Interview with Dr. Alice Kessler Harris

Interview with Dr. Alice Kessler Harris

Kessler-Harris, Alice ; McKiernan, Stephen

College teachers; Columbia University; Kessler-Harris, Alice--Interviews

Dr. Alice Kessler-Harris is Professor Emerita of American History at Columbia University. She is also Professor Emerita in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Dr. Kessler-Harris specializes in the history of American labor and the comparative and interdisciplinary exploration of women and gender.

2010-03-15

In copyright

McKiernan.Oral.10.2016.59

2017-03-14

McKiernan Interviews

89:14

McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Alice Kessler-Harris
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: Kiernan Sullivan
Date of interview: 15 March 2010
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)

SM: 00:00
Testing one two [fumbling with mic] and again, you will see, uh, anything. I am going to ask you though about your early years.

AH: 00:09
Okay. [laughs]

SM: 00:09
Um, could you tell me a little bit about your upbringing? Um, uh-uh- where you were born, and, uh, maybe some professors and teachers that really inspired you. And how did you develop an interest in women's issues, and especially women in labor?

AH: 00:34
Okay, those are a lot of questions, all in one. Um, I was born in England, um, in 1941, uh, of, uh, refugee parents who had, uh, just a year before, um, managed to make it out of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and, uh, to England. Uh, I grew up in Wales, in Cardiff, uh, and, uh, lived there until I was 14, when we started the immigration process to the US. Uh, so all of my early memories are, um, British, Welsh. Uh, I, uh, when we came to the States, uh, I spent two years at, uh, Trenton Central High School.

SM: 01:30
Mhm.

AH: 01:34
Uh, a typical immigration story. My father had a sister in Trenton. My mother was gone already. She died when I was a kid, and, uh, um, so Trenton was where we came and went to school. There was in Trenton, a o-or at Trenton High School, a, um, just a wonderful vice principal, uh, whose name was Sarah Christie, who took me and my brothers, actually two brothers, one older and one younger, on board, and in my case, um, selected the college that she thought would be good for me, and, um, took my father and me down there because I was still fairly young, and he was not comfortable letting his daughter go away-

SM: 02:29
It was Goucher, right?

AH: 02:30
-to school - right. So she actually drove us down to Goucher, made an appointment with the principal, oh sorry, with the dean of admissions for me and with the Dean of Students for my father. And, um, I ended up getting a scholarship there, and spent four very happy years at Goucher. And there I encountered another really super terrific woman whose name was Rhoda Dorsey, um, who was then a young assistant professor at Goucher, and who then went on to, um, become first dean and then president of the, uh, the college. She is still around, and I still see her, and I am very fond of her, but it was she who, um, probably more than anything else, um, uh, influenced, um, my decision to become a historian, and particularly an American historian, given the fact that that was a new arena for me, uh, and it was she actually who, in, in the end, after many steps in between, uh, suggested Rutgers to me as a place to go to school. And, um, a-and that is why I ended up going to Rutgers and ultimately getting my degree there.

SM: 04:04
How did you pick? Uh, why did you care? Was there some experiences you had in college that, uh, turned you toward women's issues?

AH: 04:14
No, I cannot say that I was particularly turned towards women's issues until the late 1960s, until the women's movement began. And, um, before that, I had been turned much more towards immigrant and labor issues, and I think that makes you know absolute sense in terms of my own immigrant background. So you know, I was an immigrant and I wanted to be an American [laughing], that was the sort of bottom line, and the best way to do that was to study American history, and particularly to study immigrant American history. So that is what I did. And even more specifically, I did a visitation on Jews in New York in the 1890s so I was particularly interested in Jewish immigrants. And to do that dissertation, I learned Yiddish because that was my family was Hungarian and German speaking, but not Yiddish speaking. So I learned Yiddish to recoup that piece of a past that I shared, and, um, the rest is history, I suppose. The Women's History piece came out of, uh, the women's movement is the honest answer, and, um, it came out of the fact that I finished the dissertation in 1968 I was already married and had a four-year-old child. I have a daughter who was born in 1964 at that point, and, uh, I had t-to get the degree done, as you can imagine. I had sort of buried myself in books and had not been particularly politically active, y-you know, a-a lot of sort of, um, you know, marches and demonstrations, but no leadership of any one kind in any of those things. And then I lifted my head up, as it were, after I finished the dissertation, and I noticed that there was a woman's movement all around me just beginning, but New York was the, uh, you might say, the epicenter of that.

SM: 06:31
That is right.

AH: 06:33
So I got my first job in September of 1968 started working at Hofstra, where I taught for about 20 years and, uh, joined a consciousness raising group. The same year, uh, met other women who were active in the women's movement, and began to get involved. And it was only after that that I noticed that this dissertation I had written, which was about, you know, the Jewish labor movement in New York in the 1890s had no women in it. You know, that I had systematically just discarded all the women because I was studying the labor movement. And the labor movement was, in those days-

SM: 07:19
Male dominated.

AH: 07:20
-male dominated. So it was at that point that I started to, um, to work on women. I mean, I, I-I went back to some of the Yiddish materials and so on, to recoup some of the women I had overlooked. And so the first things I ever published were, uh, pieces on women in the labor movement. And...um-

SM: 07:48
Do you think, um, we are in the 1960s now, late (19)60s, that the women's movement really came about because of the sexism that took place within all the other movements? Uh, we know that in the civil rights movement, sexism was dominant. Uh, uh, when you leave, when you look at the anti-war movement, it was very dominant. And, um, in talking to some other people, even in the American Indian, American Indian movement, it was dominant. And even to- in the gay lesbian movement, it was very dominant. Um, do you think the women's movement would have happened if the-if they had been treated equal in these movements from the get go? Or, uh, because a lot of people believe it was an offshoot, even though we know civil rights was a, um, role model for the movement. But just your thoughts on the sexism that took place within just about all the other movements.

AH: 08:41
I think that that is, um, certainly a chunk of the explanation for the women's movement, but I do not think it is, by any means, the entire explanation.

SM: 08:51
Mhm. [mumbling]

AH: 08:50
So, uh, you know, I-I would say that, uh, you know, and Sarah Evans first proposed this in personal politics, and I think she is completely right that the sexism within the, um, uh, civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and so on, was an issue, and alerted a lot of women to the, especially a lot of young women, a lot of college aged women, uh, to the fact that here they were fighting for equality for other people, and they themselves were being treated, not only unequally, but unfairly. So, I-I think that that is the case, but I think that after all, limited numbers of women were involved in those movements, and that there is another source of female discontent, if you like, or of the women's movement that should not be overlooked, and that comes out of the- and it is really a long history of, uh, discrimination in the workplace and of the stifling of opportunities for women in those places. So, by the early 1960s it was quite clear that women were going to be earning a living. Large numbers of women were going to be earning a living. And after 1963 after Betty Friedan, uh, the old argument that women were working for pin money, or that they did not really want to be in the labor force and so on, um, I-I think had very little purchase after that point, so that I have called it sometimes incremental changes so women enter the workforce. Uh, they enter the workforce to earn income for their family for the most part, and then they discover that their opportunities as workers are limited. Uh, they their wages are limited. Their wages are unequal, uh, their promotional possibilities are limited. Uh, their capacity to enter certain fields are not only limited, but sometimes denied altogether, and that those things by the mid and late (19)60s are creating - you might call them the fuel for the fire. You know so then perfectly ordinary women who had never marched, you know, had never gone south to, you know, join the civil rights movement. Uh, you know, the mothers of children are, uh, discovering that they are being treated unfairly. And I think that form of sexism, you know, the sort of cultural sexism of who was expected to work and who was expected to, uh, take care of the household just hit home, uh, in about the same period. Now there is a kind of synergy between them that I would certainly agree to. But I do think that there is a strand there that is if you dig deeply, you can find it in the (19)30s. You can find it in the women who were active in the labor movement and would not call themselves feminists. You can find it in the early 1960s in the President's Commission on the Status of Women, where the question of work and family is a major question, you know, unresolved in that, uh, commission, and which spawns, you know, a state commission in every state in the Union, which state commissions are ultimately responsible for creating the National Organization for Women. So, you see, there is another thread there that I think people have perhaps not paid sufficient attention to, and which parallels, um, you know, and energizes, perhaps the younger women, or that the younger women certainly align with.

SM: 08:51
T-the, uh, 1950s to me, women, even though they may have been mothers at home raising children, they were still the teachers because, uh, just about my entire school, I did not see a male teacher in my entire school. It was all female in elementary school, obviously nursing professionals and certainly secretarial because my mom was a secretary. Uh, he raised the kids and then went back to work.

AH: 08:50
Right.

SM: 08:51
So-so [clearing throat] what we saw were people that were in some very responsible positions. Um, what was it about the, the middle-class women of that period in the (19)50s, where they realized, once their kids got a little bit older, that they wanted to go back to work to help raise because, um, my niece is going through this right now? Is it - with a, with a baby - but, uh, she has to do both things to survive, uh, to pay the mortgage. And was this the precursor of the two-income family? Uh, and once the two-income family was present -

AH: 09:36
It was not the precursor; it was the two-income family. The two-income family begins, if you look at the data, it begins in the post war period. So-so again, I have written about this, but-

SM: 14:18
Mhm.

AH: 14:20
-if you look at the trend line, you see that women are entering the workforce at a fairly steady clip and the number but they are mostly single women into the 1930s the Depression period, women continue to enter the [car horn] workforce, and their proportion remains steady. It does not decline, even though there is discrimination against married women. The 1940s women enter at a huge rate, as you know-

SM: 14:58
Right.

AH: 14:58
-because of the war. And then they were pushed out after the war. But immediately after they have pushed out, if you follow that first trend line, it continues to go up. So if you see, the, the war as a blip, you can see the trend line just increasing slowly but steadily, until by 1952 1953 there are almost as many. The proportion of women in the workforce is almost as many as there were during the war. And the proportion of married women and married women with children is now beginning to increase dramatically. So then you have to say, Well, why do women go back to work in the (19)50s? Some people go back to work because they had a great time during the war. You know-

SM: 15:46
Mhm.

AH: 15:46
-they learned that they could be economically independent, and that work was very satisfying. So that is some of it. Uh, some of it is that, uh-uh, they, uh, like their husbands, who sometimes benefit from the GI Bill, uh, begin to go to college and to get an education, and then to want to use that education. And that is the group that moves into the teaching and the nursing this, what we sometimes call the semi professions, uh, social work and-and so on and-and it is the, uh, the desire to use the education that they have that pushes them into the workforce. And then there is a whole other group that, um, moves into the workforce because standards of living are changing in the post war period and the male income is simply insufficient to support, a, a middle-class standard of living for most working-class families, but two working class wage earners can live reasonably well. So, the idea that, uh, y-you know, the male does not have to support a family that the woman can go to work to pay college tuition, to provide ballet classes for the kids to, you know, get that second car, or to buy the new refrigerator, or the leather town house. You know, all those things which, you know, the consumer things which are, uh, and which become necessities in that period. That is, you know, houses do not exist anymore without electricity or with outdoor toilets, or, you know, those are and to maintain or sustain that kind of standard of living requires an extra income. Sometimes it requires half an income, and women become two thirds of the people who work part time, for example, or women leave the labor force while their children are small and then go back into the labor force. But whatever it is, however families work it out, people begin slowly the idea begins to break down that men alone support there, and-

SM: 18:08
It is interesting, I interviewed Phyllis Schlafly about a month ago, and, uh, she has typified the woman, a woman of the (19)50s, because she would not do anything unless she asked her husband.

AH: 18:20
Yes.

SM: 18:21
And, uh, sh- he wanted, um, she wanted to run for the Senate or Congress or whatever, and she asked her husband, her husband said no.

AH: 18:30
Right.

SM: 18:30
So she did not run.

AH: 18:31
Right.

SM: 18:32
So, and she said she, um, she was interesting, because she said, I- she was against the women's movement, obviously, and she was one of the leaders of the anti-ERA effort. Uh, but she also believes that the troublemakers of the (19)60s are now running today's universities, and she p-pointed that out [inaudible] making comments about women's studies and everything.

AH: 18:55
Well, I-

SM: 18:55
Yeah.

AH: 18:56
I am one of those people.

SM: 18:58
[Laughing]

AH: 18:58
So, I proudly declare myself to be a troublemaker-

SM: 19:00
Right.

AH: 19:00
-of the (19)60s-

SM: 19:02
Right.

AH: 19:02
-in that sense-

SM: 19:04
Mhm.

AH: 19:04
-because, uh, I mean, y-you know that that she chose to ask her husband, that her husband said no, and that she responded-

SM: 19:15
[inaudible] sometimes, Yeah, we are doing fine.

AH: 19:18
There was a there was a class issue there. A- that Phyllis Schlafly was of a class status and already involved with a husband who could, in fact, support her and the family, makes her not unique by any means, but relatively speaking, unusual. There were millions of women who, um, they did not even think about running for the Senate, but they did think about becoming school aides, or getting secretarial jobs, or using whatever education they-they had because they needed to. Did they ask their husbands for permission? Probably, but would a husband have said no if he understood that this money could bankroll a kid's education, that you could then send your kid to the State University, because, you know, you would have enough money in the bank to do that, or you could, you know, get that second car for the family, or take vacations every year. So there-there was a class issue that I think people like Phyllis Schlafly often do not, uh, understand. But-but there is another issue too, which is, um, the 1950s 1960s are CUSP years. They are years of transition and transformation. So, uh, you know, it is absolutely the case that many women, particularly many white, middle-class women, benefited from the single income male house holder. You know, they could, as a famous historian named Ivy Pinchbeck once said, uh, they could manage not to have two jobs. So if you consider housework and child rearing one job and going out to work a second job, which most people do, it was a, you know, a great joy and liberation to many women not to have two jobs that is, to be able to stay home with their children, to be able to, you know, make the choice of child rearing, uh, rather than, uh, you know, going out to work and rushing home and you know, so on and, and that is the other piece of this that happens in the (19)50s. So, there is, on the one hand, the pull of income, o-of the need for income, and th-then there on is, on the other hand, an ideology which still says women belong at home, femininity serving the male obedience and so on, are good values. Now I am a great example of that. I grew up in a generation where I firmly believed I would not go to work. I was going to go to college. In fact, I married a medical student in my third year of college, I was set to go. I never intended to spend my life earning a living, and it never occurred to me that that would be but then, uh, you know, I started grad school. Why did I start graduate school? Well, my husband was in medical school. He just finished medical school. He was fairly young. Uh, what was I going to do for a few years? I was going to teach. We were moving from Baltimore to New York. I knew that you could only get a job as a real teacher, not a probationary teacher, if you had a master's degree. So, my initial thought was, all right, I would go get a master's degree, and I would go to graduate school to do that, and then I teach a few years. I get to graduate school. I love graduate school. I do well in graduate school, I think it is, you know, it is just the place I want to be with the conversations I want to have. Now, by now, it is 1962 1963 you know, the word is in the air. You know, there is a civil rights movement. I belong to bits of it. There is an anti-war movement beginning. I am present at that moment at Rutgers where Eugene Genovese bangs the table and says, I do not fear a Viet Cong victory. Indeed, I would welcome one.

SM: 23:44
Were you in the room when that happened?

AH: 23:45
I was in the room when that happened. So, so you see, I am not a leader of any kind, but I am influenced by all these ideas that are in the air. And then I get pregnant, and I have a baby, I am not sure if the order of this is right, but it all happens around the same time. And once I have a baby, the husband says, “Hey, what is going on around here? Why are you continuing to work? What is- but I am committed by now, so I use my fellowship money. I get deprived of a fellowship because I have a baby, I begin to feel that sense of, you know, it is not the same for me as a, as a woman. And then suddenly, in 1968 I finish my degree, I get a job because there are jobs available then, and I discover that I can construct a life, that I am not dependent, that I want this job, I want to work. And at that point, the marriage freys, it is not his fault, it is my fault, because I am the one who changed. His expectations of a wife and a family were absolutely legitimate given the period-

SM: 24:57
Yeah, the time, yeah, the times.

AH: 25:04
-that we grew up in. But I am, you know, there is all this stuff going on around me. I am the one who changes. So, when Phyllis Schlafly says, um, you know, my husband told me not to do it, so I did not, you know, that is great, right? My husband told me not to do it too, but I did, right? And there are as many, there are as many people like me out there as there are like Phyllis, Schlafly, maybe more. And if you want to call us troublemakers, because-

SM: 25:41
Well she used that term.

AH: 25:42
-Right. No, no, I am not-

SM: 25:43
Yeah-yeah. Yeah.

AH: 25:43
I am not blaming you at all-

SM: 25:44
Right, right.

AH: 25:45
-for this. All I am saying is, is I see how she could use that term, because she is really talking about a generation of people just like me who, uh, who do not want to follow the traditional patterns and the traditional lines.

SM: 26:06
See, that is, that is, you know, you are, you are a mover. I-uh-It is not, it is not really a year. It is an attitude. It is really about an attitude. Because, um, if you talk to a, a study of the Free Speech movement with Mario Savio, the very same thing there. Um, it wa- i-it is about the world of ideas. It was the concept of the world of ideas that was important in the free speech movement. And you are talking about 1962-63 that exactly was when Feminine Mystique was written, yeah, and it came out. And, um, I would have to check this thing to make sure this is doing fine. Um, and I noticed, um, in, in an interview that they had with Betty Friedan, before she passed away, talking about The Feminine Mystique, she said it was, um, about- it was all about equality. It was about equality. And then, uh, the person that followed up said, what about the, the radical women of the late (19)60s and early (19)70s, the ones that burned their bras or would not shave their legs, or, um, you know, those kinds of individuals. And she said, you know, they were radicals. That is not what I was into. That is not what I was into. She was kind of, kind of negative toward that kind of stuff.

AH: 27:19
But she is not telling the truth about herself, of course.

SM: 27:22
Yeah.

AH: 27:23
I mean, if you if you read, um, Daniel Horowitz's biography of Betty Friedan, you discover that, uh, you know, she comes out of the left, she comes out of the labor movement. She herself was a radical for a long time in her life that, while she was writing this book-

SM: 27:43
Right.

AH: 27:43
-you know, from a, you know, a sort of middling perspective that really is not where she is coming from. And indeed, I think, uh, only a Betty Friedan that is somebody who came out of the left and the labor movement, those are the women, after all, who are also, at this point, creating groups like women strike for peace, you know, and the ban the bomb movement and so on, you know. And they, you know, many of them have a, you know, what you would call a radical background. So, I mean the, the thing, the thing is that what we understand as radical may not have really been so radical at all. I mean, I do not think I was so unusual in that period. Uh, a-and I certainly, you know, if you think about organizations like now, or the Women's Equity Action League and how quickly they took off. You have to believe that there are millions of women who are somehow dissatisfied. You know, they may not be dissatisfied in the way Betty Friedan describes, but they are dissatisfied with that traditional you know, I-I am just an appendage of my husband, um, and I can be happy if he makes a good living being an appendage. Um-

SM: 29:07
Betty Friedan says, but part of the result of the women's movement, as I help conceptualize it, is to give it a vision and lead it is an end to such a no-win either-or choice. Women today have choices, and demand choices, choices to have kids or not, and the reproductive technology there too. And it is a fact that most women continue to choose to have children. They, they know it as a choice now, but they do not choose to have too many, and they do not choose it as either-or career or children. That is something that Betty Friedan says [inaudible].

AH: 29:44
Yeah, this says there is something true about that, but there is also something sort of oversimplified about that. I do not know when she actually said that, but if you look at the data now, lots of women are choosing not to get married. Lots of women are choosing to have children even though they have no partner. Lots of people are choosing to have same sex partners and to have children with those same sex partners. So, her sort of the underlying assumption there that marriage between a man and a woman is the basis for the choice to have a child is no longer valid. It is for professional women, for teenage black women, it is not legitimate to have a child. But for professional, 30-year-olds who do not have a husband, it is, you know, the numbers of those women who decide to get pregnant or to adopt children is Legion. I have not counted them, but-

SM: 29:45
I know that David Kaiser, who, t-the historian that wrote 68, um, he knows you. I think he knows you.

AH: 30:47
Yes.

SM: 30:53
He knew about you, and when I interviewed him, he said, do not bring up Betty Friedan to me. She is homophobic and, uh, she is not, er, uh, one of the leaders of really, uh, she, and, uh, Gloria Steinem is another story. Yes, she is fantastic. And so is Bella but Betty Friedan is homophobic, so in the gay community, I guess there is some sensitivity toward her. But, um, Phyllis Schlafly, um, trying to think something else that she said, uh, um, oh my goodness, um, it will come back to me. She said a lot of things [chuckling] that you might well know. Um, what do you mean when you say the gendering of society? Because, uh, you, uh, that is I have read some of the things on the web. And, uh, what does that mean to you?

AH: 31:36
I do not know that I ever said the gendering of society. I think I might have said the gendering of the labor force, and I think I have said a shift in the gendered, what I call the gendered imagination. But if I were going to talk about that whole concept of gendering, I would say the following: that we, um, and here I speak as a historian or a social scientist, I guess, uh, that we have often explained, uh, uh, transformation and change in society in terms of class and in terms of race differences. That is, you know, people say, um, uh, the, uh, you know, the industrialization altered people's expectations of work and of their place in society, and that changes how people think about democracy and politics and so on. And we have not often thought of gender as a sort of motivational force. And one of the things I think that we have learned over the last generation, and I think it has really taken 20 or 30 years to learn it, is that gender and gendered tensions might be as important as any other kind of tensions, not more important, but as important. So, you know, you could say, uh, the effort of men and women to, you know, sort of create different kinds of relationships within families, you know, the most intimate level, to create satisfying lives for both of them, then produces a whole bunch of other issues and demands. You know, it produces, well, the demand not only for, uh, equal work for men and women and equal pay for men and women, but also the demand for, um, a more egalitarian view of what work should be and how it should be structured. Uh, it produces a different sense of children and who's responsible for them. It produces a different, uh, perspective on social policy. You know, there is nobody left to take care of the aging parents anymore. We need social security and pensions, not just to be supplements, but to take care of them. It produces a different perspective on the role of the public school system in education. So we note now in New York City that virtually every public school at the elementary level has an afternoon school program which is free and available, and that is a response to shifts in the family. So what I am saying is that the, the gendered tension, uh, produces all kinds of other, uh, incremental kinds of changes that are not easy to deal with. You know, they are, they are very difficult, and sometimes they have backlash effects. And i-if you want me to keep talking, I can say, for example, the thing that comes very painfully to mind is the welfare reform issue. So it used to be that assumptions about women's gender roles meant that poor women who needed support would be supported to stay home with their small children so that they could take care of them and the children would not suffer. Now we have a gendering, a different kind of gendered balance in this society, in which we no longer assume that women with children will stay home. We assume that women with chil- with children will be out to work. And so instead of paying for women to stay home. We pay them to go out to work, but we have not figured out what to do with the children yet. In other words, you know, we have not provided appropriate day care. We have not provided it in appropriate places. We have not given these, you know, women reasonable transportation. We have not figured out what to do when the kids are sick. You know, we...do you see what I mean? So now that requires a whole another set of questions. They have not yet been resolved.

SM: 36:14
You see another just came out. My niece told me this, and it was on CNS, uh, CN-NBC, or whatever is that breastfeeding a child in the first six to eight months, they go to work after the you know, they got to go. There is no privacy.

AH: 36:28
Right.

SM: 36:29
And so that is a big issue. Now, I believe in Obama's, uh, Bill w-was it was not for six months or trying to build something, so they have to build a room for a private area. It was just something there was they were not sensitive at all-

AH: 36:39
Yes.

SM: 36:40
-to women's, uh-

AH: 36:40
Yes.

SM: 36:41
-needs.

AH: 36:42
Look 50 years ago when I got my first job. So 1961 to 62 I taught for a single year in a Baltimore High School, and I had to sign a contract that said, and that is exactly 50 years ago, right? I had to sign a contract that said that if I got pregnant, I would tell them and I would resign within four months of the beginning of the pregnancy. That was normal. I did not blink twice at signing that contract. It was perfectly normal. So nobody had to think about privacy or extra rooms, or it was assumed that it was not that everybody did resign when they had babies, but the expectation was that you would do so. So, you know, it is a half a century later, and look at the consequences of that. You know, whether it is about breastfeeding, or whether it is about on-site daycare, or whether it is about Chinese menu benefit options and employers finding that it is too expensive to provide healthcare anymore, and now maybe we can have national healthcare. In other words, nothing is isolated in a cocoon, and when you start shifting these what look like very intimate gender relationships, you produce huge consequences for the society as a whole.

SM: 38:11
I-I just thought what Phyllis, uh, said, she said, in, uh, she said that one half of all babies born last year were born out of wedlock. That is what she, uh, she had the st-statistic, was a year ago, so, and she was I-I again, I am not sure, we talked about a lot of different things, what she was referencing into, but she put that in as a-a statement that, uh, unwed mothers, and I-

AH: 38:33
I-I would like to check out that statistic, and I would, I would bet you dollars to donuts that included in that number, if the number is correct, and I think it is probably exaggerated, but if the number is incorrect, it probably counts as unwed women and men who live together as partners and men and men and women and women who live together. In other words, if out of wedlock means out of traditional marriage, having a marriage ceremony done, that might be correct, but if, but that, of course, that does not mean anything, because the children who are born under many of those circumstances have two parents, you know.

SM: 39:15
One, one of the first questions I have asked everyone, uh, on the general questions, not specific ones, is that, um, in 1994 when Newt Gingrich came into power, he made some pretty strong statements against the, um, (19)60s and the (19)70s [mumbling]. He has, he has quoted, he talks about it all the time, in certain ways. He is a boomer himself, but, uh, and then, uh, notice, Mike Huckabee recently has said some things on his TV show about the (19)60s generation. He likes to throw these one liners out there and for church will in his writings over the years, always likes to throw a little jab here, jab there. Um, someone told me, uh, in, in response to his chapters, anybody ever really told you or told you that he worked for Jesse Helms, and that is how he got his start? I said, no, I did not know that well, I do not think he likes the world to know it either, so [laughing] s-so lo-, there is a lot of stuff out there, but basically, what I am saying is that it is, it is a general perception on those that do not like, the, the Liberals from that era, whether they be in the anti-war movement, civil rights, uh, women's movement, uh, the gay and lesbian, uh, the environmental movement, the Native American Chicano, um, is that they are just, um, the breakdown of our society really started then the lot of the issues of the divorce, the divorce rate, the lack of responsibility, lack of respect for authority, the, the beginning of the isms. Um, of course, the welfare state will always be thrown out there. That was an LBJ thing. Um, so I do not know, how do you respond to that? Because, uh, it is, it is, it is really, it is becoming very strong now. It is stronger than I have ever seen it the backlash against that era. I preface this by saying that Barney Frank, I mean, I think I am going to have to turn this, uh, no, I am still good. Barney Frank wrote a very good book in the (19)90s called Speaking Frankly, and he is Mr. Democratic and, uh, but he said that we have to as a party, the Democratic Party, we have to say goodbye to the anti-war people and those-those (19)60s people and the-the people that were around McGovern, because if we were going to survive as a party, people are not going to join us. They are going to think of the radi- radical aspects. Uh, and that is always stuck in my mind, and this is a politician saying it. And, uh, so Mike, the basic question is this, when you see blanket statements made, stating that that period, and we all know what they are talking about, the (19)60s and early (19)70s, um, that all our-uh, just about all our problems started, then, um, how do you respond to that?

AH: 42:00
How I respond to that is by saying, some people would call that the breakdown of society, and other people like me would call it the transformation of society, uh, the transformation of society to a more democratic uh, um, uh, ground. In other words, I, I you can look at what happened in the (19)60s from various perspectives. From one perspective, you can see it as an enormous challenge to a variety of traditional value systems. Among them, the, uh, racial segregation, um, gender inequality, um, [car horns] or patriarchy, uh, if you want to put it that way, uh, you know elitist, uh, government, you know, uh, decision making made by political people and so on. So what the 1960s did, from that perspective, is to say, no, we were, uh, we have now moved far enough so that we want to transform the society on more democratic and egalitarian grounds. Uh, now you could say that that is a breakdown in the sense that our forefathers never envisioned such democracy. They did not envision racial equality, they did not envision gender equality, and so look at the terrible things you have done to our society. And that is one way of looking at it. [car horns] But another way of looking at it is to say, you know, this democratic experiment that this country is involved in is an evolving experiment. And the (19)60s and early part of the (19)70s, you know, there was a decade in there when we really tried to push the boundaries a little further. Uh, we got a good way doing that. We did not get as far as some people wanted us to, and we left some problems hanging. But by Jove, you know, we, we created a far greater access for African Americans, for people of color.

SM: 44:33
[mumbling] I know it is at the end. [recording pauses]

AH: 44:40
Okay, so, no, just the point is that we, we created, uh, access. We the- you know, the New Left view of democratic participation. [recording pauses]

SM: 45:04
[inaudible]

AH: 45:04
So, I was going to say the-the new left's, um, uh notion of, um, participatory democracy was in some ways, completely nuts. You know, it is, um, you know, in this in the sense that, uh, it is stymied activity. You know, we all spend hours day and night talking about things. But on the other hand, it also fostered the town hall meetings that you now see, where presidential candidates and so on actually think that upon occasion, they can actually go talk to ordinary people, and that ordinary people have things to say so. So that is what I think about that argument. I think that when, uh, Newt Gingrich should know better, because he was trained as a historian.

SM: 45:58
Yes.

AH: 45:59
You know, change does not come without, um, uh, pain, and, and people will disagree with it, and will, uh, you know, sort of pull in the other direction and try to pull us back in the other direction. But I do not believe that, uh, we-we can or that people will tolerate being moved back, uh, you know, to the sort of pre democratic or and we are certainly not as democratic as we could be, or as egalitarian as we could be, even now,

SM: 46:40
I know that, um, his commentary the other day against, uh, President Obama was pretty strong. [mumbling] He is the farthest left president we have ever had. And what is interesting also that President Obama tries to distance himself from the (19)60s, I think, because of the Bill Ayers and the all the other stuff. But also, um, his critics oftentimes say he is the epitome of the (19)60s. He is the reincarnation of the (19)60s. So here we have a man who wants to distance himself from that period, and yet we have his critics saying that he is the, uh, epitome and the, uh, role model of that period. He is-

AH: 47:21
But he has got critics on both sides. Right?

SM: 47:23
Yeah.

AH: 47:24
On the one hand, they say he is the epitome of the (19)60s and he is too far left, and he is a socialist and so on. On the other hand, people like me are saying, wait a minute, he is not far left enough. You know, what has he done? He has not stopped the war in Afghanistan. You know, he has settled for a health care bill, which is half of what we would like to have gotten. In other words, he is getting criticized from the left as well as from the right. And if you read magazines like the nation, what you get are articles saying, you know, hold off. Do not be too disappointed. He is doing as much as he can, you know, even though he is not doing, you know, enough so, so maybe he is doing something right, because [laughing] he is going right down the middle.

SM: 48:12
You have taught s-since the middle (19)60s, I guess, on college campuses. So you saw the, uh, the boomers when they were coming. Uh, they are 64 so they, they were in the (19)60s and (19)70s, and then you had the Generation X ers that came in the, uh, (19)80s and, uh, (19)90s, and now you got the millennials. Uh, Generation Y is right around the corner. See, everybody has got these terms for them. But, uh, one of the things that people have written is that the gener- that the boomer generation, were the best educated kids that they had, the best teachers, they had the best school system. They were seen to be more knowledgeable about issues, uh, not only that, often, not all of them active on the, um, uh, issues, but as a teacher, as a professor, as someone, you had good students in all your classes and every year. But did you see, c-can you perceive that that period students may have been more inquisitive, more questioning? Even you as a teacher, uh, how they seem to they seem to have been different and I have had other professors who have told me this.

AH: 49:17
I, uh, I think the answer that question is yes, but I think you have to remember that I was closer to their age than I am now, and students are always much more willing to engage and to push a professor who is young and, you know, seen as, uh, responsive, rather than somebody who's been around for, you know, 40 years and-

SM: 49:20
Right.

AH: 49:21
It is like their grandparents so, but that said, uh, I think it is probably true that the kids of the, of the, uh, late (19)60s, I started teaching in (19)68 and those first four or five years were of course, the heart of the anti-war movement. And so, uh, you know, the kids were active. They were engaged in the learning process. Uh, they, uh, you know, if they disagreed with the book, the challenge was not to get them to not disagree. We wanted them to disagree, but the challenge was to, uh, help them to defend their disagreement, to, um, you know, to articulate and to think about, you know, what the roots and the sources were of it. And so I think that that is true. Nowadays, students tend to be somewhat more passive, although I have to say that in my Women's Studies classes and my women's history classes, Phyllis Schlafly notwithstanding, um, those students tend to be, uh, much more challenging, uh, much less willing to accept authority, uh, you know. So they will repeatedly distinguish themselves, you know, from the second wave, you know, they will identify me almost immediately as a feminist and as a second wave feminist, and identify themselves as, uh, the third, or even now the fourth, fourth wave. And that is very rewarding. That is there. It generates very useful conversations about the differences, which, of course, reveals something to them-

SM: 51:48
Mhm.

AH: 51:48
-about, you know, what the past was like and what the present is like. Uh, those kinds of, uh, that kind of pushing, that kind of challenging I do not find in my other classes, but I would suspect that others might you know, others of a younger generation, others of different political persuasion might.

SM: 52:15
In your opinion, um, when did the (19)60s begin? When did it end, and what was there a watershed moment, um, watershed happening? So, it is a three-part question. Uh, [mumbling].

AH: 52:31
Well, it began and ended - is it all right?

SM: 52:35
Yep

AH: 52:35
It began and ended at different points for different people. Um, So I do not think there is one answer to that question. For me, I would say, uh, it probably began in 1964 and it probably ended, well, it did not end, uh, because I remained involved actively in the women's movement. For me, perhaps it still continues, but, uh, the at least that piece of it, the women's movement, piece of it still continues. It is still an ongoing struggle. It is changed and transformed, but, uh, I-I would say it began in 1964 for me, because that is when I became active in the civil rights movement, and that is when the civil rights movement became a kind of living part of my life, although even in college, I had become aware of it, though not particularly active in it, um, I would say, um, that the (19)60s ends, uh, in some sort of grassroots way. Um, by the early part of the (19)70s, (19)73 the withdrawal from Vietnam, you might say was, the is a good day to end it. Now, what succeeds that, of course, is just a ton of legislation and policy changes around the issues I care about, including affirmative action, uh, for blacks and whites and for women and so on.

SM: 54:20
Yeah, I have, I have a question here. Uh, I have a question here because during the period when boomers were growing up and young, um, we had the Brown versus Board of Education. And then we had the Civil Rights Act. We had the Voting Rights Act (19)64 and (19)65, um, so, and then, of course, Roe v Wade, which was a major, major happening. We actually have we had programs on that before I left school, about the threat that it may try to be changed back. Um, that is why the Stevens Point there, right? [chuckling] That is really big. Um, but getting back to the question, when you are talking about women. And of course, I am talking about the boomers, which are now. The oldest ones are 63 and the youngest ones are 46, um, what laws are the most important that you feel for all women? Uh, in and-and when I break it down here, it is hard to not only in terms of equality, but where, uh, discrimination was present, and where it has been improved, uh where, uh, uh, the whole business of the labor force, uh, equal pay for equal work, uh, the whole issue, I noticed there is so much here, so you cannot talk about all of it. But what would be the key points, the legal issues that you feel have really changed how we look at women today?

AH: 55:48
For women?

SM: 55:48
Yes.

AH: 55:49
Um, I-I would say, uh, e-equal pay. Equal pay is not as important as, um, occupational segregation. Uh, it symbolically is important, but, uh, the bunches of studies now that have demonstrated that pay actually that that equal pay legislation is ineffective unless occupational segregation is simultaneously, uh, eliminated and the shifts in occupational segregation have been, uh, not insignificant, especially at the professional and financial levels, but not very, um, uh, I would say, marginal at the level of the trades and the, um, under crafts, uh, which isn't to say that they have not been there. So, the numbers of carpenters, of female carpenters, have doubled from two to 4 percent, you know, like that. But still the notion that, um, occupational segregation is, um, an invalid, inappropriate, um, uh, you know, claim, which was the claim that, um, both men and women agreed to for years that is gone, and it is gone not through a single law, but through a series of successive changes, starting with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, uh, with Title Seven of that act, and, uh, through the actions of the EEOC, uh, continuing through the, uh, Labor Department, new labor department regulations and so on. So I would say that is one big change. The second one has to do with reproductive rights, although I agree with you that that is now threatened. Well, I guess we will see how effective it will be, and where I think, uh, the beginning of the challenge to that, I would probably date to Griswold. So that is 1967 that is the Connecticut decision, which makes that illegal for states to limit the distribution of birth control only to married women. You know, women are entitled to birth control whether or not they are married. Uh, and that continues, of course, then through the abortion, uh, protests and demonstrations, and then Roe v Wade, but in there you have to sort of put things the cultural things like Title Nine, you know, women should be able to participate in sports. Um, I do not know quite where that belongs, but I think that was a big one. Uh, and in the reproductive rights thing, there are a whole series of things that sort of tentacles that that leads to including, um, the, uh, court decision on GE which, um, uh, said it was really okay for insurers not to insure pregnancy and childbirth. And then the 1979 government, um, uh, legislation which says nope, and people who provide health insurance for their workers have to include, if you provide any health insurance, then pregnancy has to be so the so-called Pregnancy Disability Act. So, so that whole sequence of things you know, who controls reproduction, who is responsible? How people deal with it, the Hyde Amendment. You know that there are a whole series of we could separate them out, if you like, but if you wanted to summarize it, I would say, uh, the thing that was important in this period was the recognition that, uh, reproductive issues were not were neither wholly private, that is that they were not within the control and purview of women and their husbands, and at the same time they-they were not wholly public either. You know that we, and I think that is what the big debate is about now, but I do not think it takes place just on the yes abortion, no abortion. I think it takes place on all these other fronts too.

SM: 1:00:57
Do you, do you feel that when women have to leave work, they get six weeks no pay. Is what happens, is-

AH: 1:01:05
12 weeks

SM: 1:01:06
I-is it 12?

AH: 1:01:06
[inaudible] family medical leave-

SM: 1:01:09
My, uh, my niece just, uh, says, in New York State, she could only get, um, a month and a half, six weeks

AH: 1:01:17
Family medical leave act. It is a federal act, says 12 weeks. It does not cover some people. Maybe she is in a non-covered job.

SM: 1:01:25
They do not get paid either.

AH: 1:01:26
But there is no pay-

SM: 1:01:27
Yeah.

AH: 1:01:27
-for it.

SM: 1:01:27
Is that right?

AH: 1:01:29
That is right, although many employers now provide, Columbia being one of them, now provide maternity leaves, which they did not. But the difference is, you know, there is a maternity leave and there is a parental leave, so that 12 weeks unpaid anybody can take the maternity leave. Or the, you know, the pregnancy leave is available, often out of sick pay, often for women, at the cost of giving out, you know, a vacation or something else. Not good. Not good. Much better in Europe.

SM: 1:02:05
One of the questions I have been asking everyone centers on a question that we, um, asked Senator Evan Muskie (?) when we took a group of students to Washington in the mid (19)90s, before he passed away, he was not well. He had been in the hospital. And this was organized through, uh, arrangements with Senator Gaylord Nelson, who I got to know quite well, senator from Wisconsin. And the question that the students came up with, because they did not grow up in the (19)60s, and, and they had watched the film of 1968 and they saw the students and the police could club each other. They knew that the Kennedy and King had been killed, and, uh, that Johnson had resigned, and Tet and all the other things. So they knew all this. The question they asked is, do you feel that the boomer generation, the generation of 74 million, will go to its grave like the Civil War generation, not truly healing from the really strong divisions that tore the nation apart in that time? They want to know, number one, from Senator muskie, were we close to, uh, breaking apart as a nation because of the burnings in the cities and all the things that are happening, i.e. close to a second civil war? A-and secondly, uh, with all the divisions between black and white, male and female, gay and straight, uh, those who supported the troops, those who did not for the war, against the war and all these divisions, um, you know, the question was, are they going to go to their grave, like many in the Civil War did, uh, that had all these reunions, but they still never truly healed from the Civil War. What are your thoughts?

AH: 1:03:48
I think the only people who go to their graves thinking that are people who do not know any history, because it does not take much history to recognize that every decade or so, every generation, uh, certainly has seen equally powerful divisions which have threatened to tear the nation apart, and which, as you know, in the case of the Civil War, sometimes did tear the nation apart. But you know, divisions, not only over the Civil War, but divisions over reconstruction, uh-

SM: 1:04:24
Make sure, we are doing okay. Yep! Okay.

AH: 1:04:27
Uh, divisions over reconstruction. Divisions over free silver tore the nation apart. Divisions over, um, uh, you know, World War One and whether we should go to war divisions over the New Deal and the Social Security Act of I mean, you could go on and on. And you know, the 1930s certainly saw its, uh, you know, its marches and people in the street and demonstrations and-and attacks. And you know, people thought the political consequences of that would never end, and not only did they end, but they are now some of the most popular programs that we have. So, I do not know how you-you know the divisions over the Vietnam War, to say nothing of the other divisions were powerful and deep. And, you know, we got beaten up by cops on horses. We did not understand why they were wielding clubs at us or-or, you know, pushing us around at the Pentagon, or arresting we, you know, we thought we were doing the right democratic thing. And 20 years later, do we even remember that? No, those are the stories that we tell our children. They are not, you know, sources of division. I do not know, huge divisions over the civil rights marches and-and would anybody say those tore, you know, Brown v Board of Education, Yeah, they tore the nation apart. But the rifts aren't permanent. I think that what we see now is a, um, is a very articulate, uh, right wing made more articulate by the kind of media and sources that are available to them. So when 200 Tea Party people meet in Boston, 200 is almost nothing, but when every television channel and Fox News Features them so that every household gets a sense that people are uncomfortable. They seem more powerful than in fact they are so no, I would say, um, if you know any history, you know that divisions are, are not unhealthy. I, I wish, I wish there were less racial division. I wish I were not seeing these attacks on Obama. You know, as a socialist, is that a euphemism for the N word? Is that a- you know, you, you really that that scares me a little bit. I wish we had a Supreme Court that, you know, would you know restrain the use of weapons or the handling of weapons. I think you know these recent decisions about, um, allowing weapons on the public streets of big cities without, you know, monitoring or checking or I think those are absurd.

SM: 1:07:54
Do not know why that is doing it. Here we go. All right, uh, I want to mention that, um, Senator Muskie, when he responded he did not even mention 68 he said he did not even talk about it, um, because they thought he was there at the convention. He would, that is what they were asking. He said, um, I just saw the Ken Burns series in the Civil War, and we lost 430,000 men in that war and the South almost lost their entire generation. So, um, he said, we have not healed since the Civil War. And then he explained why when I am talking about it, uh, and he said, all you need to do is go to get his emergency (?). When you drive on one side, uh, the south just leaves flags. In the north, you do not, you do not see anything. [recording pauses]

AH: 1:08:40
Do you have another tape?

SM: 1:08:41
Yeah, I do have another tape. I do not know why it is stopping. There you go. Um, anyways, uh, one, one of the other things of during that particular period, um, in the (19)60s- [recording pauses]. Alright. When you think of the (19)60s and the (19)70s, um, three slogans come to mind w-when I think of period different types of people. Number one was the slogan that Malcolm X gave, which is by any means necessary, symbolic of a more radical, violent group. The second one was Bobby Kennedy speech when they are words, when he said, um, some men, some men, sees things as they are, and ask, why? I see things that never were and asked, why not? And that was a Henry David Thoreau quote, but it was more symbolic of the activist mentality, uh, wanting to, uh, do positive things, things for justice and equality, you name it. And then third one was more kind of a hippie mentality, which was, uh, from a peer Max poster, uh, you do your thing. I will do mine. If by chance, we should get together, it will be beautiful. Which was kind of a hippie mentality. Um, and I thought that kind of civilized the, um, boomers when they were young, the (19)60s, the (19)70s, uh, maybe some of the ideas they carried on even into the (19)80s. Are there any slogans or quotes that you feel are important? The only other one that came out from us other people was we shall overcome, which was the Civil Rights-

AH: 1:10:13
I like that.

SM: 1:10:14
-and the John Kennedy quote, wh-um, uh, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Do you have some quotes that you feel, uh, really are symbolic of the period?

AH: 1:10:31
The woman's, uh, movement. Uh, the woman's movement line was the personal is political, and that was one that was very influential for me. Um, I have to say that, uh, you do your thing, I will do my thing. Uh, that was the Cultural Revolution. You left thing. And maybe that is what distinguishes me from really, the boomer generation. I could not bear that slogan [laughing]. I could not stand it, and I thought, you know, it is an anti-political slogan. It is, uh, you know, let us just drift apart. Leave me alone and I will, you know, so, so no, that that was not what I thought the (19)60s was about. I thought the (19)60s was about, um, uh, uh, a fairer and I like the word fair better than I like the word, uh, equal, but, but I would say a fairer and more equal society, creating one for everybody. So. And I think to do that, we needed, we need the Robert Kennedy slogan. You know, I think that that is the most.

SM: 1:11:46
Uh, I-I have a whole mess of questions here. We are going to cut some of these because we only have 10 more minutes here. Um, uh, all right, uh, w-what were some of the books? Now, we have talked about the feminine mystique. And certainly there were other writers that were important, Betty Friedan and, um, I know Susan Brown Miller has written some major books, uh-

AH: 1:12:09
The people we read before we read Susan Brown Miller and Kate Millett and so on.

SM: 1:12:14
Right.

AH: 1:12:15
We read, um, uh, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown [Norman Oliver Brown], uh, you know, they were the precursors of this so Marcuse, uh, eros and civilizations. Freud's civilization, and its discontents. Uh, Norman O. Brown, life against death. Those were the books that we, uh-uh Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. So, before we were reading the women's books, we were reading in the late (19)60s, these books, and those were the books I was sometimes teaching. You know, of-of the women's books, uh Shulamith Firestone's [Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein], uh, Dialectic of Sex [The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution] , uh, was important. Uh, Juliet Mitchell, the Long Revolution or no, I think the book was called Woman's Estate, uh, and then the popular books were Kate Millett, um, Germaine Greer, uh, Betty Friedan was old hat by the late (19)60s. I mean, for people like me, it is probably not for younger people. And then fiction, Marilyn French's the Women's Room. Um, Kathy Davidson, I have forgotten the name of that book, something divisions, sexual divisions or something. Um, Alix Kates Shulman, uh Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Uh, there was a lot of that, a lot of fiction going on. And then the, uh, black fiction, the African American women's fiction, beginning to emerge in the mid, uh, (19)70s. So, Toni Cade Bambara, um, uh, Toni Morrison, of course, [SM coughing]. Um, Alice Walker, not till later. But that is what we were.

SM: 1:14:23
Was Carol Oaks, one of those? Uh-

AH: 1:14:25
No.

SM: 1:14:25
No?

AH: 1:14:26
Uh, I mean, she was there but she was not from-

SM: 1:14:30
[Interrupting and overlapping speech] Simone de Beauvoir-

AH: 1:14:32
Simone de Beauvoir was enormously influential. Yes, yes, yeah. We read her early on, in fact, now when I teach that period, I start with Simone de Beauvoir.

SM: 1:14:45
In terms of magazines, we all think of Ms., but were there other magazines that were influential? Uh-

AH: 1:14:50
There were.

SM: 1:14:52
-either underground papers or-

AH: 1:14:55
Yeah, there were several of the underground papers. There was a paper called New Directions for Women, which was, which lasted about 15 years, and which was, um, you know, widely read. There was, um, uh, uh, underground paper called red rag. There was another one. There were several underground papers. I cannot remember the names of them all, but, oh, you know, we would get them all and devour them. Is, is, I think there were no, uh, the thing about Ms. was that it was a mass circulation magazine, and that is what made it different. The others had smaller circulations within the feminist, you know, intellectual, but Ms., really, you know, sort of extended beyond that, and that is what made it so important.

SM: 1:15:54
I would like, uh, these are some female um, uh, leaders that have been come to the forefront in the last 30 some years. Um, if you just give your thoughts, just quick thoughts, it does not have to be anything in depth. Some are popular, and some are maybe not so popular.

AH: 1:16:12
This is a trap, [laughing]

SM: 1:16:13
It is not a trap.

AH: 1:16:14
This is a Rorschach.

SM: 1:16:15
Uh-

AH: 1:16:15
[Laughing]

SM: 1:16:17
Lynn Cheney.

AH: 1:16:17
Yuck.

SM: 1:16:17
[chuckling] Okay. Is that - you do not have to go any further. Do you want to say anything more?

AH: 1:16:25
Yeah. I mean, I-I think, um, a very conservative woman, uh, somewhat hypocritical, uh, in my judgment, as a as a, um, uh, the chair of the NEH, which was when she first really came to my attention. Uh, she was enormously destructive, uh, both because she, uh, supported and, well, I would say it this way, she limited NEH support to projects which she found politically acceptable and correct, and that seemed to me to be a violation of the NEHS mission she excluded from panels people of varieties of political and social backgrounds and opinions. Uh, so, uh, right.

SM: 1:17:22
Eleanor Roosevelt,

AH: 1:17:24
Eleanor Roosevelt, one can only have admiration for. I mean, even though you could make positive and negative judgments about her, but she, she was, um, a far sighted and, uh, often a very courageous leader of women, uh, who was limited by her own, you know, politics and class and so on, but, uh, she was a great lady.

SM: 1:17:58
Uh, two, uh, do two at a time here, uh, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, because they were the most well-known. Seemed to be.

AH: 1:18:07
Well, Condoleezza Rice neither had much to say or do about women's issues, so I cannot really speak to that. I, uh, did not much like her as a secretary of state because she was too war like and, um, uh, too closely tied to Bush administration policies which she supported. And I dislike, uh, Hillary Clinton. Uh, I find, you know, I have a lot of admiration for Hillary Clinton, though I do not always agree with what she says and does, particularly, did not agree with her stance on the welfare issue or its renewal, but on the other hand, she was very smart, she was thoughtful, she was responsive. Uh, she you know when as senator, she took reasonable positions on many issues. So if I had to choose between them, I, you can tell which one I choose.

SM: 1:19:10
Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug.

AH: 1:19:13
Uh, birds of a different feather, although, uh, very closely tied, Bella Abzug comes out of her radical background, and though she was an impossible person by all accounts, she was a ,uh, political force, and one has to both respect and admire that force. Uh, I wish she was still alive. I would love to hear her voice out there. Uh, Gloria Steinem has been a different kind of leader of women, um, very active on the range of you know, of women's issues per se, uh, Bella was more interested in broader issues. As well as women's issues, issues of human rights, issues of, uh, well, all the issues that came before the Senate, issues of corporate-

SM: 1:20:07
[inaudible] Yep.

AH: 1:20:12
But, um, whereas Gloria Steinem has a sort of narrower mandate, uh, h-her greatest contributions, it seems to me, uh, were both in the founding of Ms., but then also in the um, uh, the effort to create a kind of inclusionary woman's movement, as opposed to one that was divided so...

SM: 1:20:40
Um, Lindy Boggs-

AH: 1:20:43
Yeah.

SM: 1:20:43
-and Angela Davis [both laughing] Lindy-

AH: 1:20:49
I am going to leave Lindy Boggs out, partly because I do not know enough about her to make quick judgments. About Angela Davis, uh, you know, what is there to say? You know, for her moment in time, uh, you know, she was, uh, uh, just an enormous inspiration to large numbers of young people. You know, black, beautiful, a woman, uh, concerned with feminist issues, a pioneer in trying to sort of, um, think about the relationship between race and gender in a constructive way, rather than in a divisive way. Uh, you know, uh...I do not know about the last 20 years. I mean, uh, you know, she seems to me now to have been sort of repeating what she said earlier, so, but that first decade or so, uh, in the (19)70s, early part of the (19)80s, um, she was terrific.

SM: 1:22:13
Shirley Chisholm and Phyllis Schlafly.

AH: 1:22:15
[laughing] There are two more birds of a very different feather. For, um, Shirley Chisholm, I have only, uh, admiration, um, you know, in all the ways that she broke new ground and did it, uh, um, not in A Bella absent way, not by, you know, pushing forcefully, but by gently opening doors, which opened partly because she was so, you know, she was insistent and yet not strident. I guess is the- I suppose some people would disagree with that, but I think that at the moment that she chose to run for president, for example, and to make a statement. Those were very brave things for a woman to do, and for a black woman to, you know, to take on, to step out, um, know that that is that took some courage. About Phyllis Schlafly, what can I say? I-I disagree with practically every word she has written. I do not know what she is like as a human being. Uh, people seem to like and respect her. Uh, I think, um, uh, she is rooted in an ideology that, um, uh, does not seem to me to be, uh, to work anymore. Uh, she adopts, uh, hypocritical positions with relationship to how she herself lives, you know, she is, she is, uh, you know, argues for particular kinds of lifestyles for women, and then lives a whole another lifestyle herself. Um, I just, I mean, I know she has been an important force and has persuaded a lot of people to move in her direction. But, but I cannot, um-

SM: 1:24:23
At the CPAK conference boy, she is popular.

AH: 1:24:26
Yeah-yeah.

SM: 1:24:26
We are coming up - because she is historic.

AH: 1:24:28
So is Sarah Palin. So ask me about Sarah-

SM: 1:24:31
Yeah, exactly. Sarah, Sarah is on, Sarah is-

AH: 1:24:32
She is on your next-

SM: 1:24:34
Actually, I had a co - uh, Sarah Palin and Bernadine Dorn, because, uh, you have got, uh-

AH: 1:24:39
Why would you pair them together? Bernie-

SM: 1:24:41
Well I got [mumbling] Sarah just happened to be on top of each other.

AH: 1:24:45
Oh okay. Um, one at a time [laugh]

SM: 1:24:49
Yeah.

AH: 1:24:51
Bernadine Dorn, uh, um, you know, she was one of our heroines of the 1970s

SM: 1:24:49
[muffled]

AH: 1:24:59
Oh I was going to say she was one of our heroines of the 1970s even though, uh, the, you know, the radicalism turned some people off, and uh, you know, the, the sense that she would resort to violence and so on, though both Ed Ayers and Bernadine have since said that they, they never, um, targeted people that they-they targeted buildings or, um, institutions, but not people, and that the damage that was done, and there was damage done was often inadvertent, but still, she was, uh, Bernadine. Bernadine Dorn had a kind of presence among people, a lot of them, like me, who never could have imagined ourselves, um, y-you know, actually committing a violent act, but who were angry enough that we, you know, might have wanted to or wished to. So, um, uh, About Sarah Palin, what can I say? She seems to me to be a sort of inversion of feminism, uh, a kind of person who, uh, would only have been, could only have been possible in the light of a feminist movement, and yet, who undermines everything that feminism has ever stood for. So, so I am, uh, you know? I mean, I-I am only not angry about it, because I do not think, at least, I hope it is that the campaign is not going to go anywhere, but in the sense that, um, you know, her, uh, capacity to be elected governor, her capacity to do that with, uh, several children, her, uh, uh, capacity to have a baby and go right back on the campaign trail and so on. All those freedoms were, uh, freedoms which were, um, produced by an active women's movement. But that active women's movement had a sense of solidarity with other women as women, uh, had a sense of, um, uh, commitment to children, not the, you know, the dragging around of a, of a baby just to demonstrate that she, you know, was big enough to handle this child who had been, you know, born damaged. Uh, of that I, I mean, I think contempt isn't too strong a word. I-I, um, I find it really troubling that, uh, women can, you know, sort of place her in the category of a feminist camp when-

SM: 1:28:16
There is another female Twitter. Now, I forget her name. She was a congresswoman.

AH: 1:28:19
Yes, from Michigan, Michelle Bachman.

AH: 1:28:20
Yeah.

SM: 1:28:20
Two peas in a pod.

AH: 1:28:27
Yes, and she is another one like that, who you could not imagine getting where they were. And yet, once there, they want to deny other women whatever you know whether it is their reproductive you know they have made their own reproductive choices. Let other women make their- they have made their own marital choices, their own lifestyle choices.

SM: 1:28:54
The, the only other names I had here, and we are I had mentioned is Susan Brown Miller, Kate Miller, Charmaine, Erin Helen. Helen Gurley Brown. I, I am actually, uh meeting two weeks the person [mumbling]

AH: 1:29:06
She was my student.

SM: 1:29:07
Oh she was?

AH: 1:29:08
Jennifer Scanlon, yeah.

AH: 1:29:09
Yeah.

SM: 1:29:09
Yeah.

(End of Interview)

2010-03-15

Stephen McKiernan

Alice Kessler-Harris

89:14

English

Binghamton University Libraries

audio/mp4

Sound

Audio

College teachers; Columbia University; Kessler-Harris, Alice--Interviews

Many items in our digital collections are copyrighted. If you want to reuse any material in our collection you must seek permission, or decide if your purpose can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Law Section 107. If you think copyright or privacy has been violated, the University Libraries will investigate the issue. Please see our take down policy. If using any materials in this online digital collection for educational or research purposes, please cite accordingly.