were identifying roles should be those of wife and mother. But they knew they would probably have a job at some point. They saw mothers with double duty."

SE (01:05:19):
Great.

SM (01:05:19):
So any other thoughts on that or that is good?

SE (01:05:26):
No, I think that is true.

SM (01:05:30):
Then I have another one that I do want you to respond to. It is on the bottom of page 11. Let us see here, you have got, "The straight jacket of domestic idea to challenge it openly would be too frightening in a rapidly changing world clouded with threat of nuclear warfare and the early bush fires of racial discontent and urban decay, where corporate behemoths trained their bureaucrat into interchangeable parts, fewer ready to face the unnerving necessity of reassessing the cultural definitions of femaleness and maleness." So.

SE (01:06:13):
And I am in some ways saying the background of what I was saying earlier about how scary it was, how fundamental the changes the Women's Movement was demanding were. And there was great resistance to raising the issue. And once it was raised, there was a big backlash in the (19)70s. And that is because it is pretty fundamental. Our identities as women and men are pretty fundamental to who we think we are in the world. And so if anybody wants to tamper with that and change it, people get upset.

SM (01:07:00):
You also stated a beautiful quote which is, "Bureaucracy suppressed demotion and passion training its members into interchangeable parts. Bureaucratic values emphasize female traits of cooperation, passivity and security, getting along, being well-liked between new goals."

SE (01:07:20):
And what I am arguing there in [inaudible] is that men were taking on roles that the qualities demanded of them were things the culture labeled females. And so there is an uneasiness already. Things are shifting in ways. So how do men prove their manhood anymore when they are being placed in these kind of settings to work? So when women start saying, "We want in too," or "We want equal chair," or "We want the right to do this and that and the other." For men, it is like, "Well, so what is left?" How will we know?

SM (01:08:06):
You bring up also, and other people have mentioned that the election of John Kennedy showed many people that change is good. And of course, change is one of the definitions of the (19)60s. And certainly John Kennedy was a much younger person. So that is true. And you also bring up the fact that McCarthyism was an attitude that many people were afraid of which is to root out subversion from within. And so there was a fear. That is where I get into the fear again of-

SE (01:08:39):
You are right. McCarthyism did make many, many people afraid. Afraid to advocate change.

SM (01:08:46):
When President Kennedy asked Eleanor Roosevelt to head the commission on the status of women, I believe that was in 1961. She died in (19)62.

SE (01:08:54):
Yes.

SM (01:08:54):
Was he dead serious on that or did Eleanor Roosevelt pressure him to do it because Eleanor had problems with him before supporting him to be president?

SE (01:09:13):
Well, I do not think it was a top priority for him. I think it was a bone that he threw to the women, but he needed women's support. And there was concern within the Democratic Party about pressure for the Equal Rights Amendment. So one of the ways that he was persuaded to do this was that people like Eleanor Roosevelt who were opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment, on the grounds, said it would undo protective legislation that her generation had won to protect women workers. So they wanted to have a commission that would say, "We do not need that." What happened, of course, was something altogether different because that commission uncovered the depth of discrimination against women. And so when they did have one committee that said, "We really do not need an equal rights amendment." That stands somehow at odds with all the other things that they did.

SM (01:10:22):
One other quote I have here that I would like to, if there is any further comments, I think it is another great quote. "Furthermore, having grown up in an era that commoditized sexual intimidation while it reasserted repressive norms, they found themselves living in the ambiguous frontiers of sexual freedom and self-control opened up by the birth control pill. Such contradictions left young, educated women in the (19)60s dry tinder for the spark of revolt."

SE (01:10:51):
Yes. Well, that early chapter argues basically that a Women's Movement was going to happen. It was almost over-determined. There were too many contradictory pressures. It is almost like tectonic plate crushing against each other and something has to give.

SM (01:11:18):
The couple of people you talk about in the book, Stokely Carmichael joked in (19)64 that the only position for women was prone. And I have read about that for a long time in a lot of other books. What did the women at that time think of that? And was he just joking or was he dead serious?

SE (01:11:42):
He was not dead serious. And you can read many other people's descriptions of Stokely Carmichael as being one of the people in SNCC who treated women equally. So it's the implication that he was one of the most macho people around is unfair. It was a joke. It-

SE (01:12:03):
People around is unfair. It was a joke. It was made at the end of a very long, contentious conference, late at night. It was a joke about the sexual relations that had happened frequently within the Civil Rights movement. It is a movement of young people. And what is important about that quote to me is certainly not to vilify Stokely Carmichael, but to notice that the quote when he said that the people around him just laughed. They were tired. They realized yeah, there was a lot of sex that went around. But when other people reported that quote, and it bounced through the movement on a rumor mill, huge numbers of women heard that quote. And to them, it named the sexism that they had experienced in the movement. It is really not about Stokely, it is about how those words resonated with lots of women who had been active in the movement. So in personal politics, I talk about it some, how I had a hard time tracking down someone who talked to me about that quote, but I heard the quote from many people who were not there, many, many people. And that is what I think is really important is not what Stokely really meant, which was basically, there's been a lot of sex around here. But what it meant to people who heard it.

SM (01:13:58):
Casey Hayden and Mary King wrote a position paper that women were treated as second class citizens, just as African Americans were treated in the nation at large. How important was that document? Because I think there has been reference that it reveals the origins of the modern feminist movement.

SE (01:14:20):
Yeah, it was one of the very, very first articulations of the issue of women in relation to the Civil Rights movement. It is the opening shot that you can trace straight from there through a series of other documents to the beginning of the women's movement. So it was very, very important.

SM (01:14:50):
One other quote, this is from someone else, Belinda Rubbalet, and her quote is, "Feminism did not evolve from the sexist treatment within SNCC, but from the organization liberating philosophy and open structure that fostered challenges to authority."

SE (01:15:07):
I think that is fair. What I have been trying to say is it took both. I think she is right. That is the most fundamental, but then there was some sexism, and it's that contradiction of the movement that offered this idea of equality, this very liberating idea and this open possibility to take on leadership roles. And then within that context, when traditional American sexism showed up from time to time as it did, as it could not-not have, women had ideas and tools with which to react to it.

SM (01:16:01):
Yeah. One of the things about that particular comment is also linked to the students for Democratic society, because the participatory democracy, remember Tom Hayden, when he came to our campus, talked about participatory democracy and seems like SNCC was the epitome of participatory democracy.

SE (01:16:21):
It was the epitome of participatory democracy. And SBS took a lot of those ideas from SNCC.

SM (01:16:24):
You also mentioned, I read some place that you thought the 14th Amendment was a slap in the face because it only gave African American men the right to vote.

SE (01:16:36):
No, I did not say that.

SM (01:16:37):
Oh, okay.

SE (01:16:38):
It did. It was experienced by the women who had been active in the abolition movement and the Women's Rights Movement in the 1850s and (19)60s, they experienced it as a slap in the face because it put the word male into the constitution. Some of those women said, "Look, we do not like it, but this is all we can get right now. And it's more important to give Black men the vote than to insist on getting everything." But it raised the issue of voting to the forefront in the women's rights movement in the 19th century, from that point on, focused on the right to vote as its key issue.

SM (01:17:38):
Well, I am down to my final three questions, if that is okay.

SE (01:17:42):
Oh, good.

SM (01:17:44):
Because I am going to do the hour and a half. It's been one hour and 17 minutes, and I am going to keep it to one 30.

SE (01:17:49):
All right.

SM (01:17:50):
So we got 13 minutes. I took a group of students in 1995 to Washington DC as part of our leadership on the road programs, and we met Senator Muskie. And the students I took, helped me develop some questions to ask him. And one of them was about the issue of healing within the nation and within the generation. The question was this, because they had seen, they knew he was the vice-presidential candidate in (19)68, and they knew about Chicago. They had seen what happened in Chicago that year and the assassinations that year. And the question was this, due to all the divisions that were taking place in the boomers' generation when they were younger, do you think that they are going to go to their graves like the Civil War generation, not truly healing due to the divisions between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, those who were for the war against the war, those who supported the troops or were against the troops? Do you think they are going to go to their grave not healing? And just your thoughts on the whole issue of healing.

SE (01:19:03):
Yeah, I actually do not think so. And of course you have to again say people are different, some people may go to their grave not healed because they want to hang on to their anger for reasons that are theirs. But I would not say that that is true of a generation at all. I think that there are lots of connections across racial lines within our generation that 45 years ago would have been difficult to sustain. I think that there's certainly men and women in our generation have engaged in deep debates about what it means to be men and women and have come to various kinds of resolutions about that. I think separatism, except for a few people who hang onto it, separatism, is not where people are pulling away and refusing to talk to those who are different. And I think most of us, and here, I will just speak personally because I do not really want to speak for my generation, but I personally feel grateful for having been able to live through the things I lived through. And there was a time that was very divisive and fairly painful because of that. But I do not feel I am stuck in that place at all. And the people that I know in my generation are not either.

SM (01:20:46):
I know that Senator Muskie in his response, made no reference to anything in the (19)60s, nothing, not even (19)68 convention. He looked up at the students after about 30 minutes, it looked like he had a tear in his eye. And he said, "We have not healed since the Civil War due to the issue of race." And he went on to talk about that in detail and the loss of life during the Civil War, because he had just seen the Ken Burn series.

SE (01:21:16):
Oh, that is interesting. That is really interesting. Well, I do think that there are a huge amount of unhealed things in American society, but then we're not talking about a particular generation. And if you look at the immigration debate right now, we have got a lot of some of the same awful stuff going on.

SM (01:21:42):
My next to last question is a question dealing with, I have talked to many feminists and I talked to one prominent feminist at her home in New York City about six weeks ago. I will not mention her name, but she likes the National Organization for Women. But she says she is disappointed in it because of the fact that if you walk into their headquarters now, the only things you are going to see as far as pickup materials, this is the first perception you have when you walk into an office. They have literature there dealing with abortion, literature dealing with the pill, and I think literature dealing with AIDS. And her comment was, "Those are all important issues, but there is a lot more issues for women than that." And she felt that that they have been hung up on those three issues.

SE (01:22:39):
And I do not have enough inside information about NOW to make a statement about them and their priorities as an organization. And I certainly think that there is reasons in Tidal Wave, I really wrestled with why the body was so important in the second wave of feminism, and you are lifting up issues that are about that. Also, domestic violence and so forth. But I would agree that we have a huge range of issues, and it is going to take a new generation to articulate a new focus based on their lived experience. Because I think people in our generation, we know what we experienced, but the world has changed in so many ways that we need new generations to clarify where are the flashpoints for them.

SM (01:23:43):
The plan of question here is the issue of trust. One of the qualities that has often been defined within the boomer generation, and that really includes the entire generation, even the activists, I have read this in books, it is just they are not a very trusting generation. They have not been trusting from the get-go, particularly with respect to the leaders that represent them in government. And as a result of the lies that many of them have seen and the disappointments that they have had in their leaders from the time they were young, right into their twenties and thirties. And they saw Lyndon Johnson, and they knew that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie. They saw Watergate with Richard Nixon. They were questions about President Kennedy's policy on Vietnam. And anybody who was a student, particularly in the first 10 years of the boomer generation, knew that Eisenhower was the first one that lied on national television about the U2 incident. And I had interviewed one person who said that I believe in leaders. And certainly I always believed in Ike until he did that. And everything changed. So we know from history that many of the people in the (19)60s and (19)70s, the people on college campuses did not trust university presidents. They did not trust their religious leaders in the churches and synagogues. They did not trust anybody in corporate leadership. They did not trust anybody in the leadership responsibilities. So the question I am asking, do you believe that that is a negative or a positive within the generation? And I add one other note. The reason why I asked this question, I was in a Psychology 101 class at Binghamton University in my freshman year, and the professors talked for an hour about the importance of trust. And its basic premise was, if you cannot trust, you will never be a success in life. Yet seems like a lot of the movements that came because we did not trust. Women did not trust men; the anti-war women did not trust the leaders in Washington. You got all the movements, so just whether it's good or bad?

SE (01:26:03):
Oh boy, I need to pull your question apart again. You have got a lot of specifics that are true. People learn to distrust leaders who were not trustworthy. You end up with Watergate. But the issue, I am not quite sure about the framing of your issue, because you are saying, here is a generation that discovered as leaders were not trustworthy, did that condemn them to never being a success?

SM (01:26:40):
Well, that was a professor saying that, but I am just –

SE (01:26:44):
I think what it does is put a burden on us to build a democracy in which we in fact do hold our leaders accountable in such a way that we do trust them. And that is a long-term change that we need to work to bring about. And that requires a lot more engagement at the grassroots level. All those ideals about participatory democracy and so forth. Some are not realizable on a large scale, but they create some values that are very important to figure out ways to bring about. And they are pretty, are plenty of people that came in my generation out of the (19)60s as community organizers working at the grassroots level, doing the kind of things that Barack Obama later did. And so that is not just about a negative attitude saying, "Authority is bad," or you that you cannot trust anyone over 30. Well, most of us are maybe double 30. So, problem. But it does raise a question of how do you create a society in which you have leaders that you do trust? Not because you hand off to them responsibility and do not pay attention, but because you are engaged with them and they are accountable to you.

SM (01:28:17):
Since I have two minutes, so can I ask one more?

SE (01:28:23):
Okay.

SM (01:28:24):
And that is the last question.

SE (01:28:25):
I am making coffee in the background. So you are just going to hear little [inaudible].

SM (01:28:28):
That is okay. What do you think the legacy will be of the generation that grew up after World War II when the history books are written 50, 75 years after they are gone? What will historians and...

SE (01:28:46):
I do not know. I do not know. I am a historian, and that guessing about the future is something that I have a tough time with because I really do not know. I do think it is a demographic bump. It had a particular shared experience as a cohort or some sub cohorts within it, was involved in massive changes in American society. But I think there is a lot more that we need to know about what comes after, before we can make those judgements.

SM (01:29:24):
You are right, because we are just talking about boomers.

SE (01:29:28):
We are in the middle of it still.

SM (01:29:29):
Yeah. We are in the middle and they can change a lot of things. And the one thing I did not mention when I was talking about healing, and that is the fact, how is the Vietnam Memorial itself, I am sure you have been there –

SE (01:29:42):
Oh, it is very powerful.

SM (01:29:43):
Yeah. When Jan Scruggs wrote the book To Heal a Nation, his goal was not only to heal the veterans and their families, but hopefully to heal the nation from that war. What do you think that is done with respect to the healing process, not only for vets and anti-war people, but the nation as a whole?

SE (01:30:01):
Well, again, I do not have any data on the nation as a whole. I can tell you my own personal experience of that memorial was extremely powerful. And I have talked about it with my students often when I talk about the Vietnam War and how it tore this country of par. And then talk about that beautiful place, which is like a scar and it names the names and it is a place of mourning and grief, and people leave their wreaths and they leave teddy bears and whatever. It honors without glorifying. And I find that very, very profound.

SM (01:30:46):
And of course, Diane Carlson Evans did a tremendous job making sure the Women's Memorial was there.

SE (01:30:52):
Right.

SM (01:30:53):
And she had to go before Congress, and she had to deal with a lot of issues that women have had to face their whole lives through the hearings.

SE (01:31:00):
Exactly.

SM (01:31:00):
Was there any question I did not ask that you thought I was going to ask?

SE (01:31:04):
No, I was not quite sure what your trajectory was, but I will be very interested. When do you think you are going to finish this book?

SM (01:31:15):
Well, the interviews are going to end at the end of September, and then I am going to be hibernating for about six months and transcribing all of them myself.

SE (01:31:24):
Wow.

SM (01:31:24):
I am not going to –

SE (01:31:24):
That is a lot of work. I know. I have done.

SM (01:31:26):
Yeah, because I do not trust anybody else. Peter Goldman, who I have gotten to know who wrote the book on Malcolm X said he has had nothing but bad experiences handing off transcripts, even when they were covered by grants, he says, "I end up doing them all over again because of the mistakes that are made."

SE (01:31:42):
Oh.

SM (01:31:43):
So anyways, I am hoping that next year it will be done and then I am finishing, like I said, I am going to need two pictures of you though.

SE (01:31:55):
Okay.

SM (01:31:56):
And I do not know if you can mail them to my home address or I can email you just two.

SE (01:32:02):
What kinds of pictures?

SM (01:32:03):
Just –

SE (01:32:04):
Why do not you send me an email telling me what you're looking for? I can send them to you on email.

SM (01:32:08):
Okay. I will.

SE (01:32:11):
So that would be the best way to do it.

SM (01:32:13):
Well, thank you very much.

SE (01:32:14):
You are very welcome.

SM (01:32:15):
And you have a great day.

SE (01:32:15):
All right.

SM (01:32:15):
Bye now.

SE (01:32:15):
Bye.

(End of Interview)

2010-08-16

Stephen Mckiernan

Sara M. (Sara Margaret) Evans, 1943-

92:32

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

College teachers; Evans, Sara M. (Sara Margaret), 1943--Interviews

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