The program hosted by New York University in new york city is about an hour and 20 minutes. [applause] good evening. I am delighted to be here. Moderation is not really my strong suit. [laughter] im very glad to be here tonight as the moderator and the book launch of feminism unfinished a short, surprising history of american Womens Movements. I will introduce the authors and a little while so let me first tell you what the format will be and then i will introduce our three speakers. We will have short tenminute presentations by the three speakers and then we will give the authors of five minutes or so to respond to their comments and then we will open up to the audience for questions and comments. And then of course at the end at 6 30 there will be a reception with wine and chiefs. Let me start by introducing in the order that they will speak the three speakers for this evening. Michelle chen a remarkably prolific journalist writes on economic social and political issues affecting women and lowwage workers in the u. S. And globally. Her work has appeared in the nation newsmagazine huffington post, the american prospect, alternate color line the progressive and other media outlets. She is a contributing editor at the times ann coulter striking coproduces the Community Radio program asiapacific forum on pacifica wca eye. Many of her articles are relevant to our discussion tonight. Notably those on Womens Movements in the middle east and latin america sex and race discrimination in the restaurant industry, fast food strikes and other lowwage worker campaigns for better wages and decent treatment womens reproductive rights and many other subjects. Our second speaker will be Jennifer Baumgardner was a writer activist and filmmaker whose work has chronicled and shaped the direction of u. S. Feminism and the last two decades. In her bestselling book young women and feminism in the future coauthored with Jeannie Richardson 2000 jennifer galvanized a generation of feminist who became a page of the decade after the Womens Movement of the 1960s and 70s. Manifest a bold vision of activism continued in its 2005 grassroots the field guide for feminist activism and in jennifers other books including most recently in addition to being a regular contributor to a wide range of magazines and other news outlets she is the cocreator of the bureau so box and the filmmaker behind the powerful documentary film it was rape and i had an abortion. In 2013 jennifer was named executive director and publisher of the press. Our third speaker is nancy hewitt distinguished professor of gender studies at Rutgers University emeritus. Im so envious of her. [laughter] who is internationally known for her essays and books on womens rights in the 19th and 20th century u. S. Her inclusive histories of Womens Movements take seriously the voices of all women and has inspired many young and old including the authors of feminism unfinished. Among her many recent books the popular edited edition no permanent waves, recasting histories of u. S. Feminism under awardwinning study of womens activism across race and ethnic lines womens activism and Tampa Florida 1880s to 1920. She is a recipient of a prestigious guggenheim fellowship at the event study for stanford in 2000 was named professor of American History at the university of cambridge. Im very delighted to welcome all three of them today and michelle if you could start. Im going to speak at the podium if you dont mind. Thank you. It seems much more official now that im standing. So yes thank you for inviting me to this distinguished panel for which i am totally not worthy but im really glad to be a part of this discussion. I am sure other womens work i have been absorbing through osmosis and my research and scholarly work over the years so i think its an interesting moment to be having in a discussion like this and i guess im going to state and the youngest because i arrived last but whatever it is i decided i would start with something a little bit later. The media was abuzz this week to talk about or chatter rather of the speech at the United Nations in westchester she asked why is the word feminism because saying saying becoming such an uncomfortable one which was interesting because i had the framing of her speech aimed at making the word feminism much more comfortable. And it got me thinking about why we should expect in this day and age for feminism to be comforting for that conversation to be somehow soothing or reassuring or designed to not alienate people and i think thats a tension that feminists and the feminist movement and all its various incarnations have been wrestling with both within itself and among its various factions and strands as well as enter generationally and also with the wider public. And then i thought about while she kind of invokes the whole trope of harry potter and she is an interesting pop cultural position because she is a girl and a child and yet shes also this emerging woman and we are watching her. She defines herself in life and on the screen for us and i thought back to my First Encounter with the language of feminism or with maybe the ideology of feminism. I dont really think they had a name for it back then. I remember when i was in eighth grade i had actually seen an ad in 17 magazine yes im beginning this talk about 17 magazine. Not a good way to start off for feminist lecture, so that was me and i saw an ad soliciting volunteer writers for a startup publication back then. It was actually on a real piece of paper. It was called the new girl times and they were asking for volunteers. It was a short publication in idoni banal that went on but they were asking for contributors to their inaugural issue and i was kind of abutting writer. I was working on my first at the time and starting to get into the world of what i thought was publishing. And i wrote and i got an introduction to the magazine on what it intended to be as a project. I was really struck by the syrupy language that it invoked and it was sort of a very, what i thought was attempt at making feminism palatable and appealing to the twain generation which was in the 1990s just emerging as a Consumer Group them. I wasnt thinking about all of this as i was 14 years old and looking at the introduction but something about it struck me as off. Then i went to my computer and i typed out an angry screed about why i was so offended that this publication had the audacity to call itself the new girl times was trying to do this cutesy thing taking womens issues and dumbing them down and making them sort of fun and carefree and 17 magazine like. So i published it and i did sort of like a mockup. I did sort of a sendup of the publication itself because i kind of took i was into cut and paste them because that was how you did scenes if anyone remembers those. Then you took a logo which was the New York Times logo and i replace the word girl so i had have this screen making fun of this publication and i was angry and then i sent it to the publishers, the publication and awaited her feedback. She wrote back with a single sentence and said i understand you wont be writing for us and i was upset about what you wrote. I think i felt a pang of embarrassment and then i was sort of like why did i do that. Thinking about it now i was a teen blowing off steam and i think i wanted to make a point about why feminism was silly then. Now that i look back at it is sort of strikes me as my First Encounter not just with feminism but the ambivalence that surrounds feminism and the internal conflict that is inherent in it especially in the way that people in my generation have inherited the movement and all of its political trappings and its language. And i think even though i was sort of denouncing this version of feminism that i thought was faux feminism at the same time claiming this for myself even though i didnt really know what i was doing. I wouldnt have called myself a feminist then. I can think of very few instances in my life so far which ive actively stood up and have had to claim that im a feminist for anything. So with that anecdote i just wanted to think about that and maybe it will help situate where we are and maybe get you guys thinking about where you are in terms of that will point that will point did you encounter feminism as an idea and in what ways have you wrestled with having to define it for yourself and to take ownership of that culture and that ideology. There is one thing that the book really shows, that there might be one feminism and every time feminist and feminism as a movement is set back as when there is one group attempting to have the parameter definition of what feminism is. Thats a historical question and the question of race and a question of sexual identity. Its a question of the way we conceive of the world of work and feminism is all of these things and yet it also needs to defined itself outside of that because in embodying all of those things its also asserting the fact that it cannot belong to any single one of those things. So moving away from the new girl times i just wanted to go back to sort of where we are in the contemporary feminist debate. I thought about contradictions that come up now that we see every day in the media. I went to quote cooper or recent essay in salon and she was weighing and on this sort of perennial internal debate about whether feminism is debt and i spend lots of time in the book and of course we all know feminism is not debt otherwise we wouldnt be talking about it. We would need this ritual cleansing every few months or years or so whether its better not. Britney cooper weighs in and she talks about race in feminism in a way that i thought was really trenchant. And she talked about the difference in the way black women and white women will conceptualize feminism in their mind and how they relate to it in their everyday lives. She says our feminism looks like an end to Police Repression and minority communities. Access to Public Schools that did neo. X. Tell our children for minor infractions and an end to the Prison Industrial Complex which locks up far too many of our men and women fracturing families and creating further economic burdens when their loved ones are released. We need comprehensive health care and access to abortion clinics but we also need a Robust Mental Health care system. Thats system. That can address long centuries of racist sexual emotional trauma. We need equal pay but we also need good jobs rather than being relegated to an endless cycle of lowwage work. Wide womens feminism centers around equality. Black womens feminism demands justice and there is a difference. One feminism focuses on the policies that will help them integrate into the existing american system. The other recognizes the fundamental flaws in the system and seeks its total transformation. I will leave it to you to figure out which side of that spectrum you find yourself hikind identifying with more and that is of course completely your choice in the question of where you are in life but i just wanted you to think about it as a spectrum. She is not forcing anyone to choose. Shes asking for an inclusive dialogue and she feels the more boys the other side is given that it often comes at the expense of the voices have long been dissed in franchise. Yes because they are women but also for various other reasons. We always dont always think of that and to be conscious of that is part of what it means to be feminist and to claim out for yourself. In the book professor six cobble writes the increased number of women at the top does not necessarily produce gains for wine at the bottom. There is no trickledown effect. If you think about what my podcasting colleague senator jaffe has said about the trickledown feminism which is that we believe in this new liberal laissezfaire mythology that there is a logic of social justice that naturally flows out of capitalism or that the free market will come up with most just solution. Thats not really anyones fault in particular. I think it comes from centuries that this is the way must be done and guerrilla change to occur there is this march of progress that every Single Institution has to go through whether its the economy or domestic life for law or systems of bias and subjugation. And thoughts to leave you with are these questions in complex that kept occurring as i was reading the book and all three of the sections that you wrote going through time and of course we should wonder why we keep coming back to these questions because they seem unresolvable after more than a century of feminism. One is protection for women versus absolute inequality. We saw this in the commission on the status of women and liebers social feminism and this constant tension between identity of treatment socalled not the same as actual equality and of course sexual equality equality not be the same as equity. This goes back to the question of what is justice. In the second question i wanted to leave you you with is how we prioritize rights. If we accept the fact that not everyone in the world is starting from the same place and that is why we need social movements of people can move from one place to another how do we triaged the struggles that we approach . Thats not to say we need to choose our battles all the time but how can we have them the closest in harmony with each other without forgetting about one of the expense of the other. So we have this between the suffragettes and abolitionists and now we have intergenerational complex of third wave in the next wave of feminism or whatever post them in this world we live in and of course it reflects on the global questions of not everything is proceeding on a timeline of economic progress and of course the progress of one country comes at the expense of another in many cases. Again is feminism whatever we do find it to be as we have often been told at least my generation has or is there a certain ideology of feminism and moral ethical ethical line that when you keep in mind as we build this movement did make a more diverse. So thats it. [applause] i just started needing reading glasses so when i look out here i will have to take them off and when i looked and in here ill have to put them on. I am Jennifer Baumgartner and first of all i want to thank you for making this book. Its meaningful and moving to me to have something that is scholarly that tells the story of people i know and that i i was apart of and writes a book that i wish i had had when i was learning about feminism. I feel like a cobbled together together assorted things because i was so hungry for the history and to see its synthesizer new ways for me to think is really invigorating. I feel like i have a really, i do think about feminism in general i shall a lot. It speaks to me and i think its because my mom was a feminist so really does feel generational to me. There was ms. On the coffee table and font saying you shouldnt be a cheerleader. There was this whole relationship when i was learning about feminism that was about a mom literally. I also think its a visibility issue. The most visible moments in the destabilized moments around 20th century feminism when people think about the feminist movement they think about the 60s and 70s are often people do. That was the greatest hits time of feminism and its often words taught even. All the important stuff was done correctly 50 years ago and what are you doing. Thats how experienced it and im sure i was projecting that it is self negating way but i remember feeling that way. Now i currently in addition to being a feminist iran these camps called a feminist camp. Everyday we go deep into a feminist issue. It could be frozen prison limited incarcerated or could be sex work. We have lots of meetings and on our first meeting we asked people how they came to feminism and maybe what their definition is. Its always fascinating but oftentimes people will times people will say is like a 25 year living with beyonce and everything going on right now my life and i will say i feel like was born at the wrong time. I wish i had been born when abortion was illegal and you couldnt get a job if you are women. You had to take valium on the time youre so depressed. I wish id been born then when it was clear what to do. I dont relate to that currently but i relate to that. When i first went to new york i worked at ms. Magazine and i remember feeling like i really missed out on the good stuff when people were really rebellious and revolutionary and they were doing important things. Every day their day was made up of meaningful work. Im never going to get that opportunity because of when i was born. I was just kind of grousing about that and how i wanted to be an actress. Because i was raised in Fargo North Dakota i will never get that opportunity. In a lot of ways handing off the volition to have a life that i wanted to have wanted to have to have the feminist life that i wanted to have for for someone else for someone most intimate. Its taken a long time and i think its something every generation struggles with to just be able to frame and understand the era that im a part of the community that im a part of it do something with them that its meaningful and to acknowledge when i have done that. It was hard for me to own my ideas. One of the reasons that manifest a is so steeped in relationship sometimes grumping about it and sometimes canonizing or cheerleading the second wave the reason i was so connected was i wasnt sure what it would mean to own what i was doing. Whats i love to have a definition of feminism that made sense to me . Was i allowed to have an opinion about abortion if i hadnt known a time when it was illegal or was i hopelessly narrow in my consciousness because i had never known that time quetta took a long time for me to figure out that i had specific points that could be useful by having been entitled to certain things. So i was making a little note before i came up here of all the things i had done professionally and i was realizing how connected they are to the second way. I grew up with ms. On the table as they say that i got to college and discovered feminism and i read all these books. I literally was the housewifes moment of truth. Thats me. You are in college and they dont have kids and dont do housework but i felt deeply the angst and i felt deeply the frustration and unfairness but i think i was kind of putting a square peg i