Now, we kick up the with the politics of marriage. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] , like to welcome you all. Thank you for coming. My very good friend will give me a set of rules to impart to you and i know if i dont do it right i want to read leave right away. I have already welcomed you. I will tell you on the second floor after this session the authors will be signing books and your authors are gentoo and kate bolick. When they signed some of the proceeds will go to the library foundation, which is near to all of our hearts, so hope you consider buying maybe more than one copy. Kate bolick is the author of spencer, making a life of ones own. Shes also a contributor editor to the atlantic and host of touchstones, and annual literally interview series. I would like to come next year. In august, preferably. Her work has appeared in cosmopolitan, the New York Times, among other publications and Sheila Rebecca both live in brooklyn. Rebecca is the author both of these books are spectacular. I just wanted to add my editorial opinion. Rebecca is the author of all the Single Ladies she is a writer at large for new York Magazine and she will be covering the elections, so if you have meathead crews gossip you would like to pass along, do it now. Shes a contributing editor at bell, National Award finalist. She has written often about women in politics and entertainment from a feminist perspective. Has also contributed to the nation, new York Observer, New York Times, Washington Post, vogue, glamour and marie claire and her first book was called big girls dont cry. It was a new New York Times notable book 2010 and she, as i said before, lives in brooklyn. Relative thing katie for picking me to be the hostess of this event because i have been married for 30 years, so i barely remember being single, but i thought we would start out with both of them just talking about how they came to write these books. Similar times, interesting. Thinks. Why dont you go first. Your books first. I wrote a cover story for the atlantic and 2011 also called all the Single Ladies and of the assignment was to look at contemporary marriage trends and how that economy was shaping and changing them and while i was supporting and researching the story i came across a statistic that was new to be the time, nearly half the population being unmarried and i realized this was my way into the story because they had asked me to write this story in the first person to write on my own experiences as an unmarried woman of 38 or something at the time. So, ended up writing this story and touched on single women as well as marriage trends and it went viral. I started hearing from women and men also all over the country and all of the world and realized what had felt like a very private idiosyncratic internal conversation that i had been having for a long time about my own single life and life in the world was the fact that a lot of the people wanted to have. And will so common that i meet rebecca and we do an event the other in new york, which is when i discovered she had just not too long before so they book called all the Single Ladies and my overwhelming feeling was i felt terrible i had inadvertently stolen her title in this article. I stole it back. A lot of publishers were asking me to turn the articles back into the book and i thought it would be a great fast same book, but its was a book i wanted to write myself. I had a different idea about how wanted to approach this, which was more idiosyncratic and personal, so i was glad rebecca was writing this book and i could write another book. Thats how that happened and my intent the atlantic put me on the cover of the magazine looking like a really tough like unlike scalia and then like marriage can of thing and its made me very uncomfortable to be out in public looking like someone i am not and looking like someone who had it all figured out and didnt want this and i wanted to show that i like many other people had grown up at a time with a lot of mixed and conflicting messages about what shapes our lives and how to think about marriage versus not marriage and its a confusing personal and social and economic and historical event, so i wanted to make it as personal as i could in a way to help the readers think about their own life and talk to me the way that i was talking to the women who world that that i write about it might book. I blabber on for too long, but thats how i yeah. So, in my case i was a journalist writing for the website and i had been writing for probably seven or eight years, often once a week and sometimes 20 times a week depending on what the news cycle was like and i was unmarried and through most of my 20s and into my early 30s i was really unmarried in my personal life, like i didnt have boyfriends. Most of my friends who are also unmarried were in and out of relationships, but i was in and out of one like really in and out of one that was not wildly satisfied, but mostly i had not had a boyfriend in high school and college for most of my 20s and into my 30s, so i was perhaps acutely aware of my single that in a way that some of my friends who were in and out of monogamous relationships were not. I had written about it as a journalist because i was writing so much. I had written stories about the role free milf friendship has played in my life. The connections i made with some of my girlfriends that had felt like spousal, without being sexual that had been the foundational positive relationship of my early adulthood. I also covered some of the statistic cicadas talking about. I cover them in kind of a dry way. Hears this news that semi more women women are living single. I covered them in coats and little news reports of stuff and i was aware of all that stuff, but none of it coalesced. I wrote a book about women in politics and the 2008 election and around the time that looking out and people started to say are you going to write another one and i didnt know whether i was or not, but around that time i had met a man and fallen in love and was getting married and in the months before i got married i was doing a lot of thinking about the way people were responding to the fact i was getting married, about my complexity of getting married, sort of what i felt seem to be about your starting your adult life and i was like, no, i have an adult life. You know. This identity that had stuck so firmly to me form of than a decade during which the my career, made my friendship, made my home in the city had been an identity that was content with me being on my own at romantically. Here was this pete the people were treated like well, now its real and i was very discombobulated by this. I thought, you think i want to write and i was also by new york standards in my social group and we can talk about this, no one was married. In my social Group Everyone was single. 235 i was kind of on the early end of my friends. Most of my girlfriends for single and not getting married and i felt like it child bride at 35. I began to think, i dont think theres been enough serious attention paid to this topic because again, as a reporter writing about politics one year i believe it was in 2004, there was a big thing about sex in the city voters. What it means is unmarried women who by the way in 2012, comprise about a quarter of the electric, so they are not the cute subset that you could just call beyonee voters, but i read about them and i was like what a minute this is all cutesy and trend story, but i dont know anyone has really taken this seriously as a fundamental alteration in what we can see of and what we expect a female adult life. The map of what womens lives or slows to like as an adult should be fundamentally reorganize and output anyone thought about that. Thats why put together the proposal for the book and i sold the book with the title all the Single Ladies naa i then had a baby and i was out of it for a couple of months. As it turns out, as advertised, it can throw you off. Then when i sort of came back and started to write this book, a friend who called me and was like using the coverup of of the atlantic, but and there was her me a moment of sheer terror because it is such a good story and it was doing the one of the motivations or me up writing this book is no had taken this seriously and im going to take it seriously. Then, the cover of the atlantic had it is incredible piece with 16 13000 words soon i 16000, ladies and gentlemen taking this topic very very seriously and it was beautiful written on top of it at the same headline that my book, but then i read it and i was like wait a minute we are talking about some of the same phenomenon. This is a massive nation altering shift. And how women live, and how men live, and how families are defined, and what parcels role policies need to do and what are attitudes about sexuality and friendship and i loved every word of kates piece and it was totally different the only thing it had in common besides the title was that we were both trying to make sense of it and put it into context and id like wait a minute, 150 people can write books about john kennedy i think like there are a lot of people who can write, as they should, but there should be 150 more books on these topics. I run into that. Since spencer came out last year okay, okay, i too had this feeling of this not being taken seriously, but for me it was more about the ways in which single women were writing about themselves and writing in a voice that was very selfdeprecating and focused only on sex life and dating life and thats how women were writing about themselves and publications were tantalizing single women and cyprus hyper sexualizing to the women in this also very it felt uncomfortable and then i just in 2000, i found this journalist who lived in the 19th century and had written an article for vogue magazine in the year 1898, called the bachelor girl that her decision to never marry and it blew my mind on a lot of levels. She was writing in this very appealing, funny, sharp, craig zero voice and that was not at all selfdeprecating that didnt sound like the contemporary single woman and showed me there had been a public critic of marriage and then you that womens lives at a time in history that i had not known existed. So, thats how started we were having a similar feelings, the both of us because i dont live in a political space and was not thinking about the larger Political Action or. I was thinking about how women think about talk about themselves and how it shapes the culture in which you live. I want to go back to a kate said about the way that for this time because marriage patterns begin to shift in the 90s and we can talk more about the timeline of how that happened, but in part based on selfconscious political victories of the mid20th century the womens limit, gave rights movement, all of which were political revolutions and combined with the sexual revolution and revised attitudes about what women adult sexuality might entail. And the legalization of the Birth Control and abortion. All of these things had created conditions that then enabled this mass behavioral shift away from marriage. Thats really started in mass numbers in about the early 90s, which is when both of us happen to be comingofage. That was when we were sort of young adults, but there was it was happening in the numbers were shifting, but there was not a real consciousness that there were shifts. There was a lot of discomfort and i write about that time in my book and i write about the role that anita hill played and how her testimony was so discomforting so were so many people one of the things that our simpson said about her was watch out for that woman that there was a sense of threat, that there were women coming that would there were not like women that we had known before and they would be in a position to challenge male power or the nomination through Supreme Court they were maybe detach from institutions that had been historically comp rentable to us like marriage. There was also dan quayle ripping into murphy brown, the Fictional Television character who had a baby out of wedlock. As a Young Journalist and i was before i was writing about feminism i worked at a weekly newspaper in new york city called the new York Observer where i wrote about film financing. My beach was like money, whose funding independent features and was very dry, actually. Yet, i was paid very little, so i needed freelance work. Every freelance time it became that came my way despite the fact my professional had been about like Harvey Weinstein and movie producers and who is paid money, all of my freelance offers work any write about your sex life and i had no sex, first. Is sadistic and conversation the other night it was like a cartoon were like someone is looking at a cow and that level is like hamburger. I felt like to be a young professional women and it was the head of sex in the city, i was a hamaker except the hem of her was a young woman who might have eight interesting sex life. No, i did not. So, its like people did not know what to make of women living in each different patterns except to hyper sexualized them. Like kate, i came to well, in fact later than kate i had already sold my book and sold it to the book about a contemporary for gnome and on, hear these numbers come unprecedented, never happened before in American History and in my book proposal i think i a few sentences that were like and i will look at the history of single women in the us, which im sure had to do with the salem witch trials and that was like the history chapter. That i sold the book and it was going to be written in a year. Then, as i began to do some research and discovered in fact the rich dutch witches in salem salem, most of them were married there was this tremendous history. In terms of scope and size this phenomenon is unprecedented, that there is this rich history, which kate connected to so profoundly as a young writer herself. But, i came to when i start to look in the history of marriage patterns in the us and discovered at the end of the 19th century there was a population of largely middleclass white women because selling men had moved west in so many had been killed in the civil war there was a husband shortage and you have these women living independently for longer and their lives, which were no longer take with wifely and maternal responsibilities, they devoted their energies to move website evolution, suffrage, the labor movement, the settlement house movement, the creation of more Higher Education and teaching and nursing professions in which women could better earn their living and so my theory about the contemporary generation, which is that was true in the 19th century, also. I do not know that and thats why my book took five years to write. I talk about that a bit in my book about the culture amnesia that takes place that we can only remember as far back as our parents and grandparents go. So, all of her Walking Around thinking that marriage is exactly like it was in the 1950s, when it fact that was in aberrant. I make a word graph in my book ratio in the 1890s, 34 of women were unmarried. Satsuma goes down, down, down until you get to mid century and its 17 of women unmarried and they goes up, up, up, to 53 took its enormous and how to take in when because history has been so pushed back into the past and we tended to think that those victorians have nothing to do with that. Although, i would also argue since one of the arguments in my book is that one of the reasons people freak out about single women is because marriage has been a useful organizing institution especially went organizing gender power and who has power. The 1950s come i dont think its just i do think what you are saying is right that we sort of have short memories that extend far back as our grandparents and i thought it, but there are also a lot of cultural forces in play that made the 1950s. And the mid 20th century, an era of white middleclass patriarchal nuclear family. The government in many ways underwrote the creation of that white middleclass in which the push of women to marry early against after decades of them marrying later less often and often it was the moment at which a lot of our pop culture, the kinds of recorded culture came to television and the ways that america sort of in a sense took a picture of itself and is that this is the best kind of america. That was the postwar it really was this a blip in which people were married earlier and more often and had more kids, the baby boom than they had another time, but it happened to be the moment when mike america took a selfie. I like that. I think for not benign reasons. I think it was a version it was white. A lot of the same Government Forces that had created the white middle class had also worked to cut off black families from a lot of economic and Educational Resources that were helping to bolster the white middleclass in the middle of the 20th century and that white middleclass was reliant on the unpaid labor of wives and pushing women out of the colleges they had recently made their way into and out of the professions. It was a way it was the most comfortably organize white patriarchal power structure, really probably have a couple centuries and that was the moment when we decided to say this is what america looks like. Norman rockwell, painter picture. I think that is why that looms as a large. Ive a question for both of you. When you talk that 53 figure, how does that breakdown into women who never married, women who are divorced, women who are widowed . All of them. Is like a third of a younger women . I think i cant print down that specific, but i can offer others. One of the reasons the marriage rate is down is because the marriage age is rising. So, we dont know yet because we are still in flux. There is some people including Stephanie Kuntz who is a brilliant marriage historians has said this and recently again cited this to me, people still guess that around 85 of people 80 to 85 of people will wind up buried. Its just a question of when, so some of the most telling statistics about unmarried people are about young people, so today amongst americans 18 to 29, only 20 of married. So, only 20 basically under 29 unmarried. Thats compared to 60 in the same bracket in 1960, which again was the height of this early marriage movement. 46 under the age of 34 or unmarried, so its almost as likely under the age of 34 that you are never married than that you are married. I would like to know also how you see this playing out politically. Like if you are looking not just i guess i have two questions, you are looking at what the impact on the election will be, but then how do you see the world 20 years from now . How does this phenomenon play out . You want me to do it . Ya. So, this is very so i see it actually reshaping our politics in practically every way everyday. Yesterday in new york state they past paid family leave legislation, which was monumental and revolutionary. And it becomes the fifth state to do so, although, washington has not enacted theres. What you see so as i said marriage was a organizing institution and our government, our social policies, our economic policies and even civic institutions have been built around it and contained in it is the assumption there is one kind of american does public paid work, the professional work. And that there husbands and there is another kind of america wives will do the domestic worth of child care, the food preparation, cleaning and in it enables their husbands participation in the public sphere like taking care of the rest of the life. Also, this depresses their own ability to compete in those public spheres. Thats not how we live anymore. Its just a holiday. We do not live in early married had a row units. We may live in hetero partnerships for some or lots of our lives and they may be married, maybe have it paid if, may be partnerships, maybe all women increasingly are corners and closer to equal errors, increasingly greasy single parenthood as a norm for women under 30. More than 50 of birth to women under 30 are to unmarried mothers. We dont have the social and economic support for how americans are actually living as opposed to how they used to live and that means is some of the policies being talked about in the president ial election on the democratic side, things like raising the minimum wage, this is key. Two thirds of minimum wage workers are women are single women, many mothers. 42 of single mothers live below the poverty line raising the minimum wage would have a massive impact on them. The same is true for paid leave legislation because in this country its not mandated that you be paid for any amount of time after you give birth to her adopted baby. Also, there is no paid leave it mandated for if you need to care for an aging parent, so paid six day legislation, family leave that passed in new york is us to do with taking care of ill family members. Equal Pay Protection that would better enable women who are now participating in the economy in the public sphere more equally than they had before to not have their work discounted on account of gender. Things like reproductive rights that enable women to exert control over if, when and under what circumstances they have children and all of those are issues. We hear a lot of the president ial election about the shift to the left, for which a lot of people say Bernie Sanders coming and hes a socialist from per month and drawn everyone left. Its my belief that Bernie Sanders is a conduit for a less moving terms of what we need in terms of our social and policy. Its not actually driven by ideology as my practical need. We are not living in the configuration we used to live. We need social and economic policies that will better support how americans actually live, which is with women is far more equal participants in the public sphere than they have ever been before and with men are more equal progestins in the domestic fear. Good luck with that scenic but, its happening. You see the policies. The policies in new york covers pavement for men and women, 12 weeks and in fact, if you are talking about a traditionally hetero married twoparent household, it can be a woman takes 12 weeks and then the man takes 12 weeks. Six months think of the impact that also has on Family Finances you dont have to put your kid in day care for six months instead of a week after they are born, which is what is true for days after their born which is true for so many lowincome americans right now. One of the other things i loved about your book was finding these sort of role models in their work as opposed to you are always told find a mentor at your company and i thought i can remember when i discovered i thought i can write when i went these women did it, so can i. Can you talk a little bit about that . In my book i talk about the lives of five women who lived at the turn of the last century who influenced my own thinking about marriage versus not marriage. Both through their lives and their work. Originally, i was doing this as a hobby this like collecting these women and reading about them in reading what they wrote and talking to them in my head. As i describe in the book i think this habit came out of my mother died when she was 52 of Breast Cancer suddenly. I was 23. We were very close and talk about everything, so to be entering my adulthood without her was terrible in a million ways, but one of them was i didnt have someone to talk to about like what i do, should i take this job, should i marry this guy, all the things i would have done with her. These mother surrogates that i plucked out of history and while i was doing it i kept being drawn to the same time period, the 1890s to 1910, and i did not know why. I thought maybe i was like it was visually appealing to me or something or different from the time. It wasnt until i started researching the book that i really cant understand why that was such a significant period. I just being drawn to it because it was a fresh way of talking about their lives that we dont have today. It is partly because of the way the media has treated the single women and also because of identity politics, which are necessary, but have really just made the ways in which people talk about their lives less interesting to me a lot of the time. I like the way these women in 1890s and 19 tens were talking about their lives. Your question was about like the work. I thought it worked out both ways since you got the search and mothers and you also got these surrogate mentors who showed you the way. Yes. I called them in the book i use the term awaken errors, which is a term that was used in her memoirs to describe the book that achieved her own intellectual journey. On like that term because it was important to me to separate these women out as heroines. I find heroines to be of limited use. Like joan of arc and people who do amazing incredible things that i could never do and so is cool for the heroines to exist, but what i was doing with these women was looking to them and asking questions and talking to them. I like this. They were showing me different ways of living in different ways of thinking about how to live than i could on my own. That included their own commitment to their work lives and also the amount of thought that they put into their romantic life and marital life, which was all very radical during the time period they were doing it and was not at all radical during my time period, but there was a silence around what women were doing that was confusing. I would like to let you all as questions now, but you had a question for rebecca that i thought was really provocative about your own daughter and i wondered if he would ask it of the both of them again. It was about your daughter not wanting to get married and you said whats wrong with these [inaudible] do you think they did something wrong, to clarify, is the fear that you did something wrong in that she does not want to do what you did . Bad role model. If you are a good role model you think gosh, we were pretty happy and why do they want to push it off so far clinic i would answer that in a couple of different ways. My parents have been married for 50 years and have been extraordinarily the marriage. It has very different power terms than i would choose for my own marriage, but they are very happy. They are in love and they spend on their time together and they travel and mean they have a model marriage in many ways. It began in an era where domestic responsibility was divided more traditionally than now. Actually, i now remember conversations that i had with a girlfriend of mine when we were in our 20s in new york and unmarried and she also had happily married parents. We were wondering like this is where we are in a math we dont recognize. Was going on with us, this is that what happened with her parents in baxley said maybe our parents were too happy and raised the bar too high on what we should expect. So, for those of us who come out of happy marriage, part of the shift that has happened is understanding marriage as a different institution. It used to be something on which women were dependent. Economically, if they wanted to have a socially sanctioned act life, or have children they had to do that with marriage and be dependent on a man. There were people for whom this was not true, but it had to be an event that kicked off your adulthood. Women could not have acknowledged ability easily on their own or a sexually liberated life on their own. Marriage you have defined someone to to marry and so sometimes you found some with whom he made a wonderful life and sometimes you found someone who was a truly bad marriage and there were plenty there were kind of in between, but the marriage itself meant something different. In an era in which you dont have to married in order to have economic independence, in order to have a sex live, in order to children in which there are so many other things that you can do with your adulthood. Marriage becomes much more discernible as an institution of variable quality and you want to find one that makes the life you can have on your own better. It enhances the life that you are able to buy your own. As many of us know, it takes a long time and maybe you never do find someone who you feel like you want to make that legal attachment to, but it also takes a long time to find a person who you feel that confidence about. In some cases, not. They still meet the right person for them and 18 or 16 or you know. But, so i think i dont think its about doing anything wrong. It may be about doing something right and showing your kids that have the connection and reciprocal relationships are a possibility and that she shouldnt settle for anything less than that. [applause]. Scenic kate and rebecca, i love the work you all have done with reclaiming words like spinster and sort of shaking up single and im wondering about the word divorcee, which still has a kind of 60s, i dont know, gross fruit cocktail violet to it. Yeah, based on your research or your writing or your friends experiences, do you feel like married women are having less trepidation about leaving troubled marriages, about becoming a divorcee with sort of the new freedom around singleness, which used to be sort of shadowy and really stigmatized . From what i have seen, historically to statistically the divorce boom happened and has quite as kind of plateaued, said divorce rates have not gone up over time and have in fact gone down a bit in certain areas, so i see it as the divorce boom helped singledom and assess that it created a lot of single people for the first time, so we had to start rethinking how we thought about single people in then it also inspired people to not get married as quickly because children of divorce have called her feet sometimes and so forth. So, i have i love that, though you are right, divorcee has that cheesy vibe, but i havent seen it and oddly i hear women say sometimes, not a ton, but ive heard women say to someone who is divorced, at least your divorce. least to get to say someone chose you once. Yeah. Yacht yeah scenic thats what i had to say. I have been single for 54 years i tell my girlfriends who have been divorced for like 10, 20 years, why do you have to live with that word, you are single now, so you mark single. Why do we have to carry that divorced word around for the rest of our lives . Its like the government always wanted to know what color we are, what race we are and now they want to know if you are married. I am single. always single. Teleconference are you single or married. I was divorced 20 years ago. You are single now. And when it taking the reason white that the reason why im single, but im retired military i joined when i was 20. I had a baby when i was 30 out of wedlock, of course, to this really goodlooking guy. He did not have much of a personality. [laughter] my sex life was great. I was considered a slut, but i didnt care because i was doing the same thing they shown 20year old guys were doing, which kind of angered me. So, i had a little girl and i realized that shes my number one priority. So, here i am 30, single, in the military with a brown baby and loving my life and i can afford things and i buy a house and people want to know why i am a single, why dont you get married. The rumors about she has some kind of sexual dysfunction, shes gay, no, i really like my life and i like my kid. I like my daughter and i want to make sure i rates are the best way possible and its not going to be how my mom did it. So, i had this pass that i have to forge for myself because i cant relate to anyone. There is really no end that can to me. You should write a book scenic yes, i should and my daughter says that all the time. I was the mother everyone came to in the neighborhood, but what i want to say is i love my life. Most of the time i am reading. If im not reading i met with the girls, but i dont allow with the girls who are married because im never invited by them. So, my friends a lot of them were married and i was the single one, so i had to seek out single women at my age and i still do at this time and shes over someplace else. She does no one people to know how long she has been single. On the very proud of it. You are great. Congratulations. [applause]. Actually, your story reminds me of a story a friend of mine wrote, my friend is named emily and she was covering she was writing about assisted living facilities and issues interviewing these 80 plus women saying, dont you want to meet someone again, and a joy to get again and it was emily, so she was a do you really want to get married again and they were saying no. They are only looking for a nurser, so i think but, you had a question. [inaudible] i was wondering if there is a similar process going on with young men and if not what are the implications for young men who are maybe back there and women have moved on . I can take that. Goahead. It is happening for young men. Well, that shift in marriage family is happening and because the majority of marriages are still hetero it has a profound impact on men as well. They are stains in the longer. They always had a higher age for a first marriage. The meeting age of first marriage for women, which was between 20 and 22 for basically all of history until 1990 at which point it jumped to 23 and now is over 27 and higher than that many cities. For men, its over 30, so yes, men are living longer than ever before in massive numbers as well. [inaudible] well, think its because everyone is changing together. I think there are lots of different shifting exultations. You have something to say about this to . Want to hear it you had to say, but my book is mostly about the womens experience. I think there should be many many books written about men and one thing that is different is that historically there has been space in the world for independent men because men have been better able and more able to be economically independent, to have sex lives that were not that sort of did not cut them off from the world if they were found out. Men have been able there may have been raised eyebrows and all that, but there has been space for independent men in the world and history. There has not been equivalent space bar women until recently. Thats one of the reasons i have to focus on that aspect of what i see is revolutionary shift in marriage patterns. The other thing that is fascinating is that if you have men and women living independently four more years for all their adulthood, what you could is not to just women moving into professional, economic spheres and enjoying sexual liberty, you also men living such so sufficiently to and living in realms they had not historically been asked or needed to, so one of the theories i write about in the book is that this is good for hetero partnerships when therefore because if you have lived in the world with many women working together as peers and colleagues as friends who go out for beers together and treat each other as equals and not just half of the unit in which they will have a breakdown of domestic responsibility that works on certain power lines and also if you women out there any paychecks and men who are learning to cook breakfast for themselves undergone laundry, when and if they do partner were come to live together and build a family together theres more of a likelihood that that tasks and responsibilities will fall to the people who are just better equipped to do them and not the people who are assigned them based on gender. [inaudible] im so sorry i cant think of the name of who it was on the name of the book, where she did interviews with women on every social level and actually went and lived with them, somewhat to their daily life was like and with the multi degreed women with equal men, their privilege women they have the happiest marriages even though it wasnt quite fair if of the woman got a better job offer, was more like most of the time they would go with the mans offer. What was really surprising was the lower class, minimum wage women who are finally having the confidence to go get that nursing degree or whatever, but they were still supporting their unemployed husband whose mechanical and other manual labor skills had been replaced by robots. You know, the guys have really kind of given up and become alcoholics or just waste oh and is spending the womens money. This was a very long period that she was doing this like over five years and it took most those women about five years to kick the guys out. In some cases, the excuse were the guys were taking care of the children and they were the worst babysitters imaginable. The houses were filthy. They did not change the diapers. They played video games all day. It was very sad because it was like you saw the women Going Forward and the men were dropping out. Since i have the microphone i will change the subject and say that i have been a very happy spinster for 69 years and i have had two decades long relationship with a male and a funeral and the best part of my life is the 40 years i have been alone. She who travels alone gets to do 50 Different Things everyday at the time i want to do it and exactly the way i want to do it. There is a disadvantage. I live in a small town and there is a fillet famous gilbert and sullivan musical about how the maiden in the town is such a distraction that the whole town just cant leave her alone and i have had so many they handle problems and as such and my female friends who are married did not believe it until they became widows and then there windows were shot out and they have been patient and such and it is still a product problem even at my age and it is very aggravating. Men cannot tolerate a single independent woman without harassing her skin eczema in the back. Someone in the back. Way back. Have a question about weddings. Im in my early 30s and i have had a lot of friends who cohabitate, have Children Together and they essentially live at married lives, but they really feel like they cant be married until they can really commit to having the whole wedding and im wondering how the rise of the wedding Industrial Complex has really kind of coincided with maybe a decline in legal formal marriage, but people really living married lives. Absolutely. Completely related. Do you have anything . Yeah, one of the things that we talk about the increasing normalization of unmarried life women, but its growing every the air and as women gain new kinds of power, yeah people who used to have all of that power uncomfortable for them to share it and so there are also these punishing messages. Just because he let his increasingly normal and increasingly a norm for women doesnt mean people are not upset about it, so the reclamation of the word spinster , you know, is the positive look at it. The fetishization of what is, which is not slow down and correspondence to the fact that its at the peak life them for many women are many more. In fact, it has sped up and so this sort of say yes to the dress social media the way the like Engagement Ring shots go, wedding announcements, all of that amp up of weddings is all part of a set of cultural messages that are still sent to women that this is the thing they should come on guys, this is your day, the day that celebrates you. And it comes in part from ideas that are long embedded in us that this is the measure of female work and it remains a normal state of the mill adulthood we will not shake it off in a matter of a couple decades. This remains the state women are supposed to aspire to and because the shift in marriage pattern has happened over between classes, economic insecurity makes marriage far less tenable. Poverty makes marriage harder. So, i spoke earlier about the way in the mid 20th century that lots of economically challenged communities of color, the marriage began to drop in the place where the marriage rates remained highest in the highest income brackets and thats the wedding Industrial Complex and its also very in tune to that and the fact that weddings are still happening so far later than ever before amongst the wealthiest americans who have money to spend on it and we have increasingly messages telling them they should splash out completely on it. So, all of these things we are in a stew work theres a trajectory, but it is one that comes with all kinds of circles and setbacks and a backlash and that the fetishization of marriage as the capstone event rather than the thing you could copyright a hood with is a big part of that. Lets me see if i can say this right. A little under eight years ago we elected barack obama and we didnt think we were racist. Cheer, gay, we have overcome that. It turned out we were really racist. It turned out that, you know, we had issues. And, i mean, theres been this enormous volatile terrible period. We had a congress, you know, decided that they were not work with them and i think a lot of white men have a lot of issues. With going to happen with the woman . Is going to be really bad. [inaudible] [inaudible] we are running out of time. I will let them talk. [inaudible] this is a country that has been built, you know, on the marginalization of certain kinds of populations and like systemic accrual of power by one population. White men who from the beginning and Voting Rights and their infringement infringement right has been protected ever since. We have racism and sexism really embedded in this country. We have seen enormous progress. Really, since our founding. We have been moving im an optimist about these things. I think we are moving in directions towards greater possibility for equal opportunity for more kinds of americans, but our systems, our attitudes are all shaped around an idea of what america is supposed to be that it is not supposed to involve the equal opportunity of the people who have been historically marginalized, and we are still in the midst of it moving through the stew and we are not at the other side. It will be centuries before we are. So, what you see and i think its very evidence in the president ial cycle right now, you see these leaps forward, but they dont mean we have all leapt forward and the fact of a leap forward justin speiers anger and hatred and fear and instability. Let me Say Something sympathetic to the angry fearful. Is true. If the norm has been you have because of power and then that shift, its a loss of something. Its a real loss and it is destabilizing and scary. Yes, if we have a woman president , there will be all kinds there will be there is already look at the these things are not unrelated. The move to make abortion illegal even though it remains legal trick the move to disenfranchise the Voting Rights , you know, voting regulation that make no mistake systematically disenfranchises people of color and women. Its a sneaky way to revoke the Voting Rights that took centuries to win. I mean, these things are not happening in a vacuum. They are happening because we have candidates not just like barack obama and hillary clinton, but also like marco rubio, like sherry sarah palin, ben carson, herman cain, things are changing in the United States. It makes people who live in the United States very incredible and yeah, its going to be bad. The racism isnt going away anytime soon either. [inaudible] [inaudible] you can make a come back if you restrict peoples ability to vote and control their own reproduction and thats what the fight is right now. We are at the heart of it. I think we have time for one more. Wears my timer . I have a san antonio question Economic Innovation Group came in with a study recently talking about income inequality and san antonio is one of those places where they are sidebyside, some of the worst poverty and welloff. I was thinking about your point about women having children out of wedlock more and more and i think historically we have always been taught to think that it is a bad thing and something we need to help those women not to do. Just like we need to improve the educational system and everything. Are we thinking about this wrongly . I believe we are. I am, however, a lefty feminist. It is conservative dogma and you can hear from many republicans who really believe that a cure for poverty is early marriage. This is any republican politician will to you this and they will tell you in terms it makes sense. No, i believe the reverse is true. I believe stabilizing people economically and im not interested in re promoting marriage as a norm. Contributes to stabilizing populations that enable them to raise the kind of families that are going to be healthier and more economically stable. Conservatives tell you it is about promoting early marriage as the norm. I think we have to stop but thank you. [applause] they will be signing books again on the second floor in the gallery. And dont forget to shop at the book tent and in the gallery. Tell her i did it. [inaudible conversations] booktv tapes hundreds of other programs around the country all year long. Here is a look at some of the events we are covering this week, in new york city, Washington Post reporter dan zach provide a history of Americas Nuclear weapons program. At the free library in philadelphia with journalist larry tie remembering the life and political career of robert kennedy. And Public Research ceo robert jones argues White Christian americas political and cultural influences on the decline. He will speak at the open Society Foundation in new york city. Friday or politics and prose bookstore, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution talks about how islam shakes politics in the middle east. That is look at the other programs booktv is covering this week. The cements are open to the public