[inaudible] great to be back here at gw. I want to thank president leblanc for welcoming all of us. Our family loves coming here. We were just talking backstage that both my husband and chelsea as well as myself have been here numerous times on this stage, bill and i speaking, chelsea dancing while she was on the ballet. I dont know why you all laugh. I was never a star. [laughter] its great being here and always great to be with you. I feel like weve done this in various combinations and its always fun and such an honor for me. First i just want to thank you on behalf of womankind for this book. I was saying to them ahead of time its a frustration tonight is going to be that we can only talk about so many of them. Not nearly the range we would want to, we could, we could stay for a week and talk about all of them. Its an amazing book, its so important to have the stories of so many women in one place. We will talk about that in a second. We should get going because we dont have a ton of time and we want to cover as much ground as possible. I want to start by saying, you wrote this book together, in journalism lingo you we would say you had joint byline. How do you decide whose name when first. [laughter] we didnt even really talk about that. Age before beauty obviously. The but the process of having a joint byline of writing a book or anything with someone else is incredibly rich because of the different experiences and points of view that your coauthor brings to the project. And for chelsea and me it was especially exciting because this book comes out of a conversation we had literally since she was a little girl talking about people, especially women, who inspired us. And that is what is so great about it, the stories are deeply personal. To each of you in some cases and to both of you in some cases and across cultures and generations and geographies and backgrounds. There is really, it is such an extraordinary range you put together. Just one other superficial question. Chelsea, you mentioned with a huge amount of affection and in exasperation, what its been like to coauthor a book with someone who still writes in longhand on a yellow legal pad. Maybe not yellow but legal pad. Im just wondering if there are any other challenges working with your archaic mother. [laughter] that you would care to share. There are students here im sure they can relate, that you want to share with us. Maybe not. Thankfully her penmanship is legible. Unlike her fathers. Unlike my fathers. I knew that my mother wrote in longhand because i had seen her writing process for what happened most recently in her previous books, i had understood what that would be like for our working dynamic. And that not only does she kind of right longhand, she edits like pen on paper too. I thought surely she would have at least come to understand why track changes are our friend. [laughter] yet she hadnt, despite all my efforts to persuade her that this would really help us Work Together and we could see our different thought processes and go back and forth in the document, i knew there was no way i would be able to get her to do shared google doc. She knows how to use a computer. It wasnt comfortable for her. Okay. Really. In my defense, you know who else right longhand for his books . Barack obama. So i rest my case. He might be a dinosaur also. Im going to turn the tables a little bit. So you can get your chance. Because im sure there are many women in the room like me and you who have daughters whom we love deeply and transcendently. But mothers and daughters trying to write a book together congress at least i think for some people images of a lot of screeching and door slamming. Were there any surprises for you working with your daughter . We started by making lists. And honestly, the lists were in the many hundreds of athletes we admired, entertainers we admired, business leaders, academics, public servants. We have many hundreds of names. We began to try to narrow it down and the only backandforth we had a beginning was i would advocate people i wanted to remain on the list she would do the same we would try to compromise, sometimes i would say i had to have her in chelsea would say no. We ended up writing more than 200 assays and are publisher rightly said, people have to carry the book around on a scooter or something. So we cut dramatically and that was hard. We have lots of really challenging conversations about who was going to be cut sometimes the editor would make suggestions or i would or chelsea would and one of us would say i dont want her cut. That was the only real problem we had and we ended up with a very Representative Group of historic figures, fictional figures contemporary figures that really did capture what we were trying to convey because at the end of the day we are so grateful for these women and their lives and we wanted them to be seen as whole people theyre not perfect up on a mountain somewhere they worked hard they overcame obstacles gutsy because they made it clear they were following their dream because they had a mission in their lives and it wasnt easy. We think those stories are good ones for us to share because we find them so inspirational. Can i followup a little bit on that. One of the things thats interesting is this spam you cover and you talk a little bit each of you about the differences going up the role models you had very few. You had your mom, you had your sixth grade teacher mrs. King you had millie ehrhardt, you had joe and little women and nancy drew. And chelsea you had more you had a pediatrician who was a woman, you had a mayor of little rock. And you had a few more, not huge numbers but a few more women figures brought up in your classes in school. But i wonder if how that sort of generational difference, how each of your experiences as women experiencing changing gender roles influenced these selections. I dont think i had quite understood the juxtaposition between my moms going up and my growing up with regard to women role models until we started the effort. My mom reflected how the only women she knew who worked outside the home Worker School teachers in the public librarians. That was so different than my growing up. The vast majority of my friends moms worked outside the home. Some were lawyers like my mom, some were nurses, doctors, entrepreneurs. As he mentioned, when i was in the first grade our mayor was Lottie Shaffer will field a woman. Betty ais my incredible pediatrician who took great care of me and went on to lead the childrens hospital. I had all these very visible women in my life and also teachers really all throughout school who were determined not only history but social studies and science and math were not just the province of old straight white men. Im so thankful to my teachers who introduced me to grace hopper or Elizabeth Brockovich these amazing women i write about in gutsy women i wouldve never known about them in such a different experience. When we began talking about it we realized what a gap there was because in my case there were women i read about in books or in the pages of life magazine i included several of them because as a child it wasnt very much in my elementary and Junior High School years probably as i recall much in High School Years that talked about women. Maybe you study agent aancient egypt. Part of this is coming to grips with how hungry i was and how encouraging my own mother was for me to pursue these women and learn more about them but it wasnt part of my schooling at that point in history. Theres a funny story in the book because i came across helen keller because of a television dramatization of her life. In this amazing woman who was taught high and sullivan to communicate. Fast forward last year the texas state board of education decided to eliminate helen keller and me from the curriculum and i was really upset about helen keller. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed and apparently we are both in although i hope she has one more prominence than that because she deserved it. I talked about how i go to the Public Library when every week when i miss my mom got old enough in the library and taking care of kids she said he got to read this new book is about a young girl named anne frank. I didnt know anything about the holocaust or what happened i was probably 10 years old. That was how i discovered these women and as chelsea and i were talking about it was very different experience between the two of us. Lets talk about the definition of gutsy. She touched on a second ago and you talked about in the book in several places. You should all know, you will see when you get your copies that they divide these women into these groups, educational, pioneer, storytellers, advocates and selected leaders, healers, explorers adventures. Thats not all the categories. Within each of those categories are women who worked inside the system, women who worked outside the system. Women who were loud, women who were allowed. Women who pushed for change, women part of change. Some of these women you could have crossed categorized. You said it could have cross reference. Another way i thought about some of the women in the book is they are pioneers women will breaking barriers like Virginia Johnson the great dancer such a big influence on chelsea. Mathematicians astronomers and scientists like abgrace hopper, even a mountain climber. Who had never heard of. Problem solvers. Women like doctor aba teacher who you might not recognize the name shes the doctor who fought to clean up the water in flint michigan. And super sisters and resistors. Suffragettes, Billie Jean King, community and labor rights. One of my favorites of the book doctor howell audie who has this life limb and everything really against incredible odds to open and sustain Health Clinics for tens of thousands of displaced people in somalia and the list goes on and on. What is the common denominator of gutsy nice in all these women . How did you each define it . What were the metrics you had to apply to whittle that giant down to the 103 women in the book . Some of the whittling down really had to also be just kind of the visceral relaxants we had really thought about not including them. For us really was gutsy is in all these womens lives because they were not only driven by their own leading their own life they felt called to do but they were determined to make the world a better place and sometimes the world was defined as a family. Whether school and community and sometimes really as the global community. So all the characteristics that you mentioned particularly persistent switch i feel very keenly as one of the Core Competencies for any life well lived. Just kind of embedded in the gutsy nest these women demonstrated and continued to demonstrate because changing the status quo wasnt just for themselves it was for everyone. I think thats the key factor because truly there are so many women we admire but as we were narrowing the list down we were looking for what it was about that womans life or work, her advocacy, her mission that affected others. It became once he started talking about a key ingredient as chelsea said im someone who has been privileged to meet some of the women as chelsea so when you meet someone like doctor howell on he is very modest looking woman stood up against alshabaab the Islamist Terrorist Group in somalia when she had opened up her farm to shelter 90,000 people confronted them by shaming them. Are you young men doing . Why are you even here . Are you fighting . You meet her and she is the most unimposing person but story of that confrontation and her continuing support for all these women now supported by her two daughters also physicians. That just stuck with me. I have so many personal stories. I met doctor on the vital voices which is a Great Organization that highlights women like her around the world and part of what i wanted to do was introduce our readers tomorrow these women because everybody gets a little discouraged and a little down about whatever happens in your own life certainly would have a Larger Society and i want people to remember historic figures who are willing to take these risks and stand up fight back and speak out today like doctor from flint when he said something is wrong with these children i take care of a pediatrician theres something wrong. She would not quit talking about it even though people were trying to dismiss her. Thats the characteristic just determination and persistence on behalf of others not just on behalf of themselves. To talk about persistence you just mentioned it, i think i read in the book or have heard you say, chelsea, i suspect this is part of the required ingredient of persistent is optimism. Even in the face of incredible challenges that many of these women have faced they somehow remain optimistic. Yes. I think if they didnt believe their energies very to their talents didnt make a difference they would not have persisted i think that is such a powerful example of what it means to be optimistic. And just listening to my mom i was thinking about arguably the Largest Group of women the back satyrs. The largely women workforce millions of women who everyday work to inoculate children against everything from measles to the courageous frontline vaccine workers in the drc who are desperately trying to vaccinate everyone against ebola. In hundreds of lives have been lost. Just in the last six years. Yet more and more people continue to rise up and do that work because they know how important it is to Public Health but also the optimism of their own communities to give every child an equal shot at life. We know in our own country its not always the case. We got a lot of questions from the audience will i think this is directed toward you. When you are not feeling your most confident, what do you do to feel gutsy . This is from alex he said parenthetically ps i love you. I think about you alex, wherever you are. I think we heard alex. I want to be a little serious about this because part of the impetus for the book was when chelsea was writing her wonderful Childrens Book she persisted and go out she met so many kids who would come with their parents or when i was out doing my book signing before the 2016 campaign and afterwards with my book what happened . So many young kids would say, who are your heroes . Would you look up to . I found that such a poignant question because its easy to be torn down in todays world. We all have our flaws, we all have crazy worlds far from perfect. For the people you can look up to and you can be inspired by . When im a little down or discouraged about the state of the world i spend time thinking about some of the people, women and men and young people whove inspired me. We have two groups of women in this work who have taken on the scourge of gun violence. We are so moved by sarah brady, whose husband was shot when president reagan confronted was confronted by an attempted assassination and was paralyzed and sarah never expected to be an advocate against all of the gun violence we see but she became one, losing macbeth, whose son was murdered and now shes in congress. And our dear friend Gabby Gifford survived an assassination attempt and kept going. And someone like nella martin is green whose little girl and the grace was murdered at sandy hook. When i think about people who face those times of unspeakable unimaginable tragedies, it gets me going again. It gets me up and chelsea might want to talk about the young woman because one of them is here with us. She just celebrated her 18th birthday. You can give julia a round of applause. We read about julia and ms. Ari and gonzales and chavez ab these incredible young women who are standing up against the nra but also standing for more research and sensible gun violence prevention legislation. Awareness about the crisis, tragically including in young people s death by suicide. So just to echo one of my mom i think how could we not do everything that we could do . If congresswoman lucy macbeth can get up every day and work to ensure that no parent confronts what she did with her son jordan was murdered, how can we not that everyday . Or Sabrina Fulton now running. If you want to contribute this would be the only kind of super political thing i say maybe. But if you want to contribute to campaign today, please consider contributing to the campaign of Sabrina Fulton who is Trayvon Martins mother running for miamidade commissioner. [applause] what right do we have two pity or feel like we shouldnt be doing everything we could possibly be doing with these extraordinary coming her courageous, heroic women can find it in themselves to fight for the future that was robbed from their children. Sabrina fulton wrote a fabulous book of two years ago with trayvons father it is so worth reading. Its really excellent. Which brings me to another audience question, im going to give it to you sophie. You watched your mother enter the world of politics and all that come with it. All the incoming that come with that. You written about encouraging kids to get involved becoming engaged learning her advocate. First of all, thank you for thinking about it at this moment in time. I know there is this belief that young people and maybe not so young people look at whats happening in the world at large and become overwhelmed by it or looked at what anyone you stepped into the arena has to endure online and offline in the belief that may be people are going to stop running for office and thankfully weve had unprecedented people running for office is. Also running for county commissioner or city council. State legislature. If youre interested in criminal Justice Reform run for state legislature. Think about, thank you for the people who responded to. Think about what you want to change and how best to equip yourself to be competent and qualified to help make the change and then run for office. Theres a lot of groups to help. I have an Organization Called nonWork Together and we support groups of Young Political activists to evergreen candidates like run for something, which is done an amazing job recruiting thousands and thousands of people to run for all kinds of offices were emerged in america focusing his energy on women running for office or color of