this through everything off. it wreak havoc on my tenure clock, psyche coming general finances i will not go into the sob story my friends here know that but need this to say i do have to say i do have a wonderful colleague in the history department two as we speak is that they paid maternity leave i like to think my misery had something to do with it because i was not so quiet but i am not really over what happened to me as a pregnant person at the city university of new york am not sure i will never totally get over it but you do get to 8.one you are tired of failing pissed off and like a victim you want to do something productive for other people. right at about that stage whenever i would do whatever

the project would we would be something that we looked at women in a professional cold sure not with victim ology because you get done without how we can get we can change the agenda of the professional culture. . . ook in the

conversation with michele norris. [applause] >> this is such a treat for me because david and i are old friends. when we worked at "the washington post," you always knew when you wrote a particularly delicious piece of copy because david would send a little notes and i still remember that years later. this book was so wonderful to dive into. most people in this room have read much about barack obama, and in every chapter you learn new things about him but you

also learned much about this country. when i first talked to you about this it wasn't clear that your writing a biography so i want you to tell me as we began about the process, how you came to write this particular book. was it the but you actually planned to fight? >> i think it was probably a less ambitious book and maybe even more focused on the question of race and less biographical be it became clear the more it became a biography full-blown, and i fully expect 20 years from now or however many years from now some new robert carroll will come along and write a six volume biography with all of the requisite archives of the presidency and all the rest. that goes without saying. but in fact i saw you at the inauguration. there was a party for gwen ifill who had written the breakthrough about this generation of young or younger african-american

politicians, not just obama but cory booker and arthur davis and all the rest. and it was just germinating in my mind. i'd written the piece called the joshua generation for the new yorker, trying to get a handle on what had happened, which was an astonishing event just after the election. and started going to chicago as often as i could, which meant weekends and little bits of time here and there, and i had never attended writing a full-blown book while editing at the magazine. and it just became more and more and more interesting. the more i spoke to diesel acquaintances whether it was at harvard law school, chicago, hawaii, all of the obvious spots. >> you do much to fill and i don't want to save the blanks, but to fill in spaces in his own book because he has told us his own story, but you learn much more in researching this book. did you find it was difficult to

get people to open up and talk to you about this because it is one thing many of his friends and acquaintances have been regarded with his story. >> i didn't find it fantastically -- once you get into the political class, once you get into the area of people who are running campaigns and have resentments or vendettas or reason to stay quiet it becomes a tricky transaction and the word on background and okay on the quotes and all that kind of washington new york stuff comes into play. but going to chicago and talking to the former mates and community organizer or particularly women who worked with him in community -- there was no hesitation at all. it was fun. that's the kind of reporting i like best. and the whole transaction over off the record, on the record, and all the gradations in between. as tedious and also it becomes very tricky in terms of whether you are being told the truth or are being spun like a top.

>> there are a few people we meet along the way who really helped us develop a much firmer picture and i want to begin in hawaii if we can, because there was a friend stanley who you talk to extensively. >> stanley is the mother, not a common name for the woman and she won the name because of her father's grave disappointment that his daughter hadn't been otherwise. [laughter] eventually she went by anne peery i will call her anne so we will get confused because his name was, wait for it, stanley and she decided to be an anthropologist at a and particularly in the area of indonesian studies and java knees craftsman and the rest and she founded academic mentors at the university of hawaii who happened to be the granddaughter of john dewey, her name is allison dewey. u.s. about the difference between his memoir and

autobiography and this book. they are radically different. i think that a memoir and an autobiography is a story. it's the story we tell ourselves. they can be deeply researched. i know that you've been working on one. i think obama did research for his but it is highly shaped thing, literally shaped. he doesn't do the work of a reporter work history or archival work. he's doing personal work, literary work of self understanding. and his book has no politics in it whatsoever. his book ends when politics begins. it's the book of diprete political man although he may have had ambitions. but to go back to hawaii, the other big missing piece or one of the larger missing pieces in the autobiography is the mother. it's called quote code dreams from my father stopped quote and it's about in many ways somebody trying to do battle with, learn about, reconciled with a ghost,

and utterly missing father who leaves the household after infancy, at infancy, free appears for ten days when obama is a kid, disappears again. and obama cheers all kind of stories about him the way kids do but can't get his hands are bound him. and it is the big trauma of the book and there are three big sections to the book. it's a highly structured young man's literary attempt and it's a very good, but it's highly structured and the end of each of these three big sections, and this is not somebody we know to be in tears a lot, he ends weeping and one of them in this with him weeping at his father's grave whereas his mother came off and you may disagree with me in the campaign and from the journalism as kind of flighty, a certain kind of 60s character with a skirt and interested in kind of left-leaning politics of international development sort,

kind of pathetically trying to help her african-american son and understand being african-american by giving him records or certain kind of books. i mean, what could she do? in my view of it and my research of it and@ autobiography. >> and hal -- she was trying to help with him dealing with being an outsider yet when she brings him to indonesia they have to

basically move out of the house and -- >> that is exactly right. when she started doing research and java they lived on the old grand, the old palace grounds, and because there was a relation there that the second husband had royal relations, so they were allowed to live on the palace grounds in jakarta. when obama, jr. would make occasional trips to jot to join his mother on vacations, they had to move off the palace grounds because it was one thing to have an american but quite another thing to have an african-american. this is not a guy who suffered the slings and arrows of john lewis, but as vivian, one of the heroes of the civil rights movement say is, you are born into this country at any generation as an african-american and you don't seascape suffering at all. and so barack obama, what is the

night he becomes a national and international figure? it comes in the summer of 2004, boston. he gives a speech -- he is a state senator. now if you are in d.c. you don't have a state senator -- [laughter] going in front of an audience i asked raise your hand if you know who your state senator is sick sands will go up and five of them are lobbying. [laughter] he was the state senator and running for a senate seat. he makes this speech that mocks everybody out. everybody knows who he is. he's on every national television shows and radio show and in the newspapers and magazines. he's profiled here and there. he goes to the logan airport with his campaign manager, white southerner named jim cali, and he pulled aside for extra wanding and searching. that didn't happen to jim jim cauley. and he says barack, what the hell? and obama says and i quote these are the words recalled, "do, not to worry.

i've got it. this has been happening to me all of my life." so they are not in light sticks of moses generation. nobody is suggesting for a second that he didn't have access to elite institutions occidental, columbia, harvard law school, but he didn't is faith that experience either. i don't care if he grew up in hawaii, even in hawaii, which prides itself on multiculturalism except for one thing all the black people are on military bases except a couple kids here and there. so it was a really difficult struggle for him. >> and how does that and for his personality, his outlook, his world view? i mean, chris had ali was a good friend of his, and pfizer of his often describes the experience of living in america as a black man you experience something that he attends to deep muscle tissue bruising. not the kind of thing that you might be able to see that the kind of thing that you sort of fuel and the eight that makes

itself present in the will you might feel arthritis in the reign. it's there and is surfaces and let you know that it's there from time to time. from the extent he has that how has that informed? >> chris headley, the dean of law school at berkeley and has known obama for quite a while i think it is also chris headley who said race and rocket science, it's harder than rocket science. [laughter] one of his friends at harvard law school from the first day of harvard law school is a woman named cassandra butts and she was a friend to this day and has worked with obama and describes obama essey translator because of his unique interpreter. somebody the when you have an interpreter when you go to a foreign country and that person becomes your lanes, and because obama grew up in a multiplicity of wiltz in a way that most of us do not she's able to do that in a political sense. he can go into an african-american church and

claim a credibility there because he's spent -- and he had to achieve that. he didn't just walk through the door as a child. but he can go also to all kind of other communities and translate that community to them, that there for the metaphor of the bridges maybe not till found. it's not just a historical one that obama himself acts as a bridge. again i don't want to die too deep into the goo of psycho history. it is a dangerous, muddy and inconsequential please. but there is no doubt that people's backgrounds and their associations and the way they grow up and the way they were educated and the historical moment they are in effect who they are and their presidency. i'm not suggesting for a second that he's thinking about race when he said the situation room and talking about iran or afghanistan. but it has its effect both politically, personally, intellectually and the rest. >> there was a meeting, several

meetings actually in the lead to his decision to run for president where he was surrounded by friends and advisers. and and one particular meeting he talks about what it would mean to run for black america. and he talks about how he would -- ki envisioned what that land would you like for young people to wake up the morning after the election and realize wheat, i wasn't dreaming the night before. the united states just elected a black man to the presidency. he thought about that and articulated that he talked about that. do you get this sense that he was also thinking about what that moment would mean for white america and particularly for the various segments of white america that might be resistant to that milestone? >> i don't want to be glib but in a sense what is the difference? african american history is american history. there is no american history free of african-americans. african-americans were zero lot earlier than my relatives who had been around for generations.

and there is no american culture without african-american culture whether it is music or literature or etc. this is -- this is just who we are. so it affects all of us and you are seeing the difficult side of it now. q. are seeing -- >> that's what i'm asking about, was he thinking about some of that element -- >> this wasn't going to happen smoothly whether he got elected or not. and you see in the tiberi mifsud -- i'm not suggesting that for a second anybody in the cheaper the movement is racist or even the remote majority. there are economic concerns that the bubble up and have caused this throughout american history these kind of movements happen. but at the far end of it, you have seen and heard some pretty ugly things, and it can't be bought eckert incidents that the nature of these ugly things are this combustion of economic uncertainty and anxiety and an african-american president, and

it creates a kind of surgeon vocabulary and a certain kind of outrage. we saw a phone message left on the -- john lewis of all people, a phone message left on his machine. again, i don't want to suggest for a second that one phone message paints an entire movement as racist. it would be outrageous and wrong. but there is clearly, clearly some small part of the country that uses terms like "we want our country back." now what does that mean? that there's a kind of nostalgia for an imagined lost valhalla of a time when the president, like barack obama, is inconceivable in part. >> david, i want to reach back to the was early years again because upon reading the book -- some of you just purchased the book for the first times we

don't want to give too much away -- >> you can purchase it for a second time if so inclined. [laughter] >> and by one for your friends and family members. upon reading the book, barack obama comes across as somebody who is deeply ambitious man and was a deeply and vicious young man and actually was a deeply ambitious child, and actually talked about the presidency much earlier than many years before. >> i think that was cade talk -- kid talk and there probably isn't a parent in the room has who hasn't told his or her kid you could be anything. >> but when he was running for congress. >> he ran for congress and got beat so that he almost never went into politics again. i think that he gets serious, really serious about himself in terms of ambition when he not only gets into the harvard law school, but he becomes president of the harvard law review. that's when you begin to tell yourself if you are possessed of

a healthy or enlarged or even engorged ego -- laughter, not only am i in this birthplace of supreme court justices and senators and so on, but i am now the best of the best and in his case because he's the first african-american president of the harvard law review the next morning fox is writing about it in the times and it's on the wire it's all over the media. so even when he's running for small potatoes offices there is an enlarged sense of where this could go. the problem is he shows up in chicago and even though that has given him many things chicago doesn't always throw open its arms to him politically and say any office you like. you want to be the mayor? is yours. he had to contend with the fact there was no way he was going to be mayor because the dog he would have run against and waited to leave is still in the office now. [laughter]

and he ran -- and his act of running were act of and piety. he ran for the state senate and 96, thanks to a sex scandal that allowed alice palmer to try to run for congress. she lost and ran back and tried to get back in that race and wanted obama to step aside. obama wouldn't do it and when she tried to get the signatures to get on about how quickly he got her thrown off the ballot. he was appalled. >> he cleared the field. >> he ran unopposed. as you know in chicago politics, the republican side may as well be spared can delete the -- sprick is. it's not going anywhere. unbeatable .88 he ran the lead a former black panther and very popular congressman, maybe not the greatest congressman but certainly a popular one, bobby rush. and he was defeated soundly, not only because of bodies son had been killed in an act of violence on the street a couple

of weeks after the race began and then his father died and the community was really sympathetic. but also because he had no -- ki didn't have the routes that bobby rush had come and bobby ramesh's campaign and another opponent put it all on the street that who is barack obama, they asked. those questions didn't begin with sarah palin and john mccain. who is barack obama? they began much earlier. who is barack obama? he's not one of us. he has a white mother. she's from hawaii. she is backed by the university of chicago, highly controversy institution on the south side especially for black folks. and also, his money is coming from white people, from shoes. it got really ugly and he got beat so bad that certainly michelle obama was not eager to repeat the experience and really almost left politics for the

life of a little of this, a little of that. writing, teaching, may be running a foundation. was that close. >> people who are successful are often successful because they fail. if they learn the proper lessons from their setbacks. >> absolutely. >> what did he learn from that and how was he able to move forward? >> he learned he's not bobby rush. he learned he's not a guy that is going to succeed by trying to out-bobby rush bobby rush. he started going on trips of the state, the counties, the suburbs around chicago. he starts going south in the state with a kind of old political hand from the state legislature named dan showmen and he's been visiting -- and he starts to see that white people at vfw in the southern counties who are culturally may be closer to the southern states that they are a lot closer to the chicago aren't, you know, dismissing me.

i'm getting a friendly reception here. i translate. and so when he decides to run for the senate, it's not as if he wins the southern part of the state, but he does all right and he does very well clearly on little suburbs like evin stand. he sweeps the black vote and he gets a little bit lucky. he gets a little lucky, wait for it, to more sex scandals. as you remember blair hall, certainly the richest candidate if not the most skilled, goes down in flames when his divorce records or opened up and they are not an edify and spectacle. [laughter] then he is when to run against the very strong republican, who a former goldman sachs partner who has gone off to fund a really good school on the south side, he has now done well and now he's going to do good and very handsome. and his divorce records are open to and they involved a french

sex club and, you know, we are on c-span so we don't want to go too far but they are not an edifying spectacle. and barack -- barack obama and sap running against alan keyes, the most sacrificial of sacrificial. [,gd dvice and tell you the kind of things you may not even want to hear. when the fairy godmother started passing out mentorship or good mentors, he was abundantly

blessed. judson meijer, emil jones, i could go on and on. >> larry tribe, martha, knute minow, is a large list. >> how did this happen? did they choose him or in some ways did he find his own mentors? >> well, i do know there are certain young people >> i remember kent boo wrote a piece about al gore a long time ago and she wrote that al gore is an older person's idea of a younger person. [laughter] and barack obama was more mature than the other students at harvard law. she was more pleased. he wasn't sort of a feverish and his ambition. he was the most overused word in the world about obama, he was cooler about it and he's also smart and laurence tribe was attracted to him and made him a research assistant. before that, when he was a -- and i think this may be the most

important mentor of all and some of that spent unbelievable amounts of time with him when he was a community organizer he was hired by a guy named jerry tallman who is working with all of these catholic parishes and other churches throughout the south side and he desperately, desperately needed a black organizer. it was very hard for him to for obvious reasons to march into these black churches and, you know, expect everybody to, you know, job before him and do what he wanted in terms of community organizing. he needed a black organizer and he found this skinny kid who had applied after reading an ad in the new york public library in a little tiny newspaper called community jobs, and jerry tallman was his coach and teacher in the place where he finds -- and he's not responsible for everything because jeremiah wright is also very important in this -- it's the place and time that he find

seriousness, a sense of idealism, a sense of community, and a sense of home. jakarta and indonesia, that wasn't home. that was a sojourn to even hawaii to some extent, he wasn't going back there. there was nothing for him there. was he going to be the, the congressman from honolulu? not just chicago with the south side of chicago, that was home. he also found a church there that was important, and jeremiah wright is an essential figure in the early time frame. >> and he found michelle. >> and he finds michelle obama when he came back -- he did an internship at a law firm and there was michelle obama who had preceded him at harvard law. she was about the same age, but because he had been an organizer they were not together at harvard law. and he was knocked out by her.

sheik kamal so fast. [laughter] >> and she's an interesting character here because she keeps him grounded when the world is going crazy and the world seems -- seems to rise up and greet him wherever he goes, she is always saying things like i hope at some point he does something tour all of these. which sounds -- but it is as you describe it part of the chemistry in the relationship. >> the stick is she is the observer and the one punching his lot in considerable self regard it certain times. but in the end, he seems to win most of the major battles. in other words, all along the way she is very reluctant about the electoral politics. i mean, she came from a family and from a city where the view of electoral politics is, you know, the daily. greg triumph of harold

washington, they were excited about that is everybody was in the community, but very weary of electoral politics. the whole idea of running for state senate -- by the way, she was right. he gets to the state senate, the black caucus can't stand him, the work is boring, she is bored, he finds it trivial. he has a very low boredom threshold which also speaks to a certain ego as well as intellect but also ego and then he runs for congress and its craved. she says enough is enough. we can do well at the same time. we've got all of these loans. enough is enough and he gives it one more shot and wins the senate seat. >> she is as committed to community service as he is. >> but in a different way. she played that out as a professional woman at the university chicago and the hospital and all the rest. but electoral politics i think was something that she came to

far, far less willing and obama himself pursued it really hard. >> what explains his restlessness? >> will again, i want to be careful of this. i think there is a lot of his character that is created and he said so himself said there is no reason not to indulge that is deliberately and counter distinction to the father. once he actually learns about his father's courier, he reacts to it. his father thought that he was going to be at the very pinnacle of postcolonial kenyan politics. he was going to go on an airlift as a young man to the university of hawaii, get the education that he could get in the united states. he then went to harvard and got a higher degree in economics and he thought he was going to be back in nairobi in the circle of kenya and all the rest and he was going to have an extremely

powerful voice, somebody on the left spectrum of the kenyan politics and it just all went south. politics didn't work out and it's a long story, politics didn't work out as he thought. he was extremely erratic in his personal life, he was a terrible husband and not a very good father at all. at one point its eve and -- one of his children who now lives in china has said that obama senior beat one of his wives and he becomes a terrible drinker and his life ends with him drinking and driving. this is the erratic life that obama simply would not stand for in his own life, barack, jr.. sweating this kind of meticulousness, the reserves, the careful less he describes -- this is not the psychoanalyzing -- he describes at least in some

parts a reaction to this erratic father. >> how did people misinterpreted or underestimate him when he first began the presidential run? and let's consider the first primary in iowa. >> and iowa. remember there were very few black people in iowa last time i was there. and why did he win iowa? well, i think two big factors. a lot of complexity goes into this. you run for this tiny caucus for ever. two things were important and let's leave aside hillary clinton's own campaign problems and divisiveness in that campaign and all of the miscalculations. barack an organization. barack an organization. real discipline and a kind of innovative organization and barack is something to separate

himself and capture a left-leaning democratic party faithful in iowa. very different from the victory in south carolina, which to me is an incredibly interesting drama. but once he wins iowa people wake up. who is this guy? he beat hillary and then suddenly they are all on almost equal playing field and everything is gangbusters after that. >> i wondered if one of the things people didn't fully realize the importance of community organizing and what he learned from the brief period of time he spent as a community organizer and how he applied that to his candidacy and i guess how he might even apply that to now how he operates in the white house. >> fighting keys constantly using the metaphor of organizing certainly in the campaign less so now in the campaign as the metaphor for how he imagined he would be a politician. when he ran for the state senate

and started getting the first introduced to the chicago reader and the tribune he would talk about all i imagine a politician as a community organizer and office and so on and so forth with the truth is we've learned a lot about the life of so wilensky the last few years and not everybody knew it, obama was not a soul berlinski organizer. it was about confrontation and the kind of rough figure, self styled figure as you could imagine, very much of his time. obama was on that, although community organizing has struck such especially in secondo is -- chicago ase. i think the community organizing gave more to barack obama than barack obama could give community organizing especially in the short period of time. he had a modest accomplishments and this victory that came to pass. he said at a job recruiting center that collapsed under its own weight after a while. it's just not much.

and i think part of what he learned is the frustration and limitation of community organizing, that he looked around and he looked at harold washington's on fulfill promise. here's somebody that spends his entire first time, harold washington, completely embroiled in a battle with the city council. he gets to the second term, it's great to get debt better and he dies at his desk and leaves behind not the kind of political legacy organization that he could have or should have. obama was as he is leaving in organizing heading to law school he realizes and thinks to himself and says in these little round-table discussions he has and you can dig up if you're so inclined or you can find them in this book, he says you know, i've discovered in order to make change at any level despite the corruption's and hypocrisies and involvement of money you have to get elected to things and so off he goes to harvard law school to

get the tools to get elected to things. .. could you please show him around, because he is getting, you know he is a little lost

here. he is not coming off well. some of his colleagues think of him, you have heard this before, professorial and distant and all those things that he had a hard time with when he would first enter springfield. and so shulman helps him out. he gives them his kind of illinois education. >> we are going to bring all of you into the conversation and just a minute but just a few more questions. what are the things that is very interesting exercises to look at the early writings for the early speeches of a presidency and in this case barack obama left a particular gift with the columns that he wrote in a small newspaper on the southside and i want to ask you about one in particular which is the column he wrote after 9/11. which is so revealing and his worldview and his view of america also but just sort of a confidence expressed at that time when many people sort of

almost had an instinctive reach toward patriotism. >> michelle is referring to a column, a more or less daily column that obama would write for the hyde park paper, the local paper in hyde park, the herald. and, most of the columns were here is why i am for a health care program or i am working on racial profiling bill or whatever, and they are fairly, they are fine, they are unspectacular. it is not exactly in or anything at that level. after 9/11, a lot of local politicians were asked to weigh in on their feelings about it and what we suggest for the country. most of them are utterly, in the mode of the words of consolation, they are unremarkable and obama writes much longer than anybody else,

prides himself on his writing, and he is taking a kind of you know, this is a horrible tragedy, and we must punish the guilty and so on, but, and these are words in other peoples mouths after 9/11 got in trouble, susan sontag and others and certainly as although the expression is g/árbrbrbrbjárbrb

about a decision that you make. early on in the administration when the white house had welcomed a group of young children to the building, michelle obama had said something almost an offhand manner while talking to the kids. she said you know this building was largely built by slaves. and this was something the kids in the audience nodded their heads, but much was made that remark because it is a historic fact but it is not something that is talked about much. you actually go back and spend a lot of time looking at the history of slaves in the white house and i want to know why do you decided to at that time and muscle into a. >> you referred to pretty close to the end of the book, he has been elected and the narrative is going to take us to the inauguration and i stop the narrative, and began a section about precisely this. that slaves built the white house in go into some granular

detail about their names, how much they were paid. they weren't paid. they were paid in the money went to the masters obviously. much of the capital is built by slaves. much of the dredging of the city that we are sitting in now was done by slaves. slaves were sold outside lafayette park. there were slave auctions by a virginia company. they went from lafayette park and were soon put on riverboats and sends to the south. i spend considerable time also recounting the story of african-americans in the white house, which until barack obama and modernity were black people in service. elizabeth paglia's one figure. elizabeth carefully was mrs. lincoln's seamstress and she wrote the memoir, and she

was closer to the lincolns in some ways than almost anybody in the white house. she had an absolute birds eye view. she became a free black and she wrote her memoir, and mrs. lincoln felt betrayed and she ended her life and a home for the indigent, indigent, i forget the name of the institution in the washington area. and also i recount the at the same time between frederick douglass and lincoln. it is interesting, henry louis gates who became famous in the obama story a little later for reasons that we all know in the presidency described for me, has a long description in the book about his impressions of obama and he said look, the most radical thing about barack obama is that he is african-american. and then in a way he is a postmodern frederick douglass,

and what did skip gates mean like-- by this? he meant he is somebody who is able to tell a story. frederick douglass had a unique capacity to tell his story back and forth across racial lines, that he grew into, in anthropological terms he is a trickster figure. in other words he is able to translate. this is a remarkable figure in our history, barack obama, however you feel about his mistakes, his faults or his politics. wherever you come down on that, this book isn't by no means a hagiography but this happening, somebody, african-american and by this name, becoming president is to paraphrase joe biden, a big deal. lascaux. [applause] >> lets invite the audience in.

[applause] we can make their way to you with a microphone and we can start down here with this gentleman in the gray. hold on just a second. >> we have about 20 minutes for questions. >> my name is angelo. i am looking forward to your book because of a personal nature. i've been fascinated by obama as a person since i read his book. i grew up in kenya. i met his father and 67. >> where were you when i needed you? [laughter] and so, what you said about the father and a mother is very valid. in the sense that the father was never present so when you look at obama, it is interesting, not obama the politician. what you see is what i called

genetic quality from the father, the height, and his father's deep baritone. and above all the supreme self-confidence which in his father's case was an in-your-face confidence and in his case it is much more contained because he doesn't have to prove himself. his mother, the environmental side, the capacity to listen to somebody and get into somebody else's head. you see in the first book the discussion with his half rather in china, who was at that time a senior at stanford coming back to kenya. so what i am trying to get at is you get these two sides of this person, one genetic, the acute intelligence, that they seek, this self-confidence which has always struck me about obama. which enables him to dominate people more senior than him.

he is able to do what he does, so i just would be interested in your reaction. >> i can't argue with that. my only caution, my only caution to that is to be careful as with any of us we are not absolute products of just the ingredients provided us by either genetic or parental qualities. but i can't argue with what you say, completely accords with the other people i've interviewed you describe obama as extraordinarily deep voice, his self-confidence that became later as he became less successful and more frustrated, far beyond cockiness into a kind of unattractive, frustrated defeated rugged toshio. it is not a happy site, but your description is completely in accord certainly with what i think a lot of us here know and certainly my own research. >> there is a question right here.

i think your shirt is purple. maybe if you stood up. yes, thank you. >> my name is carol heilman and i am retired from the u.s. foreign service. and, i just wanted to ask you briefly what do you mean by the joshua generation? >> in 2007, shortly after announcing for the presidency, barack obama accepted the invitation of john lewis and others to go to selma alabama for the annual reenactment of the beginning of the march from selma to montgomery. this seminal moment that loosens the floodgates for johnson to put forward a voting rights act. salama alabama being a scenic, also bloody sunday and constant turmoil by design of the civil rights movement.

obama accepted this invitation and quickly thereafter hillary clinton accepted an invitation to calm and they both gave speeches, both very resonant churches and selma. obama in in his case at brown chapel where king spoke all the time. and the speech he gave, unlike the announcement speech where the metaphor was lincoln and the association for all about lincoln and kind of general americanness, this was a speech directed toward almost exclusively to the african-american voters and population, because if he is going to get anywhere in this endeavor, he has got to win some huge proportion of the black vote. and the terms he used were, and these-- this has been in black churches since forever, this metaphor of moses in leading people out of the promised land and people used to call martin

luther king when they weren't calling him to live they were also calling him a moses figure. he was saying that the previous generation exemplified by joe lowery was the moses generation. they suffered for us and they have wrought us this far, but the journey is far from complete. we are the joshua generation. you can easily follow this biblical metaphor where it is going, and by implicitly in the speech, i am the head of this joshua generation. it is an act of great rhetorical golf to say this, and he did. again obama, not lacking for self-confidence but he is after all running for president, and to get the democratic nomination it would be nice if he got a huge proportion of the black vote in the clintons remember at that time had an enormously deep relationship with many african-american leaders and the population in general. i mean, some people not but

certainly this is a diverse population as in he is. a whole range of political opinion, but obama could not assume the black vote so that is where that vocabulary comes from and the joshua generation of politicians as gwen ifill talks about and others, includes the present mayor of philadelphia or arthur davis or cory booker and newark. there are a lot of them. these are all people in their 30s, 40s and maybe in their early 50s who were too young to have experienced the civil rights movement except on television as children. >> thank you. >> it was suggested to racism and discrimination because of his skin color. he was not subjected to the legacy of slavery, and the

transgenerational transmission of trauma drama which often involve some self destructive aspect in one's life. the first issue, how important do you think this is? some people say he is not african-american. he is african and american because of this distinction. a second quick.. apart from the tea partiers, do you think that there, that the opposition to him, which is typical but maybe more so during his administration, to rise from unconscious and conscious racial aspects? no black man should have this much privilege. he is uppity and we have got to get him. >> to the last question, to say that everybody who opposes barack obama has conscious or unconscious racism i think is

immensely unfair. if barack obama were white, if you were john kerry pursuing more or less the same politics or hillary clinton pursuing the same politics whether it is in foreign-policy or domestic policy and face this kind of opposition in congress are on the street, would i immediately ascribe it to racism or sexism in case of hillary clinton? i think people have real political disagreements and concerns and anxieties. there is a such thing as a panoply of opinion but do i think some of the opposition and some of the uglier voices directed at obama has something to do with racism? i think it is undeniable. i don't think you can deny that at all and as for his racial identity, you know in large measure this is something given to you but you also have something to say about it and when he filled out his senses report who might argue with that? especially me. i don't know what michelle would say but these are distinctions

if they are distinctions at all, with a very slight difference. yes he has an african legacy although it played a role mainly in memory, that in his life he experienced life as an african-american. when he goes to get his car, he has had keys thrown to him as if it were assumed he was going to pick up a car as the guy who gets valet parking. when skip gates gets arrested in his home and handcuffed, i will guess this would not have happened to me, so these things happen. there is racism in this country. there are reasons for racial profiling laws. it is not the same as 1964 and 1964 isn't the same as 1865. there has been progress but think that we live in some post-racial utopia, i don't know where this idea ever came from,

it's just unbelievable folly. how about right here, because they think i know her. >> in reading his autobiography i was very interested in the part about his movement from occidental to the colombia and@á he wants a bigger school. he wants to be closer to an african-american population center and as you know colombia is right near home. when he gets to colombia by his

own admission, his own description to me in an interview, but also some classmates although i found this the hardest period to report out fully and there is a reason for it. he becomes not just serious but self serious. righteous, almost monastic. he reads a lot. he takes long runs in the part e-echo at first he is a roommate named phil berner with whom he kept up correspondence for years thereafter but he is really, he is not a monk. he has a social life and certainly an academic life although not expect tech are one. he lives fairly quiet but he decides to get serious. the parting part of his life starts to recede when i first interviewed him in front of an audience like this in phoenix in the book tour i asked him about

the passage about drugs and asked him if he inhaled. he said that with was the idea. [laughter] a fair.. but because of the life he led at columbia, i felt it easier to report about occidental, about chicago and hawaii and a number of things. columbia he was a little bit more in polluted. >> hello, i teach medieval history. but i teach at george mason where obama recently came and spoke about health care and at one point he was saying he really didn't know how health care would play out with his reputation as the president and i believe him when he says that. i was just wondering, is that his modus operandi, where he just does what he thinks is going to be the best thing and, or is he more calculating? >> he made no secret about the

fact that he was for health care. in fact probably a health care plan more far-reaching that we ended up with and he was elected so this notion that he is imposing something on the nation by fiat as if this were a kind of dynastic situation is really wrong. i think it is being a little bit of faux modest here. i think the way-- self-deprecating. i think what he would like to happen is this is seen as a domestic policy initiative and success on the scale of the social security or any of the big domestic policy initiatives that have taken place in this country. but because of the nature of the politics right now, and because of the nature of the program itself because it is going to have to be worked on an and improved as time goes by, some of this is up in the air and it is going to be interesting to see what effect it has on the

november elections. the republican party is completely committed to the idea that the passage of health care will be an albatross around the neck of congressional democratic candidates. obama is betting otherwise. >> we have time for two more questions. >> i have a question that is more based on the political nuts and bolts of visibility to win. was he the genius behind the idea of using the internet, which no one else had done, and the rest of them all were absolutely up in the air about what in the world was going on, or did he just buy into these ideas and absorb them and then become reflective and go with them? in other words, did he delegate or did this idea come to him and

then have him work with them to do it, because it really was the genius is his campaign. >> this is my former colleague at "the washington post." i think we sat two seats away from each other for a couple of years. thank you yurko no, don't think he was an internet whiz himself or two in the 2004 senate race in illinois he was deeply frustrated with the lack of the internet presents and they put up a chat room. it was a pretty primitive use of the net in illinois. it was much more traditional, television advertising and once they got a lot more money they were able to reach markets that they didn't think they were going to have. how did he win that race? his biggest opponent fell apart and obama himself kept proving to be a better and better candidate. that is the story of the democratic party race and the republican party race was a joke. he was giving money to other campaigns. in the presidential race in 2008 a lot of credit for that internet edge initiative has to go to other people like david

plouffe, without a doubt. i don't think barack obama-- i don't think there is any threat that when obama leaves office he is going to his take steve jobs' chair. [laughter] i mean he likes the blackberry and that is fine. he has other things to do. >> last question. >> started with this idea, you said who is barack obama? and much of the, much of his power from his critics in and his fans if they can project whatever they want onto him and that he can be on every magazine cover and he can be president of the united states and yet he still remains elusive. so i was curious, first as he still elusive to you and second off, what is it about him and what is it about us that makes that so? >> to some extent, and i don't

want to be too fancy about it, all people are elusive. we are elusive to each other. that is why we have cobbles, to go deeper into any character. if you start going too deeply in guessing to deeply you are totally in the weeds and that betrays verifiable fact or reporting or archives or whatever it is. i think, and historical figures that are long gone much more examined and obama remain an enigmatic to us to this day. i don't know how many books a year come out about abraham lincoln. so the fact that there is elusive aspects of iraq obama is only natural. it is the other aspect of the so-called elusiveness that is troubling to me, the notion that he wasn't born-- we are still hearing the stuff from birther's. and i have to say in my own book, i just say he was born on

this day in this hospital because it is verifiable fact. there is a birth certificate and to be obsess beyond that after a while is to indulge in the fantasies and craziness of this fevered pursuit and it is obviously not just limited to that. that said, obama clearly, because remember he was an alias to state state senator. he was a senator for five minutes before the question started coming are you going to run for president. the experience i thought was completely legitimate. how could it not be? when your biggest political battle was dealing with ricky handed in the state senate and you are in the senate for a year in making your first trip to russia, this is not a deep experience so his story, his projection of his own story and projection of his own family as a kind of metaphor for the country and the direction he was going and ethnically and diversity, you could see where that was driving the clinton

campaign crazy because they had been deep into politics and policy for so many years. they thought it was their turn. >> i have one last question and it will be brief. i thank you all of you for coming out tonight in david i thank you for the time in the muscle that you put into this book. we are going to learn a lot about barack obama in reading this book that i think we also learned something about the country and this is my last question to you. and working on this project what did you learn not just about president obama, what did you learn about america? >> it is either a very short answer or a very long one. you know, the essayist, the novelist as well, the essayist that means the most to not just me but too many people is ralph ellison, and he would always hear these passages from him about americanist and

african-american being indivisible. and i think there is no saga on american life that makes that plainer than the story of obama 's a sense, whether you are a fan of his politics or not. the fact of his election and the fact that hillary's election if it would have happened and a woman god willing would be elected very soon, and i hope a deeply qualified and wonderful one. [laughter] i did not mean that has a shot against hillary at all. i mean that. that this is an important moment in american history. it it is not everything. it doesn't solve our problems in iraq and afghanistan and iran. it doesn't fix everything. at disney been fix everything about race but it is enormously important if you care about americanist and what that means. >> david thank you.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] @@bb

the book includes madam marie currie, jane goodall and rachel carson. the cuny graduate center in new york city to host the hour-long event.

>> hello everybody. i want to thank you all for coming. this is a great turnout. but nothing less than we would have expected. i am gloria jacobson, the executive director of the feminist press. which is the publisher of the madame curie complex. the book is part of our women writing science series, which is funded by the national science foundation, and you might ask, or you might not, you might know the answer why do we need a women writing science series? the answer is of course that women still are not encouraged by their teachers to enter the scientific field, and to stay there, which is really important , retention. they are not promoted as much, they don't get the best grants, and this is still, just by many years of activism, something

that is consistent throughout the scientific field. so, the feminist press, we put together a project and the two project directors are here and the founder of the press. and shirley, who is the program director of the whole science project which also has a web site called under the microscope.com. and a board member who in fact has done a lot of work on the science project. but, this was put together because it seems to us that it was really important to look at women in science in a different way, instead of theoretical and looking you know at them through a microscope, we said let's do

something that is lively and interesting and engaging and tells a story about women and science, because we know that everyone likes a good story, not just those of us who are publishers for instance. so, julie's book came along and it is one we are delighted to have because it is all those things. it is lively and it is accessible, but it tells an incredibly important story about the role of women in science, and the heart of it is something that we rarely think about or acknowledge but it is that women's way of doing things is often different than men's. it is not necessarily biological. i don't think it is at all. but, our experience of the world in the way we inhabit the world and the things we see and do as women make a very big difference for how women do science.

and, that means that when women are excluded, their way of doing things in their experiences in their understanding of how to conduct an experiment is lost. and what is so fabulous about julie's work is that she really explores what women contributed to the scientific field by bringing that very kidney perspective to it. so, before we start, i do also want to make a few announcements. first of all i want to thank very much adrian cline and brian schwartz who is also on the board of the feminist press, for the science and the arts programs which are sponsoring this tonight and i want to tango the graduate center. i want to thank martin siegel for being open to night. it is not easy to find that here at the graduate center. i also want to invite all of you upstairs afterwards to the feminist press offices. we are going to have a little reception in honor of julie.

she will be signing books there as well, so that is room 5406. go to the fifth floor and then just follow the signs and you will find your way there. and now, let me do a brief introduction of julie which is to say she is a professor of history at the root college. i think the fact that she is a historian is very important to this book because she knows how to tell a good story. and, this is her second book. she is also the author of women and the historical enterprise in america. julie. [applause] >> thank you gloria. thank you. thank you. there are a lot of people and i am thrilled. a lot of people i know. i have a couple of students here who are already raising signs which is great. farouk students have to in three jobs at one time so the fact do you guys are here, i am thrilled. a lot of people from the

feminiss. of course i have to thank the people from science and the arts, the graduate center, the feminist press and of course i want to thank c-span and everybody who put this all together today so thank you so much. it is a very rare opportunity we get to talk about the stuff we write about. i teach all these classes and i talk about american history but i never get to talk about the stuff that i'm actually writing so this is great. it is a very sort of solitary business. when you are writing a book in you hunker down. and i never get to talk about it so this is the perfect opportunity. i was hoping if it is okay with you guys, if we talk a little bit about my personal experiences that brought me to writing the book. yes we will talk about the book and get into the skinny of the book but it makes a lot of sense i think if i talk to you a little bit about my personal experiences in my professional experiences that brought me to write this book because to be

totally honest with you when i look at this i would have never written as even six years ago. all this stuff happened to me about five years ago, 2005 and when i think of all these things coming together, it made the book a no-brainer but before that i wasn't even interested in looking at women in science. i looked at other women in professional cultures and professional historians but i thought this is that the people who do the history of science do. i don't do the history of science. the whole department is history and science and i don't do that so i thought this would be something i could actually do. let me tell you a little bit about what happened. 2005, very very interesting year for me personally because this was the year my dad died. he is not a scientist so don't think this is some weird homage to my dad. it is nothing like that, but my dad was absolutely enamored with scientists. and he worshiped the men of manhattan project and literally i think i must have been maybe

seven or eight years old when he started telling me stories about in. and the nuclear chain reaction at the university of chicago in 1942. these were the sorts of stories i grew up with. he just thought these figures were larger than life. and a very very strange story but a true story. when i was in high school, we had to do this project in western humanities class. we had to do the skits in roman history and i have an identical twin sister. she was in the class and we had to do the skits. my sister's group had to go back to my house at work on the skits. i wasn't there, i was at somebody else's house doing a difference get. my dad came in the room and i am getting this for my sister. she is introducing my dad to all of the friends of ours that are in the realm and she says to dad, dad, this is alex teller. now i did not know that my

friend alex teller was actually the grandson of edward teller. my dad knew for sure that this was the grandson of edward teller. and my sister said that my dad was giddy when he met this kid. sort of like girls at a jonas brothers concert. my dad was absolutely beside himself. i sister said, how did you know he was the grandson? what was it that made you know this? he said the strangest thing. he said it was so obvious. it was all in the eyebrows. [laughter] and it was the funniest thing because it was so strange. i used to wear makeup at prom and my dad did notice but he noticed the eyebrows on alex teller. i actually went back, my dad has these world book encyclopedias in the home office and he had been from 1958. these were once he had read what he was a child and sure enough if you would go to the t's and go to find teller you would find his picture of edward teller and

other than the fact that the eyebrows were a little bit more wiry and a little bit more disheveled, they are alex teller's eyebrows. the funny thing about this is it was such an odd observation for him to make that now i look back on that and i, now that i am an historian i get a little bit of context and it occurs to me my dad was one of these boys who came of age in the 1940s, 1950s and that is the period i call in this book, the age age of heroic science. really be a cult of the atomic physicist. this is right about the time my dad was seizing on these ideas. he had studied this encyclopedic entry for years and years and i realized, this is when people are starting to imagine that scientist is being this hypermasculine figure and i will talk about how this happens but what also happens is that literally women who were doing science at the exact same time

get rendered literally culturally invisible. this is a dynamic i explore in this book. it was very hard to write off the women of the manhattan project is they don't write about themselves. they see themselves as these big players in this but anyway these figures were larger than life growing up to my dad at least. and my dad was larger than life to me. he passed away in 2005, and this was a very strange moment for me. i was in a lot of transition. i was teaching at cuny but living in boston so i was doing this back and forth, and my cousin, he knows because i was sleeping on his couch the whole time because i was coming back and forth, i was between book projects. i didn't know what i was doing but i was telling the dean of the college that i was writing about women intellectuals so she'd thought i wasn't just sitting on my rear end. i can say that because i have something to say for myself but the other thing too was the day that my dad died, i was about five months pregnant.

which is totally an integral part of this whole thing. because i was already a little bit uncomfortable traveling around a lot with my roller board going from to and from boston, new york. i was pregnant but that was going to pale compared to the discomfort of being a pregnant woman who was teaching at the city university of new york in 2005, sadly. i would like to say that unpaid maternity leave was the most-- least of my problems as a pregnant woman at the city university of new york. lots of things happen, because i had the baby not in june, july august as a sort of extracurricular activity when i'm not teaching. i had the baby in april, and this threw everything off. it wreaked havoc on my psyche, my general finances. i won't go into the whole sob story. my friends here know the sob story so i'm not going to do

that but needless to say, i do have to say this. i have a wonderful colleague in the history department do as we speak is on a paid maternity leave at the city university of new york so things have changed. i would like to thank my misery had something to do with it because i wasn't so quiet about it. as you can tell i am not over what happened to me as a pregnant person. i am not sure i'm ever going to totally get over it but i do think it will get to a point when you are tired of feeling bad, tired of feeling like a victim and you want to do something productive for other people. it was right at that stage that i decided whatever i was going to do, whatever the next book project was going to be it was going to be something that looked at women and a professional culture, not the-- victim ologies. i wanted to do something that might've been prescriptive about how we can change the culture of

this professional-- the gendering of this professional culture. whatever the field was going to be. the problem with this, for historians in particular is that we are very good at talking about why things were the way they@@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ rbrb it has everything to do with

where i am inserting myself into this conversation on women in science. larry summers was the president of harvard university in 2005, sort and there were economists in the room and scientist in the room and he or positing reasons for the dearth of women in institutional science. he women's biological proclivities may have something to of course seized on this which is amazing because if any of you have been to these academic conferences, people talk and it goes in one ear and out pays attention to what he says when he drops the b bomb, waited for the transcript to come out so i looked at the transcript to see what it said and i have to say he doesn't

just talks about insufficient childcare as being an issue. he talks about general discrimination being an issue but to be totally honest with you no one seized talked about go everybody talked was the part i thought was strange because i got to tell you when i heard the biology part of my first inclination was to be it has nothing to do with it and i was dismissive but clearly that wasn't the reaction of other people and that was the thing i wanted to wrap my brain around. what was going this. that is when i decided i wanted to know what was going on. as a cultural historian what frequently happens, we are interested in what these people was much more interested in

don't know that i have it all figured out, but let me tell you what i think might be going on here. i think to some extent, if you were to go to somebody on the street and you were to say give them do you think women are capable of science? i think the vast majority of people would say absolutely. women are capable in science but i think that is the only part they tell you. i think the part two, the next part of the reaction is women are competent in science and so science insofar as they are and new leading man when they are doing the science. and i think even the people that are the most stalwart defenders of women in science ultimately think of of the concept of scientist city is masculine to the core. no matter how defending you are of women scientists, ultimately i think that is something we haven't gotten rid of. so at that point i thought, what i want to do is i want to write a book that talks about this gendering of scientific culture. this was a novel idea to me that this is not a new idea. lots of people have written

really good empowering stuff about science as this gendered culture and they have been doing it since the late 1970s, the early 1980s. with any of you have read anything by sandra harding, evelyn fox keller, there is so much out there, really smart stuff. in terms of the feminist process there is a little bit of a problem because it has such a limited audience. it is so highly theoretical that often what happens is it feels disembodied and you forget literally they are talking about real women doing science and every day. absolutely smart, important stuff and it was totally foundational for the writing of this book, so much of it. you have that on one end of the spectrum and then you have the other end of the spectrum the stuff that is much more accessible, very readable. human interest stories, very compelling, often written in the biographical mode. these are the things particularly now, we are in the

month of march. uc women's history month, library displays, if there is something about a women scientist nine times out of 10 it is madam curie. nice biographies, very compelling to read, fascinating women and in terms of the feminist process a lot of this is more promising because it is so much more accessible. people read it. if you are a young girl or young woman you are motivated and inspired by it. this is fantastic but the problem with a lot of this stuff, not all of it and a lot of it is that it does nothing to proselytize science as this gendered culture four all of the presumptions of masculinity stay in that culture and you just insert women into the mix. it reads in this compensatory time. it is almost over celebratory sometimes. not very helpful if you are trying to proselytize science as culture. i think in a book i call it something like, these folks that are women who perform outside of

their female skin to do nobel prize-winning science anyway sort of thing. great as far as they go. when i decided-- i wanted to borrow from both genres. i wanted to look at the things that proselytize science as culture but then i wanted to write in the biographical mode because this is compelling and i wanted to find women who were identifiable, fascinating women. so this is as far as i am at this point. i decide to talk to a good friend of mine who is not here sadly because she is off doing her on top but her name is carol burke in. she a fantastic-- fantastic historian and the baruch science department. the rape thing about her work is she is an amazing mentor of women. she hooked me up. she talked to her book agent. her book agent is a bright guy named dan green. he thought this is fantastic so he starts pitching this, and he comes back with this very interesting feedback. what it basically was was great

idea, particularly in the wake of the whole summers thing, great time to talk about women in science. who was the one person that you are going to write about because of course that singular biography is what sells. for me i've got to say this was a total dealbreaker. that is exactly what i did not want to do. the reason why i necessarily had to write about lots of different women is because the subject of the book is not actually the women. not one women, not lots of women, it is the gendering of science and the women are the lenses. what they do is a they sort of roof rack light on this problem and all of these different ways. if i had one woman, she would refractive this way, but i wanted this way and i wanted this win all these different perspectives because there are so many different ways scientific culture is gendered. so i wanted to look at married women and single women and women

in the lab and women in the field and women who were doing science at the turn-of-the-century and women after the second wave of feminism in this discipline and that discipline. i needed all sorts of different lenses on this problem. the other thing is i am an historian so i want to show change over time in this gendering of science. what i wanted to do was i wanted to talk about women at the turn-of-the-century, women at the end of the century. there might be women out there who are 108 but i wanted somebody who was going to be able to tell my story all the way through the 20th century and that can't be done with one person. so i explained this to dan. he completely understood me. he talked to the people at the feminist press and they completely understood what i was talking about them that is why this is a feminist press book. they always knew it had to necessarily be about lots of different women so he could shed light on this problem in all these different ways. said to show the story of the gendering of science over time i

had this notion of of a metanarrative about science that i am gendering, so what i did was i divide this book into seven different chapters. each chapter looks at a woman or a community of women. it is loosely chronological so it starts at the beginning of the 20th century and goes to the end of the 20th century. what i also did was i have this larger metanarrative about science so i have these historical overviews, and i talk about the science in three different distinct historical moments. and the first moment is when-- what i guess you could describe late stage scientific rationalization because professionalization and sciences been going on since the 1870s. by the time we get to the the turn-of-the-century it has been going on for a while. the three women and communities of women that i talk about, those first three chapters, these are women who were trying to do science during this moment of professionalization, which is

a very interesting thing to try to do. because the thing about professionalization is that it is always necessarily a masculine icing process. that may sound very strange but what i mean about this, you get a group of people who decide that they want to professionalize a field and what that means is they want to infuse it with legitimacy and they want to infuse it with prestige. the ways to go about infusing something with prestige is is together a lot of masculine connotation. this is what they do of course with professional science. so you have got this group of insiders, and they want to be seen as this exclusive group and you define everybody else, the outsiders as amateur and of course everything associated with scientific amateurism is feminine. that is the way you create the hierarchy. professional science up here, amateur science down here. everything associated with domesticity, i.e. women, our

amateur by default four this is how things happened. so what i do as i show you three groups of women who are trying to do science anyway and it is a very interesting paradox because what happens is if you are one of these women who once to do science, you want to enter one of these masculine bastions of science whether it is the lab or university or whatever it is, you enter it but to do that and still appear to be this appropriate woman, you have to do it and sort of look like the domestic helpmate. so you have to play that domestic world. but if you actually pull it off, you look like an incompetent scientist because of course domesticity, scientist city are apparently antithetical, so this is the paradox that the women in the first three chapters of the book have to deal with. the very first chapter of this book is about madame curie. madame curie, most of you probably no, was not american so

, this is american science, wiry talking about madame curie? madame curie comes to the united states in the 1920s and the reason why she comes is remember she discovered radium, radioactivity but the problem was she didn't patent so there are all of these american chemical producers making all of this money on radium and she can't even afford this much of it so she can do her own research. so she talked to this publicist in the united states, and she hooks her up because what she does if she starts this campaign and all of these american women are going to raise money so madame curie can have a radium. i tell the story about this campaign. what is so funny about this, this little tiny campaign says everything about not just how american women are being defined in this. now but also how american science is getting defined because she comes to the united states and of course all of her american handlers have to try to deal with the contradiction that is madame

curie. here is this woman do is really good at science. the only person in the world who is god's two nobel prizes in science mind you at the time but the problem if she is a woman and women are not supposed to be naturally good at science, so how do you talk about the american public? the way that american handlers deal with this is they suggest to americans-- you see it in all of this discourse-- that the reason why she's so good at science is not because she does science for science sake like men do. it is her maternity that makes her so good at science. the reason why she discovered radium was because she wanted to cure cancer for humanity. she is basically like mother theresa with a beaker basically. [laughter] and this is the way she gets described. the real tension in the chapters that this is not madame curie in the least. she is no mother of the year.

she has two daughters and she is pretty neglectful of them during certain junctures of her career and she wanted nothing to do with medical radium. she wanted to do science for science sake. this was the exact way she would talk about it but this is the way she had to get marketed to the american public. so that is chapter 1. chapter 2 is about a woman who i do think actually pulls off this domestic persona a little bit better and her name is lily and gilbert. lillian galbraith was the proverbial women-- literally she had 12 children. she also happened to be in the most virile of scientific fields he could be in at the turn-of-the-century and that was industrial engineering. even today in the 21st century there are still pockets of engineering and physics that are not just their e-mail but they are masculine in their culture. this is exactly the case in industrial engineering at the turn-of-the-century. the reason why i write about

her, she is fascinating. a fascinating moment that the thing about her is as marvelous as she appears she is one of the most subversive women in this book because those strange dichotomies between scientist city, domesticity, she completely turns them on their head. i don't know she does this knowingly, but she does because what she does and sdef"k@ @ @ rd women have to deal with this paradox that comes comes with professionalization in a slightly different way. they are going to feel like a choice to be married with children and the choice to do

science are completely mutually exclusive. you do one or you do the other. this was the case for a lot of professions but you really see it with these women because all of these women choose to basically be married to that observatory. they don't have children, and they don't get married but the problem is now that they have made that choice and they are in that observatory, the way that they get talked about at the observatory is as the sort of domestic housekeepers in the way their science gets described as always in the sort of domestic metaphors. these women are doing busy work. they liken it to sort of needlepoint or doing the dishes or something like this. now i have to say this is a very important point to make. i have been talking in the sort of extractions, talking about domesticity and doing this and that and you might not understand how meaning and metaphor and language actually gets mapped out into the real-life experiences of these women but i'm telling you the

meaning that comes out of these metaphors has everything to do with the way we have come to value women scientific work. these women are spoken about as domestics. it is funny because i value to masterwork and you value of domestic work but culturally it always brings women down a peg to talk about that in domestic terms. always, always always. just to give you a sense of this let me ask you, does anybody know here who maria gephardt maher is? anybody? she is a physicist. do you know why she won the nobel prize? the shell or break a theory of the nucleus, exactly. my husband is a physicist and he knows now but he didn't know then, did you? she wins in 1963. she wins the nobel prize in physics. the way that we have metaphorically speak of science, there is hard sciences like

theoretical physics infused with masculinity and then we have got the soft sciences. this is the stuff that is squishy that women deal with. those are sort of lower on the hierarchy. she is in one of those fields higher on the hierarchy because she is in theoretical physics but the interesting thing about it is that is not the way the american press talks about it. i actually when i was going back and looking at the clippings, when she won the nobel prize in 1963 she actually won the nobel prize in physics with two other men. one guy is at princeton and then there was another guy named jensen who actually wanted at the same time for the shell orbit very but the thing was he figured it out independently. frankly he figured it out after she did but she didn't irritate him. the two of them get the nobel prize for this at the same time and it is amazing because when the press talks about the shell orbit very and jensen's canted looks appropriately masculine.

this is something to do with atomic science and science that kills. and then you see it in her hands , totally different. so if you guys don't mind let me read something. ..

some couples been in one direction and some of the and others just like the organ of a new class and everybody who has ever danced a fast waltz knows it's easy to dance in one direction than the other. in that's the way they describe this theory in her hands. it's funny because the other way it looks very masculine in this way of the safety and, in fact, it doesn't even really look like science and i think that's the cultural intention because what's going on here is for her to look like inappropriate woman and still be this competent scientist she always has to be painted in is going domestic shades. you cannot talk about her as competence and not domestic at the same time because then she doesn't look appropriate and it's funny because i was looking at all the press coverage when i was doing research and when she

wins that prize in 1963 every single clipping says dr. jensen, miss of joseph matter. she, of course, have a ph.d. and this is how she gets talked about. 21 the nobel prize it's funny because of the journalists are so compelled to tell everybody that one of the other physicists were talking about science she took herself off to the downtown to christmas shopping. because that's what inappropriate woman would do. let me read what the journalists as about her big night as she won the nobel prize. in professor mayor, a tiny shy devoted wife and mother who speaks so softly she can barely be heard, science achieved an astonishingly brilliant in. last winter to receive the highest honor that the man's world of atomic science can bestow. i would argue that's getting

paid for the first time but that's not what they're talking about. [laughter] but on a spectacular and night when the glittering nobel medal became herseth area saw everything to the starry eyes of a romantic woman. it was a fairy tale she says, the king of sweden gave it his arm and my husband and it looks enchanting in his white tie and tails. he borrowed them from ouron. now months later the magic of it still brings a special light to maria's white blue eyes. it's funny because a year before this james when tears nobel prize in biology and no one talks about the glinting in his beautiful blue eyes. it's amazing how you can talk about them and the same light, you can't and this is not the turn of the century, this is 1963 and the reason why i'm making a point of this is because the association with thomas the city still stigmatizes women in science and the 21st century. and this is what i had to make

the point perhaps the entire book and this doesn't make a lot of sense to people because we know women who are domestic, people who say they keep house and that's but it doesn't matter, any one single, married, a dead, it doesn't matter. every woman falls into this dusty city as the discourse is getting confused so i want to make this clear why this is a big deal and every time women in science, nobel caliber winning, talk about in these domestic terms it demotes these women and yet this is how it gets talked about american culture. in so anyway getting back to this historical scheme i had in mind, that was the first section of the book. the second section is what i've already described as the age of her rope scientists. this is the culture of the atomic physicist when science gets infused with the greatest prestige in american culture. this is, of course, because of

world war ii, you get the rise of atomic science and the atom bomb and all of a sudden there and working on the atom bomb parked on the front covers of every newspaper and have tons of cultural authority. chapter four of this book is women of the manhattan project. i cannot tell you the problem of cultural invisibility did when i came to read this chapter. you cannot find these women. i was looking for all this great juicy archival evidence of these women. they are there and i don't mean there are big players, they are women literally setting off the test site, they are there next to them, all these guys my dad venerated, they knew women and operated with them on a daily basis and i couldn't find a good to see a archival evidence about these women because of the weird thing about it is these women started to internalize this invisibility. they wouldn't talk about themselves in grandiose terms

and so this the problem. i had a very hard time buying them so i spent a lot of this chapter for sort of trying to diagnose this dearth of evidence and try to diagnose this and visibility. the very last moment, historical moment in this book is really looking at women scientists with the rise of second way feminism. i don't think it's a puissance at the same time women are starting to question and the general. of also start to see some pretty interesting epistemological it ruptures going on in science itself. now, it's a very same time you have people like betty friedan, literally within that same year people like thomas q1 starting to talk about science in terms of revolutions, starting to question the very masculine scientists. all of these things are happening at the very same time. this is one rachel carson it is worth writing silent spring.

this is not signs as usual because, first of all, it has its ethical posture and she doesn't apologize for it, she talks about the nature, this is a no-no in the time of masculine science but she's starting to do this. all of a sudden people are starting to question not just the scientists predict louis m'aam but now they are saying this guy probably has the subject to be bringing to the science, probably asking certain questions because he's got that subjectivity. so people are starting to question mess. it's funny i have to say back in the 1950's there is a fascinating study done by margaret mead and she and this other woman went to all these high school students and asked them, drawing a scientist and in 1956 the vast majority of people when i'm john m. some with a lab coat, spectacles,. this is how the scientists was

kidding imagine that in american culture. not so much so in the '60s it. we start to see people particularly with the rise of the sociology of science in the field, there are saying all those things that ragin in the 40's and 50's, this idea that a lone male maverick this is by himself without anybody bothering him hundred down and comes up with his nobel theories, all of a sudden they said scientists collaborative. they were done in a collaborative why and how those culturally feminine traits complying well with others, may be a good thing in big science. [laughter] so all of a sudden we start to see that science itself bismal logically is getting culturally feminized. i don't want to overstate that is happening a little bit so lovely sea in chapter six is that to the women -- i show a generational perspective, look at women to come to professional aged bride had the force on the

eve of a second wave of feminism that i talk about women who get a feminist consciousness with the rise of radical feminism. i talk about rosalyn yalow who comes into being tried before the feminist turn then i talk about people like alan fox keller few get pulled completely politicize and really is a radicalized. she has a whole different idea of what her identity is as a scientist. then i talk about women after that and refine these women not only see themselves differently but starting to except maybe they're bringing different methodological -- methodologies and different perspectives and bring in different questions to science. this is all happening with the '60s into the '70s and you see this with these women i talked about particularly with barbara mcclintock, because of the one thing that barbara mcclintock science was that was the big

no-no was intuitive. what we start to see is maybe some people looking at the same, you know, maybe that's not a bad thing to bring to science such as chapter six. chapter seven, this is the last chapter. my husband tells me this is the most interesting chapter, i don't know these are women, three women in this chapter, and this is the chapter basically paleontologist, i'm sure you guys know him a, he has is proteges he calls his lady primatologist said. when i started in the field in the 1960's it was largely male. but then 1960's and '70s, '80s and '90s becomes completely feminize and by 2000 their 70 percent of all ph.d. of primatology going to women. so i talk about these women who are fascinating, fascinating people in their own right but what's so interesting about this chapter is in the last chapter

in of luck and i read it first. completely the first thing that came to my mind and the reason why is because the one question in my mind first like when i first decided to read this book of these women are very thoughtful about responses to this question. i don't even know they are pitcher can't look at their sides and the way they live their lives and not think they were -- weren't. this is the question: is there such a thing as a feminine or feminists science? and if there is, do we want to package it this way for women in the 21st century? this was a question that was always in my mind when writing this book. i got to tell you cannot look at these women and the answer to think about responses to these questions so i read about them last and so this makes the whole thing back words but the whole process was, i was having a glass of wine with carol burke

and and carol who is also riding is home of some book about women in civil war wives. there are three different biographies and we would sit over our wine and talk about our process. she was telling me that she came across these women because she found this little nugget of something in each of these women absolutely fascinating. she didn't know what she wanted to do yet but these were the women to write about so she started exploring and as she got to know them better and more intimately suddenly she started to see this larger the narrative. she wasn't sure to talk about tragedy or horatio alger tale, but as she got to know these women the packaging of the life stories started to come to be appearing she was telling me this and i've got to say that sounds reasonable to me. that's probably how most buyers operate and yet for me the process was exactly the

opposite. i completely new them as the narrative from day one, exactly this over arching story to tell. i was going to look at this moment to women and rationalization and when size gets very masculine and essentially an all this epistemological changes in science and second wave run as some here and i even had this clear idea in my mind of a different gender dynamics i wanted to show. i knew i want to talk about nepotism policies and what this did for married women who tried to do science in the 20th-century. i knew i wanted to talk about the phenomenon of biological clocks in science. a very different then say feel like mine. in history the whole idea is to get better and better and wiser with age here you're supposed to get better and better like a fine wine. presumably. but, of course, presumably in physics very different. there's this idea that you come

of age in your 20s and 30s, that's when you do your best work. really everything is done by the time you are 40 and supposed to put those hundred hour weeks and this is where you get your big brain child of an idea that happens in the 20s and 30s then you win the nobel 20 years later. of course, this completely happens to coincide with women's biological clocks and this is for the sabotage begins for women in physics. i want to talk about that dynamic and i think the most important dynamic to talk about was the fact that science is so totally social. all these people bring down the 1940's and '50's talk about science is a solitary thing. you do not get was going out with women if you don't see signs as social. and i wanted to find people that would literally show me or tell the story of this 00 -- sociology of science and the geography of the lab, the social politics of the lab. this is why i wrote about

rosalind franklin. you get to see signs as social and she's not part of that party this is why people are usurping her data so that's the story i had to tell. i knew the dynamics to talk about, new the narrative, didn't know the people. had no idea who i wanted to write about so i had to go back and find the women that helps me tell the story in the most compelling way. totally backwards. and i don't say this because i'm recommending, just because this is what happens. so that's pretty much of the process. i guess if i could tell you what i want you to leave with -- i want you to understand that this book is about the gendering of science but is told to the women who are fascinating in their own rights, hopefully not to tell a sob story. i think a lot think they're so many ways to describe how you can screw a woman and i don't mean that. yes, you have to tell that part of the sorry but i want people to be mindful about the way the scientific culture is standard

in and how we can reach conceptualize from the 21st century. anyone have any questions? [applause] thank you. >> [inaudible] and i was like to answer questions but we'd appreciate if they could come to this microphone for better audio quality so if we could have questions i will start asking if you sent a copy of the book to lawrence summers? [laughter] >> no, i don't know about the press. >> hello, i'm great. i'm very happy to be here. i am actually one of a who those theoretical nuclear physicist and a very masculine world.

>> wow. >> i were two many groups who was really the only woman. >> you know the applied to. >> when you mentioned that drawing the figures i think that's still valid and i get that a lot of. you don't look like a theoretical nuclear physicist. i am asking how does a steer radical nuclear physicist expect to look like and i did exactly which you were saying. >> and those presumptions are to be nine. the empire real-life. >> they do. >> i'm trying to make a point in my life of not following into that trap and get out of it and just be myself and embrace myself the way i am and try to be a role model because unfortunately i don't have any role models. >> this is a hard thing. >> nominee nuclear physicists who on higher level position. >> mentoring, mentoring, mentoring and if you don't have this this is a problem and the

radical physics absolutely but we should let everyone know, this is what a physicist looks like. [laughter] i'm so glad you came up to say that. >> and to have a question but i do want to say that i'm very much looking forward to reading your book because i think it's going to bring a totally fresh air because you're not a scientist. >> no. >> here are not inside of a the same problems that men talk about, that we can feel victimized and feel this off. feel that it's unfair but i think i'm looking for and so i think it's going to be fresh air and inspiring for may. my question is, you mentioned several times that you are focusing on the american way's and do you find that the say in european countries this issue would be different light if the

polish news would write about the speed to a different name of all the issues would be this spot. >> as a good question and that's a little out of my row of expertise but i can tell you there are differing cultures particularly in italy a different side to the colleges for women that are much more amenable. i was st. louis won nobel prize winner who actually wins the nobel prize for a work with nerve growth factor at washington university in st. louis but after she was she went back two italy because it's a little more amenable. it is different but that said it bought many of the women in this book sort of speaking his starkly actually they come to the united states because they're having such a hard time in europe. >> [inaudible] >> you now. she was in germany and couldn't find a job, came here and didn't

get paid for the first 25 years to work as a physicist. she followed her husband from prague. so a lot of people come from europe but that said there's little pockets of very amenable spaces and there are institutes in europe that are very amenable to women. >> thank you for a wonderful presentation. i am the director at a manhattan local high school in new york city and i also teach a research program so for the high school students had lied to inform you that more than half of my class is actually comprised of female students of all races but the question i have for you is, for this since i work with oftentimes i find that when you work with a younger student they don't have the concept that science is only meant for one gender or the other however when i find myself combating are the parents because i have a number

of cases where the female students and oftentimes i have never encountered male students having this issue, and the female student's parents are demanding and asking questions why is my daughter spending so much time in your class and laboratory where as the male students i've never encountered this question. instead they ask different question that is i don't want my son to study psychology because it's not hard science. i was wondering if you could provide any insight or advice. when i try to handle these cases and convince them it's absolutely crucial to help your child realize the potential of the matter what gender they are or what subject they are pursuing. >> the reason you see it in appearance is because it have the punch already and these kids when they are younger, it's funny because we see this that actually test scores in math for girls and boys fourth and fifth grade, girls are doing better at that stage and then by middle

school it goes like this and then high school, college and the pipeline starts to trip after that. i don't know i have been advised about one of the things i can tell you is some of the women in this book, they did things that little boys are supposed to do. they played with gadgets. they did all these things and for the ones at two parties. they were putting things occurred to and that sort of thing and the ones whose parents let them do it -- i will give you an example. barbara mcclintock was one of those and there's no doubt that we fall into these expectations of what we think girls and boys are supposed to do and i have a daughter who i actually think is very science minded. i have teachers that call and thing some of the stuff she does is a little inappropriate. [laughter] so i know this still, i still get this and she does this that the boys in the class do and they aren't getting phone calls. so there's no doubt that you're

fighting a battle here about what -- but so many of these women who did well and size for the ones who did this anti-social behavior and where to themselves. all these things that girls are not supposed to want to do, never successful scientists. it takes all types to make the world around and they seem to be more accepting of it. absolutely. >> manhattan >> im8 physicists. >> they come out of the woodwork and. >> [inaudible] i just happen to come here with my mother and pierre. >> you're hundred down like you're supposedly. >> my question is -- [inaudible]

i just wanted to see if you could see any differences in different science branches like social sciences and natural sciences seem to be very different. like it's much more normal if you are a social scientist if you are a woman unless or abnormal if you are a woman in naturalize specialists. >> there's no doubt one of the reasons i talk about some of the women it is i wanted to see the variations in different disciplines. not just in numbers but in the culture as well so you're talking about differences in numbers or talking about some cultures more medical quacks absolutely. there's a ton of research done about what it is that makes more women come to primatology and a lot has to do with the fact that you can use permit to logical arguments to make a feminist arguments. a lot of women are drawn into the study and apes and can say things about human nature.

so this is strong women in the other thing too is this a strong tradition of women working in the field of some women felt comfortable entering that space because they've seen it done before. physics, very different story. very different story. one of the women i read about box keller is a graduate student at harvard and 50 who leaves in physics and goes into biology for these reasons. very high style. >> when i was a freshman karen. i continued in physics but i was thinking to change. >> i can understand it still there, these problems. >> i wanted to build a physicist but i felt so abnormal, i didn't want to get questions like why are you in physics? i don't want to see that change of faith when i say i'm a physicist. everybody