We can say that many decade after the publication of the seminal book of simon debof wa. Its still powerful analysis in order to shed light in the fact that gender inequalities because a picture is still a picture of gender inequalities in the world, is a political issue and not a one. Moreover, i think that its essential to make the difference between the improvement and the significant improvement since publication of this seminal book and the fact that gender equality is not achieve nowadays. So i think that we have to face a picture with a lot of improvement in particular, the fact that its democracy, men and women are equal. But we are still a huge work in term of raise, the issue of what is gender equality. I think that nowadays, we are still in a political search of complementarity. If you look, for example, there are still fifth percent of women are out of state in the world that are what . Heads of state. Oh, heads of state. Yes. 5 . If you look for interim of labor market, we have a huge gender pay gap between men and women and theres a load of that shows the persistence of inequality and that gender norm are embedded in our Society Still today. Do you have a i think among other things, the variety and talk a little bit more into variety and range of inequalities from, throughout through the west, but in the nonwestern world, thats the remarkable thing. It used to be in the second wave of feminism that we western women felt that we were in a kind of vanguard and we could get very culturally smug about, you know, oppression, abuses that were not happening here. But look at the things that are happening here. Abortion is being utterly attacked. Everything from salaries to physical violence against women. Even contraception. Pardon . Even contraception. Yes. So everything that we politically took pride in is under assault. The huge problem of the range, let me use diversity in a negative way, the diversity of discriminations and oppressions, also make it very hard to address. Because its like, theres so many toxins, how do you handle each one . There are also huge divisions between women in different countries, in different classes, of different ethnicitieethnicit religions, races, this complicates the problem enormously. I wanted to ask you, everybody, but in particular, simon traveled to america while she was doing research. Her lover nelson invited her to chicago and introduced her to richard wright. And for the first time, she saw racism, the post war just postwar racism of america, which was terribly shocking to her. And she was also, it was france, it was 1947, it was right after the second world war. So she frames the notion of the woman as other and the woman as the objectified other and objectified in sort of the generalalities that you can use when you objectify someone, diminish the object. She used race and religion, the objectified minorities to frame her arguments. 20 years later in the 60s, white women were told, you have to take a back seat. The issues of class and of race are much more pressing by the way, black women and all women of color were told the same thing. We were all told the issue of race, which were not going to say out loud, is actually the issue of, you know, race. And the men in each group, we were told the same thing, you have to take a back seat and support essentially the patriarchal struggle against racism. And class as well. And class as well. But i wanted to ask everybody on the panel, do you see these struggles as separate . Can, or should they be separated . And how do the experiences as a woman of color, how did the experiences of objectification relate to each other . Im not saying one is worse and one is better, but i think they mutate constantly. One will cover the other. You will think that some form of discrimination is entirely racially based, which i certainly grew up thinking, because feminism, the second wave of feminism. Feminism for my generation simply did not exist in the 1950s and early 60s when i was coming of age. Then, when you start to learn about sexism, you realize that, they are constantly, sex, class and race are constantly interacting, collaborating, sometimes competing with each other. Very much competing and thats one of the problems in the intellectual formation. You know, that each group is inclined to feel, really because again, in terms of justice, we operate in a scarcity economy. Women, people of color, are not wrong to feel necessarily practically. Well, if youre putting women ahead, then probably in some way, as the operating system, youre discriminating, or youre deciding to forget, you know, about another group that needs attention. So we are constantly struggling with this need to play groups against each other and reward one over the other. Anybody else have a thought on i was just gonna say, i think one of the problems in american feminism is the tendency of certain a kind of certain feminist voice to identify as victimized in the same way as say a woman in saudi arabia is victimized. Without distinction. Without distinction. And a friend of mine just wrote an amazing book called excellent daughters, about women in the middle east and you can see that their experience is way worse than your average kind of liberal, college freshman, whose problems are just not on that same level. I think one of the problems in america is that we collapse these distinctions so radically, and were so eager to jump in there and say, im victimized, im victimized, that there may be a loss of nuance. Is that true in france . I think thats the main challenge, its to make equal citizen, and for this reason, we have to go behind and overpass the singularization. And for me, the point in common between racism and gender inequality, or sexism, is the fact there is a bureau politic of gender inequalities or racial inequalities, in term of naturalization of this inequality. So its a very important point in common, and i think that its important and the challenge is to focus on this point in common, in order to reshape the society in a political issue together and to carry a new frame, a new political frame and not to fall in the trap of tension between victimization Competition Among victims. Competition among victims. So i think we dont have to fall in this trap, in particular, in terms of setting the political agenda, in term of public policy, and we have not to forget that the reason and the challenge is to have a real transformative approach of this issue and not a bur okuracy. What are the most urgent priorities that we can find Common Ground with women of different classes and at different degrees of struggle, of oppression, of freedom . What do you see as the most urgent . I think that the situation is a trap. If you its like its not the good track in order to solve the problem. If you think in this term, you only permit to have Like Division in term of inequal citizen. And for me, its contradictory. With a real reshaping of our society. Yes, i think exactly the same thing. I think its a trap. Its like, if we were wondering whether we should first fight for the gay rights or first for the woman rights. I think its just impossible to think this way, that way. And maybe the difference between well, there are a lot of differences, but one of the big difference is that in france, we just discovered that we were living in a mixed society. We didnt know about that. No, really. Oh, okay. Makes you laugh, but its true. Its true. It has happened, well, i would say ten years ago or so. Not before. And maybe less than that. So we were all supposed to be the same, the same kind of citizens thinking the same way, having the same religion, which was forbidden in the public space, and everything is not totally different, but it has become certainly different and we are not used to it at all, and we especially have a lot of problems now because well, you all heard about all our date on the veil, the islamic veil, and it has been a problem that divided all the feminist movement, all the left wing. So, you know, a lot of things we dont know about that kind of issues. I wanted to the second sex started as a memoir. It was not going to be 800 pages and she said she was moved to write it because when she tried to define who she was, the first sentence that came to her was, i am a woman. I wonder if you would speak personally, because you said you didnt really realize, you didnt think much of being this or that until you were 35. I remember i didnt think much of it either until my mother told me one day that i should maybe not raise my hand so much in school. Im curious to know when you became aware of this otherness, or if you did. Maybe you were spared. I think i ill just give a generational portrait, which is, my mother, i think there was rapid, rapid social change. So my mother came of age and her father told her, only ugly women are lawyers. [ laughter ] and when i was a kid, when i was a tiny kid trying to watch the brady bunch, my mother would stand over my head giving me feminist critiques, going, girls shouldnt just want to be cheerleaders and i was like, i know, mom. And then my own daughter, i was watching the primary debate with her, it was hillary and obama. She liked obama. She was about 5 years old. And she said i said, but, wouldnt it be cool if there was a woman president . And she looked at me with utter disdain and she was like, mom, of course theres been a woman president. Because in her world, why would there not have already been a woman president. And i think that that change is something thats dizzying and psychological in terms of what we feel was available to us. So i didnt feel as i was growing up, that i couldnt do what i wanted to do. Obviously the sexism was more complicated and shrewder in the world i grew up in, but it wasnt somehow i was raised with that feminist consciousness pounded into my head. Well, as i said, i was born right around the time simone debof wa was publishing. I was very young when she published this book. I grew up in a relatively enlightened, in terms of my family and schooling, environment. Meaning, yes, if you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, you know, whatever, choreographer, you can do that, but you must not violate any of the structures and strictures of also being a very successful woman. So you really had to do double duty. Being a successful woman not only came as im sure many of you remember, with a battery of laws and conventions about how to look, how to dress. In the old days, you were supposed to only cross your knees if you were a proper girl. You didnt cross like that. You crossed at the ankle. And there were thousands [ laughter ] there were hundreds of rules like that. Especially impressed on me because the history of race had dictated that black women were essentially seen as beasts of burden who pretty much had proven that they were, you know, sexually loose, intellectually inadequate, like their brothers and really not capable of being this thing called a lady, a wellmannered lady. So i grew up in the bourge wa zee with all of that too. And so, its a strange message. You can do exactly what you want, but you really cant if it involves breaking any rule. Dancing backwards in heels. Exactly. And still being considered less than fred astaire. Every american knows this. Ginger rogers and fred astaire were a famous dance team, and he was a great dancer, but she did everything he did backwards and in high heels. [ laughter ] so that was always the so when was your did you have a moment of youre 40, and so you came of age in another world. There was a moment for you and this is also what you do for a living. This is your passion, your research. Did you have a personal moment where you realized there were either things that people were telling you you could not do or that society was in some way a barrier . I prefer to speak of simone debuf wa for me, to be aware that it is essential to take into account that there is inequality between women and men and that we have to go beyond this identification and singularization. For me, the essential is the main point is to face a kind of dilemma. In a personal experiment, but also in a more collective and political experiment. The dilemma is that in order to objectify inequalities, we have to have a picture of the place of women and men, both in private sphere and in the public sphere. And we have also to consider that if you want to live a real equal society, where each city, and its no more the women or men or black or white or yellow or tall or short, big, i dont know, but there reason of equality, we have to go beyond this identification and i think that simone debuf wa permit us and invite us to live in this world, in this realistic utopia. And in particular, the fact that female or male are human being, and we have to say, beyond this and not only with this banality, but now we have perhaps to think in a more continuum or a more well, this is a very what youre saying is actually a very, very controversial point. It was a very controversial point. Its been a very controversial point among debof wa scholars. The most famous line in the book, is, one is not born, but rather becomes woman. And she does, as you say very well, she had a utopian vision of what she called an eventual fraternity. She had to use a gendered word and for her that meant the difference is in an enlightened world it would be abolished. But there are essential differences between the men and women beyond the obvious ones . But that women should cultivate their differences. And french women have been on the forefront of this discussion. And so, i mean, this is a debate. Used to call it female nationalism before we called it female essentialism. And all nationalisms, racial, female, et cetera, poison. So im just do we believe, are we essentialist . Do we believe the differences are how do we whats your thoughts . I am not an essentialist, no, no, no. I am not about race or about gender any more than i am about class. It to me, its as ridiculous as being i mean, there are not obviously differences. But to be essentialist about it is as ridiculous as saying that all classes you know, its the great chain of being, yeah. Simone debuf wa makes a distinction between the guest and the class. And she explains that the gender base individuality between men and women is like a class, categorization, because we dont have the ability to change in the gender base. We know that its more complex and we have to think beyond this banality. But i think its a very relevant issue now, nowadays. Because we have to face with a trend, a trend that is make in the audience of complementarity, of this essentialist, in an age of complementarity that is modal. Not only in the family, but also in all the society and there is an audience between this and teral la gassy and the kind of newly because nowadays, with legitimate gender equality and inclusion of women in management or the political sphere, in the name of performance of women, of the fact that women do politics differently, or management differently. And i think its another trap. Because its only permit modalization of the essentialist as well. Its still sexism. Sexism means inclusion, but its still sexism. And it only permit women to be the second sex and not a real equal in the political and all of the sphere. So i think its a very relevant point. I think it doesnt really matter because her main point, which is, women are constructed, is still the relevant point of how the culture conditions people to become female. I do think theres a strain of american feminism, if you think of margaret fuller, i accept the universe, she did have ideas about the complexities of sort of biological complexities of being a woman as opposed to to just simply a social construct, but i dont think it matters in terms of debof was contribution. Whether the science is different or no, i dont think it matters in terms of her contribution at all. Its just she started a great debate on pretty much every issue and ground and the debate has sort of spun, you know, like the universe, the expanding universe, some of it into gassious areas of outer space and some into very sort of dense and interesting ones. I would say that in france, what is worrying me is that we we dont know what we are lost. Pretty much lost as far as the idea of progress is concerned. I mean, we dont know probably something has changed after 1989 in europe, before the fall of the berlin wall. We knew where was the progress and where it was not. And since then, since then, everything has been mixed up. And so we dont know if feminism is a good thing or its not. We dont know if the antiracism is a good thing or is not. You will find some people thinking having idea you would have never thought 20 years ago, or 30 years ago. I think we are really much living in a lost society. And the question of culturalism, essentialism, are not as, well, as obvious as they used to be. Because i have known a country where, well, a certain number of things were obvious, and nothing is obvious anymore. You are the head of a very important cultural institution, and you all are also teachers and writers. Is there what who are the heirs to simone debof wa . Who are the figures, the writers, the philosophers, the activists, who are speaking to and for women in a radical way . Beyond sort of academic or ivory tower debates . For me, one of them is ellen, the italian writer. But i dont know who those figures are for you. I think one of the problems is there arent so many of those figures. When the second sex came out, they wrote it was brilliantly confused. And she meant that as a high compliment. The problem now, things are oversimplified. Certainly in america and feminism, theres sort of the internet jezebel feminism where most of its about talking to this echo chamber where people just say somebodys sexist, and then everyone else is like, ooh, thats very bad, and theres not a dense, complex, psychological investigation going on anywhere near the nature of what simone debof wa was doing. Its sort of clan warfare . I think so. And its just, theyre really bad, we all think the right things. And nothing is unpredictable. One of the things thats so great about the second sex was how wild and unruly and unpredictable it was. And the absolute and the way that she looked at how these really complicated social forces affected our most intimate lives was so complicated and had that brilliant confusion. So i actually dont think i think there are some meedians who are looking at this problem in a really sophisticated way right now. But i actually dont think theres a great feminist voice out there, to me. Anybody else . I think the french feminist elizabeth bad inter, some of her writing on motherhood to me is very interesting and might be her critique of how women are implicated in their own idea of what we have to do to be mothers and the whole idea of the child is king culture and the way that the sort of expectations we place upon ourselves and the way in which women are holding themselves back for that, i think thats an interesting idea. Im glad you raised the subject of motherhood because i was going to. Another source of controversy for critics of the second sex is her stronger than ambivalence towards reproduction. And she had a mother who was a martyr. She was horrified the way collette was by the sacrificial women she saw around her growing up. They played the maternal role at the expense of their individuality. But i like to bring this into the present and talk about the predicament for contemporary women, the unequal distribution of domestic chores and childrearing responsibilities. Im putting most people will have read the reproduction of mothers. She poz itss that women are pretty much in every culture, raised by mothers, that its so unequally distributed that this perpetuates misogyny, because children have to identify with the other to get their freedom and the other is male. So id like to talk about the challenges that face modern women in having families and in being mothers and in preserving their individuality from the undertow. I think four of us have children, but were all parents and one of us have not. I am the one. But were all in love in this issue of the inequality the yes. [ inaudible ] our siblings, yes. And i would say one of the remaining real tab boos in our culture for women is not having children. It still is. You experience it that way. I am surprised at moments. Its a little bit like youre saying, oh, you thought, up until a certain age its not an issue being a woman. And ive gone through my adult life, i came of age with the second wave of feminism, not having children, many of my friends didnt. But the number of times someone will gaze deep into my eyes, particularly recently as i published a book and say, did you really not want to have children . [ laughter ] and if i you know, if the story that i tell, ive now patented it [ laughter ] they want to probe, are you sure . What were your parents like . Youre right. [ inaudible ] its the unfinished woman. And this is the compensatory woman. These are one of the nuances that and one of the nuances is also, well, what went wrong in your love life, even if youre still even if youre still out there. Its never to late to adopt. You cant be judgmental politically, but you can have pity. So the pity is the form that our cultural conservativism takes. I spent many years as a single mother and i would add that as another tab boo, having a child on my own, i have written about this, the strange conservativism in this country, 53 of women born to women under 30 are born to single mothers, so thats the majority of babies. But yet, we have this crazy, exotic, kind of dysfunctional situation. So some of that, theres a lot of i think that a lot of our conservativism now in america is aimed at women who are choosing not to be mothers or not to be mothers in the way that they used to do it in 1953. We are lost in old europe, but not that lost. [ laughter ] so, no, i dont think its tab boo anymore. We can talk in general, depend where you live, what kind of class and family and thing like that. Captioning performed by vitac id rather be down here in harmony rather than, whatever, wasnt pretty, but you know, in negativity, but theres 900 bills in illinois so the place is not functional right now. You dont have to go far to see the conflict between the city of chicago and the state. Its a complete disaster. If i have to go through the state on anything, im reluctant, okay . We need some direct funds. The city of chicago is an 800 pound gorilla in the room because they suck up everything that the surrounding counties or rest of the state has needs for. So if you have a little money out there, you know, where hanover park will be far down in the pecking