Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone to the 32nd annual printers row with fast. I would like to give a specialrs thank you to the sponsors. Social media plug, the theme is whats your course encourage everyone to share the stories they hear this weekend on twitter, instead grant facebook using the hash tag prl16. You can download the app where you will find all of the chicago tribunes content and discounted books for subscribers and the complete schedule. You will get 5 off the membership. Todays broadcast is being broadcast on cspan2 book tv. When the time comes, please line up at the microphones of the audience can hear the questions you have. And the last thing before wen os start, please silence your cell phone and turn off the flash is how many cameras you have. With that, we are pleased to welcome chicagos podcast and todays moderator, gretta johnson. [applause] thanks to all of you for day, coming. I am verging on the likeness thabutits too hot, so good foru for choosing a c. My name is gretta and im the host of a podcast called nerdette. It can be anything fro anythingr calculus just as easily as for could example, feminism. The cspan title of the discussion is discussion on women, which i think is great because we are all automatically qualified to be on the stage regardless anything else we do in our lives. Of i thought if each of you has a different approach to feminismsm in your books do you want to go down the line and talk a little bit about what you are working on and why. 2015 i released an article this past february and its very loosely based on her life and inspired by the life of ivan b. A wells barnett who was a suffragist that fought for civil rights and had her own newspaper and editor or journalist most known for the fact she was heryd own crusader during her lifetime. My novel is of the young wife of a girl from jim crow south who moves to the west and start her own paper in the distric distrif Kansas City Missouri in the First Quarter of this century and never once used the term feminism in my book. However when you read about the action of her partner she launches the newspaper clearly h belong to the tradition of the stranded offshoots of feminism which is the us to not only women but also black men and black children and its become clear in which they use the newspaper for the democratic rights. Certainly they identify with the term of black feminism. [applause] i wrote a memoir called shrill that came out a couplee thanks weeks ago. Very perso is a personal approachablerif feminism on the experience of growing up as a big girl and a big woman where i felt that i was taught and conditionedmake f aggressively to make myselfall n small physically in my presence and opinions and so the book is about growing out of that and figuring out how to live in my body and personality. The way they are now is not to shape and mold and shrink them for these externally applied e expectations for a million reasons because they are based on capitalism. Theres a lot of people making fun of th the fact its our jobo be small and compliant. My mid i i discussed that i was living my life in the future who would eventually succeed and then i could have a real life. So the book is about coming to that moment and pushing through to say this is my body and that may never change. I have to be okay with that. Be what else i havbottles i have as nothing wrong with being me. So thats the arc of the book. That sounded very grim but it also deals with other stuff that i harp about. All of the fun things. [applause]ca traister, and i i wrote a book called off a single ladies. Its interesting we have totally different genres. My book is a nonfiction look that can mean a whole different thing and i am a journalist and i write about politics. I intended this book to be aboun the swiftly expanding population of women who are delaying or forgoing the traditional hetero marriage thats exploded over the past few decades. When i started doing the research on the buck i realized there was a fascinating history in the United States all around race and class and social the bo movements so the book wound up being a bigger project and itss a mishmash of the way that we need to look at the social policies in which americans are living now in the lives and also a look at the history living independently and what happened in areas when they did waser independently of marriage and there is a friend o thread of mn story in there, too mac but its a minor thread. [applause] i have to say i am super excitet to talk with you about all the things. I definitely want to talk about hillary because it was a big week and i feel like you will have an insight about that having written big girls dont cry. But i thought i would start with asking you how your relationship with feminism has changed over your life. Partly i ask because i guess im going to admit i wouldnt call myself a feminist even five i. Years ago. E feel so [inaudible] that makes me feel so much better. For me i thought it admitted that there was an imbalance that i kind of just refused to acknowledge. And its funny looking back because thats from the place of privilege that ive looked through my mid20s and felt like for the most part i did have the same opportunities men did and i was treated fairly so whats the big difference. I dont know if it is reasonable to call post feminism because here we are i want to hear about are you . Another that is a term i go back and forth with and i want to say primarily its because i studied history as a graduate student and i would always consider historically what they did during the first wave of feminism when we look back at their lifes work we would contextualize this and i would look for contemporary analogy is. I struggle when im on the internet and im looking at the feminist conferences i have a problem with a lot of what i see. For example, i wont put anybody on blast but i was looking at a conference, one occurred in australia and one in india the footage i saw that occurred in australia for example did notex address the fact that there are very many that have too much to drink and think of it with a rifle to go hunt aborigines. They think its fun to hunt and find them, discard them. There was no dialogue about this. So we were exporting feminism and we are going into the land is still as having a sort of me approach. When i feel there is room you can be about your self. Writing is a form of activism. But i do think that we have a responsibility because we have exported to feminism to take on or at least address or give a voice to some of the struggles happening with women globally. C my same feeling applies to the n conference where there is aring. Movement if you hear an indian woman getting beat by her husband, the idea if you run over and ring the bell girly stuff that ma maybe for the nig. But we dont hear when they are in india speaking at the conference is even addressing the issues of Domestic Violence so it would seem to me its the aspect of the Real Movement thats largely missing and i think if you want to use the term as an adjective, thats fine but please if my voice is falling on your years and you ee one of these women ask your self what exactly are you doing to say i am a feminist and i want what he has. Its got to be bigger than that. [applause]ally har i tried really hard to think of feminism of something i do and not as i am aware that you can use the status and then you get a bunch of credit. Its still stigmatized and horrible. You are still treated horribly in certain circles if you say the word feminist. I totally agree there are huge gaps even in peoples global understanding in what women are facing in other places, and itey is easy. Of course i just wrote 300 pages out of my feeling. I am very conscious of those and worry about it a lot. Its a struggle, and i try to not just write about my feelings but to seek out other peoples viewpoints and make sure thatke im at least aware of my place in the world at the same time i think that personal narrative is powerful and i dont want to choose between campus rape or honor killings. Its important to address all of those things and its important for me to stay to some extent in my lane and not to those whose experiences i dont understand. Its an action. But in terms of my journey i was taught i went into it definitely buying into the stigma that it wasnt cool and boys wont like you if you are a feminist because they are annoying wet blankets like everything like to ruin everything. I grew up in a super progressivb household. I went into college like i dont know. Then the freshman year i had aa professor who said raise your hand if you are a feminist and then we were all like one girl that was cool and had a nose ring and then they went around the class shaming us individually saying you dont believe that you deserve equal rights . Yes but no one has asked me on a date. So i have some strikes againstsn me. De they had equal rights and the world is not a safe and just place the women. Since then, my understanding has broadened to understand that there are a lot of women of color that dont identify and its important to understand that, too ma. Was that too much flipflopping. I mostly stream everything but because of th the claimants that we arclimate thatwe are lig more televisionn. In laymens terms, feminism was given and a woman who wants to be equal to a man. It gets turned on its head because what does it mean, and you do have to add there is a very different picture when yous do that. When i consider the conversations that i had in the academy, i often cant get a higher salary and when i consider that africanamerican men the degree to which they are hunted by the police and there is a mass incarceration i fare better wanting to be equal in the community that looks very different. It needs to be expanded upon because its different based on your class and based on their race that definition fails us i dont think about men at all. [laughter] i was just curious. I think this is about a global takeover. The definitions that are generated are complex and far more nuanced. Im teaching it in the fall of northwestern and im just reading the fantastic book called shadowboxing. Its a very rigorous analysis you made me think of it again because you mentioned capitalism thats got me excited about reading the book because im going to get a lot from it because we are at war with capitalism let me tell you. The terms that you encounter in the academic approaches are more nuanced and rigorous then you would hear on a talk show. As far as briefly in terms of my own background and feminism, im totally ambivalent on the term. I wrote a piece many years ago about abandoning it for many years in part because it has come under valid critiques. Theyve come under so muchch attack from the right and are very threatened by gender equality and there are periods in recent history its been used to suggest all kinds of ugly things about women and we could start from scratch. I dont have a particular attachment to term. No, i i just think it is a term about feminism itself in the Womens Movement or a series of movements of all kinds of social movements in the history that have worked from all kinds of angles towards what i think of as the larger goal of increasing opportunity in addressing and bi injustice with interlocking and over as over intersecting. This is feminism, the Womens Movement. Its been the right ofion. Contradiction and a to suggest that its been unified in some way, it is meaning half the population has agitated for increased opportunity and greater access to the rights ane justice. Its half the population and they contain multitudes of the priorities of the expected experiences. There is never going to be one on Guerrilla Movement that serves women and so from thebe beginning of the movement thereve been fights. Its one of the things you see time we just got the example ing the primary election they dont like hillary and feminism is exploding. No, no. My positive spin on this is that its the cacophony and conflict that tells you the movement is healthy and it is continuing to move forward and fight battles. The unified Womens Movement wouldnt be doing as much good because there is no unified priority. So the story but its about to implode on itself because everybodys arguing about what we should be dealing with thats a sign that it is healthy as it always has been and is shifting with changing circumstances and. Challenges. So thats my take on some of the stuff. I was raised and a progressive household. My mother came of age just before the movement and she had been raised very conservative. Her political awakening had come and she got an advanced degree but she hadnt been brought to life by feminism in any way. My father also a very progressive, he would have said he of course married to a woman that made a bargain he did and believed in the intellectual equality of women that he never washed a dish in the relationship that was domestically and still is very traditional. My almost conservative on a fa farm. I was interested in high school i went to the march for womenss lives at the period i was comin of age it was like a deep freeze on the feminism. I went to school at northwestern and let me tell you you could basically go to the potluck and ask who are the feminists. No one we know. I was very interested in these things looking at the literature from the feminist perspective. I didnt know i wanted to be a journalist but the idea that i would find the professional athletic interests are about Power Dynamics and identity. I never imagined the world but there would be the professional outlet for that. Where i wa i took a job where i could write about things that interest me like in 2003 and 2004 which happens to be the kind we now refer to out of the 2004 election and i began to write journalism from this perspecti perspective. N mostly its been about learning. As a student i was looking at literature but i didnt take any of the classes. Its been a process of teaching myself about the history of alli of this stuff so thats how my perspective has changed. Ive been wrong so many times about it which is great because then i had to learn more about it. When you said you wanted to s put a positive spin, i would like to see more action in the feminist movement i was thinkinw today when i was watching the news and i saw the back page of the stafford daily and the massive protest and number of a signatures that they were able to galvanize, it occurred to me this probably wouldnt have happened without feminism. As for the positive spin we dont want to come down on the antifeminism. Its done a lot of good i justsu want more. I want to say the sentenc this t the judge handed down its absolute ludicrous. [applause] and al the fact that they are vocal is a wonderful thing and the same way feminism plays a part in the fact that when the female teachers sexually abuse their young male students thats also wrong and why men get much longer sentences. Lets stop calling and teachers having sex with their students in the calling of molestation and rape, what it is. So the culture is moving forward in feminism has played a major role. And thats what makes me even when i am critical of the aspects of feminism and at this point when i was a young person i couldnt imagine having a career in feminism and now its like there is a reasonable critique of the celebrity c feminism culture and a lot of it is totally valid of the empty calorie feminism. Lashon however, agreeing to with lashonda, if it also produces a population of young women and young men that are able to look at the world with the lens anddr interest in gender and power and one of the things ive been ho thinking about one thing i wish there was more of his others are too long. Part of the comparison getting back to your plaintive race and incarceration is the sentences we are handing down to African American men in particular and as long as we have this instance that has rightfully garnered our attention is very fair to say the sentence is too short and it might be worth looking at the excessive sentences we handed down to other people. Who we label the rapist and , guy that made a mistake. Its easy for people to call a black man a rapist and then while hes a kid thats a good swimmer and god drowned. Going back to the work that people do i know it seems frivolous to a lot of people communicating on the internet about these issues. I dont think that it is wholly without value. For example in my community this week in seattle we discovered that a person who was a fixture in the community, a person ive known for nearly a decade allegedly was exploiting it is a gray area whether it counts as rape or not but he was preying on young women and people have known about this for a long time but it was like individual voices and no one be peeved one woman and it took until right now when they finally found each other because you have things like finally bill cosby is going to trial anh finally we have just a little more Cultural Dialogue about what rape means and how it affects people and how we talk about it. I watched in real time these women he had been whispering about it trying to figure outig what to do i watched them find each other and other women circle around them and demand that they be heard. Thats a product of the internet and at the current moment. Its one case in one city, but its real. Something similar to that happened in chicago. They had an investigative piece about a wellknown member of the Theater Community who it turned out had been engaging in some super manipulative behavior anda i think even in the stanford case to your point that wouldnt that wou have happened without feminism and also without the internet. Internet. The letter the victim wrote, that blew up. That was like the most shared thing on my Facebook Page for years and then also the expansion of feminism as a profession, that letter it is the internet and also a reporter that has done an incredible because again now there is a profession and there was in the 70s, but for now because of nowf technology and the internet its a big profession you have publications that employ the reporters so you have someone like katie baker at buzz feed that has reported a series of incredible pieces about Sexual Assault and has earned the trust of people by today for the letter to publish. So they expanded feminisms current status and popularity. I think the efficacy of the internet cant be denied. I dont have issues with trolls but in his west can talk about that. [laughter]now, when i think about the women that have to content with them maybe more power to you, your voice is being heard and you were deemed powerful. They are trying to shut you down because you do have a voice so you should be celebrating. [laughter] you its true we know no one tries to start a fight with you unless you are being heard and you are threaten