[inaudible conversations] >> welcome to c-span2's booktv. we bring you 48 hours of books on history, biography and public affairs by nonfiction authors. this weekend on booktv on c-span2, the former chief of the osama bin laden unit on been locked in's continuing war against the u.s.. he thinks the new york times's liberal agenda has tarnished its reputation as a trusted news source. susan jacoby force the health industry on american culture in never say die. look for the complete schedule at booktv.org and to get our ski jill e-mail to you sign up for our booktv alert. >> next, frank brady explore the life of chess champion bobby fischer. he recounts his reclusive miss and issues with the united states government and his re-emergence later life as a man

who championed conspiracy theories and suffered from paranoid. frank berry recalled the life of bobby fischer and barnes and noble in new york city. this is about 45 minutes. >> i would like to start off -- this is not a reading this evening, simply talking that will have a q&a. unlike to stop off with something from the book to set the mood. the scene was in the 1960s when bobby fischer was going to go to argentina to play in a big international. so here we go. a week before he left for argentina, bobby and the author of this book had dinner in

greenwich village, hanging out with avant-garde artists and expressionists and one of his favorite eating places. the night we rather jackson pollock and friends were having a conversation at the bar and andy warhol and john cage dined at a nearby table. not that bobby noticed. he just liked to pump food the restaurant served. was a shepherd's pie kind of place and the anonymity that came from sitting among people who preferred gawking at art celebrities rather than taking note of chess prodigies. we slid into the third. from the bar and ordered bottles of beer. the waitress didn't question his age even though he had just turned 17 and wasn't legally old enough to drink in new york state's. some of the world enough to remember that 18 was the limit at the time. but he looked like he was 18.

bobby new the selection without looking at the menu. he tackles and enormous slab of roast prime rib which he consumed in a matter of minutes. if he were a heavyweight boxer enjoying his last meal before the big fight. he just received in the mail that he didn't like it so much. during a lull in the conversation which was typical because you weren't embarrassed by long silences, i asked our you going to prepare for this tournament. always wanted to know how you did it. he seemed unusually chipper and became interested in my interest. he said i will show you. he slid out of his side of the booth and send next to the kremlin into the corner. sets. all the little pieces lined up in their respective slot ready to go to war.

i don't know if you ever seen one of those but they are hardly larger than an index card. as he talked he live from me to the pockets such back-and-forth and set out a scholarly treatise on his method of preparation. he said first of all, all the players, i will only really prepare for bronze stein. . he then showed me the progression of his one and only game. a draw from yugoslavia two years earlier. he took me through each move the two had made. discouraging number on sign choice and logging it the next. the variety of choices bobby worked for was a dazzling and overwhelming. in the course of his rapid analysis to discuss the ramifications of certain

variations and tactics, why age would be advisable or not. it was like watching a movie with a voice-over narration with one great difference. he was manipulating the pieces and speaking so rapidly that it was difficult to connect the moves with his commentary. the couldn't follow the tumble of ideas behind the real and phantom attacks and shadow assaults. you couldn't play there since it would weaken, i didn't think of this. was he kidding? the slots on his pockets that were so worn from thousands of games that the pieces almost fell into the slots at his will. and all of the images were worn off. then he went on and discuss his style. he asked me do you read his book? i said no. isn't to russian and he looked

annoyed and amazed that i didn't know the language. learn and! he said. as a fantastic book. i am not playing for a draw. he started selling the pieces in seconds almost without looking. it is hard to prepare because he could play any kind of game, position or tactical or any kind of opening. he then began to show me from memory game after game. looked like dozens focusing on the openings that bronze seen played and various variations. multiple outcomes. but he didn't confine himself to bernstein's efforts. he took me on a tour of games that lewis paulson played in the 1800's. and experiments in the 1920's as well as others that had been played just weeks before and games he had gleaned from a russian newspaper.

all the time he lead possibilities and suggest alternatives, selected the best lines, discriminated, decided. it with a history lesson and a chess tutorial but mainly an amazing feat of memory. his eyes slightly glazed were fixed on the pockets that which he gently held in his left hand talking to himself. totally unaware of my presence or that he was in a restaurant. his intensity seen even greater than when he was playing in a corner. his fingers spread by in a blur and his face showed the slightest of smiles as if he was in a referee. he whispered barely audibly, if he plays that i can block his bishop. and then raising his voice so loud that some of the customers scared, he will play that, i

began to weep quietly, aware that in that time suspended moment of was in the presence of genius. [applause] thank you. okay. some of the things we are going to do is talk, have a q&a. there's a microphone over here from c-span. c-span is filling this for future broadcast. if you have a question don't yell it out, at the microphone that you picked up on the tv. i was attempting to do a number of things when i began to write this biography of bobby fischer. those of you who do not know how to play chess at all, you can

read this book anyway. it is not a chess books. is a biography. and of great interest to chess players but you don't have to play the game very well to enjoy it. i had written a number of other biographies and from orson welles to aristotle, i approach bobby's life the same way, as a biographer. sort of a microscopic look at his life. i attempted to leave no facts behind. that is the way i approach all of my books. i want to know every fact. every trivial fact. right may not use it but it gives me confidence that i know my subject and i may use it somewhere along the line. there was no library and

visited, no archive, no research that was not examined on my part. in addition to approaching this as a biographer, researcher, are was also an official witness in and participant in bobby's career. i was the director of one of a first tournament he ever played as a child in new jersey at the old monterey hotel that doesn't exist any more on the boardwalk. bobby was maybe 10 or 11. his mother was with him. i didn't talk to bobby at that time but i noticed him. he was a magnet for people because he was the youngest person playing at the tournament and everyone gathered around and watched him. i knew that he was going to become what he became but i

noted how serious he was, he really took his time and concentrated. we also played in some of the same toward amounts together over the years. we never met in an official tournament game. we were light years away. he was in another universe in terms of ability. but we did play perhaps hundreds of speed games over the years. don't ask me who won. he was an incredible speed player. very interesting to watch him play speed chess. it was like basketball. neighborhood or playground basketball, a lot of trash talk. you played that against me? how dare you! that kind of stuff. you are a cockroach. elephants stepped on cockroach.

that kind of stuff. throw the peace down. absolutely the most incredible speed player in the world it turned out. i will also the arbiter of the u.s. championship where he won pinball of his games without losses and it had never been done before. it has not been done since. it may never be done again and i was right there on this board during our time so i had an opportunity to study and observed him and i study that in the book. bobby was forfeited, it was

before the print. with the constant championing an ended up losing my job. i was in iceland with him. the match took two month. i came early and left late. during the time -- i was his friend. we had a falling out, whatever we had, we had arguments. many years where we didn't

speak. we played chess and came to my house and red chest magazines the eagles led to a lot of those, i taught him how to play billiards. we were friends. that was my focus. study fischer as a biographer. as an official chess arbiter. as a player and as a friend. i go through this in the book, he was a chemistry late competitive personality. no matter what he did. he was a good swimmer, going through high-school and prep

school, and when they had ray iss bobby would be in the water when everybody else was in mid dive. he wanted to win. when he got older and went up in his 20s to the tacticals and played tennis, he beat everybody in tennis accepted the tennis pro. other than that he wanted to win so i go into that and talk about his competitive personality. he also had an incredible memory. when he was preparing -- there was a book of boris spaskky's games. there were about 10,000 moves. almost as a parlor game he would send you the book and say pick out a game and you when it was

played and who boris spaskky played against. 1978 he played against portugal. he had memorized 10,000 moves. that was just one of his memories. i could tell many other stories and i do in the book. about how good he was. and he had a total focus on chess. he said bobby is an idiot savant. doesn't know anything about chess. i don't know if you read the out liars, howard takes 10,000 hours in a sense, for ten years to become good at something.

probably more than that. he spent six or eight hours a day. he didn't know anything else. have you ever talked to a musician, and they know the mind, they know the interpretation of dreams and all kinds of things but many don't know about literature or music or life. i am not putting down--at least one psychologist -- he spent the greater portion of his life studying chess. so what? he became the champion of the world. that was sort of interesting. that was part of what i do in the book.

approach and confront these conceptions about him. when he won the world championship before he died three years ago in reykjavik exactly three years ago, he studied all kinds of books. this is not a defense of bobby and i will get to the bad parts. he was a voracious reader and he could talk about the causes of war and he behead become an intellectual in 40 years from the time he won the championship because he stopped studying chess and started studying other things. it was 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 too? i don't know about that. possibly it will help. it may inspire you. you won't learned the specific openings because there are no diagrams. it may inspire you to become good like he did. some i think i have shown how he did it. how else to show the difficulties. his mother was i would not save vagrant, and live in a hospice, they live in a trailer and move to brooklyn, $56 a month.

soviets got their country retreats, and spend all her time playing and studying chess. bobby got zilch in terms of any support and that embittered him a lot. i go into that. i talk about his fall from grace. why did he refuse $10 million that he actually had for sponsorship of products into tournaments and current speed. he went off, and live there for 20 years. he would not give an interview.

he wouldn't do anything. why did he become anti-semitic? his mother was jewish completely, the paternity is up for grabs. one of two men, not positive who that man was. both of them were jewish. when regina fisher married the next time, she married someone who is jewish again. he denied he ever received training and yet i have found evidence he really did -- he never had a breast. which is sort of unusual. why did that happen? you have to read the book. we will get into it. i do get into it. you never know what is in someone's heart. when you are writing a biography

how can you take someone's life and cram it inside the pages of the book? it is difficult to do. i discussed it. it was brought in. he became anti american and i became ballistic. i didn't want anything to do with him over all of this and then i started to think. maybe he is like wagner. if you are jewish i am not buying his albums. i am not buying a volkswagen. it is possible if that is your point of view, what about go again? he was a terrible person. listen to the music of frank sinatra.

so can we indeed accept the art of -- and divorce the man? can we divorce the man? it took me a philosophical confrontation, almost an existential confrontation, should i write this book? i got many offers to write this before and should i write it or not? i think i can split it. i think i can honor his accomplishment while denigrating is absolutely horrible, about jews and america. this is not a memoir of myself in any way, shape or form. i am practically invisible other than the piece i have written

except in cedar tavern. i am hardly in the book. this is bobby's story and his wife. it is a great -- he ended up a multi-billion air. it has shakespearean overtones. that is all i have to say. now i am ready for q&a. [applause] remember, wait until the microphone comes around. how are you? >> where did he get his money?

>> he violated sanctions and the united states had against serbia. he played in montenegro and a $5 billion match. he ended up on that. [talking over each other] >> wasn't most of that's wandered by the serbian banker? >> a million dollars and television rights that bobby never got. but the $3.5 million definitely got in cash. he stayed at the intercontinental hotel. he took a train to switzerland and deposited in the union bank of switzerland. he had his money.

>> did his government try to take the money? >> they still are. bobby violated those sanctions. on top of that he stopped paying taxes in 1977. he wasn't making a lot in the wilderness years. he had some royalties he was making on his books but not a lot. he had to pay taxes on that. here is the microphone. >> where did his money go? >> he didn't make a will and the

money still exists. he spent it since 1992. he died in 2008. he bought a house for his girlfriend. he bought a condo in reykjavik and supposedly $2 million left. >> did he believe the things he said or was he just being provocative? did he have friends in high school? >> were you in high school with him? you are much too young. are you still here? in any event -- [inaudible]

>> i met him in a residence in 57. he used to walk around the campus with his head down and the russian chess tournament in his back pocket. i was in brooklyn. [talking over each other] [inaudible] >> did he believe -- i believe he did. at the end of his life he came out with what seemed like a terribly pretentious statement by saying i am not just a chess genius, i am ingenious in all things. he believed himself to be that. that was the whole point with bobby even when he was younger. whatever he said, it was.

he believed it. you either accept it or not. sometimes it seemed very irrational. but that was the way it was. so he believed it. he wasn't just being an actor. >> i am sorry. just a chess question. he played speed chess as a game. did he ever play blindfolded? >> he rarely played blindfold chess but on a trip from the duval street in key west to cuba when he played as a young man, it takes six hours, but during that time he played some blindfold games but his opponent kept not remembering the game.

to bobby, he was playing because he was going over games in his mind. >> what made him anti-american? >> there was a story that appeared -- a series of stories in life magazine about bobby and the writer who is now dead wrote from bobby that he would not write a book about it. a year-and-a-half or two years after the match was over in 72, he came out with a book so bobby sued him in court for $100 million and bobby always had problems with lawyers. decided to handle the case himself.

so the brief was scribbled on yellow paper. eventually it was thrown out of court. bobby claimed there was no justice in the american jurisprudence system and therefore at that point he said i won't pay taxes anymore. i don't believe in america. this corrupt government. >> thank you for delivering to us the book and the first one you wrote and many things you are saying now. he kept losing. i enjoy your book. found it very interesting. and thank you for the second part of it. the second part of bobby fischer's life. >> let's get one over here and

come back to you. >> were there ever any critical mental issues 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, the latest being dr. magnus in reykjavik who was with bobby in the last months of his life. i will give you a quote that you he said he was disturbed, he was paranoid but he was not schizophrenic and he was not psychotic. he was the director of the largest mental institution in iceland. very reputable man.

he came from a troubled style that 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. >> why is your book called "endgame"? >> because it was the end of his life and i want to show the end of his life. thank you very much. thank you. any more? we're back to this man. the brooklyn tech trader. >> do you have an opinion how well fischer would have done in his prime? >> how would dempsey have done against tyson? a very difficult thing to compare. things that cannot really be

compared. i think bobby fischer was the greatest chess player that ever lived. there may be others coming down the line. our japanese-american player nakamura, won one of the strongest chess tournaments ever played a few days ago and he may surpass what fischer did but up until now fischer's claim was the strongest player. fischer was away from the game for 20 years. he had not been away from the game and then played caspar nemerov i would say he would win but kasparov would deny that. back there? >> hi, professor brady. >> a former student! wait a minute. your name will come to me. don't tell me your name.

we're talking about a long time ago. >> i am dating myself because i'm calling you professor brady. >> lillian bork. >> that is it. very good. i was on the phone with my dad the other night mentioning i was going to attend your book signing and he played with bobby fischer had a man and chess club. so asking about him, he said that at times bobby would play 15 people at one time and he was always ten steps ahead of everyone so no one really won against him but he did mention that his mother had a lot of influence on him and i want to know if you can elaborate on that and if you think that really propelled him to say the things he said later in life?

>> his mother was a great influence on his mood but in many ways she helped his career. she was like a professional press agent almost. there was not newspaper or magazine or anything else she didn't go to to get press for bobby. she encouraged him. did they have fight for? of course just like we all probably have had with our parents. they had fights. that is another misconception that i had tried to straighten out. they love each other. they were in contact all of the years. he wanted her to come back. she went and got her doctorate in hematology and her medical degree in later years. wanted her to come back to the united states because he missed her. when he was on his deathbed he they loved each other.

she was a professional protester when she was -- sort of as i say the pawn doesn't stray too far from the queen. he became a protester but sort of on the other side. she had great influence on him. she was both mother and father to him because she was a single mother. okay. a couple more questions? couple more? we have time, two more questions. >> it must have been a unique experience for you as biographer to revisited subject you had written about so many years earlier had and i can't imagine when you were writing profiles of progeny that you develop a familial bond with bobby and i

wondering how that affected you over the years. you touched on it to a certain degree at howard affected how you saw him and degenerate overran the years and what you feel ultimately was the relationship. >> as bobby change i changed. relationship change. when i wrote the first book i didn't have a doctorate. the thing about getting a ph.d. if you don't, have and forbid. so i learned something. tyler and many books between the first and first one. nine or ten other books. i felt bad about his

anti-american statements and 9/11 statements and so forth. i was horrified. but i had to take a couple years to get over that. i said i should take this story. there's nobody better in the world that can tell bobby fischer's story than me. it was obligation on my part to tell that story. i think i told it accurate and honest appraisal of his life. we got here, we got here. >> did he trained physically like an athlete would? >> absolutely. he swam, he played tennis, he lifted weights, he was a very physical person. his walk if you saw him was like a tennis player.

he would swagger because he was so used to playing basketball. he was an athlete. he was a true athlete and he kept that up pretty much all his life. times when he didn't do anything but he was also a walker. he walked miles and miles, he walked my legs off. he would think nothing of walking from the upper west side to the lower east side and back again. miles and miles and miles. he was a fast walker. if you were next to him, it was wind because he walked so quickly so he was in terrific shape. he really trained before each match. so that is about it.

>> i wonder if he had any romantic relationships. if he ever married. >> he was never married. he was in prison and the woman he was living with in japan quite honestly to get him out of prison so that -- so he would be looked upon may be as a japanese citizen but he was not married to a japanese woman and they got married in prison. he was in love with a 17-year-old girl when he was 49 years old. there were occasional romantic dalliances but i go into that in the book. thank you very much. [applause]

>> frank brady discussing the life of bobby and the one on booktv. to see this and other programs online go to booktv.org. >> every weekend booktv brings 48 hours of history, biography and public affairs. here is a portion of one of our programs. >> we continue to work our way around the room. >> the motivation for women going into the military, did you find it any different from the the reason men go into the military? >> i think there are a whole range of reasons. some and told me it sounds much like nurses, that they really wanted to escape their small towns and didn't want to live like their friends who were married and having lots of babies. other what women wanted adventure and to go to war.

they really wanted to fight. i talked to one woman who was german who immigrated to the united states because she was too old for the german military and wanted to fight in war. [inaudible] >> some of it was economic. there were many women i talked to who came from real poverty. very serious poverty. for the and the military was a way out. i spoke with many women who had been teen mothers. and had children very young and they saw this as a career path and it was a good career path. in light of the current debate over health care, there were several women who had children with diseases or health conditions and needed good insurance which is why they joined the military. >> that makes me think, what was

the socioeconomic background of women joining nurses in vietnam. >> it was pretty widespread. economic factor was a big motivator. there was a split in the vietnam war of korean nurses who were in for quite some time and the young nurses that were recruited straight out of nursing school most of those signed up for what is called the army nurse program which is essentially the rotc for nurses and most nurses signed up for those educational benefits. there are a whole range of motivations. men signed the because they knew if they were drafted, they might make the agreement is opposed to good nurses so that draft is essentially men's motivation. women were quite different. >> to watch this program in its entirety go to booktv.org. type the title or the author's name at the top left of the

screen and click search. next, stephanie coontz from evergreen state college reports on the generation of american women who were introduced to feminist politics in the 1960s. stephanie coontz sites the publication and readership of betty friedan's "the feminine mystique" at the transformative moment for many women who began to question their familial and professional world. this is 75 minutes. >> i chose the title of this book from the first paragraph of betty friedan's book "the feminine mystique". i want to start by reading it and i will chat with you. the problem lay buried deeper still unspoken for many years in the minds of american women. it was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a year ending. each wife struggled with it as

she made the bed, shop for groceries, matchbook cover material, 8 peanut butter sandwiches with the children, late beside her husband that night. she was afraid to ask even of herself as on the question is this all? people who read that book at the time 50 years later can sometimes still quote those words. sometimes betty friedan went on the woman would try to block that out with a tranquilizer or thought problems with her husband or her children or what she really needed to redecorate her house or move to a better neighborhood or even have an affair. more often according to the women i interviewed when and i was working on this book, they thought the problem wasn't themselves and delete the solved by fixing themselves. psychiatrist if they could afford them to tell them what it

was and how to make it go away. this is an extended plea to convince women that their feelings were legitimate. that the source of what she called the problem with no name was we live in a culture that does not allow women as it allowed men to and gratified needs that were important to them. contrary to what we hear nowadays sometimes. feminism was about the need to grow and fulfil their potential as human beings. denied permission to pursue that goal, ridiculed, many women developed a hunter that neither food nor sex could fill. the response to her book was absolutely electric. one of the highlights of research for me was i was able to tracked down 188 women and men who had read "the feminine mystique" when it first came out and they could quote whole

sentences, passages. often they could remember exactly where they were when they read the book and how it made the field. breathless with relief they would say. i suddenly knew i was not alone. the things i thought were wrong with me i realized might suddenly be right with me. one of the intellectual giant that i know of the sociologists, i could still -- never would have imagined her to be so insecure as she sat around saying you are going to be punished. selfish women are always punished. she started crying when she read the first chapter. halfway down she flushed her tranquilizer is down the toilet. it took me a while to winnowed down my interviews to 188 because when people heard i was looking for individuals who had read "the feminine mystique" i got scores of letters from people who were sure they had read the book but comments made it clear that they had not.

they had wildly different memories of what it said. one fan of the books added document always women are discriminated against in work and law and economics even though she barely mentions those issues. others told me it encourage women to seek fulfillment by indulging in me first consumerism or going after ambitious careers, ideas betty friedan explicitly condemns. one insisted this was the book that told women to burn their broads. i hope everybody in this building knows no such thing ever happened. betty friedan's book ignited so much passion and its title in a world where we never heard of sexism or chauvinism, the title conjured up images that it became a receptacle for people's hopes and fears about feminism and family life to the point that people who never actually read it think that like the

bible they know exactly what it says. as it happened, i was one of those people. i was approached to do this biography of "the feminine mystique" and i said my mother talked about it so often. i said great, somehow i had truly come to think i had read the book because i heard about it so much from my mother and other people and books i had read so i said ok and found it in my class and sat down to read it and half way through the first chapter realized i had never read it and i couldn't believe how dated it was in so many ways and also how modest its proposals for change were. how uncontroversial its ideas were. but that is the real story. that is the reason it is important to capture this period and anderson went on. why it seems so radical and stirred up so much emotion on

both sides of the story for betty friedan to says she previews in good housekeeping magazine, you know how magazines like to use -- generate the most provocative titles ever. this was provocative. eyes a the title said, women are people too. that does not sound particularly provocative page turner title but at the time this was not considered self-evident. it was considered a terrible mistake. leading experts explicitly argued this was a direct quote for society to regard its citizens as people rather than as primarily males and females who occupy different roles had completely different nature is. sometimes today we get worn down by the stresses of juggling work and family like a lot of people in this room do but we forget

the price people paid when they didn't have to balance work and family and when they were penalized when they tried to do so. went women who wanted a meaningful work life were accused of suffering a bad case of penis envy. that was when they were told. when men who wanted to get more involved in child care and direct quote from a 1950s sociologists were suspected of having too much fat on the inner thigh. i will spend most of my time here talking about the price women pay for this and why they responded so much about i want to get to the point briefly as to what men paid as well because men paid the price too. most people have a good idea of the obstacles working women faced in the 1960s. it was ok to go to work. housewives were often called parasites if they stayed at home

once their children were grown but what they were not supposed to do was to get what we do leading psychiatrists called a career which they define as a job plus prestige. they were not paid enough to threaten their husbands or their primary commitment. if a woman wanted to work, she had to open the paper to the help wanted female section. i went for the entire april 1963 as in the new york times. they were 4 receptionists, pretty looking cheerful gals. one of them and this and was repeated a couple times, you must be really beautiful. this was a legal job at the. some requested college but that was inevitably accompanied with one other which i bet you can

guess. must have good typing skills. once hired women were paid less than men for the same work. as late as 1970 a woman working full time with a college degree and this was also true for black male college graduates earned less than a white male high-school graduates. nothing kept an employer from firing a woman if she married, if she became pregnant or if in the airline industry she put on a few pounds or reach the right cold age of 30. when one airline -- there was a maternity leave i discovered. one airline in the 1960s said 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 was sexual harassment on the job made

illegal. i could go on about this and i do go on a little bit. one of the chapters in my book. what i want to is turn to something that surprises most modern audience claps even more. to understand in a culture where we are always being invited to partake in the monte wars where people seem to think the prevalence of working women and reforms of feminism have undermined the prestige of homemaking, i want to point out how little security and social respects they at home mothers and wives had before betty friedan and the women's movement came along. in the 1930s and 40s were up period when americans were being subjected to this broad attacks on motherhood and stay at home moms. sons were being told to snap the silver cord. that their mothers tried to wrap

them in. husbands were encouraged to stand up for themselves and reassert their authority in an increasingly feminized white-collar world. philip wylie coined the term momisand about those who try to keep their sons to their apron strings and that there has this to an early grave because they insisted on more consumer items incessantly about their self sacrifice and demanded politicians listen to there meddlesome moralizing. communism, momism was the domestic side of communism. the reason 2 cannon house office building american men were found unfit for military service was their moms. one army information officer wrote that mom and her pies have killed as many men as 1,000 german machine guns.

by the 1950s women's magazines were taking these ideas about the horrible effect of stay at home mothers and too involved wives into a grocery stores and beauty shops and suburban homes accusing overprotective moms of greeting everything from homosexuality to fascism. one ladies home journal articles that if hitler's mom hadn't been so overprotective history might have taken a different course. what was even more confusing as i talk to women who read this and how demoralized they felt, these ideas were not just from reactionaries. they were contemptuous of women as the button-down organization men that they despised. liberals like ferdinand lundberg who wrote the rich and superrich which was a critique of capitalism was just as

condemning of moms as right-wingers were who called for a return to manliness and people like and ray and who celebrated masculine aggression. they all blamed the problems they saw, very different problems they saw on exactly the same source, women. there was a 1956 book the crack in the picture window which investor rated modern suburbia. what was the main problem according to him? a matriarchal society with the typical husband, a woman inadequate, money terrified neuter and the typical wife a nagging slob. this was the anti woman rhetoric that was so pervasive that sudan inc. some of it in her riding including be totally repellent and now discredited notion that overly devoted moms turn their sons into homosexuals and she used it to turn the discourse on its head and say to avoid this

we should let women have some interests of their own. this lack of respect for moms permeated the culture and the lack of rights for homemakers would stun most modern women. in 1963, only eight states gave the wife any legal claim to her husband's earnings or property. shea supposedly had the right to be properly supported but that gave the husband such leeway that when one enterprising kansas woman sued in court to get her quite well off husband to install running water in her kitchen, the supreme court rebuffed her. in all the four states command had the right to decide where the couple legally was a resident and if the man moved in and wife refused to follow she could be charged with desertion

and in the rigid divorce system he could win a divorce for her. if you had a rotten marriage, too bad. marital rape was a legal impossibility because it woman's marriage vows implied permanent consent to sexual intercourse. carriage counselors