i want you also to note that at the end of the session 10 or 15 minutes before the end we will be taking questions from the audience. there is a microphone set up in one of the isles and if you are immobile reach her hand and we the mic to you. let me start with myra macpherson. she is an author and a veteran journalist. she has had many years of the "washington post" writing for the paper's legendary style section. she has interviewed serial killers, celebrities, international leaders like cuba's fidel castro and when she was in and then she interviewed president kennedy. >> i was four. >> she wrote for the post on vietnam veterans and led her to write her groundbreaking book -- groundbreaking book long time passing vietnam and the junta generation one of the first books about the first to examine the insidious problem of ptsd. in 2006 she wrote all governments lie, the life and times of rebel journalist i have stoned and she has also delved into intimate topics and she came to live out loud and inspiring family journey through illness loss and grief. mcpherson witnessed the last three as a young woman's life who died of breast cancer. her new book is "the scarlet sisters", sex, suffrage and scandal in the gilded age. it's a biography of a proto-feminist victoria woodhall and her sister tennessee laflin his escapades in the 1870might shock even the most liberated contemporary women. as rags to riches pair were born into poverty. they went into the family snake oil. literally before breaking free of their parents and moving to new york where they became stop roker's, freelove advocates, suffrage ads and newspaper publishers. and if you think barack obama and hillary clinton are political pioneers consider this victoria woodhall was the first woman to be nominated for president in 1872. her running mate, frederick douglass. m.g. lord as a journalist cultural critic and highly-regarded teacher in this professional writing program. for many years she was a syndicated political cartoonist and columnist based at newsday and is a regular contributor to "the new york times" book review its arts and leisure section and numerous other national outlets. she is the author of astroturf, the private life of rocket science a family memoir about cold war aerospace culture. she became a true literary celebrity after she wrote the groundbreaking forever unauthorized biography of a real doll. which examined how a fantastically sexual doll that was inspired by a jokey knickknack came to hold meaning for so many american girls pray she argues that barbie was invented by women to teach girls for better or worse what was expected of them and now she has turned her critics days to another curvy american icon in her new book "the accidental feminist" how elizabetelizabet h taylor raised our consciousness and we were too distracted by her beauty to notice. here she argues that taylor was more than a fine actress. she was an unwitting role model for feminist causes and ideals. whether posing as a boy to write national velvet, as an unwed mother in the sandpiper for the uzi unhappy academic wife in who's afraid of virginia woolf. this was all of course long before she was the first lumley celebrity voice to take up the fight against aids. i think i also need to note m.g. that you are cowriting for an opera commissioned by the l.a. opera about the 110 freeway on its 70th anniversary. [laughter] that's talent. >> that project is creeping along. nancy is an author historian and expert and by amending american politics. she is topical science at columbia binghamton university calloused a long beach and is currently teaching a course on women in american politics at occidental college. she has also been a visiting scholar at the ucla center for the study women and the ucla institute for research on labor and employment. her books include the reconstruction of american liberalism 1865 to 1914 and the 1990s, a social history. professor cohen has written essays for the guardian the new republic the "l.a. times" playboy and "rolling stone." she is the kind of source every political journalist or talkshow needs in their rolodex and i count myself among those who can count on her for comments that are always right on the money. in her new book "delirium" politics of sex in america professor cohen analyzes the counterrevolution that was unleashed by the sexual revolution and its persistent influence on politics. she explores why and how the christian life has willed that such an extraordinary influence over the debate on issues like sexual freedom,, feminism contraception, abortion and of course the fights and battles still rage on. the sexual counterrevolution chair gates has been going on for more than 40 years thanks to a small politically sophisticated minority. it is no coincidence she writes that the politics of sex women's rights and marriage has erupted at the very moment when the gop is further to the right than any political party in american history since the time of slavery. so we have come a long way, baby. of course most of us aren't smoking anymore, at least not cigarettes. i live in venice beach so -- taken together your books present a wonderful chronology of the history of american feminism starting in the late 19th century with a stop in the middle of the last century and examination of what is happening now. it's fascinating to me that each generation fights essentially the same battle. some things never change. we are still fighting about equal pay, portable to care the balance between work and home life, whether women can do everything that man can do and now we are discussing the battlefield instead of the racetrack. women are still dismissed as jezebel's or for claiming their sexuality by two working if amas. and intent on making impossible to get an abortion even of course if it's legal so i wonder if each of you could start us off by giving a short two to four minute explanation of what exactly inspired you to write your book and let's just go in order starting with my rep. >> i always hate starting first. before he do that since you have really covered so much i want to quote to close and have you imagine where it came from. one is the love affair of the community should be left for the people to regulate themselves instead of trusting to legislation to regulate them. this is not some activist talking about the defense of marriage act. this was woodhall in 19 -- 1871. this was a time when men had total power. there was nothing a woman could do on her own but these two absolute managed to do it and the other one which is again topical is put a woman on trial for anything is considered as a legitimate part of the defense to make the most searching inquiry into her sexual morality. this is not someone currently talking about the problems of rape and domestic islands and being able to get a fair trial. it was teddy back in 1871. the reason i got involved with the sisters never thinking they would be so rip and read out of the front page, they worked for equal pay for equal work and we saw what happened this last week. the reason i went into it was because, precisely because in 2008 everybody was talking about the possible wonder team of hillary clinton and obama. i started reading this tiny little squib has said it's been done before with virginia woodhall and frederick douglass. i was just astonished because i had known of what i'll but didn't know they were that progressive and then i started reading about her incredible sister and found out how they pull themselves out of absolute fraud. they were fraudulent fortunetellers and became not only the richest but the most famous women in america that time and i will tell you more about that later. >> tell us how you got the idea for your book and why you decided to write his m.g.. >> i never thought i would write a book about elizabeth taylor. my last book was about the jet propulsion laboratory. [laughter] i had mostly been writing science articles but what happened was i found myself stuck in a vacation house in palm springs with a bunch of children ,-com,-com ma gen x, jen why. they didn't know who elizabeth taylor was. they really had no idea. gen x, gen x knew her only through joan rivers appalling fat jokes through the 1980s, you know more than -- more chins than a chinese phone book. and jen why, jen why knew she had some vague connection to film but mostly they knew her as the person she was in later life and aids philanthropist and a leader in that way. stuck in his house the only thing we had for entertainment as box sets of elizabeth taylor movies. so we thought all right it will be a camping night and we started watching in chronological order and we were absolutely blown away. not just by the quality of her performances but why the unrelenting feminist messages of her movies. in national velvet her character alpha brown age 12 challenges gender discrimination. she's excluded from important horserace because of her gender. she poses as a male jockeys and wins, exposing the pure bigotry of the exclusion of women. her next big one, a place in the sun, 1951 is an abortion rights movie. it's an adaptation of theodore dreiser's an american tragedy. i will have an opportunity to elaborate on this more but basically no pregnant mistress, no american tragedy. butterfield eight is a movie about a woman having a right to her own body not adhering to the conventions of 50s era marriage where a woman was a possession either owned by a man as a spouse or rented as a. she writes no sale in lipstick on the mirror of her married lover's bedroom. and even who is afraid of virginia bluff is very much about what happens to a woman and in fact both a man and a woman locked into a marriage where the only way the woman can express herself is through her husband's career or children and her husband is unsuccessful when she can't have children. so i was amazed by this onslaught and i won't yap too long but i wanted to make sure that my friends and i, my infantile friends and i weren't projecting 21st century ideas on timid 20th century material so i started looking in the academy of motion picture arts and sciences here at the library and what i latched onto, just a little bit briefly of the content of american movies between 1934 in 1936 was entirely controlled by the production administration. they held sway over every word in those movies and all the things that my friends and i had seen in the movies, the censors had seen and tried to grind them out. the scene in which the shelley winters character, not the elizabeth taylor character asked for an abortion had to be written about 12 times and to a degree these actors had to communicate through telepathy. but suffice it to say that my suspicions were buttressed by the paper trail left by the censors and the combination of those two things were what led me to produce the book. >> thank you. nancy. >> so, one day when hillary clinton was making her first run for the presidency i had an epiphany. i was going through some of those typical women things, balancing work, balancing my kids and i thought you know we have experienced some of the biggest transformations in world history in the last 50 years, the revolutions in gender, in sexuality and freedom. and i thought you know maybe there is a connection between our political "delirium" and this revolution that amended the most intimate relations that we all have. and so i jotted down this line, perhaps the pill hadn't been invented. american politics would be very different today and honestly i thought it was a literary device kind of metaphorical and not literally true and then the week that the book came out in 2012 as many of you probably remember the republicans convened an all-male panel to debate birth control including at least one celibate. thanks republicans, thanks for the books promotion. i really appreciated it. anyway so that is my look looking at the last 40 years of our history to see what i call the sexual counterrevolution has been driving our dysfunction, driving our polarization, driving our insanity and you know as robin mentioned the real reason for this is that the republican party has been captured by a group of sexual fundamentalists who honestly believe that women's rights, civil rights in the sexual revolution or a mortal threat to american civilization and they have been latently acting on these views. i'm not in any sense saying that every part republicans like this. it has to do with the factions within the party but part of it is it's not just republicans. it was democrats and liberals also do misinterpreted public opinion, over react did two election losses and ran scared and allowed a lot of this turning back the clock to happen. i do think we are seeing a shift in that but there is a lot of ground to make up after these 40 years of rolling back these rights for. >> mayra let me start by asking a question. you immerse yourself in the 19th and early 20th centuries. as feminism even a word that inclined at that point? >> no, and in fact i find it kind of upsetting when i see somebody calling susan. >> anthony a feminist because she was so urgently wanting only the vote. she was a single-minded personal she wanted was a vote and elizabeth cady stanton who was really quite and you wouldn't know it to look at her. she had this love affair so she was right into the free love movement. all the rest of the subjects were aghast that the sisters could go on and such feminist ways. they were trying to keep it just on the vote in the sisters said hey if all we do is reelect the same corrupt and white males to get the vote, they were unbelievably ahead of their time. when you are talking about the women and the flight that same fight was going on and is identical in the mid-19th century with the religious right and the sisters were so far dance. the man who is running with grants wanted to put god in the constitution and they said we are not sure he wants to be in the constitution. and those other two along with him. they were incredibly upfront about this but they fought these clergy and they fought -- a woman's worst enemy was a gynecologist. they were all anti-contraception. they were all just fiercely involved in this and one of the few joys, and i mean few of being older is that i covered everything you were taught about. i covered gloria steinem and i covered the whole movement. we saw the backlash and we saw it with phyllis schlafly at the time. she was able to convince women that if you have the equal rights amendment they would end up having to lose their husbands the husband had to pay alimony and she said we would have to have unisex bathrooms which made me wonder she was on a plane. [laughter] you know and i debated her and she was there to protect the rights of the unborn child. i said how many of your friends will adopt a black baby? that's not the point. i said yes it is. we still have these real big fights but what i really wanted to say about this religious movement is today and i'm sure you covered it because you are so smart the money is there. you follow the money. the coat druthers and everybody else. the tea party for us is the gift that keeps on giving because we can ice fight back at it. although women's, i'm being tweeting everybody. on the internet you have all these women writing, every single one. as soon as the koch brothers do something they rattle it back and and we have to fight the money. windy davis, i have covered texas politics. god forbid you should ever go there but anyway. [laughter] it's just horrible and they have, with the most to crony and and -- draconian abortion law. the women are my heroes because they took such unbelievable chances. i will stop now but i won't talk about when they were put in jail and arrested for obscenity when they blew the whistle on and reward beecher's adulterouadulterou s affair. >> i just want to jump in here on a question of where they feminist. coincidently feminism was discovered in america 100 years ago this month. century magazine wrote feminism is on everyone's tongue. it's in the germ of our women. we must define it. we must understand it and what feminism was, it was imported from the french by greenwich village bohemians. to me it was many ways against the susan. >> anthony type of what they call the woman movement. we want to distinguish ourselves. they fought for legal birth control which wasn't legal at the time. it was season -- censorship. people were put in jail for mailing information about birth control and i agreed with the woodhall sisters who were are amazing you guys. i've been waiting for a new biography about these women so thank you. they were audacious. they struck people as kind of charting a new human sex, leaving behind the moralism the sanctimoniousness of women. if you look at someone like liz taylor and you think about how the very nature of what women are to be, not just rolls, it's no wonder that we have seen such resistance to accepting these changes. thousands of years of these roles for women that in the space of a half a century were completely changed. personally i look at this as the glass half empty. i think we are in the cusp of more amazing changes and we have the feminist movement to thank for it but it's also these values are now common sense throughout america and we have one. >> i also want you to address -. >> the glass half-empty business, i'm glad you mentioned last because that was one of the things that made the women's movement complicated in the early part of the 20th century. it was so closely linked with the temperance movement because men would get drunk and beat up their wives. and the separating of these movements i think was very important. >> in some ways elizabeth taylor among other things she was one of the first three -- [inaudible] >> i don't think the vatican was writing on it. it wasn't like some priest chatting privately in a courtyard to is the official radio station in the weekly newspaper. >> the she had affected his response to that that's in your bucket i'm trying to remember what she said. >> she asked if she could see the pope. i think she got her revenge with an underappreciated movie called the sandpiper. we have actually gone beyond the whole issue of abortion and she makes a the decision to have a child out of wedlock. i mean really she is the sort of emblem. she is openly, the characters openly atheistic and because of her physical appearance very much linked to the ancient goddess cults. she manages to destroy the faith of the marriage of a protestant which is about as close as you are going get to a high church episcopalian played by burton. it's a marvelous movie. it was not reviewed at the time i think because there were such big stars. one of things i usually like when i give a talk like this is you have to believe me but it's often more effective when i can show a clip from the film and you see it and air at yourself and you don't have to trust me which may be an obstacle for some of you. >> not at all. i wanted to ask you because she was worried about 1942 -- she was born in 1932 so she came of age basically during world war ii so she was very much of the cohort of women who move through life, the second wave of feminism became controversial and changes were made etc.. did elizabeth taylor in her own life ever consider herself a feminist, ever talk about feminism or show any kind of awareness that these rules were in fact emblematic of the larger changes in the culture? >> i think the fascinating thing about elizabeth is that direct terse on things in her that only much later life would she be able to identify and herself. these qualities that you could be beautiful and you could be very strong. she didn't have much of an education. she was a contract player at mgm from the age of 12 on. she was educated at the little red schoolhouse. she didn't go to college but she learned the things that she came to know by working with some of the best directors in america. her character in giant leslie benedict, don't know if you you're familiar with this movie. speak it was a little synopsis. >> you should see it immediately. i think you would probably see it on tmc. it's in adaptation of and edna ferber model about a woman from the east coast to mary's -- i'm searching for you. rock hudson is a racist oaf and mistreats the mexicans because they are not u.s. mexicans --. >> workers on this giant cattle ranch in texas. this character wesley is extraordinarily concerned with social justice. her husband tells her that she can't visit the community of mexican workers and she defies him. she visits anyway and she farmed sick child there. instead of pushing that child away the way that some people might she embraces the child and she forces the physician who only tended the euro-american ranching community to address, to make that child well. to me it almost seems like in later life after she got sober, she became leslie benedict. all of her friends who were sick and many people in hollywood out of fear or pushing them away, she embraced them. i have a long interview in the book with michael godley who was rock hudson's doctor and initially identified the aids virus in medical journals. and he kind of agreed with this analogy of leslie benedict because it wasn't just raising money. you know it was showing -- it was forcing the mainstream community to acknowledge both the humanity and the suffering of the people on the margins. >> can i ask a question? my feeling is that the real feminist and all of that ferber was an intensely feminist woman and she wrote the book. suddenly last summer was written by tennessee williams. in other words, if one little anecdote about elizabeth taylor but the second thing i'm asking is do you feel that she picked these roles? the writing and the background and the concept had nothing to do with her. but i knew her when she was married to senator warner. >> you not a bright light. >> let me tell you. let me tell you. when she sat there and she said i never knew senators could he so dull. [laughter] >> apparently she had fried chicken and bourbon as a distraction. >> mostly the bourbon. >> and the joan rivers jokes. i once asked this question nancy. seems like women get liberated and i'm a braided and liberated again. they went to work in droves during world war ii. the men came home and the women were forced back into the home in this image of a blissful 1950s housewife too cold for a decade and a half until bread -- betty friedan came along with "the feminine mystique". do we have a wrong impression about feminism has evolved order is there always a backlash? you said we won but there is a switchback all the time now. in a lot of places like texas, if you are poor young woman who needs an abortion. >> they managed to close every planned parenthood clinic in mississippi. >> so let me clarify when i say one. i think the values of gender equality, civil rights, equal civil rights for all women, for people of all sexual orientation mainstream america. if you look at poland, only 7% of americans don't support the idea that women should have equal political social and economic rights as men. marriages ,-com,-com ma polling at about 60% now. but just because we live in a democracy and most everybody agrees was something for a supermajority agrees with it doesn't mean that's what the policy is. this is about public sex. what i write about is how a very small group of reactionaries through taking politics very seriously by joining school boards and getting involved at the precinct level, i worked over it period of 20 years to take over the republican party to the sense that even moderates in the republican party have to vote the way -- there was a vote on equal pay this weekend all for republican women senators voted against that plot. this is a very moderate bill. one of those women is kind of a strong antiabortion right-wing senator. the other three are relatively moderate but it has become a question of party loyalty ,-com,-com ma making it through the primaries that they have to vote with the tea party which is really the christian right rebranded. one of the things is the question about the waves of feminism honestly there was a point when feminism became much more insures rule questions, questions of sexual violence very important but at the time feminism started kind of leaving electoral politics behind women who i write about what the founder of the men who want to be women who was fighting against the equal rights amendment who hid feminist books under her bed sober nieces wouldn't see the pornography. i think it was the female section that she didn't want them to see. anyway these people decided we are going to get involved in the republican party so while party democrats were kind of running scared about the issues of and a lot of feminists had turned their backs on electoral politics, the other side, the tiny minority that really does not support women's equality in the sense that i think most people in this room think about it, day one and a political party. what i am saying is we had one in the battle of public opinion and if we take that next step in to politics we will win in politics. but until we match our kind of politics with our opinion we are going to keep seeing the public policy going backward. >> look at the women who are running today. grimes is running against mcconnell. mcconnell has gotten so much more money and there is the old cliché -- i have covered five presidential campaigns in their zeal to say about someone who wasn't very smart and he was an empty suit. mcconnell does this big where he calls her an empty dress. he is practically bulletproof because he has this hold and he's an incumbent. the same thing with windy davis. they are smart wonderful women running but until you can get the backing and the money it's not going to work. the longest running woman in congress said to me, 20 senators is not enough. we have to have, if we are 50% of the society we have to have 50 women senators and then we will start seeing some top-down changes. but i just think we have to be very realistic about what the public wants were not. it's the same thing with the nra. many people don't inc. we should have guns but the nra keeps, both democrats and republicans reelected over and over again. we have to follow the money and that is what we have to do more of. >> you want to add to that? nancy mentioned polling and it made me think of my students because my millennial students in a very progressive attitudes on most social issues but i think they need to be made aware that the things that they take for granted can be taken away. >> do you think that's a function of them being in california in a rut relatively liberal bubble or being young? >> had been friends since they take abortion rights for granted. i like showing up, i like assigning a place in the sun so they can see the absolute horror of what a worldwide without roe v. wade. you would be surprised how much more energetically political they become when they see what it looks like when the other side prevails. >> i covered abortion when it was illegal in 1969 and i can tell you the coathanger pictures, all of that, people dying with total reality and i agree with you totally that younger people can't imagine having that ever happen again. >> nancy you write in your book about how the christian right has been energized by women with phyllis schlafly and others and so i wonder if i throw out a sentence i wonder if each of you could respond to it started with nancy. women are sometimes women's own worst enemies. >> i and first-year? i really don't think we should expect all women to agree so i strongly oppose the politics of these people i called sexual fundamentalists. they have a worldview that comes from basically a fundamentalist reading of their religion whether its orthodox catholic or evangelical protestantism. it's not that they are anti- woman or they their misogynist. they believe that women's proper role is first as a mother and a wife. you have ones like sarah palin who is like if you can cover the mother and wife and then you can also be vice president, great but it's always premised on this is the god-given role of women. now that's their view and i think if we want to understanunderstand what this political fight is about we have do you know understand their view and i guess i would say to millennials eyes see it fairly politically motivated. there was apparently a stampede to get into c. heller hudson at ucla. literally a stampede. all the students were telling me about it and there were six they they -- amazing excitement about the idea of the first woman president and by the way that is the sequel to this book so keep an eye out for that in 2015. so i think if we can have a discussion with these young people about this is what is motivating then they get to decide. do we like most women and the millennial generation think that women and men should have equal roles and we would like to see men having more opportunity to be with their kids and men are struggling also with more family balance. i think that's where they are or do they want to share this view that there is a god-given role for men and women and that is what we must follow through our lives? i think we win by having a debate. >> what do you think? are women women's own worst and enemy m.g.? >> in responding to this find myself going back to forever barbie which after 20 years is still in print. >> congratulation. >> exact way. still taught in four required courses at the cinema school here. of course it has to do with concepts of gendering and marketing. and also it follows me around. in "the new york times" review of the elizabeth taylor buck i got all excited at the beginning of the review. tolstoy twain and melville and then as it developed it came out that i'm the herman melville of midcentury sex icons. [laughter] but what nancy was saying about the idea of a woman having to be a mother first and foremost i think we have to give a tiny bit of credit to that propulsive 11.5-inch plastic doll which was a revolutionary toy, barbie in 1959 when it came out. highly sexualized, no husband and from the get-go or finale of for a career. harvey was the antithesis of the dolls, the baby dolls that taught little girls to nurture and be a mother. it was all about rejecting your idealized adult life onto a grown woman and not nurturing a baby. what is very similar in fact to something like helen gurley brown's sex and the single girl which was proto-feminist and despite prose was very much an argument for women's sexual and financial autonomy. this thing creepy though it may be to plant the idea and i'm not sure if you could stand on her own 2 feet but she could wobble defiantly on her own 2 feet without being held up by a man. [laughter] >> i had a totally different feeling about barbie. i didn't want my daughter to even have her. i thought she was antifeminist frankly put on this business about women being their own worst enemy, it was major with his sisters. as i said they wrote this scandalous article about henry ward beecher having an affair and as victoria said he speaks to 16 of his mistresses that every sunday in church. they were put in jail by anthony comstock. from les miserables, he put them back and over and over again for what was a really small offense and absolutely joining that of course are the tube teacher sisters who wrote. rowed uncle tom's cabin and call them tramps and and prostitutes by catherine and this is very funny to me. catherine was the martha stewart everyday. she supposedly told you had to be a house maker, how to be a good mother, the many steps to ironing her husband's shirts and she was an old spinster. she had never been married. she didn't know anything she was writing about. she never had children. she joined something like 5000 women petitioning against the vote at the very same time when the others were. so there was always that kind of standoff i think between two different -- sometimes that religious connotation but also it was how dare you be so incredibly audacious? this comstock the bad thing about what the sisters were able to do is sit turned around and made him a hero. he was anthony comstock ,-com,-com ma sort of a self made by star. he saw sin and everything. he saw sin and medical looks. >> like kenneth star? >> exactly, exact date and everything else. there were some cartoons made of him and one was this one where he is standing up with this woman next to him and looking at the judge and he says your honoe birth to a baby. [laughter] but that was a situation where he happened to make -- going back to your point he got the federal law that made up sanity tougher and was against everything, all the best writers wrote, things against walt whitman and against george bernard shaw and you chased margaret sanger out of the country and forced a major abortionist at commit suicide. he stayed in our life until the 1920s so when you talk about the anti-movement to the women there i think has been a steady backlash both male and female. we have to remember and i'm sure it's in your book that the women's movement in the 60s started because the antiwar movement males were just leaving them out. they were not letting them run anything and one of them said i got mad when tom hayden got off the plane and handed me his dirty laundry and say clean it create so we have had this back and forth for a long time. >> before we take questions i do want to ask you a very current question that may not seem important but i think it does give us something interesting in the culture. you know cheryl sandberg of facebook has launched his campaign with the girl scouts head to ban the word bossy as an adjective that is used for girls i'm really curious whether you think this is an orwellian attack on language? >> what about -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> i actually think we should embrace it. we need to reevaluate it. i think it was a social media stumble. >> how about you m.g. quakes do have an opinion about that? >> where does tina fey weigh in on this? >> bossi pants. >> i would like her opinion. >> okay, maybe we should tweet her and see if she will answer. >> unbelievably, well it's not unbelievaunbelieva ble, anything is believable but the words i'm just beginning to shape this up for a speech i have to give on sexism in politics. the twisting of the words, a man is ambitious, great. a woman is ambitious, you know. you can take the simplest word and put a connotation on it and it goes on and on. i expect to see the words strident, at some point in hillary's speech. it's there. >> i want to urge anybody who has a question, the microphone is over here. >> i also feel that women who have more than one cat take a severe beating in this culture. [laughter] i myself have endured it and i would like to speak out against that terrible prejudice. [laughter] [applause] >> you especially if they are single. >> exactly. go ahead. >> hi. i write for revolution newspaper and i have a comment and a question. actually today is a national day of emergency action on abortion and their approach is going on across the country this afternoon. we have to confront, and i think it's a poisonous idea that even to explain what you meant it tape or found disagreement if you look at both in people's thinking and in the laws. women around the world are being hurled backwards but also in this country the last three years, 200 restrictions against abortion, 47,000 women die every year around the world from illegal self induced abortions and then the mainstreaming of pornography, 11 years old is the eight average age the boys watch. >> do you have a question? >> i said i have a comment and a question. people don't know this. >> it's okay. we want to hear your question. >> including my generation. >> i think it's great hearing you. keep coming. i wish there were more of your code generation in the audience to hear it. let's give somebody megaphone. >> i have one. [laughter] i will frame a question i will try to be brief. i ultimately think it will take a different system to end pornography and end patriarchy and the violent degradation and enslavement of women around the world. we can talk about that but we do need mass resistance but i did want to ask, the idea that hillary who is always been a war criminal decides is going to do anything. what we should rely on the is the democrats is part of what is poisoned and hamstrung and paralyzed my generation and younger and i do think people have to get out in the streets and fight. that is the lesson from previous generations. >> the women i wrote about, they were girls at the time. they happen to be beautiful which helped enormously. they had meant it would do anything in the world for them but they pick played the only game possible and the power game was a male. she got up and gave his famous speech the first woman to address congress and she said if they don't go with us as revolution and the whole hall burst out. there are those moments and there are all those people who will do it but i've been very concerned about what i consider complacency of women in your age group. they can have it all. i was talking to buy 13 your granddaughter yesterday and she said oh my friend once to be a doctor and i think i'm i want to be a lawyer. it's ingrained in them that they don't have to fight for much. >> we did go down to mississippi and a lot of women currently are self inducing abortions. even on campuses and in the high schools. there is that happening now. >> have a question based on her statement. when you call it a revolution what do you interpret that to mean and do you think that's a good idea lacks any of you. >> i am a historian by training. i've studied a lot of revolutions. i think we have learned that some revolutions in history work i do not live in new revolutionary age and i don't think we need a revolution to accomplish a lot of what needs to happen in the united states, plain and simple. >> other to? >> what does the word actually means? my concept is i keep repeating is a revolution within. there just got to be more women elected. that changes things. even though you mentioned those for i was talking to one of the women senators and she said we work across the aisle. we were the ones who got congress to not have the government, not full that the government. the women actually did it and work together. i feel, unlike your thought and i understand your idea of where hillary has trimmed in many ways that i don't find comfortable but i think she would be forced if she were the first woman president to be with women's issues at least. >> iselin have the energy for a revolution anymore. i think it has to be in the hands of your generation. i don't think i have enough for that. [laughter] >> here, europe. >> this is my dilemma. i'm a veteran and i'm 70 years old. i totally appreciate the way you feel. the problem is this. i'm not how much longer i have. i could probably vote for hillary even though i have a lot of reservations about her because before i die i would really like to see a woman president. [applause] >> do any of you think that there could be a female candidate for president who is not severely compromised? >> i think there is one. elizabeth warren. elizabeth warren. >> you are welcome to get up and take the mic if you want to talk about it. >> i live in washington d.c. and i've been told and muscle is too strong of a word but -- to see whether hillary runs or not. >> of clare and her wood from house of cards were not a fictional character i don't know whether i would want her in the white house but i'll bet she could get there. >> that's what i mean by severely compromised. >> she would a few people along the way. >> finally i would like to return to a hoary question and i spell that was then h and not w. eagerly women who came to age in the 70s and before it never occurred to them that the word feminists had negative connotations, that was something they would be a uncomfortable identifying themselves as though you are in a classroom and you were in a classroom too. when you care i'm not a feminist what is your reaction to? do you have a rant or a. >> a or anything like that? >> i find him a place in the sun. they have to do a report on it. >> it's interesting when you say i'm not a feminist but back in the 70s is that i wanted to go out into lou koller work because one of the feelings i have eyes felt and talk to gloria steinem about is it was an upper-class upper-class movement and the middle-class movement as a bus during the victorian period math. these sisters came. they were from total trash and so they were looked at -- to associate with them if you are middle you are middle-class suffragist was a problem so i said i want to go out so into detroit and started interviewinterviewing them. in those days it wasn't i'm not a feminist but it was i'm not a women's liberation is. i'm not one of those women slippers. and i kept hearing this so i started talking to some of them. a woman said you know my foreman said if i wore tighter t-shirts i would get a better job so i reported him.

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