he was surprised he had never had a biography written about them and it turned out he was a little bit miffed nobody had taken the time and 14 books in print and nobody had ever written a biography of him. so i wanted to find out who was kurt vonnegut the author of these books that suddenly became so popular so suddenly because, you know, he was out of print as i say in the prologue there in the mid-'60s and by 1970 had a body of work that had been resuscitated from sort of the ash heap of literature, like god bless you mr. rosewater and sirens of titan, mother night, cats cradle. he had a corpus of work suddenly whereas before he had been just somebody who wrote paperback books that ended up in drugstores and bus stations next to mr. lucky and conan the barbarian. now, he's the next great literary thing. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.

>> booktv interviewed bonnie morris at georgetown university about her book, revenge of the women studies professor, a book based on her one-woman play of the same name. this interview is part of booktv's college series. >> professor bonnie morris, i want to start with chapter 4 and read a little bit. professor morris, i'm really sorry to bother you but could we talk privately a moment i really enjoy your women's studies class, i do and i love it and i want to finish out the semester but my husband -- he feels differently. he thinks it's a lot of radical ideas and he wants me to drop your class right now. he just doesn't like me to go out at night taking a women's studies class even though it was once a week and i told him over and over it does count me toward finishing my business degree.

she then invites you to dinner at her house, she's older than you and you write and i went to meet her husband and win his approval. i talked lightly about camping and hiking and movies while he stared at my bust over the spiced ham finally at the end of the meal he stood up shook my hand, saying well, little lady i guess i thought you would have horns on your head and carrying a suit of armor and i welcome you're woman enough after all this. >> this is a true story and the book is based on my one-woman play which in turn is based on actual incidents in my career teaching women's studies. and when i was in graduate school, i was able to start teaching my own women's history courses as soon as i had a master's degree i taught night school and the class, which was a history of women and work enrolled actual working women,

many of whom were 36, 40, i was 23 at the time. and these women were coming back to school. they were returning adult students. they had amazing stories. and what i was able to offer was a history of what they were experiencing as women in the workforce balancing career and families. but i did have a student who really had what i can now look back at now is the hints of a domestic problem and i really wanted her to stay in school so this was an example of a husband who had a stereotype about what goes on in a women's history class and i knocked myself out trying to win enough of his approval that he would not keep his wife out of class. that was in binghamton, new york, and a time when there was, as now, poverty and struggle. but a desire for education for many women. and, unfortunately, then as now,

women's studies or women's history is seen as controversial to too many people. >> what is women's studies? >> well, women's studies, of course, is an effort to fill in the blanks of what we are not taught about in terms of how women have contributed to planet earth. and for the most part, women's contributions to history have been overlooked or trivialized or they're simply absent. we learn about the history of great men, the founding fathers. that's all considered the public side of history and women are seen as the private side. people are very respectful of what goes on in the family but what goes on in the family is private and sometimes it's not seen as important. it's portrayed as modest or hidden, bringing attention to what women do or how women have contributed always returns to

the question many people object to bringing women's studies or women's history into a middle school, high school classroom because there's an assumption that women's studies is only about sex, birth control, abortion and actually, it's also about women in politics, women in law, women working on farms, queens, prime ministers. and my job is to break down the fear many people have. what goes on in a women's studies classroom? don't you all sitting around a circle humming and giving each other gynelogical exams? no. i have students who think think it's radical or easy. and they're horrified they learn they have to take tests and write papers and that they can actually flunk women studies. so as the courses have gradually

become mainstreamed, i now attract people who just want that humanities credit. and who think, well, this will be my easy class while i take my premed in the spring and many are the sad faces in my office, how could i possibly have earned a b. well, you know, you really need to know the names of some of these foremothers and, no, you didn't get that in high school. so, yeah, you have to read the book. and one of the things i also do i'm a reader of the a.p. u.s. history exam. and every june i read about 1100 a.p. essays. and we do have content on women's history that's part of standardized testing now. so everybody has to know more women's history than they used to to be considered an honor student or to get advanced credit. that's elevated the status of women's history but that has not

eliminated the kind of questions and nervousness i encounter every semester with a lot of people. >> professor morris, if you teach a freshman survey class, let's say. >> guest: uh-huh. >> how many men are in that class? >> that's a good question. i teach women in western civilization. i would say it's about 10%. it depends on the year. sometimes in a group of 100, i'll have 17 men, 12 men. they are great. the guys are often some of the best students. i can also say interestingly, i tend to have a lot of international male students. i think many of them have been pretty up front about wanting to look at gender issues. they come from the middle east or korea, pakistan. i've had students who have told me deliberately they want to take this class because it's the only time they'll have a chance. they won't back in bahrain.

i've also had guys who are very up front about being raised by single moms. they're very respectful of what women have done historically to keep families together and i also just have really smart guys who were political science majors who intend to pursue careers in everything from justice to law. >> you have that student, that male student, in the class who maybe sees this as a -- as a -- has a more nefarious reason? >> sure. i have guys who have raised their hands and objected. they have but not any more than the women, actually. i have more conservative women than i used to in part again because the field has been mainstreamed. we have people like kay bailey hutchison writing women history's textbooks. so it's no longer considered a brand of radical feminism to do

women's history research and that's a whole other topic. but it's also true that a lot of people are just shocked by what they're learning. they never learned that, you know, women couldn't do this until 19 whatever. they didn't know that women were forbidden from serving on juries or attending princeton until 1968. so the result is a lot of folks will say, wait a minute, wait a minute, where are you getting that? and that's a natural reaction. but i would also say that once in a while, we'll get somebody who is just very uncomfortable because the subject matter is painful. it's painful to look at the history of exclusion and fault and so what i would have to do as an academic and say, in the discussion section, please feel free to respond as personally or

as angrily or as emotionally as the readings move you. in the written work you submit, you have to be professional, scholarly, detached, empirical, reasonable. and so that's the deal. you can say whatever you wish. all political opinions can lead to an a. you don't have to have one view but i will evaluate your writing based on a good, you know, scholarly style. and so i teach many athletes. i also teach women's sports history and sometimes the athletes will use a little bit of street slang, and i have to write in the margin, woo, let's find another word for this. so it's really more about teaching folks to write about personal history in a way that is professional and not so much

people challenging me because they're horrified by the subject woman. >> what does one do with a women's studies major? >> that's a very common question. the quick answer is law school. most of the students i've worked with who have been minors, majors in women's studies go to law school. they do very well. a lot of women and men do work on women and development, often in africa, southeast asia, south america. they build women's shelters. they run agencies. many go to work for nonprofits, ngos. some do, you know, website design for women's organizations or become directors of women's shelters. i have lots of students who do internships with the different groups in d.c., whether it's planned parenthood or working

for -- a little bit of international focus, too. there's also a lot of students who will minor in women's studies and they combine it with a health degree. they're going to be nurses, doctors. there's a lot of folks who are looking at the impact of more access to education on girls and women in the rest of the developing world. and these include students who are going to go work for the west bank world bank -- world bank. >> when did the women's studies movement begin and who were some of the foremothers? >> oh, great question. well, the first program was at san diego state university in 1969. so we -- we've had like a 40-year anniversary for a couple of years now. this was based on, obviously, the feeling of the time of

bringing real topics into the university, whether it was the peace movement or black studies, but there was an obvious lack of coverage of women's issues and women still were not welcomed at a lot of schools. so if you look at a book like who's who in women's studies in 1974, a lot of the first classes were being taught by nuns at catholic women's colleges. and they had titles like women in society. those are very much part of the sort of justice activism feeling. one of the proponents was gerta learner who was an amazing historian and a refugee from nazi, germany. my particular mentor alice kessler harris one of my mentors from grad school was a refugee

from the holocaust and a lot of the women who started women's history had amazing stories to tell and they were also persons who knew very well what it's like for history to try to make a whole history invisible and i think that's an important side note. you couldn't really do a doctorate in women's history in too many places until the late '80s and when i started grad school at binghamton it was about one of four places in the u.s. and the big change has been that women studies programs have been offering degrees that range from a minor and a certificate to a master's and george washington university, where i also teach has the oldest m.a. program in women's studies in public policy in the country. and the focus here in dc, obviously, is more on women in government. but other programs in the u.s.

you might find more of a focus on women and literature, women in psychology. and a lot of the programs bring together faculty students and administrators every year through something called the national women's studies association. for women's history there's something called the berkshire conference and that's once every four years a big in-gathering of women's history experts, male and female. these are all wonderful events where you see the range of topics everyone is interested in and it is everything, from the renaissance to female pirates. i've done work on jewish women's history and immigration. women in sports, women in war. women in rock 'n roll. and it fills an ageless hunger to go to these events and really

meet your colleagues. >> professor morris, is women's studies a u.s. phenomenon or u.s. movement? and has it been internationalized? >> it's been pretty global and one of the things i've learned is some of the same challenges exist internationally. i've taught on a program called semester received very popular with undergrads twice in 1993 and 2004. and on each indication it's a 100-day voyage and you take about 4 to 800 students around the world on a ship, 12 countries, 100 days. what day is this? what's the currency we're using? have i had my shots, yeah, look, whales. it's a very different kind of teaching but at any rate, not only at semester at sea because i took this sort of one-woman show to different sites including israel and new zealand

and ireland and iceland, i encountered women's study faculty and students in at least 20 different countries. they all have the exact same story. everyone is made fun of for pursuing research on women. everybody has to spend more time articulating why do you want to look at women than talking about what they've learned. we're all wasting a lot of time defending our choice on subject matter. there's a fantastic network, the internet has made it possible for me to connect with women studies faculty all over the world, the first program. i really got friendly with online was in mongolia, these women were incredible. hi, we want to start a women's studies program. we have two books. can you send us more? we know we will not fail. we are the daughters of genghis kahn.

i showed that email to my dad and he said no self-esteem problem there. i sent my book. when i did my presentation in iceland. very different. they have a female prime minister, they have a woman in the building. they had women in g. to hear me speak. i had to prepare a welcome speech in icelandic because everybody there spoke english and i wanted to try and even with all the gender equality that's very unique to that community, there was a sense of how do you present information on women in a way that's not overly sexualized or that doesn't market women? there's just different issues in every country. in new zealand, the big question was, indigenous women's rights. there the land rights of mallory

women, they were very confrontational with me. what are you doing to reach out to native american women? that was the kind of question you would not have had in a different context. so going from place to place with the same presentation has been very useful for me to broaden my range, frankly. >> what was your meeting with fidel castro? [laughter] >> okay. so first of all, state department permission and all the paperwork in hand for semester at sea to dock in havana as an education group. we thought we would spend three days touring havana and meeting some students and going to a baseball game. that's it. on the last day, word came out fidel castro is going to speak at the university and you are invited. so quite a few people from the ship actually said no thank you. i don't care to, with strong feelings about him.

i went with some of the faculty and students. we had headsets and he spoke for four hours without stopping. he held a class of water and he never took a sip. so at the end we were invited to have mojitos upstairs and it was an out of body experience. i thought i'm having a mojito with fidel castro. but here's what's interesting i was one of few women and i was wearing a bright yellow dress or -- for whatever reason, i struck his fancy. he came over, grabbed my arm and said, if women ran the world, there would be no war. the maternal instinct is strong. do you not agree? and i said actually, i don't agree. i mean, look at the war like women leaders we've had or at least women we've had some knowledge of aroundments. i started talking about margaret thatcher and gold ja meir.

and i sent an email off to my parents i had drinks with fidel and, of course, their response was, sure you did and the photograph followed and that's not going to happen again but that was a chance to debate essential stereotypes about female power with a known dick -- dictator, that was an unusual day. >> when you teach about margaret thatcher, how do you approach her? >> having just seen meryl streep in the iron lady and, of course, i love meryl and that was an amazing film and what is margaret thatcher is not known as an aficionado for female legislation and she is a very good example of a woman who had to be more or less accepted as, quote, an honorary man in order to be taken seriously on the world stage.

and that is a very good jumping-off point for students to talk about. to what degree have we made everyone male and said now we have equality? we have consistently moved women into ever more opportunities that were once only available for men, sports, law, military, government, not the priesthood, but okay. and then we don't see women having attracted men to traditional women's work which is still very low paid or devalued, daycare, et cetera. so there's general cultural anxiety that women have had to break into the old boys club or at least imitate public prestigious aspects of strengths that somehow defemale --

defema defemalenize. does a woman have to be war-like? how does one bring in a sense of difference? should there ever be acknowledged difference between men and women? if you advocate for maternity leave, are you going to be seen as somehow lowering standards of productivity or even security? but anyway, you can get all that just from talking about the roster of female prime minister who have had to function as the only woman at a power meeting. >> bonnie morris, you also met with president bill clinton. >> that is a great story. i actually met him twice. he was christmas shopping and i was in the mall. and that was fun. but formally we met at a basketball game. my first year, i was teaching at

george washington. and he brought chelsea to a became. but in '94 the president sat and cheered on the men and then when the women's game began, he got up to leave and i thought, okay, what are you going to do, bon? so i just charged into the bleachers where he was very comfortably shaking hands with pretty, you know, approachable secret servicemen letting him meet the people. i stuck out my hand and i said, hi, mr. president, i'm a women's studies professor here and i'd really like to encourage you and stay and much with a the women play. it would show your support for title 9 law and be a really good message for your daughter here and we have this great team and what do you say? so he said, well, i'd love to but i have a meeting at the white house at 3:00. and i sort of looked at my watch

and said well, you can watch the first 20 minutes of the women's game. please sit down. and i thought, well, i've just given a direct order to the president of the united states and he sat back down. so he sat down. he watched the women and he became the first u.s. president to telephone congratulations to the winning women's team to the ncaa that year. so i'd like to think i had something to do with that. but you have to have a certain kind of confidence to just jump in and say, hey, this is not fair or look at what this symbolizes? and, you know, living in washington, teaching near the white house, i love in an embassy neighborhood. i'm really aware of how we showcase who's in charge, what is power, where women are

perceived as mattering so that was a small example where i really did have a chance to say, gosh, don't you like women sports? i do. and i teach these women and they not only can, you know, really do those lay-ups, they're a students. and they're here on scholarship just like the guys. and don't you want to applaud them? i do. so i think now that we have more fathers of daughters who are in sports. we have more men advocating for that too. but, yeah, that was another day that's not going to be repeated. [laughter] >> bonnie morris, where was you raised? what did your parents do and how were they educated? >> oh, boy, i owe everything pretty much to them. i was born in los angeles in the '60s and raised by parents who were very liberal. in fact, they had a very unusual romantic intermarriage.

they were cautioned not to mattmare in. my mother was jewish and at the time they thought it was a big deal but now it's nothing to write about. they exposed my brother and i to all the social issues of the '60s and my father in particular gave me a reading list when i was as young as 9 which included black power literature, to kill a mockingbird, langston hughes and alice walker, although he didn't know she was in that volume. and we went on many peace marches and then when we moved to the east coast, i went to a quaker school, carolina friends, which was very progressive but also had a women's studies curriculum. so i was able to start taking women's history in a formal classroom setting but a school that encouraged learning at your own pace when i was 12.

and i was able to sort of pursue the subjects that interested me because i had been, you know, tested and pronounced gifted at an early age so a lot of teachers were very interested in mentoring me and working with me. so i had all of that as a kind of privilege i have to acknowledge. and my women's studies classes at friends school were really simultaneous immersion well, how did women get the vote? when were the first women's history conferences in the 19th century? and also we looked at some of the issues of the day, the equal rights amendment and arguments about female equality in our own time. i'm still in touch with all those teachers. and all those folks. but clearly, it had a huge impression on me. i went from taking women's studies at 12 to teaching it

within 10 years actually. >> who are some of your personal heroes? >> ah, boy, i should have crammed for that one. well, boy, right off the top of my head, early on in life it was women writers like louise fujitsu who wrote harriet the spy. and, of course, harper lee who wrote to kill a mockingbird. those two books really shaped my life. i was very affected by billy jean king beating bobby rigs that was, of course, a famous tennis match in the 1970s that i watched. shirley chisholm when she ran for president in '72. i heard her speak at duke university. i was very aware that a black woman was running for president and i was very frustrated and i could not vote yet.

later on, i was very impressed by the emerging voices of lesbian authors, rita may brown, audrian rich but also i had an interest in what was going on globally in terms of jewish women who had been resistance fighters in the holocaust and then the memoirist who wrote about the struggle for women to tell their stories in a female voice and initially i majored in jewish history as an undergrad and lived in israel for a year. so i'm kind of all over the place in terms of survivors, those unafraid to speak, those who were able to use the written words the way i hoped today. ..

>> guest: i am a big fan of the women who have done a lot of work building the national women's history museum. we're trying to establish in d.c. and that ceo is joan wageses, but meryl streep is working as the spokeswoman. we're trying to get that built. it's a virtual museum right now. i'm also a person who is, um, you know, a fan, i guess you

could say, of some of the women who have broken ground like ellen degeneres who went from being sort of vilified for coming out to beloved by millions. and just an amazing person. allison beck dell, cartoonist, for the same reason. kate againton, comedian for the same reason. and also, certainly, alice walker for really establishing attention to the literature of women of color in a way that made space for many other authors. but, of course, she was instrumental when i was in grad school. >> host: what about sandra day o'connor? >> guest: oh, yes. this photograph, and ruth bader ginsburg, oh, my goodness, all of the supreme court women. elena kagan, sotomayor.

isn't it incredible, it went from zero to several in my lifetime. i guess you'd have to have half a person because of nine. i worked on a film, if women ruled the world, shot in the capitol rotunda. we had a dinner party with women who had achieved, and prior to the filming there was a sort of cocktail reception. i was able to meet sandra day o'connor, i also met betty friedan and various women who were a big part of that dinner party. that was very exciting. i actually asked sandra day o'connor who she admired, and she said mia hamm because, of course, the american women had just won the world cup. and i was delighted that she advocated for greater attention to women's sports. that was a thrilling occasion, um, and i was definitely one of

the less famous people in a room full of high achievers. but my role was to sort of represent the women's history person. and part of the film i took my students on the trolley around d.c., and we pointed out how few statues of women there are and how easy it is to imagine women as justice and liberty. we have, obviously, the statue of liberty and women holding up scales at the supreme court, but we don't have that many actual women cast in marble. and there's a whole controversy over how the marble statue of the suffragist was actually in the basement of the capitol for many years until it was lugged upstairs. and the complaint was, well, it's so heavy and dusty and, yes, so is women's history. it's heavy, it's dusty, bring it out in the open. >> host: what do you think of

that sculpture of the three women? >> guest: well, i think it's great. i support those who also think sow journaller truth should be a part of it -- sojourner truth should be a part of it. who's not here? you know, where are black women, slave women with, servant girls in this overview of n this time period what were women doing. um, in fact, i'm real up front with one of my midterms that if you don't acknowledge that we had this double standard in the 19th century, women are delicate and shouldn't do sports, while we also had slavery. if you don't talk about that double standard, your not going to get -- you're not going to get an a. if you mention it, you have a shot at it. that's just inexcusable. so it surprises some people when

a white women's history professor devotes so much time talking about the history of non-white women. but the biggest trap is to have women's history equal white women's history. and that is no different than, you know, other kinds of exclusion. um, i wish i had more time in a semester to cover the communities that still are not well represented and, um, more and more looking at whether women with disabilities or what have you. but there's also students who are so moved that their background is mentioned at all, it's astonishing to get e-mails and cards and letters from students who are for the very first time ever hearing about

someone who represents their community. maybe they've been in school from age 4 to 20, and they're finally hearing about not just the female heroine, but one who is latina or deaf or gay or was in the army or whatever it might be. >> host: have any of your views changed since you've been teaching women's history and studying women's history? >> guest: yes, they have. i'm much stricter. i used to be an easy grader, and i'm real mean now. i'm herefied by the -- herefied by the lower -- horrified by the lower standards or reading and writing. i get students e-mail me with text messaging speak. hi, prof, how are you? and, you know, i went to a hippie school, and i thought i'd always be this mellow person, but no. so i give out pages of single-spaced etiquette guides,

you know, don't address me as, hey, pr, of although i'm really approachable and informal. practice, you know, you're going to write a letter to the editor one day. so i'm kind of an editorial, strict woman now. i'm also, you know, more cautious about, um, being too open to people coming into my office hours and unburdening personal relationship drama. i have to be a little more detached, um, because occasionally i'm not the right person, i'm not a therapist, i'm not a rabbi, i'm not a spiritual adviser. so i guess i know more of what my professional obligations, limitations are. um, and here's what's really strange, i'm old now. i am old enough to be my

students' moms, so they don't see me as their generation which when i started, my students were older than me, right? so that was an evening out, and now i'm the mom figure. so, um, i come from a time with a cultural literacy that includes, you know, the war in vietnam and when people first started to have computers and cell phones. so my film and literature references have to be updated. um, that is a whole extra job to be current. on the other hand, i'm, as a mother-aged person, able to be supportive and loving and pat on the back in a way that matters in some scenarios. somebody who's really finally achieved, you know, i can be a substitute parent.

i've got a lot of students far from home. but the other thing, connecting that with your question how, perhaps, have my views changed, i understand -- i don't like it, but i understand that it's just generational to reject what your parents did. students who reject feminism or who see women's history as part of their mom's era of women's lib, i understand that that comes from the need to detach yourself from what your parents' generation did. so when i have students who make fun of women's history or who want to begin a sentence with, well, i'm not a feminist, but my mom was, that's, um, a function of time passing. it's not so much, um, an oppositional political ideology. so i've learned, um, where is a student trying to define herself as different from mom, but she

probably agrees with a lot of the same things? and the funny thing that shows up many of my students don't want to identify as womenment -- women. they're taking women's studies or women's history, but they identify as girl. they see woman, now, as a term that represents their mother, their mother's generation, women's rights, women's lib, i am woman, hear me roar. they also are in this terrible economic moment when they don't expect to own a home or to have that kind of settled family life maybe as early as another generation hoped. so they see woman symbolizing some soccer mom who owns her own house and has a mini van and is more settled. they don't think they'll be a woman until they're at least 30 and have an advanced degree and maybe their first home whereas in my day, we were identifying

as women at 12. so it's really changed. um, also young women are entering puberty earlier, they have a much longer adolescence. let's say you're capable of having a child at 10, but you're going to delay marriage until you're 30. will you get all those degrees? that's a 20-year adolescence. so a lot of the conflict/reaction/controversy about how we teach women's history is also affected by the way age groups have shifted around, folks wanting to distinguish themselves from those who came before them. anxiety about really being a grown-up and what that means financially. i have to lightning-rapidly make all of these calculations where is this student coming from in

their caution or their stereotyping about women's history. is it from their family heritage, their desire to get ahead, their sense of a feminist is ugly, i better not identify as one. and the only way to break down all of these fears is with humor because exactly what people want to project is this image of the women's studies professor as a scary, unattractive behemoth with an axe. so when i come in, and i'm fairly cheerful, and -- california girl -- and can talk about body surfing or whatever seems unthreatening. it helps to situate a student who really expects some kind of, you know, humorless demon. and then we talk about why those stereotypes exist.

>> host: and finally, bonnie morris, why revenge of the women's studies -- >> guest: oh, i know. i am so not, like, a vengeful, violet -- violent person. well, when i first started thinking about, i wanted to talk about all these issues, why do some faculty advisers discourage students or their parents say you shouldn't take those classes. there were about 15 turning points in my own career where people had been rude or shaming or discourage anything ways that kind of all summed up this isn't a real field. women don't count as a subject. and i wanted to present all of this at conferences and events that were being flooded with scholarly papers. and i thought, well, i'll do kind of a one-woman show.

that'll be different, and can i can express the same -- i can express the same issues but in an entertaining format, that'll bring in more people. and it was definitely me being able to talk back to all the people who had doubted me or who had said women's studies doesn't matter, including that husband who didn't want his wife in my class. so i thought, well, it's almost like, you know, revenge of frankenstein, revenge of the women's studies professor. and, um, my modus operandi in life is when i've been insulted or i find things that are offensive, i often turn it into a short story. first, i'll write in my journal, then i'll turn it into an essay. and that's way of getting that kind of insult out of the body and into public literature. so, um, there's that saying revenge is a dish best eaten

cold? there's that waiting period when you really think about how you want to talk back, but in a reflective, thoughtful way that really will convince people what you want to say. and so revenge of the women's studies professor, here i am, i'm going to tell you what happened as i try to become a really good professor and how i got through all of the belittling that happens to such a person. and i'm going to make you laugh, but i'm also going to have the last word. and that's the only revenge i really want. um, to show the stereotypes are funny, but they can hurt, and a student should never be discouraged from looking at the history of their mother. >> host: revenge of the women's studies professor, bonnie morris, professor here at georgetown and at george washington university s the author. now coming out in very shortly,

probably by the time this interview airs -- >> guest: that's right. >> host: this book will be out, women's history for beginners. >> guest: that's right. that's book number eight, and it's going to be out on the 14th of february, valentines day. that's a good, introductory textbook which starts right with the first woman and goes from there. that's part of that whole wonderful series from for beginners press, economics for beginners, einstein for beginners. so it begins with why don't we know more about women's history, who's invested in you not knowing, and then it goes through a basic sort of walking tour of famous women and not so famous women and lots of resources. um, i have a wonderful illustrator, phil evans. and that's, um, intended, i hope, for high school as well as college class rooms. and again, a cheerful approach

to women's history in a way that should not intimidate, but instruct. um, and i had -- >> host: why is this illustration in your book? >> guest: um, the illustration that where women have been kept out of public life because a woman out alone in public is assumed to be somehow unchaste, ask that one reason we don't know about women's accomplishments is a good girl is not supposed to be known by anyone but her male relativeses. so there's a lot about the emphasis in scripture that, um, women be hidden from other men. it's very hard to become famous if that's equated with immodesty. >> host: bonnie morris, professor here at georgetown, thank you. >> guest: thank you. >> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see

featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@cspan.org, or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> well, on your screen is the newest book by longtime washington foreign correspondent georgie anne geyer, predicting the unthinkable, anticipating the impossible. georgie anne geyer, what is this book about? >> well, this book is a compilation of my poems since the first soviet bloc of communism, and i have felt for many years that what we have to do, those of us in the foreign field, we have to anticipate things, we have to predict them. i predicted death very easily, and that's what this book is trying to show. >> throughout your years as a foreign correspondent, where have your travels taken you? what are two or three of the most exciting places you've been

and situations you've been in? >> oh, go, i've been all over the world -- oh, gosh, i've been all over the world. egypt, israel, all over latin america, vietnam -- not so exciting -- cuba, i interviewed castro many times. and really i've gone almost everywhere. i can't think of places now. [laughter] >> so if people sit down to read "predicting the unthinkable," what are they going to find in there? what would you like them to take away from that book? >> these are about all parts of the world, and a lot of it's about the message of thinking of different people. so they can anticipate what is coming and predict it. we have great diplomats and military men and journalists who have predicted, but it never sort of gets to the ultimate

reasons of the white house and the state department. >> so if you were to travel today, where, where do you see a future problem or a future situation that we should be aware of, thinking about now? >> well, certainly syria. i think the rest of the middle east is going to come out of this quite well. but syria is such a violent place and such a nasty place that it will have to be an all-out revolution to overthrow overthrow -- they're not doing much of anything. they depend upon us, our borrowing. and so almost everywhere you look including our own country, there are problems to look into. l. >> now, we're here at the national press club. it is authors night here at the national press club, and we're talking with georgie anne geyer

whose newest book right there is on your screen. regular viewers of news shows from cnn, msnbc, c-span, fox, all of them have seen georgie anne geyer on the program commentating. um, but, ms. geyer, it sounds like you have a bit of a speech impediment now. what's happened to you? >> i do. four years ago i had tongue cancer, which i didn't even know existed. and i never smoked, never drank too much, never smoked at all, and so they sort of let it go for a long time until it was stage 4. so now i'm, i survived, but now i'm trying to go a little beyond surviving. [laughter] >> has it impeded your travel plans? >> oh, yes. oh, yes. because, you know, i can talk to you, and you understand it, but in germany or france or egypt they won't understand it.

so i'm rearranging my life. i can survive. that's important. >> georgie anne geyer's newest book is predicting the unthinkable, anticipating the impossible. thank you for being on booktv. >> thank you. >> here's a short author interview from c-span's campaign 2012 bus as it travels the country. >> pat mcnealy, your books is titled knights of the quill. who were the knights of the quill, and what interested you in writing a book on this aspect of the civil war? >> the knights of the quill were confederate reporters who wrote for newspapers during the civil war. their colleagues in the north were called bohemians, and one of the things that interested me and my fellow colleagues who wrote the book is that these reporterses normally use sin no anymores during the civil war. the confederates used the

synonyms but in the north it required the reporters to put their initials after their names, after their articles. and so as a result the federal reporters were more easily identified. as a result, a lot more has been written about the federal reporters than about the confederate reporters, and my colleagues -- henry schulte of, retired u.s. sea professor, and debbie von tool and i thought since this is an underreported area of civil war, we wanted to find out about the lives and memories of these people who reported the civil war for us and remember them. >> you've written that people of varying backgrounds, which included doctors, lawyers, educators, even a former u.s. diplomat, became war correspondents for the southment what do you believe interested these different types of people to pursue this unique role as a war correspondent? >> it was not uncommon for

journalists to also have other occupations, or it may very well be that it was other occupations and people who were interested in journalism. you couldn't really make that much of a living normally working for a newspaper, even in those times. and so a lot of times you had people with two occupations. the people who went off to war, though, were people who loved to write. and so they were, they were not only doing their primary occupations in some cases, but they also were writing and sending information back home. i think that they just loved to write and gather the material. the other thing is if you were a journalist, you didn't have to fight. they didn't have to join the army to report, but they didn't have to fight. and even though it was difficult and their lives were at risk, it still was a gratifying job that they had. >> who are the most significant of the confederate war correspondents? >> we identified 28 who were

paid full-time, professional roars during the civil war for the south. they were all significant, in our opinion. we think they were all, led unbelievable lives and made contributions frequently after the war that were also astonishing. my favorite, the one that i think is the most significant, is felix gregory defontaine who wrote for the charleston south carolina courier. he was one of america's first to nothinger ifs which -- stenographers which meant he took shorthand. hehe was also one of the first reporters in the war because he was in the south touring to write about the hostilities between the knot and the south as early as 1860, and he was there when the shots were fired in april of 1861 at fort sumter. and he covered almost every major battle during the civil war. he was also at the end of his life trying to write a magazine about the civil war. he also wrote 12 books during

his life, seven of which were about the civil war. and astonishingly, he took four months in the middle of the war to buy newspaper, to continue to write for it and to write a book about the civil war. at the end of the war, he was able to rescue a wagonload of documents that were being shipped down from richmond as the federal government deteriorated. and those documents that he saved are in many of the museums today in america including copies of the provisional and permanent confederate constitution. >> did newspapers in reporting itself, did it change during the civil war? >> very dramatically. in fact, the civil war was a turning point in journalism. one of the things that had happened was the telegraph had been invented in the early

1830s, and it had been used some in the mexican-american war where we had 12 war correspondents in texas during the mexican-american war. the telegraph was widely used. additionally, we also had had the invention of the camera in the early 1830s, and it was used especially by the north in the civil war. additionally, we also had new rules that the confederate press association developed which made, created rules that were not unlike the ones you'd hear in a journalism classroom today. so we had many dramatic change during the civil war. >> what surprised you the most from your research about confederate war correspondents? >> well, i think the one thing that would surprise most people is the comparative size of the newspapers in the north and the newspapers in the south because when you look at the material, the coverage of the war, you sort of think about them as being the same size. but the newspapers in the north were dramatically larger, and

also dramatically much better funded. the harpers weekly, for example, had a circulation of 200,000. lesslys illustrated had a circulation of 100,000x the new york herald had a circulation of 85,000. the herald sent 63 reporters to the war. additionally, they also had photographers like matthew brady and his colleagues, and they had illustrators, harpers weekly had three full-time-paid illustrators. in the south, two of the large newspapers were the charleston paper in south carolina, the courier and the mercury. the courier circulation was 7600 at it height, and the mercury's circulation at its height was only about 3600. and they never had more than three to five correspondents in the field at any given time. so it's just amazing