almost any marital problems they experienced from infidelity to domestic violence resulted from failure of their femininity. infidelity, check if? chris of groomed enough. are you a good housekeeper? domestic violence? maybe you are so efficient and aggressive that your husband feels periodic need to reestablish his manhood. this was in a journal by the american medical association in 1964. i am not saying all homes were marked by that kind of dysfunction. many husbands treated their wives very well. many homemakers were quite content. when you actually look at the definition of content most modern women and men would be shocked by what was considered a happy marriage. a month before the feminine -- "the feminine mystique" hit the newsstands, gallup conducted a

major poll in december of 1962. he purported to find american housewives were the happiest people on earth. what did it take to make a happy? that the man being number one. one woman interviewed said be insubordinate to men is part of being feminine. what gives her pleasure. another said that a woman needs a master/slave relationship whether it is husband or wife or boss and secretary. .. more likely

than any other to devalues themselves they then assessed their child care skills more negatively rather than less educated, less 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 as i listened to these women talked, 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 to college these 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. 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 about that become respectable or desirable for women 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's female counter-part, every year assured the incoming freshmen that what would happen to them in this school is that they would be educated to be splendid wives and mothers. and, in fact, during this period women were told if -- one of the main points to going to college was to get your m.r.s. 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 women

were encouraged to get in those dice by advice books as the bright new trend of getting your p.h.t. putting hubby through. a lot of women just nodded because they know it and younger women's jaws dropped. and women took this seriously and women in college were less likely to drop out before caution than men but by the 1950s and '60s they were twice as twice as likely to drop out as men. almost always to get married. and unlike today, the more well-read, the more you knew is an educated woman that was it not natural to like your education very much or any other activities that were not directly to home making. women who attended college in the 1950s and early 1960s were especially likely to have been

taught the scientific -- the so-called scientific views of freudian sociologists. any woman who wanted more meaning if the life that she found in the kitchen and nursery suffered from psychological maladjustment. women give up their aspirations voluntarily not out of coercion not in the battle days before women could vote but voluntarily because the normal woman finds her greatest satisfaction in her husband's achievement. magazines -- i went through the magazines targeted to both blue collar women and middle class women in that era and to also educated black women and it was the one 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 heard, 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 special kind of misery and self-doubt. and to think that it must be their own inadequacy. so, you know, it's true. many critics over the years have complained that friedan's book tended to have the most emotional resonance for these middle class women with a slightly more education than harbor and especially, though not exclusively, to those who had or aspired to more education than was normal to women these days. she didn't deal with working class women, she didn't deal with african-american women but the more i worked book, the more i learned a lesson 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 who's pain accounts for more. the pain of a working class woman or a low-paid factory worker or clerk who had been 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 -- it was in some ways more

be willedering because they knew they had privileges. some of these women wrote to me when i first wrote this book, i don't have much sympathy for bored middle class housewives and these women moved through middle class through marriage when their parents had been moved up and had been sent to college. they knew 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 their bellies swollen and there's many mothers who would say i would have given my eyeteeth. lillian ruben's mother said just treat her 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 even more demoralizing and friedan anticipated the bill clinton feel your pain, the oprah approach, however, unlike these self-help books that followed her, she said like 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 got that message down. now, friedan has rightly been criticized for ignoring the special needs of working class white women and african-american women and i've 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 believe before i, you know, re-read the book, that the problem with friedan's neglect of african-american women all the more ironic because she had been a civil rights activist and was working to intergrate her own neighborhoods, but she just ignored them completely in this book which is very sad but the real problem was not as i believed when i first read this and many people have said that black women would have loved to lead the lives of these women were leading. many of them would certainly would have loved to get out of the demeaning, low-paid domestic work that they were stuck in in this period and that friedan and paula murray later helped get them out of -- once they became activists in the national

organization for women. but they were also much more likely than white women to see work and community activism as their central part of their identity. it was not quite feminists but black leaders of the '20s and '30s who first raised the demand that a woman should have a three-part identity as a wife and mother, as a coprovider for her family and as a community leader and activist. and when you ask black women and white women in college, what are you going to college for. the white women would say to be better wives and mothers. the black women would almost always say to be better members -- not just to get a job but to be better members of the community. so i came -- you know, i came to see the real tragedy of friedan's orientation to this -- on this exclusive group was that she could have pointed to the examples, to this demoralized that didn't think it was possible to say yes, there are

women who can be wives and mothers and combine that identity as workers and community activists and if support of that, let me mention the findings of sociologists burt landry that upper white middle class moms were least likely to work outside of the house. but black upper middle class those who could have afford to say home were more likely to stay at home and in white families when a husband didn't want his wife to work outside of the home, 90% of the wives did not do so but that was true for only about half of the brack wives whose husbands disapproved and blast black husbands were less likely to disapprove so this could have been a model for her. i'm not saying the african-american community was any feminist paradise. even rosa parks' lawyer once told her he thought women should be in the kitchen. that was their proper place. but i've come to believe that that was the real problem with friedan's book is her inability

to explain to these whites middle class women that there were other models in the world. and that's not the other problem in friedan's book. it's terribly day in the use of evidence in its assumptions. homosexuals which you would find offensive. she didn't total credit the source of her ideas and she later allowed to be given an occasionally acclaimed a little too much credit for launching the second wave of feminists. an older generation of feminists had been tenaciously working on behalf of the gender inequality long before friedan started writing "the feminine mystique" and in the late 1960s, a whole new generation of women came in to the movement on the basis of their own experiences. people like myself who had been activists in the civil rights movement and peace movement and really had not experienced the same kind of wife and mother type of mystique but began to see, huh, we're always the ones

asked to make the coffee and take the notes. often as i now know, we hadn't read "the feminine mystique" but friedan spoke to this layer of women that i've to come of as the sidelined wives and older daughters of the greatest generation that usually only means the men when people start referring to them. and these women might well have been lost to the women centers that they helped to found, the women's studies departments that they went into the, the battered women shelters that they helped found and even just to themselves had friedan not reached out to them in the language of the woman's magazines and using the -- this nonpolitical personal language convinced them that this was a social injustice that needed to be addressed. now i want to leave time for questions and for informal

conversations so just let me end by mentioning a couple of the other things i came to appreciate as i researched this book. one was, the price that men paid for this division of labor that prevailed in the '50s and '60s. men had a lot more privileges then than now and i certainly have run into men who are nostalgic for those days. [laughter] >> but they constantly had to prove their entitlement to such privileges to other men. they had to recreate that manhood, that male privilege every day, partly by challenging the masculinity of other men, partly by suppressing their own softer impulses. and while women tended to become depressed when they reached the culmination of what they've been told they should aim for in life, i became a wife and mother, this is all there is?

men often didn't find out that this is all there is until they reached the culmination of what they were told what was their role in life. when they retired from work with the gold watch and the pension and found out they were strangers to their own children and often to their own wife. so i think that -- you know, it gave me actually much more empathy for the guys in this position and i talked to a lot of young men in particular who vowed they were not going to make their fathers' mistakes as a result some of them had seen their mothers reading "the feminine mystique" and one of them said i knew it was kind of a band book that a dad shouldn't know about. but going off and reading it himself, it changed what he wanted out of marriage and what he wanted out of himself. i talk in the last chapter of my book about some of the gains women have made and not made since then. but i want to end by suggesting that ironically, one of the things that we really owe to the

work of friedan and the other second wave feminists in that era is that so many of these things are not just women's issues anymore. you know, for example, men now report greater work/family conflict than women do largely because feminism has raised the cultural expectations of men's participation and family life. and it's made our world much more complex than when it was just, you know, the low-hanging fruit of these legal inequalities that we had to fight. enough women, for example, have cracked the glass ceiling or at least gotten up to the -- to the top through the escalator that now the lack of good jobs, living wages and meaningful work can no longer be seen as something all women suffer from or that only women suffer from. especially with these sorts of things that have been happening to real wages of men. and meanwhile the intersection of the masculine mystique with

the new occupational and income trends in america. in some ways disadvantaged low-incomed men in comparison to their female counterparts in very significant ways, especially in their teens and 20s, even though it's also true that traditional prejudices against mothers continue to plague both homemakers and working women alike. the old feminine mystique may be mostly gone but its counter-part the career mitechnique for men is certainly there and there are also new mystiques for women that kick in at other ages. for example, when i call the hottie mystique. that, yes, you can do anything the guys can as long as you're sexy every moment you're doing it and the other one is the motherhood mystique yes, you can do all these other things but you have to be an absolutely perfect mother and you should fight with other women about what it is that makes for perfect mothering. but i just -- i want to leave time for the questions so i just

want to end by saying that this was one of the most moving books i've ever researched, largely because of the stories i've heard from these women. but also because in researching it and in talking to the women and men they shared their stories with me, it really did renew my confidence, and i have to admit that has sometimes flagged in the last 10 years. [laughter] >> that when enough people start asking questions and naming problems that have not yet been named, we can work together to find answers and to implement solutions. and we can come an extraordinarily long way in what has really been an extraordinarily short period of time. if we can turn over the massive laws and social prejudices that existed back in the mid-1960s as much as we have, we can move

forward from the problems that are plaguing us now and that's worse being reminded in a time that's very pessimistic. so i felt better finishing this book. i hope that you'll find some hope in it and let's open it up to questions or comments from the audience. [applause] >> please come to the mic, though, so that we can get those questions or comments on tape. >> i was wondering if in the process of interviewing people for the book, you actually interviewed any women, you know, identified as working class or who were african-american or otherwise minorities and what their experience of reading the book obviously the problem of the book it doesn't speak to these women so whether being a working class or minority woman

and reading the book sort of helps them get to feminism any way or turn them away from the larger project of feminism in general? >> i interviewed several african-american women. the ones that were turned off by it didn't finish the book, you know, they just read enough that it wasn't relevant to them. but i found at least three african-american women who had gone on to become professionals and who really felt the book helped them. that they understood that it didn't talk to their experience as blacks but that it did speak to their experience and fears as women. and the interesting thing about working class women -- i interviewed a lot of women who were working class women and whose mothers' definition of moving into the middle class was to tell them you're not going to have a job like i do. your way of moving to the middle class is to get married and to settle down.

and these women said that they didn't want the same kind of job their mother had but they did want a job. and so they really liked the book because it helped them think through that way. there were plenty of them who wrote it off. but my remarks -- i'm not if i'm pronouncing her last name correctly, a wonderful sociologist who came from a working class family and when she read the book, she was the only one of her many siblings to go to college. when she read the book, she said that the other thing that really bothered her about this that friedan seemed to think that women could get self-confidence and meaning only from high prestige academic jobs. and she went out and she interviewed women who did the kind of jobs that friedan could have stuck her nose at, you know, like flopping food on plates in cafeterias and these women said i'm proud of what i

do. i'm good at it. i like the social interactions. so she found that when you looked at -- and lots of studies backed her up. when you look at blue collar housewives, they were less contemptuous of housework than their middle class counterparts and less worried about whether they were normal if they did want to go to work. but in general, in them as well as in the middle class, women who worked outside the home were less depressed than women who worked inside the home. and that held across classes. other people? >> thank you so much. i'm very interested in vivian wornick's writing about the activists of the '30s and how the failure of those movements in the 30s and the cold war -- what affect that had on feminists?

i haven't read your book and i'd love to know when you have a to say about mccarthyism and friedanian? >> well, there's a couple of ways that mccarthyism is very relevant to this story. one of them is the fact that feedback left his association. she'd never been a member of the communist party but she had been around lefties and had seen what happened to them in mccarthyism and she was determined that she wasn't going to be painted by that brush. this was a period when, you know, i'm sure most of heard of what happened during the red scare and mccarthyism. that people would be blacklisted from jobs not just because they had been communists but if they had known anybody who had known anybody who belonged to an organization that might have been associated with communists. it was just a terrible time. it was a terrible time. my own mother said it was just a time when you wanted to pull your covers over your head, so, yes, all of these groups were,

in fact, badly impacted by mccarthyism. and a lot of progressives turned their attention to the fight against nazism, the fascism. and so feminism fell on hard times. plenty of women continued working behind the scenes but they were quieter and less assertive than they had been in the '20s. >> hi. my name is jen. i teach classes in gender and politics at hunter college. and it's such a pleasure to finally get to hear you talk after reading your work for so long. >> thank you. >> i work issues masculinity and gender immersion and i'm so glad to anticipate reading the sections of the book of man and the impacts of feedback work. the question i have has to do with whether -- the ways in which your work on this book enhances and sharpens some of the conclusions you came to in the way we really are in terms of domestic labor today?

that aren't just question of work -- we talk about work/family balance but given the kind of career pressures you just finished referring to, it seems odd that there are so few sharp interrogations of the fact that our solution looks -- still looks a lot like friedan's. that women or families but really it's woman to hire another woman to come into the house to perform domestic labor. and what more you thought looking back at this book again? >> well, one of the ways friedan was corrected and mocked friedan was painted as people who never read her as antimale and antimarriage. actually, she was romantically promale -- people who knew her said she was the biggest flirt you could know. she said once that she wanted her epitaph to read she made women feel better about being

women and, therefore, better in their relationships with men. and she had this idea that if men and women shared access, their marriages would be better. and it turns out that she was right. she was more right than the sociologists who predicted this would lead to tremendous conflict. there was a big increase in the divorce rate once women got the right to leave marriages they were unhappy with. and there was a large increase in male/female conflict when women started entering the workplace and demanded men step up to the plate and something that isn't rel publicized in the press, the divorce rate has been falling and it's falling the most among college-educated women and couples who have more egalitarian views. and so this is why work/family -- we have to just constantly being seen that this is a woman's issue that women

should fall. i'm sympathetic to couples in the crutch and with the lack of family-friendly policies we have in the workplace. i started calling them inneanderthals and i know enough about them that they had it much better work/family caregiving than we do. [laughter] >> so whatever we want to call it, our lack of work/family policies, affluent parents.

and i wanted to ask a question about middle class parents, middle class mothers, because, you know, i see a lot of hostility to helicopter parents

now or the amy chu's of the world. and although -- i have to say personally it kind of drives me crazy, i can also see this sort of scapegoating of parents has its counter-part in parents who are not working class. so there seems to be a movement to kind of redefine poverty as a deficit of parenting so there's a counter-part. and i'm just wondering, you know, given the experience of having, you know, looked at -- looked at what happened in the '60s, do you see any parallels of things going on today? and also, you know, how do you -- how do you explain that connection 'cause there's a connection between the things that happened to people in the middle class and the way it works itself out through society. >> okay. there's a lot of issues there. one big difference with the 1960s is that we feel much more

compelled to spend much more time interacting with our kids. in fact, studies show parents today spend -- mothers as well as fathers, fathers spend more time with their kids than they did in the '60s but mothers, too. stay at home mothers spend slightly more time with their kids than working moms. but working moms spend more time interacting with their kids than stay at home moms did in the 1960s. and some of that, i think, is good that we pay attention to kids. i mean, if you've ever watched "mad men" betty draper's interaction with that kids, go play with that plastic shirt that the cleaners came in, very realistic. there's a reason why they put those warnings on them. part of it is, i think, good but another part of it reflects the collapse in the society of a sense that we owe our children something collectively and we're asking parents to prepare our

kids for the world of work and the world of competition in ways we once expected the community to prepare them and so you're getting this -- and particularly with the -- what people have called out the hollowing out of the middle class. you know, if you make it, you can make it very, very high. but if you don't, you're falling down more. it's harder and harder for families to see their children replicate their own sort of middle ground. the result is, i think, that parents are feeling more and more pressure to give their children every jumpstart they can. again, understandable but it exacerbates the problem. two economists recently compared the time that educated americans spend with educated canadians, they found that all groups in both countries had increased their time with kids. but that the educated american parents had just increased it tremendously. whereas the canadians hadn't

done so -- and they suggested it has to do with the difference in the hierarchy of the universities there. the canadian regional universities are all the same this it they don't have the same steep hierarchy of these high prestige cleanse and so their parents can be a little more relaxed you get into college you're going to do okay, whereas, the americans are constantly i've got to get them the very best. and again, as another good example of how this just exacerbates the problem and becomes a vicious cycle. another study shows in the united states 40% of a parents income advantage is passed on to the child compared to canada where only 20% is passed on. so the more that we institutionalize and harden the passing on of social inequality the more parents are going to feel desperate to solve it at an individual level instead of at a social level. other comments. >> hi, my name is jennifer.

i haven't read "the feminine mystique" because i lived it with my feminist mother. i should read it. and i'm really looking forward to reading your book. again, i think those who came and were considered the third wave of feminists and the combat that happened -- if you could speak a little bit more about that. i know we're all kind of struggling through it in terms of classism and social definitions of socialism versus capitalism, but i think it's interesting that working class women were so much more comfortable with who they are in that three-person paradigm and that women of privilege so

psychologically tortured in some ways. i think it's heroic that she spoke to her own group. it would have been almost too much to speak to the whole worldwide group of women at that time. she had to speak to her group that she knew. you know, i didn't finish school. i'm finishing school now, and i spent a lot of time -- i gave up school. i had a career somewhat because it wasn't educated-bound and raised a daughter who is now in college traveling and so i think i kind of adopted in some ways a rebellion to that need for myself in order to give to her that i saw my mother struggle with and more of a working class woman's perspective of needing to lift my child to a different

way instead of myself. it's a struggle of the whole -- the issues of self-indulgence versus self-care. i think this is the mommy war, the second versus the third and the mommy wars, but could you touch -- i don't know if you touched upon this much in your book but could you touch upon it a little bit here? >> well, let me make one thing very clear and that is that the working class women of the time were not comfortable, were not like living lives that like, okay, you know, except for a little material want here, i'm feeling very secure here in my own skin. they had to experience a different kind of security. i was lucky enough to run across this marvelous source which was this in-depth interview that took many years of market research for true confessions magazine. and true confessions magazine, of course, was marketed to the wives of blue collar workers. so they were very interested in

knowing what makes these women tick as opposed to the motivational researchers who were trying to sell to the middle class women saying well, what makes these women tick? and they did some interesting comparisons that i thought was interesting. they would tell stories and they would ask the middle class women and the working class women to finish the stories or share mkts one of them that stood out to me is they showed the women of a picture of a woman in the middle of the room with people pointing her. the middle class class woman she's done something wrong. she's going to be punished, she's bullied. she's? trouble. they are going to come get her. she's stolen something. and the middle class women said her conscience is hurting her. so there was tremendous -- the working class women's stories

always ended over bad. and if she saw someone stooping over they thought one person was being beaten up and the middle class women thought they were being helped up. they just lived tough lives. whereas, the middle class women were more secure in material ways but then more inclined to doubt themselves if they were not happy with those secure lives. so i think that for me it was helpful to get past some of the class differences that are always raised. the other thing in terms of the sacrifices that mothers make -- writing this book was really good for me because it helped me -- so many women told me that reading "the feminine mystique" had helped them understand and forgive their mother. and this was something you heard from working class women and middle class women alike. that they said -- one of them said it was like going back and

getting to see my mother's whole life, the director's cut so that i understood why she had been pushed in one direction and then another direction. and working class women said, now i know why my mom pushed me so much and did damp down my dreams and aspirations because of what she went through. probably the most stunning quote was from a woman who's very severely depressed mother wrote her a letter when she was 15 away at camp saying about how wonderful "the feminine mystique" was and cathy was completely, you know -- didn't know what she was talking about. she went back later and she told me that i only felt i understood my mother two times. once when i wood the book of job and the other time when i read "the feminine mystique." so i don't know if that answers all of the issues. you raised a lot of them but i hope it was a start. yes. >> i just wanted to say that i

haven't grown up in the horrible period that betty friedan was writing about. i felt very strongly about her book. i remember when i read it, it described the life of my mother as if the whole book was written about her. i know many other people had that reaction to it for themselves and my mother graduated -- started brooklyn college at 16, graduated at 19. was a teacher, was a magazine editor. had a lot of life of her own before she married. my father was older. he thought he was doing her a favor by taking her out of the work force and that destroyed her life in so many ways. so when i read that book, i immediately understood the truth of it. i know there are problems with the book as you've discussed and i'm sure it's discussed much more in your book. i know that betty friedan did

some things after "the feminine mystique" that weren't always glorious and some of which are pretty bad. but in my mind, she's an incredible hero. she's an incredible pioneer. i don't think she is nearly as celebrated as she should be. i think that, you know, perhaps it's still too close to when she lived. we still have people alive who fought some of the battles against her and have reason to have grievances but i absolutely believe that over time, people will understand more that this was a great, great hero, visionary, pioneer whose book was just a gem that has made all of our lives better. [applause] >> it seems like some other people agree. let me say the other things. i said "the feminine mystique" was dated and i want to modify it a little bit because it's also important when we think -- we talk about choices of women

to stay home today. despite all the gains we've made, it is still possible to get in a spiral of self-doubt and low self-esteem when you're really isolated and i have two examples that really brought it home to me. one was a gay historian i interviewed who told me, you know, he had a job. his partner did not. his partner was staying home, terribly depressed and he had his partner read "the feminine mystique" and he said repellant, but it helped my partner understand the depression. even though there are women in isolated areas who can read "the feminine mystique" and gonna hope from it and i got a letter -- i want to tell you about. i certainly wouldn't use his name. a man wrote to me, and this was stunning, he said i listened to your interview on fresh air and what you described about how sad

and low self-esteem these women had and he said i think i'm like that. he said i always wanted to become an academic, but my wife got a really high-paying job and i loved staying home with the children and now she says, you do it so well, you should stay with it and she goes over my finances and she says you're spending too much on books. you know, you got to spend this time with your kids. and he said, i just don't know what to do. it just broke my heart. first of all, i'm not a psychologist. i don't like to play one, you know, even on tv. but it felt as though -- this isn't just a gender thing, okay? it can happen to men as well as women. and it can happen who think of themselves as independent if they get trapped in this isolation, which we come back to why it shouldn't be just a

woman's issue. >> hi. i'm not sure -- i don't think this is -- it's not directly related, i guess, either "the feminine mystique" or to your book but i just wanted your input. what's your take on women who are basically floating along using the gains that the second wave feminist movement have made especially -- i'm talking specifically about politics and, you know, sarah palin and her ilk who use the language that, you know, comes -- that comes about in "the feminine mystique," the second wave feminist movement made popular in order to in a sense roll back gains that second wave feminism has made and that -- that "the feminine mystique" was a cultural touchstone for? >> well, you know, we're living in such a complicated time, i think this is one of the challenges of feminism. the fact that gender no longer is the master status.

that even in an arena of the country -- of our political system that has always said, women should not work when they have kids, that sarah palin feels entitled to go out and run for vice president, that's a victory of feminism. in itself it really is and yet at the same time she is opposing many of the other kinds of reforms that we think are necessary to consolidate women's positions such as work/family leave. there was just an interesting debate in slate about who gets to call themselves a feminist and some people said since she was against abortion she couldn't call herself a feminist. i don't agree with that. i think that if your moral line, if you believe that abortion murder, you could be a feminist and oppose abortion. however, you would have to then support contraceptive choice and the development of child care,

good quality child care for unwanted kids who come into the world. that to my mind it's a little more complicated to say who's a feminist and who's not. and even what is a feminist man? i mean, why -- why -- sometimes i feel uneasy saying, i'm a feminist when i'm talking to a group of working class guys who want to know, you know, what do i want -- what am i trying to offer them? what am i offering them? they tried to be good husbands, good fathers, good -- you know, and yet they're falling behind. and so i think we're in a situation where developing tactics and strategies and alliances is a lot more difficult when it was just against a series of laws that we could all come together on. now our differences about class and race and politics and religion and region are coming to the fore.

yes. >> actually, i was just going to say we have to end it here. i want to thank you, stephanie coontz, i want to thank everyone for coming and i want to thank you, rebecca we have a strange stir and "the feminine mystique" available for sale and i don't know, maybe you'll sign both. [laughter] >> i'm not going to sign betty's book. that would be way too -- [laughter] >> in any event, thank you very much. i hope everybody has a really good evening. >> for more information on stephanie coontz and her work, visit stephaniecoontz.com. >> publishers would he be has announced the nonfiction books that will be released this spring. here's 10 books in the category of history and military history in order of release date. sarah vowell unfamiliar officials will be released on march 22. on march 29y the good book by

acc grayling and the great soul by joseph lelyved. and it will be available on april 12th. and on april 26th the floor of heaven, a true tale of the last frontier and the yukon gold rush. michael burly's book moral combat good and evil in world war ii will also be released sometime in april. on may 3rd, to end all wars, a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914 to 1918 by adam hochschild will be out in june. and the liberator of latin america will be released. on june 13th, mightier than the sword "uncle tom's cabin" and the battle for america a book by david reynolds will be available. and on june 21st, independence the struggle to set america free by historian john furling will also be released. to find other books that will be released this spring, visit

booktv.org and check out the news about books section. >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback. twitter.com/booktv. >> well, on february 16th of this year, the borders bookstore group declared bankruptcy. joining us now on booktv to discuss the impact of this bankruptcy is sarah wineman who is the news editor of publishers marketplace. how did borders get to the point of declaring bankruptcy? >> well, i think it's been a long time in coming. certainly the last three years in particular as quarter after quarter, borders has been losing money. they've also gone through a number of management changes especially at the top. they've gone through, i think, something like four ceos in the past four years. but the story can also date back to the beginning of the 21st

century, i suppose. things like their website to amazon in 2001 and they didn't reclaim it until 2008. their ebook was never at the same level as amazon of the kindle or the barnes & noble with the nook. it always kind of seemed borders was operating a few steps behind every other retailer and especially on the print side in combination with various managerial mismanagement, it really didn't come as a particular surprise that borders declared chapter 11 >> sarah weinman you mentioned the amazon connection. what exactly did borders do with amazon and in your view, what kind of mistake was that? >> well, to reiterate, back in 2001, when borders had had its own website, but they instead of running their own ecommerce, selling books directly

themselves, they passed that to amazon. so essentially they were giving up revenue to their competitor in order to essentially make certain things easier but in doing that, it was something of a double bargain because they didn't essentially own their own online property. so by the time that they changed directions, they had, i think, a new ceo who said this was not a very good idea, but in reclaiming it in 2008, but then amazon already introduced the kindle, barnes & noble was learned in the works so it wouldn't be introduced in 2009 so that eventually when borders did develop its own ebook strategy in selling some additional ereaders, they just never were able to catch up in terms of appropriate market share. >> what happens to the borders ebook reader, the kobo? >> well, kobo says that any ebooks that have been bought through borders website are i

believe in their words perfectly safe but it's also interesting that kobo's other partner in australia which incidentally franchises the borders name for various bookstores, they've also declared bankruptcy over there. so i'm hopeful that kobo's assertions are indeed true but i think it will be interesting to see if, in fact, the ebooks that people bought through borders sites are indeed safe and people can reclaim them and read them and so on and so forth. >> so borders has about 642 big box stores across the country. how many are they closing? >> they are closing 200 and the going out of business sales are, in fact, starting tomorrow. i believe that the liquidation sales will be between 20 and 40% off. and those -- those are already going to be in the works. they've actually already, i believe, started shutting down the cafes at the super stores. and it will be very apparent walking into those 200 stores

that have been designated for closure all around the country that you'll see the going out of business sales signs and be able to get the books, cds, dvds and other appropriate merchandise at those prices. >> so why is it barnes & noble has been able to maintain its big box strategy but is it all about the ebooks? >> i don't believe it's all about the ebooks. i think with respect to -- it may come down to this, which is that barnes & noble certainly most recently -- they are run at the top by people who value books more than anything else. with respect to borders, essentially because there's been such a tremendous turn of management changes, they brought in people from outside companies who had experience in general retail but may not have know their experience would translate what's appropriate for the book business. the book business is very quirky and it's not always the best with respect to what public

companies in particular need. for example, expecting and demanding higher and higher profits, the book business operates on a very tight margin. 1%. you're lucky if you get up to 3%. as a result this sort of uncomfortable fit operated by people who weren't as experienced with how the book business works probably added to borders' troubles. >> sarah weinman, when you look at the bricks and mortar business, what do you think of that? >> we may be witnessing the natural end of the chain bookstore business which essentially started in the late '80s and early '90s when borders expanded. when barnes & noble expanded. when we started seeing these massive superstars that stood alone. some of them were part of malls but most of them were entities you could drive up to and park

your car and go in and chunky chairs and a drive for books. i do wonder perhaps we were fooling ourselves that this could last as long as it did. and maybe 20 years was the natural lifecycle for such a thing so we'll see especially as digital sales keep going, perhaps we'll see a greater preponderance of smaller independent stores. a number of them have opened. certainly they face many of these pressures that have been debated and bandied about since i'd say the last decade but the ones that have opened and have a certain business acumen have really tried to engage both in their communities and develop even a small ebook strategy, they seem to have the best chance for survival. i think we'll hopefully see more of those so the ecosystem is going to change. it will certainly impact how publishers perhaps sign up authors and what sort of advances they're paying and what

books will be most visible. but to see that the shrinking of the chain bookstore business means that the book industry is dead is a connection i would be deeply uncomfortable in making because there's too many signs that are pointing towards more optimistic waters. >> who are some of borders' biggest creditors and what have they said since the filing? >> well, on the unsecured creditor side the biggest one is the penguin putnam group which i believe is owed $41 billion. the major six publishers. simon schuster is owed 70 million and harpercollins, mcmillan and so on and so forth. i believe the only publisher that has issued a statement is penguin. others have stayed mum with respect to what's happening. and, of course, there are the

larger secured creditors which are bank of america which held a credit agreement. they're still owed 200 million. i believe ga capital is owed also owed 21 million off their tranche agreement as well. they have to pay off their banks and their biggest publishers and landlords are trying to get whatever they can as well as additional creditors. so all told, i believe borders owes about 300 or so million to vendors. and they still have to figure out how they're going to get paid. >> can in your view borders emerge from bankruptcy or with its remaining stock of stores, et cetera, become a profitable company? >> i think it would be wonderful to see them emerge as a smaller, leaner profitable company and i believe the factors that have enabled them to go into bankruptcy may not be so kind and for giving. to my mind they're a little too much concordance with what

happened with circuit city when they went chapter 11 nation late 2008. went through the courts and realized they didn't have an appropriate business plan and eventually went into chapter 7. they're not terribly happy with what borders seems to have in mind. their top priority, for example, seems to be highlighting their borders rewards plus card but if customers come in and they know that this company is in trouble, do they really want to redeem their borders rewards plus card or sign up a membership that they may feel does not have a future so i think unless borders has a really rock solid strategy as to how they're going to survive they may suffer the same fate as circuit city. but at the same time, i don't think we're going to know for several months at the earliest. >> sarah weinman is the news editor of publishers marketplace. thank you for joining us on booktv. >> thanks so much for having me. ..