historical, and i'm enjoying that. so i'm three-quarters the way through that one. i also plan to read the immortal life of henry l. black, and that is if i get enough time to do it. and the billionaire. >> now from the 2012 eagle summit, elizabeth kantor talks about her book "the jane austen guide to happily ever after." the program was held in the heritage foundation in washington, dc and runs a little over 30 minutes.

[applause] >> thanks so much. talking about marriage, which i'm very excited to do, to a group of young, i imagine, mostly single people. and i am going to drag in jane austen just as soon as possible. but i want to start with a paradox about marriage in the 21st century. at the end of last week there was an article in "the new york times" on comparing essentially single motherhood to parenthood with two parents are married to each other. and explaining about the advantages of a two-parent married families for children, and really the only newsworky think thing was that it was in the "new york times." folks who read kay or charles or -- about a decade ago, a book

called "the case for marriage: why married people are happier, healthier and better off financially." it's never been more clearly scientifically established that marriage is the best way to raise children and really great for the people who are married, for their finances and for their personal happiness, and i'm no social scientist but if you want to read up on this, brad wilcox at the university of virginia and the national marriage project has done a lot of work on this, and i actually imagine these are things you've heard already. so, to maximize your happiness and make sure that your future as yet only imagine area children turn out really well, you're all going to rush out and get married. right? okay. obviously people don't get married for those sort of calculating reasons.

but even if you did decide to get engaged as soon as possible, it would be a little harder in the world today than it used to be because the other side of the kind of paradox of marriage the 21st century is that just at the time when it's become obvious that marriage is really good for people, marriage is in decline. wilcox talked about a retreat for marriage. he talks about a cohabitation revolution that is falling on the heels of the divorce revolution in the earlier generation, and people say divorce rates have stablized but that may be because fewer people are even attempting marriage in the first place. so on the one hand, this institution is great for people. on the other hand people are retreating from it. and it's not just in marriage itself that we see this sort of

crisis in relationships between men and women. there's been research for the book which i'm going to talk about in a minute. i read an awful lot of people just in popular culture writing articles in books about relationships and it's pretty clear that there is a crisis out there. it's like the modern relationship has hit a wall. a few years ago "atlantic magazine" was suggesting women settle for a guy they weren't excited about. last year "the atlantic" went a step further and all the single ladies are saying there aren't any good guys out there, resign yourself to being single for the rest of your life. i read articles in books by a lot of women who are pretty hostile about how men are immature and won't commit. i read a lot of comments by guys

who are really angry about women who they think just see them as a meal ticket and are going to mary them and going to walk away with the kids and the house and the dog and a big part of their paychecks. so it seemed to me that marriage is in a kind of a crisis today, and also relationships as a result or in a crisis. so, i read all kinds of interesting analysis of this problem, and what i did was i've written a book that is not analysis of the problem. it isn't meant to be a solution. this is the jane austen guide to heavily ever after." and i'm proposing jane austen as really a solution to what's wrong with modern relationships, the viable alternative to everything from the gut culture to the fact that even folks who really aren't part of the hookup culture, complain a lot that it's hard to meet the right

person or to come to a place where you both want to commit to each other. i started with the project of writing about jane austen -- it's really a practical advice book. i wanted to make it a self-help book for women, and i hope to get toward the end to why advice needs to be directed more to women than to men. a real self-help book for women on just giving very practical tips how to change the course of their love life, and i'll give you just a brief run-through of the sample advice. some of this is about avoiding the various pitfalls on the way to happily ever after, staying away from the kind of crazy romanticism where you're just pursuing drama instead of happily ever after, and staying

away from the cynicism that makes for hostility between the sexes so it's hard for people to meet and learn to love each other. there's a lot in the book on discerning men's intentions, which is something that women in jane austen's day just knew was really important part of their job as a woman, whereas today there's a lot of women kind of scratching our heads about why is he not that into me? why are men afraid of commitment. jane austen actually has -- well, i quickly found eight in six novels, examples of guys who are kind of classically afraid of commit independent her novels and they range from people who are just hard-heardded players like henry crawford in lancefield park, through a guy hill willowby in sense and securities who is married to -- to somebody like -- at one point

katherine wentworth looks like he is afraid of commitment and it has to do with jealousy. so i think it can help women a lot to look at a temp plate for, i'm telling with somebody who looked like he was interested in me but not anymore. what is the reason behind this? and -- but i can't obviously give you the advice in the book in 15 minutes. so i want to back up a little bit and talk about the case for jane austen as an alternative to the typical 21st century ways of thinking about dating and mating and courtship and all that kind of thing. when i first started writing the book, i wasn't thinking, jane austen is a genius at writing and at social criticism and at male and female psychology and

relationship dynamics, and she happened to be writing in an era before the crisis in relationships had gummed things up. so she could have some useful advice for modern folks. in the course of working on the book i came to see that jane austen was really more than that. i found out about what you could call her place in marriage history. the history of marriage, which is also sort of the history of the relationships -- it's really interesting -- for hundreds of years before jane austen -- and you could say starting with the place in the gospel where divorce is forbidden, and going through -- literally for hundreds of years. marriage had been -- is an experience for human beings had been improving, particularly in the sense that marriage in a practical way, had been getting

to by less and less about money arrangements, family alliances, parents giving their daughter away to get something in return, and more -- been getting to be less been those things and more about love, for large numbers of people. and love, which in ancient types was mostly about, you know, adultery that you write poetry about, rather than living happily ever after. love had been getting to be more and more about marriage. so that by jane austen's day, young men and young women are making their own matches. they're deciding whom to mary themselves, not their parents or their guardians but they're still aware that's a new freedom they have. that hasn't always been the

case. that parents used to make these decisions and the freedom is a new thing. and they're also -- partly because of that awareness, that it's new that you can arrange your own marriage, they are still doing it with some prudence. so, a jane austen heroine, and like a real woman in the early 19th century, gets to mary the man she falls in love with, but she tries to take care not to fall in love with somebody who is going to ruin her life. she needs to think about, will they have enough money to live on. does he have a character flaw, say, compulsive gambling or alcoholism that is sure to ruin her life? she is -- if you look at the end of "pride and prejudice" there's definitely passion there that's a picture of two people who are really in love with each other, but it's also a picture of one

of them calls rational happiness. understand they're deliriously excited about each other but they also have very good reasons for believing they're going to be happy in the long run. that it's not just a one-time adventure; that they're having extreme emotions and it will all be very exciting but will all en. so, jane austen is a high point in the history -- the literary history but literature and real life, especially when it comes to relationships, you know, affect each other a lot. you have to ask yourself why 200 years ago was a story like the story in "pride and prejudice" realistic enough to write believable popular fiction. today what is our popular believably about -- sex in the

city. so that wouldn't happen any reality is reflected in the fiction and is self-shaped kerr the fiction author shapes the reality in turn. and i wish i had time to talk about how things like the courtly love and the highland wages changed major. all kind of marriage history there but sticking to jane austen. she is a real high point in the history of fiction about marriage, the novel of manners, as they called it. as literary critics call it. not only because it took hundreds of years to get it to the point where women had choices like the choices in "pride and prejudice" but because after jane austen, even starting in her day, the thing started to come unraveled. it's downhill from there. and what caused it to unravel is

a whole big group of ideas you can call romanticism or the cult of sincibility or liberationist movements. jane austen made fun of this sort offing in a work called "love and friendship" chase satire where everybody find stuff like -- happiness seems boring and they're in pursuit of intensity, authenticity, liberation, intense experiences. basically they go around expecting love to strike them like lightning, and then not up naturally they wake up to find their lives are chard rubble after that experience. so, for the last 200 years, we have kind of as a culture, in terms terms of pop culture, music, fission, the way we talk about love -- we have been seesawing

back and forth between a romanticism that says just follow your bliss. doesn't matter -- you only know it's love if it makes you miserable. and on the one hand. right? which is -- and then which is -- has all kinds of problems. on the other hand, kind of a victorian attempt to hush the whole thing up, be careful, watch out, don't take any risks. but i think it could benefit us a lot to get back behind that false dilemma between passion and prudence and realize you can have both if you go about love the right way, the kind of clear-eyed 18th century way that jane austen can show you. jane austen's novels, 200 years after they were written --

publication dade -- date is 200 years ago next year for "side and prejudice" are still compelling for modern women. they sell copies and we watch the movies. that's because they express something that is really a universal aspiration of the human race. the picture at the end of "pride and prejudice" shows you marriage, permanent committed relationship, as an ideal that almost anybody can see the attraction of, but maybe it's hard for us to see why it's compelling or what the sort of principles and insights are that she is putting into that picture. and i thought about a lot of

different principles that jane austen -- that you fine in jane austen novels but the one i think is -- i want to talk about because it's most politically incorrect, the hardest for modern people to take seriously, and what it is it sexual -- the idea that men and women are quite different from each other. not only in the obvious physical ways, but that there are important psychological differences between men and women in jane austen novels, you see that mostly when you're looking at how a man or woman approaches a relationship. mr. darcy, in a snarky mood, says, lady's imaginationer is very rammed. jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment. now, i don't know if this is your experience but to me it

rings true that typically not -- i mean, obviously there are always exceptions to virtually any rule, but typically women at an earlier phase in relationships, start thinking about long-term possibilities, typically earlier than guys do. and that can create some problems in relationships. another scene in which she can get at japan austen's insight into the difference between men and women, is in "sense and sensibility" when marian found out that will lowby deserted her to marry a woman with a lot of money and her sister is comforting her and marriane -- and saying, unfortunately he didn't feel about you the way you felt about him. and marriane says, he did feel the same, eleanor. for weeks and weeks he felt it. i know he did. now, it's puzzleing because it seems like marriane and

willowby do feel the same way they've want to spend their time together. they're thoroughly enjoying each other's company. but either willowby didn't feel the same way at marian did the whole time, or else he could feel that way and then it was eers for him to forget it. does that make sense? in other words, it kind of lights up -- highlights a way in which typically women are more forward-looking when it comes to relationships, and men are more living in the moment. i found in "the new york times" something in their modern love section, a really interesting piece by a woman who won a contest, about her love life. and complains none of the anyone her life will commit to her or

anybody else. she doesn't know anybody who is a boyfriend that doesn't have an open relationship. and so she says -- she is striving for a zen-like sense of attachment so she can essentially live with the fact that the men in her life are like that. no one is any property and neither am i there is shy should just enjoy the time we spend together but it's the collective experiences that add up to a rich and fulfilling life. the guys in her life don't seem to have to strive for that it zen like type of attachment, and i guess when i'm recommending from jane austen is that women could take our natural capacity for relationships, our natural almost obsession with recommendationships, and make it a strength, not a weakness, not try to make ourselves -- accommodate ourselves to the men at their worst, but that those

men and women could learn how to do better together. thank you. [applause] >> i'm sure you must have questions. yes, the lady in blue. >> hi, i'm suzanne kelly from north green university and i want thank you for being here. my question -- okay. my question for you, in today0s re site, a notice couples who get engaged they wait for years before they get married. do you think it's healthier, once you find that person and know you want to get married do you jump into the relationship and go for the ride or do you wait it out until it's the perfect time to get married? >> i think -- i don't -- it's funny. jane austen makes a little bit of fun of the clicheed wisdom of her day, which was long

engagements or a terrible thing. but she also liked intestinal she might thing our engagements today are bizarrely wrong and you put your finger right on part of the problem when you said, waiting for everything to be perfect. you know, in a certain sense, finding love and commitment with the right person is perfect, but there's a lot of talk in the literature about marriage about how marriage is postponed for people because they're waiting until they have achieved all these milestones of adult life. finished a long education, maybe saved up for a house, can afford -- this is the one i thing is just crazy -- can afford a $20,000 wedding. when it's really not about the party. it's really about a life-long

commitment, and you think it would make sense to want to start your life with that person in a relatively short period of time. right? >> do you think delaying the marriage often times destroys the relationships? >> well, i mean, every relationship is different. i mean, every relationship is different, and i'm not saying a long engagement can never make sense. i'm just saying that the goal is just life long relationship of commitments, and, again, reading a little bit of the marriage literature, it seems like one of the reasons that the age of major is so late and that the marriage rate is so low comparatively historical terms is that people are waiting until their lives are perfect already to think about getting married,

which is a mistake or problem. >> did you have a -- go ahead. >> thank you for coming. >> speak close to the mic. >> thank you for coming. what is your favorite jane austen book? >> i can't say. it's like who is your favorite child. i mean, they're her children but they're all perfect. i have -- i mean, i would recommend "pride and prejudice" to be the first one anybody reads because it is fun. i have a special place in hi heart for "persuasion" because hi first experience reading it was when i fell in love with my husband and he suggested i read it. it was almost like being on drugs. you get these endofins in your brain, and then reading this book which is doubling or

tripling the experience. so, i don't think anybody can argue who has ever really been deeply in love, that jane austen, who was a spinster, that she didn't know anything about it. but she knows exactly what she is talking about. >> i'm kristina from patrick henry college i'm wondering what you think about the search for marriage and commitment among women and the different at taut todd among men have hindered friendships between single men and women? >> in practical terms, you know, in terms how we can fix the courtship rituals, to me it seems like -- for example, you have a relationship that starts as a really close friendship. to me it seems like what we need is more occasions for men and

women to pay sort of casual attention to each other. a situation in which asking somebody out for a date doesn't mean you have asked them out in the sense of going out with you. so, -- i mean i think our cultural will be healthier when we get to a state where men and women can be friends but also where they can be sort of casual dates in jane austen's day, the social life was you went to a dance, and a guy could ask you to a dance and he was expressing some sort of interest in you. it was acknowledged. he thought you were cute or wouldn't ask you to dance. but it was a very limited sort of experience. everybody knew it was for a couple of dances and then you were supposed to dance with other people for the rest of the night. you could tell me better than i know because you're in it. but i get a lot of complaints when i speak, women coming up to

me afterwards and -- sometimes men, too -- where do i meet women like this? that part of the problem is that it's so high-stakes for a guy to pay any -- a little bit of attention to a girl to ask her out because it might mean he is asking her out in that other sense. >> in the back. >> one more question. sorry. i married my wife loves all the jane austen books and makes me watch them all. i just wanted to ask you, it seems like generally men live up to the things expected of them. and my wife expects me to be a gentleman, and so i'm just curious, with the way that, like, modern feminism kind of doesn't have very men expectations of men. they just want them to get out of the way. do you feel like that has something to do with relationship problems and since women don't necessarily expect

men to be gentlemen all the time, men live down to that expectation and that causes some of the issues between men and women and how we just not getting married anymore because men are like, why should i? i can get everything i want out of the relationship and i can leave and nobody has a problem with that anymore. >> i think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying. i think jane austen really offered a completely different idea of female empowerment from the sort of substandard kind of female empowerment that we're often taught. i don't know if you remember, there was an item -- i didn't see the show but the question that sort of famous from sex in the city, which is, can a woman have sex like a man? and what that meanses, can a woman have sex like a really -- not like a decent human being or gentleman, and what you see in jane austen instead, she is

interested in this question and there's a famous question at the end of persuasion where she talks about -- her characters talk about men and women and their different kind of capacities they have for love. her kind of courtship and the kind of rules that her heroines live by, i try to show how those rules, those principles, can be updated in a practical way for modern women. her heroines live by certain rules for themes and also expect certain things from men, and all of that is in aid of getting to a place where a man can be in love like a woman, you know? a man -- he writes at the end of the novels are not caressed -- the women are not negotiating them painfully into admitting that he is her boyfriend, and

then proposing, and then often today the negotiations not even finished by the time your married. then you have to kind of like painfully talk him into having a baby. that kind of -- that kind of relationship is not the kind that jane austen's heroines have. they have the kind of relationship built on high female expectations, and they get to a point where the hero wants to lay himself, everything he has, he whole life at her feet, very different kind of dynamic, and i think it does depend on high female expectations. >> since i have wheedled men into seeing jane us a step with me, is it good for men to read? >> i think so. i think so. i am -- i think jane austen is good for aberdeen, really, and i have a lot of men have read my book and are excited about it. but in terms of just who is

going to change this dynamic in modern relationships? i'm actually betting on women because i think we're more interested in the question. >> in orange? >> hi, i'm hannah from the university of michigan. i would love to hear your thoughts on the media today, shows like girls where the main character hannah is treated poorly by her boyfriend and then -- >> yeah -- >> movies and shows like true blood and twilight where its shows an ininfatuation with one another and there's mixed messages. >> there's a lot of media for girls, for example -- i mean, i watch -- i'm not a watcher, so i don't have a lot of -- i don't watch all these shows itch can't comment on them. i think that what's interesting if you compare what you hear about sex in the city with girls, for example, that i think

it's just evidence the kind of modern courtships are -- people are becoming frustrated with them and they're willing to complain. i mean, that's just to be about the sorted humiliations of a group of girls in new york, and 20 years ago women weren't complaining that their love lives were a bunch of humiliationes. it's all about, we're empowered and free. so, to me it seems like there's sort of evidence that people are ready for an alternative. >> hi. gab biehl. i have a question going to the major issue. seems like a lot of young people are thankfully getting married but the problem it is feels like there's a level of commitment but the marriage covenant isn't

there, and when they say 'til death do is part they mean until no longer happy, and because american prioritize happiness before above all over things so has happiness goes, doso does the marriage. so when he harder years come, because that initial infattation can't last throughout the marriage because there will he rough patches. >> you know, i don't -- to me it seems like -- i don't think it's the right wait to talk about it to say after happily ever after. you can see, for example in "pride and prejudice," darcy and elizabeth are already doing -- before they get married what they need to do to make marriage happy. their relationship, which is in a certain sense the one jane austen gets into the interior of psychologically more than the other relationships.

their relationship works and really succeeded just because both darcy and elizabeth are willing to overcome their personal flaws and mistakes in order to learn better, and that's what the title is about. an attempt to over -- the prejudice against darcy because he is shy and seems like a snob, and toward a guy who is completely worthless player, right? mr. wickham. and darcy has to overcome his disfeign for her. he talks about her eyes and is attracted to her but he thinks i'm attracted to her because she is cute. not -- she doesn't appreciate her as a human being. and so he proposes to her in kind of an insulting way the first time, like, you've

overcome my good sense and i want to marry you because i can't help it, which is not the right way to approach it. and she turns him down flat, and then he goes away and does the thing you have to do in a relationship of your married, which is realize, think about, could any of this have been my fault? so, they're moving from a love that is merely romantic to a love that is really what we call charity. >> thank you, elizabeth. [applause] os how old >> host: how old was she when she killed herself? >> guest: she was 26. >> host: why did she kill herself? >> guest: she killed herself

because of -- well, she left a suicide note that said that she was distraught over her husband's philandering. so that was the immediate cause. >> host: that was the president's grandfather, stanley dunham's mother. >> guest: yes. she lived to be 26, and because of that traumatic event, stanley and his older brother, ralph, moved back down with doneham's parents, so living with his grandparents and great-grandfather, a man named christopher columbus clark who fought in the civil war. >> host: where did stanley and madeline, the grandparents, meet. >> guest: they meat in augusta, which is 12-15 miles from el dorado in butler county. on the way to wichita, and that's where madeline grew up and stan had already been out of high school for several years,

and madeline was a senior in high school, and he was working on construction, in the renovation of an oil plant. >> host: what was their life like in kansas? >> guest: the life before the there'd? >> host: after the married. >> guest: of they married? it was sort of -- her parents didn't really like him. matter of fact the first thing that her father said was, i don't want you marrying that wop. an element of race in that. she married hem secret by've she graduated from high school. she was a very smart woman who had been on the honor roll, until she met stanley who was slick-haired and slick-talk who prom mitted to get her out of kansas and that's what she wanted. she had grown up loving betty davis and the sophistication of hollywood and here she was stuck

in a small town, and stan promised to take her back to california. their lives -- to answer your question directly -- were somewhat unstable. not that their marriage was necessarily unstable, but his jobs were always unstable, and they never knew where they were going next, so it was a rocky road. >> host: on the kenya side of the family, where did the obama clan begin? >> guest: the obama clan began actually in sudan several hundred years ago but i start the story in the small village out by lake victoria, to the south and east of the major city out there, kasumiuu, it's a very poor part of kenya. it's where the tribe is basically centered, the second

and third largest tribe in africa. they're about the same and then the large tribe. and that's where the obamas found themselves. >> host: on the president's paternal side who are his grandparents? >> guest: his grandfather was hussein anyango, who was born in the late 1800s, and was the first -- in the first wave of westernized -- he was the seventh dayed a ven 'tis that came out to western kenya, so hussein and -- his name was onyango -- learned english from the seven dayed a ven 'tis and became sort of inculcated into the british culture as a british colony so worked as a waiter and chef and took for many british military people, and folks in nairobi. and the mother was a woman named

akumu who came from another village in the area, and she did not -- hussein was a very difficult guy to live with. he beat his wives. he had several wives which was part of the culture. when he moved from the area near where she grew up, and moved back to another homestead of the obama clan, around the bay of lake victoria, she had had enough. he had a new younger wife with him then so she ran away. she left the family when barack obama, the president's father, who was also named barack brachn obama. >> host: his parents died in 2006. did president obama ever meet them? >> guest: no. he never met his grandparents.

he not there in the 1980s after his grandfather died. he only met -- aside from the very, very early days of his birth, opposite in his life, but he didn't get back to kenya until both of his grandparents were gone, and he lived with his white grandparents so it was a dramatic difference in that part of the story. >> for barack obama the story, how many interviews did you do over the course of the last four years? >> guest: i would say that almost 400. and i had a wonderful assistant, gabrielle banks, who helped with later interviews and specific parts of the story, but i traveled all around the world, and so -- everybody i could find, and every part of the life of the president obama, of his parents and grandparents. >> host: barack obama, sr. was born in 1936. what was his childhood like? >> guest: well, he -- from a fairly early age, was dealing

with western culture and the british. he was very smart kid. his father was difficult to get along with. and not often there. mostly in nairobi when barack was growing up. he was lucky in the sense that -- two senses. one was he was smart enough to get into the only really good school in that area, and although he never totally finished there, he was a very smart student. and you have that sort of clash of old and new, that almost every one of his generation had to deal with. for all of his youth anded a less -- adolescence, he was living in a colonial country in a very poor part of kenya, sew

lived in mud huts and companies and no television or anything like that. almost a century behind in some ways. and yet kenya was starting to emerge during all of his youth. the push for independence was beginning and westernization was taking hold, and he was part of that. so, he straddled two very different worlds. >> host: how long were you in kenya and what tide -- what did you see over there? >> guest: kenya was one of the great experiences in the life. it was so vivid. every day onen forgettable. we were there for about two weeks, and it felt like a year. in a wonderful sense, though.

>> what are you reading this summer? >> the first thing i do is look for anything michael conway has coming out and i'll buy it in hard copy because i can't wait. but i'm reading that right now. adultery. and then -- comes out every year -- i think she is up to v right now. but that's great fun. and you sit on the beach and the kids want to talk to you and you just want to finish your book. so i'm really the mysteries and action kind of packed. i stay away from policy when i'm on vacation, and just go for something more -- on airplanes and something that takes me away from where i am and allows me to relax.