match and i stood up for him and went to bat for him in print it turned out to be a lawsuit with the sure suing the schakowsky and with my constant championing of him i did up losing my job at chess "life" magazine which i had founded. i rebounded and i was with him, the match took two months but for three months i came early and left late. then he won the world's championship. and i also looked at this biography through the eyes of a friend per car was his friend. we had many hollings out.

[laughter] whatever we had, arguments. [laughter]

personality. no matter what he did, not only chess. i mean, he was a good swimmer and going in high school and grammar school in camp at summer he would swim and bobby would be -- when they had races, bobby would be in the water before everybody was in middive. he was just fast. and he wanted to win and when he got older and the teams and when he went up to -- and in his 20s when he went up there, he would play tennis and he would beat everybody at tennis except the tennis pro. other than that, he wanted to win everything he did. and so i go into that and talk about his competitive personality. else had a phenomenal memory, an incredible memory. when he was preparing for up there. there was a book of games.

hundreds and hundreds of his games. with about 10,000 moves in that book. and almost as a parlor game he would grab the book, pick out the game when it was played and who he would play again. all right. 1978, he played against someone and he would then rattle off all the moves. he had memorized the 10,000 moves. i mean, that's just one of his memory feats. i could tell many, many other stories and i do in the book actually. about how good he was. and he had a total focus on chess. many people, as he was growing and even when he got older, you know, bobby is an idiot savant but he doesn't know anything about chess. well, i don't know if you read malcolm gladwell's book the outliers how to achieve success

it takes 10,000 hours in a sense that's like 1,000 hours a year for ten years in order to become good at something. bobby spent probably more than that although gladwell disputes that. he would spend six or eight hours a day. you might say, yeah, so he didn't know anyone else. well, have you talked to a musician. they know music, don't they? okay. i know psychiatrists, they know the mind. they know the interpretation of dreams, they know all kinds of things but many of them don't know about art or literature or music or life even, you know, they know how to analyze you and tell what you to do. and i'm not putting down -- i see one psychologist and i'm not putting psychologists down. yeah, he spent the greater portion of his life studying chess, so what?

he became the champion of the world. and that was sort of interesting. and so that's part of what i do in the book. i try to approach and confront some of these misconceptions about him. and because, from the time he was in his 20s, when he won the world's championship until he died three years ago, just almost exactly three years ago, he studied constantly all kinds of books. and this is not a defense of bobby and i'm going to get to the bad parts of bobby. i just want to let you know that he was a voracious reader and he was -- he could talk about the discourses of the war. he had become an intellectual. in the 40 years from the time that he had won the championship because he stopped studying chess all that much and started

studying other things. it's very interesting. so my specific approach in the book was to show very specifically how bobby became good. if you read this book, will you become good too? i don't know about that. but possibly. it may inspire you. that's good you're not going to learn the specifics openings because there are no openings here. there are no diagrams, there are no games here, okay, but it may inspire you to become good like he did. so i wanted to show that and i think i have. the hours of practice, how he did it, how he analyzed and so forth. i also showed the difficulties he had. he came from a poor family. his mother was -- i wouldn't say a vagrant but she was -- when bobby was born, she was homeless. and they had to live in a hospice. then they lived in a trailer and

then they finally moved to manhattan and then finally to brooklyn in a small little, you know, walk-up apartment for $56 a month. he never had any government support like the soviets. they got their country retreats. they got salaries. they could do anything they wanted. they could spend all their time playing and studying chess. bobby didn't get that. he got zilch in terms of any support. and that embittered him because a lot. so i go into that. and then, of course, i talk about his fall from grace. and why did he refuse $10 million that he actually had from his attorney for sponsorship of products and for, you know, entries into tournaments and appearance fees.

and he went off into the nether of the seedy section of los angeles and lived there for 20 years as a recluse. he disappeared. he would not give an interview. he wouldn't do anything. the other question is, why did he become anti-semitic. he was a jew. his mother was jewish. completely. the father, the paternity is up for grabs. it would have been one of two men. we're not positive who that man was but both of them were jewish. and regina fisher married the next time she married someone jewish. he denied he ever received training and yet i have found evidence that he really did have a bar mitzvah although he never had a brisk which is sort of unusual. so why did that happen? well, you'll to have read the

book. [laughter] >> and we'll get into it. i do get into it and i offer speculation. you never know what's in someone's heart, you know, when you're writing a biography how can you take someone's life and gram it, you know, inside the pages of a book. it's difficult to do. but in any event it's there and i discuss it. and it was -- it was rotten and he became anti-american and i became ballistic. and i didn't want anything to do with him in all of this and i started to think, well, maybe he's like vadner. maybe if you're jewish, you say i'm not listening to him and i'm not buying his albums. i'm not buying a volkswagen. it's possible and it's your point of view and that's fine. and i thought vadner, what about

gagone he was terrible. frank sinatra was a rotten son of a bitch. can we indeed accept the art and divorce the man and can we honor the art and what accomplished and divorce the man? and if we can do that, then indeed i started to think -- it took me a philosophical confrontation, almost a confrontation with myself. should i write this book? i had gotten many offers to write this before. should i write it or should i not? and i said, i think i can split it. i think i can honor bobby's accomplishments while also denigrating his absolutely horrible and obscene comments about jews and about america.

so this book is not a memoir of myself in any way, shape or form. i'm practically invisible other than the piece that i read where i met with him in the cedar tavern. i'm hardly in the book. this is bobby's story. it's bobby's life. it's a great odyssey of what we went through truly a rags to riches story in many ways. and he ended up, you know, before he died as a multimillionaire. it has shakespearean overtones. and it's truly the stuff of greek legend. so that's about all i have to say. and let's have a q & a. [applause]

>> remember, wait until the microphone comes around. >> hi, how are you stewart? >> good, good. at the end of his life where he did he get his money. >> in 1992 he violated sanctions that the united states had against serbia. he played in montenegro and ended up -- was a $5 billion match. and he ended up winning $3.5 million and he lived on that. >> but wasn't most of it? >> hey, how are you? >> i'm great. >> but most wasn't it swindled by the serbian banker? >> no, there wasn't. there was a million dollars in television rights that bobby never got. but the 3.5 million definitely he got it in cash. his sister flew to belgrade,

stayed at the intercontinental hotel it was exchanged and she then took a train to switzerland and deposited it in switzerland so he had his money. >> wasn't the u.s. government trying to take the money out -- >> yes, and they still are. bobby, first of all, violated those sanctions so he should be fined at least $250,000, of course, he's dead now but on top of that, he stopped paying taxes in 1977. he was so anti-american. and so i don't know how much -- you know, he wasn't making a heck of a lot during the 20 years i call the wilderness years that he was living in l.a. he had some royalties that he was making on his books but wasn't a heck of a lot but he still had to pay taxes on that so they're trying to get a lot of this money and who knows, they may still do it. it's up for grabs right now in

the icelandic courts. wait, here's the microphone. >> i wondered if he made a will and where did his money go. >> he didn't make a will and the money still exists. now, he spent it over -- since 1992. he died in 2008. so, you know, he had those expenses. he bought a house for his girlfriend. he bought her a condo. and apparently there was $2 million left of the 3.5 million. . >> did he believe the things that he did or was he just being provocative and did he have friends in high school? when he was in high school? >> were new high school with him? >> no, no. [laughter]

>> you're much too young. but there was -- there was somebody here who supposedly went to high school with bobby. are you still here? wherever you are? in any event -- [inaudible] >> hi, frank. actually, i met him in a residence in '57 i think it was and he used to walk around the campus with his head down and a copy of the russian chess tournament in his back pocket. >> so you went there -- >> i went to brooklyn but i took a summer course. >> we'll forgive you. [laughter] >> did he believe -- yeah, i believe he did. and, you know, at the end of his -- at the end of his life, he came out with what seemed like a terribly pretentious statement saying you know i'm not just a chess jean skwlus --

genius in all things and he believed it. that was the whole point with bobby even when he was younger. whatever he said, it was. i mean, he believed it. and you either accepted it or not. and sometimes he was, you know -- he seemed very irrational but indeed that's the way it was. yes, so he believed it. he wasn't just being an actor. >> yes. >> i'm sorry. >> the mic. >> hi, frank. >> hi. >> this is just a chess question. you said they played speed chess as a game. did bobby ever play blindfolded? >> yeah. he rarely played blindfold chess but he did -- i know that on a trip from the de-val street in

cuba as a young man they played blindfold chess but during that time he played some blindfold games but his opponent kept not remembering the game. [laughter] >> but to bobby, you know, in a sense he was always playing blindfold chess because he was going over games in his mind, so, yeah. >> what made him anti-american? >> there was a series of stories that appeared in "life" magazine about bobby, and the writer, who's now dead wrote these stories from a contract with bobby that he would not write a book about him. and a year and a half or two years after the match was over in '72, he came out with a book and so bobby sued him in court

for -- i think it was believe it or not $100 million and bobby always had problems with lawyers. decided to handle the case himself. and so the brief was scribbled, you know, on a yellow paper and that kind of thing. and eventually it was thrown out of court. and bobby claimed that there was no justice in the american jurisprudence system and so, therefore, at that point he said i'm not going to pay any taxes anymore. i don't believe in america. it's a corrupt government. >> some questions on the front here. >> i just want to thank you for delivering to us the second book. i have the first one you wrote and many of the things you are saying right now when he was playing speed cheese and i was laughing we were saying i want to cross you and he kept losing to him.

i enjoyed your book and i found it interesting. the chess world needs bobby's fisher. >> thank you, thank you, thank you. we'll get one over here and we'll get back to you. >> there were any clinical, mental issues that were attributed to him given his statements that he made? >> no psychiatrist that i know ever said anything along that line. and i interviewed a number of psychiatrists who knew him. the latest being dr. magnus schoolson in rekijeh who was bobby during the last months of his life. dr. schoolson said and i'll give you quote -- you'll find it in the book, he said he was disturbed. he was paranoid. but he was not schizophrenic and

he was not psychotic and dr. schoolson is because an m.d. and he was the director of the largest mental institution in iceland. very reputable man. he said he came from a troubled childhood and he was mixed up but clinically he could not say that he was paranoid schizophrenic. he had paranoid tendencies as most of us do to some extent. [laughter] >> why did you title it "endgame." >> because it was the end of his life and it's the end of the game. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. any more, we're back to this man the brooklyn tech traitor. >> if you have an opinion how well fisher would have done in his prime. >> how would dempsey have done

against tyson? you know, those kinds of -- [inaudible] >> that's a very difficult thing to compare things that cannot really be compared. however, i think bobby fischer was the greatest chess player that ever lived. there may be others coming down the line, the japanese-american player won the strongest chess tournaments ever played a few days ago and he may surpass what fisher did. but up until now, fisher i claim was the strongest player. now, fisher was away from the game for 20 years. if fisher had not been away from the game for 20 years and then played kasparev and i would say fisher would win and kasparev would deny that.

[laughter] >> yes, back there. >> hi, professor brady. >> oh, my god, a former student. good lord! your name will come to me. don't tell me your name. it will come to me. >> well, i'm dating myself because i'm calling you professor brady. >> that's right before i got my doctorate. >> that's right. >> lillian? >> that's it very good. [applause] >> i was on the phone with my dad the other night and i was mentioning that i was going to attend your book-signing. and he actually played with bobby fischer at the manhattan chess club. >> really. >> so i was asking him about him and he said that at times bobby would play 15 people at one time. >> absolutely. >> and he was always 10 steps ahead of everyone. so no one really won, you know, against him. >> yeah. >> but he did mention that his

mother had a lot of influence on him and i just wanted to know if you can elaborate on that and do you think that that really pedal him to say the things he said later on in life? >> his mother was a great influence on him, in many ways. she helped his career. she was like a professional press agent almost. there was not a newspaper, magazine or anything else in this city that she didn't go to try to get press for bobby. and she encouraged encouraged. did they have fights? of course, just like we all probably have had with our parents when we're 16 years old. so, yeah, they had fights. but that's another misconception that i try to straighten out. they loved her. she went and got her doctorate in hematology and her medical

doctorate later on in years and wanted her to come back to the united states 'cause he missed her. when he was on his death bed, he asked for a photograph of her. they loved each other. and she was a professional protester but she was a left professional protester. but as i say, the pawn doesn't stray too far from the queen. [laughter] >> he became a protester but sort of on the other side, anti-americanism and so on. she had a great influence on him. and she was both mother and father to him because she was a single mother. okay. a couple more questions. a couple more. we have time, sir. two more questions. >> it must have been a really unique experience for you as a biographer to revisit a subject

that you had written about so many years earlier. and i can't imagine that when you were writing that you must have developed some sort of familial bond with bobby and i'm just wondering how it's affected you over the years. you touched upon it to a certain degree but how it's affected you as you saw him change and degenerate over the years and what you feel ultimately was your relationship with bobby? >> well, as bobby changed, i changed, the relationship changed. when i wrote the first book, i didn't have a doctorate. i sort of learned -- you know, the thing about -- but the thing about getting a ph.d. is you learn how to research and if you don't, heaven forbid. so i went ahead and learned something and i learned something and i wrote many other books between the first and this one.

about 9 or 10 other books. so i changed and as i told you, or as i mentioned, i felt very bad about his anti-american statements and his 9/11 statements. i was horrified. but i had to take a couple of beers to get over that and when i did, i said i should tell this story. there's nobody better in the world that can tell bobby fischer's story than me. and so, therefore, it was an obligation on my part in a sense to tell that story. and i think told it an accurate and honest appraisal of his life. we got here, we go here. sorry. [laughter] >> >> did he train physically like an athlete would before matches? >> absolutely. he swam.

he played tennis. he lifted weights. he was a very physical person and, you know, his walk -- if you saw him, he was like a tennis player. he was swagger, you know, because he was so used to this kind of stop, playing basketball. he was an athlete. he was a true athlete and he kept that up pretty much all his life. during the wilderness years there was times he didn't do everything but he was also a walker. he walked miles and miles and miles. he walked my legs off. he would think nothing of walking from the upper west side down to the lower east side and back again in the course of an evening. you know, miles and miles and miles and he loved it and he was a fast walker. i mean, if you were next to him that was wind because he was walk so quickly so he was in terrific shape and he really

trained before each match. so i think that's about it. unless someone has one anxious question that they want to ask. nick? yes. [inaudible] >> i'm wondering if he had any romantic relationships, any -- was he ever married? >> he was never married. and he was in prison and then the woman that he was living with in japan came quite honestly in a gambit to try to get him out of prison so that it became -- he would be looked upon maybe as a japanese citizen, but he wasn't married to a japanese woman and they got married in prison, you know, towards the end of his life. he did have -- he was in love with a 17-year-old girl when he was 49 years old. nothing ever cons sumated. however, he was in love with her and, you know, there were occasional romantic dalliances

in his life. i go into that in the book. well, thank you very much. [applause] >> that was frank brady discussing the life of bobby fischer on booktv. this program will re-air tomorrow february 20th at 8:15 pm eastern. >> we're here at the national press club talking to lincoln historian james swanson about his new book "bloody crimes." can you tell us what inspired you to pursue this angle? >> well, two things, when i finished "manhunt" i started to realize that the hunt for john wilkes booth was one-third of a great trilogy of the great stories and the final journeys were abraham lincoln and jefferson davis after they fell from power and became a greater

martyr and a greater hero during his fall than during the height of his power and presidency and that interested me because these final journeys of abraham lincoln and davis are as important as other great american journeys the journey of the lewis and clark and the journey to the moon and i don't think the civil war is over. we still discuss issues that lincoln and davis discussed about. and i thought about doing one book about each of these stories. one book about the lincoln funeral train and the pageant and the other about the davis escape and one day i was visiting willy lincoln's tomb in oak hill cemetery in georgetown and lincoln would often visit that spot alone and as i walked along that path that abraham lincoln walked, i realized as i looked to my left one of the sons of jefferson davis was buried right and he had to walk to the son to the tomb of his own dead son.

i realized there was much more they had in common just the fact that their final journeys were happening at the same time. and as i started to research it i found out and lincoln and davis had bizarre similarities and that's what really inspired me to do the book about both of them, you know, under one set of covers because in many ways although you'd never think it, they were alike in so many bizarre and strange ways and it was that insight that made me want to write their stories in one book. >> and can you tell me story came from? >> yeah, the title "bloody crimes" really comes from john brian and abraham lincoln. when john brown was awaiting execution, he was allowed to possess a king james bible and he underlined his favorite passages and one of them was from the book of ezekiel, make a change for the land is full of bloody crimes and then on the morning he was hanged, john brown handed a piece of paper to his jailer and it said, i john brown am now convinced more than ever that the crimes of this bloody land could only be purged by blood.

and then lincoln helped me think of a title too because we think of lincoln's second inaugural address as a message of peace, brotherhood and reconciliation but there's a very dark passage in lincoln's second inaugural that's been completely forgotten and lincoln says essentially if all the blood drawn by 250 years of slavery and the slave master's whip has to be repaid by blood drawn by the sword, let it be so. and so lincoln's discussion of blood and vengeance and john brown's prophesy that there's blood to come are really -- it gave me the idea to the title of the book. >> what's your next project? >> well, i spent the last several years surrounded by death, assassination, american mass tragedy, the crime of slavery, imprisonment, the deaths of 620,000 americans. so i think i'm going to take a break and do "manhunt" and the honor of whining the edgar award. i've become friend with two great american thriller writers

and they've encouraged to try fiction. there still might be death and destruction in it but at least it won't be real and so i think i'm going to take a break from nonfiction and try to create a thriller novel. >> thank you, thanks for your time. >> thanks. >> next, stephanie coontz, history and family studies professor at the evergreen state college reports on the generation of american women who were introduced to feminist politics in the early 1960s. ms. johnnie tuitel cites the 1963 publication and readership of betty friedan's "the feminine mystique" who began to question their familial and professional roles. this is about 75 minutes >> i chose the title from the great paragraph from fri-dan's book, "the feminine mystique" that and i want to start by reading that and i'll just chat

to you. the problem lay buried, unspoken for nineteen years the book by friedan opens. it was a strange stirring. a sense of dissatisfaction. a yearning, each suburban wife struggled with it alone as she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slip cover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured cup scouts laid beside her husband at night she was afraid to ask even herself the silent question is this all? people who read that book at the time 50 years later can sometimes still quote those words. sometimes friedan went on -- a woman would try to blot out that feeling with a tranquilizer and what she really needed was to redecorate her house or move to a better neighborhood or even have an affair.

but more often actually according to the women that i interviewed when i was working on this book, they thought the problem was in themselves. and could only be solved by fixing themselves. they begged their physicians or their psychiatrists if they could afford one to tell them what it was and how to make it go away. and friedan's book is an extended plea that their feelings were legitimate. that the source of what she called the problem with no name was that it -- we lived in a culture that did not allow women as it allowed men to gratify a need that was just important as sex. contrary to what we hear nowadays sometimes what feminism, the need to grow and fill their potential as human beings. denied that permission. ridiculed if they attempted to do it, many women developed a hunger that neither food nor sex could fill.

the response to her book was absolutely electric. one of the highlights of researching this book for me was that i was able to track down 188 women and men who had read "the feminine mystique" when it first came out and they could quotas i said, whole sentences, whole passages. often they could remember exactly where they were when they read the book. and how it made them feel, breathless with relief they would say. i suddenly knew i was not alone. the things i thought was wrong with me i suddenly realized it might be right with me. one of the intellectual giants that i know as a sociologist today i would never who has a mind like a steel trap said she sat around saying, you're going to be punished selfish women are always mund she started crying when she read the first chapter halfway down the book she flushed her tranquilizers down

the toilet. it took a little while to winnow my interviews down to 188 because when people first heard i was looking for individuals who had read "the feminine mystique," i got scores of letters from people who were absolutely sure they had read the book. but whose comments knead infinitely clear they had not, you know? they had wildly different memories of what it said. one fan of the book said, oh, it documented all the ways that women are discriminated against in work, in law, in economics. even though, in fact, friedan barely mentions those issues. others told me encouraged women to seek fulfillment by indulging first consumerism or going after these ambitious careers, ideas that friedan explicitly condemned. one insisted this was the book that told women to burn their bras, although i hope everybody knows in this building that no such thing ever happened. but my point is this, that friedan's book ignited so much passion and its title in a world where we didn't know words like

sexism or shoafism. that it became kind of a receptacle for people's hopes and fears about feminism and family life to the point that people who actually read it think very much like the bible that they know exactly what it says. and as it happens, i was one of those people. i was approached to do this biography of "the feminine mystique" and i instantly said, you know, my mother had talked about it so often. so i said, great, you know, i had somehow -- i had truly come to think that i had read the book because i heard about it so much from my mother and other people and books that i'd read so i said, okay, so i assigned it to my poor class and sat down to read it and halfway through the first chapter and realized i had never read it and i couldn't believe, you know, how dated it was in so many ways but also how

modest its proposals for change was. how uncontroversial her ideas were but i think that's the real story. that's the reason it's important to recapture this period and to understand what went on it. why it seems so radical and stirred up so much emotion on both sides of the story for friedan to say as she previewed an excerpt from her book in good housekeeping in 1961 and you know magazines like to use, you know -- to generate the most provocative titles ever. and this was a provocative one i say the title says, women are people too. that does not sound a particularly provocative page-turner title but at the time this was not considered self-evident. in fact, it was considered a terrible mistake, leading experts explicitly argued because this is a direct quote for society to regard its citizens as people rather than

as primarily as males and females who occupied different roles and had completely different natures. so sometimes today we get kind of worn down by the stresses of juggling work and family. i suspect a lot of people in this room do but we forget the price people paid when they didn't to have balance work and family and, in fact, when they were penalized when they tried to do so. when women who wanted a meaningful work life were accused of suffering from a bad case of penius envy. that's what they were told when more men wanted to get involved in child care and direct quote from the 1950s psychologists were suspected to have a little too much fat on the inner thigh so i'm going to spend most my time here talking about the price that women paid for this division and why they responded so much but i do want to get to the point very briefly as to

what men paid as well. men paid a price for this division too. i think most people have a very good idea of the obstacles that working women faced back in the 1960s. it was okay to go to work because. in fact, women -- housewives were often called parasites if they stayed at home once their children were grown but what they weren't supposed to do was to get what the two of the leading psychiatrists called a career which they defined as a job plus prestige. they weren't supposed to go for anything that would pay well enough to threaten their husband or interest them well enough to threaten their primary commitment. the first thing, if a woman wanted to work or had to work in those days she had to open the paper to the help wanted female section. and i went through the entire april, 1963, ads in the "new york times" in the help wanted female. they were for gal fridays, receptionists, pretty-looking cheerful gals.

one of them -- and this ad was repeated a couple of times so he must have had high standards. you must be really beautiful. this was a legal job ad. some ads did request a college grad but that requirement was inevitably accompanied with one other which i bet you can bet. must have good typing skills. once hired, women were paid less than men for exactly the same work. as late as 1970 woman working full-time with a college directing and this was also true for black male college graduates less than a white male graduate. nothing stopped them from firing her if she got married or pregnant and if in the airline industry put on a few pounds or reached the ripe old age of 30. that was maternity leave. there was one airline in the 1960s said that if a woman had a miscarriage or her child died within the first year she could

get her job back with no loss of seniority. there was no recourse against a woman being fired because she failed to put out or because she complained when someone felt her up. not until 1993 actually was sexual harassment on the job made illegal. but i could -- i could go on about this and i do go on about it a little bit and in one of the chapters in my book but what i want is turn to something that i think surprises most modern audiences even more. and to understand in a culture whereas rebecca points out we're always being invited to partake in the mommy wars and where people seem to think the prevalence of working women and the reforms of feminism have undermined the prestige of home-making i wanted to point out how little security and social respect stay at home and mothers had before friedan and the woman's movement came along. the 1930s and 40s and 1950s were

a period when americans were being subjected to this barrage of attacks on mother hoods and stay at home moms. sons were being told to snap the silver cord that psychiatrists said their mothers tried to wrap them in. husbands were encouraged to stand up for themselves and reassert the authority they were losing in an increasingly femininized white collar war. there was the word mommism to describe the she-tyranny of women who kept their sons tied to their apron strings, nagged their husbands to an early grave because they insisted on them buying them ever more consumer items, boast incessantly about their self-sacrificing and it demanded that politicians listen to their meddlesome moralizing. it's no mommism, communism -- you know, mommism was a domestic side of the threat of communism.

and the reason that 2.5 million american men have been found unfit for military service. it was their moms who set it up. and one army information mother that mom and her pies have killed as many men is 1,000 german machine guns and by the 1950s women's magazines were taking these ideas about the horrible effect of stay at home mothers and too-involved wives into the grocery stores, the beauty shops, the suburban homes accusing overprotective moms of creating everything from homosexuality to fascism. in one lady's home journal article said if hitler's mom hadn't been overprotective history might have taken a different course. and what was even more confusing is i talked to women who read this and how kind of demoralized they felt. these ideas were not just coming from reactionaries.

the beatniks were as contemn tuus as the button down men they depriced. and the author of the rich of the super rich he was a big critique of capitalism was just as condemning of moms as right wingers were, who called for a return to manliness in people like ayn rand who threatened aggression and the different problems they saw on modern society on the different same source, women. there was a 1957 book the crack in the picture window that eviscerated modern suburbia. what was the main problem according to him? it was a matriarchial society with a typical husband, a woman boss inadequate, money terrified neuter and the typical wife a nagging blob. this was the antiwoman rhetoric that was around and, you know, it was so pervasive that friedan

even incorporated some of it in her writing including the totally repellant and discredited overly devoted moms turn their sons into homosexuals and she used to turn it on its head in order to avoid this we should actually let women have some interests of their own. but this lack of respect for moms is what permeated the culture and the lack of right for homemakers i think would stun most modern women. in 1963, only eight states gave a wife any legal claim to her husband's earnings or property. and the other 42 she supposedly had the right to be properly supported and to give the hundred leeway when one enterprising kansas woman sued in court to get her quite well off husband to install running water in her kitchen, the kansas

supreme court rebuffed her in all three states the man had did right to decide where the couple legally was a residence. and, in fact, if the man moved and the wife refused to follow, she could be charged with desertion and in the rigid divorce system he could win a divorce for her. and if you have a rotten marriage, you know, just too bad. marital rape was a legal possibility because a woman's marriage vows were held to comply to permanent consent to sexual intercourse. marriage counselors of the era told women that almost any marital problem they experienced from infidelity to domestic violence resulted from a failure of their femininity. infidelity, go check if you really keep yourself groomed enough. are you really a good housekeeper? domestic violence, maybe you're so efficient and aggressive that your husband feels the periodic

need to re-establish his manhood. this was in a journal published by the american medical association in 1964. now, i'm not saying that all homes were marked by that kind of dysfunction. many husbands, of course, treated their wives very well. many homemakers were quite content but again, when you actually look at the definition of contempt, what i think most modern women and men would be shocked by what was considered to be a happy marriage, just a month before the feminine mystique hit the newstands gallop conducted a major news poll in december 1962 and he purported to find that women were the american housewives were the happiest people on earth. what did it take to make them happy? that the man be number one. one woman he interviewed said, being subordinate to men is part of being feminine. what gives her pleasure. another said that a woman needs a master/slave

relationshipwhether it's a husband a wife and a boss and a secretary and just sentences after describing how happy women are that they had all the rights they wanted, they just didn't care to use them gallop even noted it had been hard to interview all these women because some of the husbands wouldn't let them talk to the interviewers. [laughter] >> so it's no wonder that homemakers in the 1950s, some homemakers in the 1950s from all income groups were extremely insecure about their role in society. they were actually more likely than women who worked outside the home to suffer from low self-esteem and depression. and more likely -- ironically, though, the ones who were the most likely to turn this inward and to really feel depressed were the people that we might think at first glance would have been the homemakers who would have been most comfortable in the world. women who had chosen to give up

their jobs or their -- or their education in order to become wives and mothers because they thought that is how they would find the most happiness and who believed they ought to find all their satisfactions within the home. these women were more likely than any others to devalue themselves and doubt their own worth. they even assessed their own child care skills more negatively than either less-educated, less-for the fortunate stay at home mothers or equally educated working moms. unlike today, if moms who actually did work outside the home were more confident in their child-rearing skills than these middle class homemakers felt. and so i set out as i listened to these women talk -- i set out to figure out why were these women so responsive? why did they feel so lost? and it seems to me that what friedan did was have its biggest impact on women who were part of

a generation caught between two worlds. back in the early 20th century, if you wanted an education, you know, you were defying the role of women to even want an education. most women who went into college those days either considered themselves feminists or were already quite atypical in their lives. and they continued to be after they got their education. they went on and they became -- they did become professionals. by of course the 1960s and '70s, the daughters of these so-called -- of the women of the so-called greatest generation did expect that they would go to college and use what they learned outside. but the women caught in between were the ones for whom suddenly it had become respectable and even desirable for a woman to go to college but not to use her education afterwards for anything but to be a wife and mother.

the president of radcliffe college, harvard female counterpart every year assured the incoming freshmen what would happen to them in this school was that they would become educated to be splendid wives and mothers. and, in fact, during this period women were told if -- that one of the main points of going to college was to get your mrs degree and if you failed to get that degree, to take that degree, the instant it was offered, the bachelor's degree you got instead might be a permanent life fate that you would be just left without. the only higher degree that women were encouraged to get in those days was called by advice books as the bright new trend of getting your p.u.t. putting hubby through. a lot of women just nodded 'cause they heard it. younger women's jaws drop when i tell them that. and women's took this advice series.

-- seriously. by the 1950s and early '60s they were twice as likely to drop out as men and by 1960, 60% of women in college were dropping out almost always to get married and unlike today, the more well-read you were, the more you knew as an educated woman that it was not natural to like your education very much or any other activities that were not directed at home making. women in the 1950s and 1960s were taught the scientifically views of freudian psychiatrists and functional sociologists that any woman who wanted more meaning in life than she found in the kitchen and the nursery suffered from psychological maladjustment. women today give up their aspirations voluntarily not out

of coercion as they did in the battle days, you know, before women could vote. but voluntarily because the normal woman finds her greatest satisfaction in her husband's achievements. magazines -- i went through the magazines targeted to both blue collar women and middle class women in that era and also to educated black women and it was the ones targeted to educated white middle class women who were the most likely to promote the views of freudian psychiatrists in their -- and other human behavior experts about what are healthy and unhealthy gender roles. and so the result was that educated housewives who didn't feel what they had learned, what their educations had taught them, they ought to be feeling were more likely than any other group to turn this inward into a feeling of a special kind of misery and self-doubt and to think it must be their own

inadequacy. it's true. many critics over the years have complained that friedan's book tend to have the most emotional resonance for these middle class women with slightly more education than usual. and especially, though not exclusively to those who had or aspired to more education than was normal for a woman in those days and at first when i worked on this book she didn't deal with working class women. she didn't deal with african-american women but the more i worked on this book, the more i learned a lesson that perhaps i should have learned, you know, before i reached this age, you know, it's common enough in your 20s when you have these moral hierarchies, but the more i began to realize that you actually don't have to make a virtue hierarchy of whose pain accounts for more. the pain of a working class woman or a low-paid factory worker or clerk who had an exhausting job at work and then

an equally exhausting job at home or the pain of a black woman who couldn't protect her kids from racism no matter, you know, if both she and her husband were working and no matter how educated they were, that was different and more immediate in some ways more urgent than the stress facing a middle class woman as a homemaker, finding out that she didn't believe it was as good as she knew it ought to be. but i don't think that that pain of those homemakers was trivial or should be discounted. and it was more -- because it was in some ways more bewildering because they knew they had privileges. these were not -- sometimes people wrote to me when i was -- when he they first heard this book i don't have much sympathy for board middle class housewives. most of these women had moved in the middle class only through marriage or very recently when their parents had moved up and they'd been sent to college. they knew that they were

privileged. over and over again they would say to me, i remember one in particular who said, you know, there were black children being beaten for trying to go to school down south. there were children in appalachia with bellies swollen from hunger. what right did i have to feel so bad? and many of them whose mothers would say i would have given my eyeteeth for a home like you have you ungrateful mother. louian ruben's husband said treat her like a dog she's so ungrateful to you. so these people just felt terrible about the way they were feeling and if you don't feel you have a right to have some pain and in some ways it's more demoralizing. and in many ways, friedan anticipated the bill clinton feel your pain, the opera approach. however, the self-help books that followed her, she said lack the self-help books you are not

alone. your pain is valid. it's okay to feel this way. you're not abnormal. but she also said the fact that you feel this way is a symptom of a larger social and political problem. so as one of my -- the women i talked to said, it might have been the first self-help book i read but it was the last one i needed once i get that message down. now, friedan has been rightly criticized for ignoring the special needs of working class white women and of african-american women and i found some fascinating research that i won't go into about the differences in those groups. black women in particular, though, i really want to mention because, of course, it is true they often had to work. even if they were college graduates and a lot of people have argued and i believed before i, you know, re-read the book that the problem with