next debra spar president of a college. this is a little under an hour. ..

and i really, really curious and how you respond to the book and some of its major themes. so, the book is a bit iffy hybrid. i was talking to a reporter earlier that said how would you categorize it and i said that is one of the harder questions you can ask me about the book because it is a combination pity it it's partly a cultural history and partly a social analysis. there's a fair amount of data as a former economist i couldn't resist putting that into it but it's also in large part a personal story so that's what makes it a hybrid quality putting together the day the and a more personal story than i actually intended originally to put in the book but i managed to sneak in there. what i am trying to do is examine the status of women today and asking this for this basic question of how far have women come since the feminist revolution is why?

and why we still appear to have such a long way to go with. but what makes the book a little bit different is that i am really asking these questions and telling these stories through the personal perspective of the women of my generation and it's not just that the women of my generation have a particular part to play it's just it's what i know so telling the story through the lens i think is the easiest which is the life i experienced and women of mighty feige experienced. so i was born in 1963. one of the odd things is that everyone knows how old i am so i can't mistake that anymore. and if you just remember sort of relative history. being born in 1963 means by the time i entered middle school john f. kennedy had been assassinated, martin luther king had been assassinated, the cuban missile crisis unfolded,

woodstock had come and gone, the vietnam war had come and gone, roe v wade had been decided, the sexual revolution had occurred and the feminist resolution had occurred so it was a packed ten years in social terms and i was too young to participate in any of its pity if you can remember things that happened between the time you were born and the time you were 12 you are vaguely aware of it but you are a part of it because you are too young. you are a kid to get so by the time i became and women of my generation became politically and socially active it seemed that feminism was over and that we had won what and that is a hard message to get across if you're born in a different point in time that if you're born in 1963, by the time you were in high school it sort of felt like great, thank you the very much.

the feminists came in and did some work. i can go to college where everyone and have a career where ever i want and i'm done. as a result of this i think that most women of my generation compared to women won only ten years earlier of the year than us tended to the stain feminism as we were growing up. it wasn't at least speaking personally for the moment because we pulled back and said let me think about feminism is it good or bad. it's just that it felt like it was over and that it was our parents, it was our mother's fight. you are all young enough to realize you're not that interested in the things your parents fought for because you want to fight your own battles and push for the next victory. so i think a generation of the we tended to move away from feminism not because we thought it was bad but it wasn't our fight. but also led into this and this is a little more complicated is that a lot of what we were

hearing about feminism isn't very attractive because if you are hearing about feminism as a kid just listening to whatever you heard on television, you got the media's distorted view of feminism so what you tended to get was this cartoon vision in which all feminists were angry, they all hated men and spend all their time learning mather block none of which was actually true and i've had several of the older feminists remind me they didn't even burn them as the miss america pageant. it was a rumor that got started and stayed around for 50 years. but if you are 12 and you are watching this you just absorb it as truth and so growing up like i don't want to be a feminist. that's not who i am. instead what i saw coming through the media and in some ways i equated with feminism --

i hope i'm not pushing the wrong button. there we go. this is what i thought. i saw charlie. the students were too young to recognize this ad but if you show it to the women my age and older, there's women shaking their heads. [laughter] this ad was everywhere in the mid 1970's and they captured the sense of this era because this is what we thought we were going to be. we were going to be the charlie girl and who is the charlie girl? in this particular version she goes on to become one of charlie's angels but who is she just sort of demographically? she is as the text says george riss, sexy young triet who doesn't want to be that? gorgeous, sexy and young. these are good words. she's clearly beautifully and working. she isn't a stay at home mom. she's a working woman eloquently addressed and have the briefcase

sort of in the background and in several of the ads they have attractive men and several of the ads have beautiful little children. so without saying much more than a gorgeous, sexy coming down with the ad is conveying this is what the working mother's life is like. you go out, look beautiful, leave your child somewhere, the brief case shows up, the men show up, this is good. who wouldn't want this image? this is to the generation that grew up on the brady bunch. so which you want to be? you want to be charlie. and of course right around the same time, -- this is why you should check these things before you come up here, charlie's angels come out some charlie was a big thing in the mid 1970's. but again, this is hard for you all to remember. we didn't have cable so all there were were three channels, two, four and seven you just turn the dial. everybody watched charlie's angels. the were working in their

bikinis and killing people. [laughter] this is what professional life was supposed to be like. this was a very attractive model of what the working woman's life was like and it wasn't because somebody pulled to the site and set listened this is what will be like when you enter the workforce. this is what you are picking up through the media. i don't mean to trivialize this too much, but i think what happened as a result is that the women of my generation sort of intuitive lee grew up saying don't want to be a feminist because they burn their bras and they are kind of unhappy all the time, i want to be charlie, which means want to be attractive, want to be working, want to have children but not really think about it. want to have men. and it's a very, very seductive image. and we kind of fell for it generation of the speaking. and to be a little bit more specific, i think the women of my generation and to some extent i think still women of your

generation kind of grow up believing not only that we can have everything but that it will all just kind of come to us rather naturally. and i think when i look back at this period of time, i think what happened is that the women of my generation without meaning to because nobody sat down and decided to make this happen, but we actually privatized feminism. we are also the generation that brought ronald reagan and margaret t privatisation was a common theme. we took what had been a collective call to social action which was what feminism was about is that changing the world was about civil rights and equality. we turned it in words and we needed about charlie. we needed about the personal quest for perfection rather than being about the social goals. we were the ones who need it about having it all. that isn't what the early feminists were saying that that's how we interpreted it.

in addition and this points a little bit more subtle but i think it's crucial to the we took the older expectations that women have always had and now we've been getting rid of them or e eliminating. we actually test the old ones and added more. rather than liberating of the women from a series of confining expectations, we at the antion all the things that women were supposed to do because our mothers and grandmothers generations have had these very confining expectations then you will get married, you will be a good housekeeper, you will have children and be a good mother. we didn't get rid of any of those. instead, we added to them and we said by the way you will look like this and you will be in the work force and you will wear a bikini and we ratchet that up without getting rid of any of the older expectations and the result of that is what i call in the look of wonder women because we created this myth that you

would be perfect and that you would do everything and he would do it all well. and i just want to give you one very recent example of what i'm calling the wonder woman myth and i find it so plain and that it's worth taking a moment to discuss. it's this woman, mary ann bortolotti. some of you may you remember she won of winans singles championship at wimbledon so a massive achievement. this is a woman, 28. she's been playing tennis ever since she was six. so at the very peak of her professional success it will never get better than winning wimbledon for the first time. she goes on for her first major interview and the bbc commentator -- bbc. this isn't a slap news operation. the bbc commentator who's interviewing her says well, you know, is it true when you were young your father pushed you to practice so hard because he

looked at you and said well she's never really going to be a looker? it's just horrifying. secure you are in a moment that has nothing to do with your physical attractiveness and your looks are being made the topic of inquiry. i think this is something that women face every single day of their lives in ways that men don't. so the good news is that women like mary iain cretul we can compete at wimbledon and the interest men's sports used to have pitted the bad news is they are still being valued for their looks in addition to being evaluated for all of the other things that the do professionally. so let me just leave that example out there. what i want to do for the next few men says i want to take you through three sets of examples. the way this book works is on a trace through the narrative of a woman's life, so the book after the historical chapter this is girls and how we raise girls and what kind of expectations we as

a society are putting on the girls and young women that it looks at the body image and how the women's body image are fundamental for different women than for men. it looks at saks which was a really painful chapter to right. it looks at marriage and bs and housekeeping at the work place and aging so it tries to follow through the arc of a woman's life. we don't have a lot of time so i just want to touch on three of these issues that are captured in three different chapters and i chose them at random but it might be nice to touch upon. the first is duty and body image. the second is marriage and what has and has not changed and 30 is housework that you all might be young for but you can probably start imagine it. so let me start by talking about beauty. and i don't suspect i have to argue too hard to convince people in this room or any room that we as a society still remain totally obsessed with

women's bodies as subject of perfection and perfectibility. if you go back to any of the early feminist works this was one of the most important themes that we had to stop the society's success with women's bodies, and we had to move beyond duty as a standard to replace other kind of standards for women. does anyone in this room think that we pulled that off? note. if anything and i would argue this pretty easily, we have instead worked again to up the ante for duty as a standard by which women are evaluated. so go to the corner, to cut any women's magazine and what is it about? it's about beauty. and we now have a duty standard that applies not to just the women of your age that have been the archetype of the beautiful era. you're supposed to look like you are 20 to one tell you are 92 so far as i can tell.

particularly in this city you're not about to have a wrinkle or gain weight. one is supposed to or is assumed to be beautiful throughout the entire course of her life. and one of the things i do in the book that some of you may have seen a clamor piece that excerpt on that was i just sort of counter about how long it takes me not to look like a model which i never will but just to show up for work in the morning it takes me a lot longer than it takes my husband and he uses a lot of hair product. but even so, that is about all he has to do. if you think about the standards are not for models but a woman who is a lawyer or doctor or a professor there are standards that apply are a major constraint on women's time and energy and in come. it's not a bad thing but it's something we have to be aware of and what is a bad thing as in the mary m. burke told the story and we see this with hillary clinton constantly is when

people are completing the assessment of women's qualifications that their assessment of women's beauty. i was talking about this topic recently with someone who mentioned she had just gone to an exhibit at one of the museum's that included several corsets, things women use to where 200 years ago to make themselves more attractive and she was commenting somewhat frivolously isn't it great we don't have corsets any more? than her companions that if you stop and think about it, maybe it was easier when women had corsets because if you think about it coming to didn't actually have to work very hard if you were a corset. it may have been painful, but you put it on the and you were done. now the expectation is we are going to maintain corset like bodies without the help of the course that. so what do you have to do? instead you have to diet and exercise which is arguably much harder than putting on a course it so i will throws out there. i'm not been to argue the point too much but i think it's

interesting that in our so-called liberation, we have made it harder for women to achieve standards of beauty because the woman in the core set really has essentially the same shape as the woman sort of take any model and they will have more less the same shape but without the advantage of any kind of mechanical intervention. so, let me turn and talk about marriage. again, you wore all a little young for this but let me throw the argument out. the marriage chapter is one of the more interesting words to write in the book because there isn't that much written about marriage interesting we in this sort of cultural studies of feminist history. and if you just sort of take it at the broadest level, marriage should have disappeared as a social and institution. manages essentially an economic contract if you go back and look at marriage throughout history and the of original marriage ceremonies in the jewish

tradition it's quite interesting because it is actually a contract worth. it is essentially an economic transaction that the family is given the way the daughter in exchange for something, land, cows, sheep, but it's an economic transaction and what the woman is getting is her virginity and the promise to have children and in many cultures of the woman didn't produce children would be small because the was the deal. thankfully we are way beyond that now. we don't enter into marriage in this country at least as an economic bargain. so why are we all for getting married? why interestingly has same-sex marriage taken over in such a huge way following essentially the same social conventions which make no sense?

we have a white wedding in a remarkable way given that it is a vestige of something that doesn't exist. the other thing is we have added a brand new ingredient and that is the love which is a good thing but it's also ratcheting the expectations because we back then love had nothing to do with marriage. was a social and economic bargaining and was clear what both parties had to do. now we have a messy thing called love into the bargain in a fancy way to up the ante again pitted i was thinking about this last night and i stumbled onto something that never crossed my mind before but there is a beautiful and instance of this on broadway. i'm sure some of you have been in this play.

the full glare on the roof. there is a wonderful when they're confused over the fact the daughter wants to marry someone and it doesn't know quite what to do with this. trying to be a modern dalia he goes to his wife 25 years and he says do you love me and she comes back by won't sing it because i can't sing but she said to like what? and he said do you love me? her answer was to do i love you? for 25 years i've watched your clothes, cooked to your house to the co -- connect, cleaned the house and why talk about love right now? and it just captured the change because what she is asking and what we have asked as a society is you don't give up on the other stuff. so still i have been married for

25 years. i have lost your clothes, cooked your meals, given to children. went to the coroner to buy the milk and i love you. and we have actually added to the bargain in very complicated ways. i would be the first to say adding love into the marriage equation is exactly what you want to do. and it's crucial. but we need to just pull back for a second and say maybe this is why we are fetishizing wedding that such a big extent because we have made marriage that much harder. because we haven't gotten rid of the older expectations and we have added this new ingredient and that the risk of sounding hopelessly middle-age i think for your generation what makes this even more complicated is that if you buy into the social norms of the hook up culture, what we are essentially expecting the young women to do this to be carefree promiscuous

for ten or 15 years of their lives and then somehow to stumble out into this wonderful monogamy for the rest of your life. that's hard. enough said. let me turn finally to talk about housework. and again, hopefully none of you are doing too much housework these days although we do hope you clean your dorm rooms. but once again if you go back to some of the older feminism and and particularly betty friedan who is an explicit on this point, the women were supposed to be liberated from doing the housework. the core of the argument is that women have to stop polishing their floors so they can go out and actually do real things that have an impact in the world. we were supposed to move away from washing clothes and cooking meals so we could have a fulfilling personal life.

rather than women into some extent man moving away from doing housework we are doing more housework. and we are doing the housework and the much higher and almost surreal level of expectation. what the women today expect their homes will look like actually takes many more hours than their mothers or grandmothers were expected to do once again, pick up any of the shelter magazines on the stand and look at what you're supposed to be whipping up for dinner every night. look at what you're bathrooms are supposed to look like and what your bedrooms are supposed to look like. just because it is the autumn time of year i pulled a couple of random photographs to the do-it-yourself halloween

costumes. again, you go to the drugstore and buy a mask. it's really easy to beat now with my kids are trecker treating i'm supposed to be making these creations. if you are working at a law firm or investment bank you don't have time to be selling if that is the expectation and when you are done you should be making the magical the cupcakes because if you don't bring the magic, a cupcakes to the bake sales they occur weekly at every school that your child attends then you are the bad mother. so on your way to the meeting or the conference call or the international trip you have to be whipping up little cupcakes. then finally on the weekend the bird feeder because you are taking care of the birds in addition to the class parties and the halloween cupcakes. i am exaggerating a little bit

but not much. paillette real simple magazine which has the gall to call itself ymbol bec everything is hard to do and i can do it yet it's easy to laugh at this stuff but it becomes the dominant social norm and you don't do this you feel bad. and again i am older than all of the students here in the room but one of the things i hear all the time whether they are working or not and mothers were not and married or not or straight or not st it is built. the guilt that somehow they haven't done what they are supposed to do because what they were supposed to do or what they felt like they were supposed to do was everything and nobody can do that. so let me just add what do we do, how do we fix this mess we've gotten ourselves into and i actually don't think it's all

that hard. there are some problems out there where you look at it and you say i have no idea how we get out of this. this one is at least in half yearly not that hard to unravel. what do we need to do? we explicitly have to give up on perfection. at every moment in the day and every opportunity -- and i know this is hard in this context rather than constantly focusing on how perfect you are or how less than perfect your friends might be, go for something a little less than perfection. this is something i try to do in the book. i'm kind of terrified of it because i throw a lot of my personal story is out there but i'm trying to get the message across that nobody's perfect. all of us are bad at some things and in the mistakes that we have made now that we need to air all of our dirty laundry on the sleeve but we need to be more honest what we've been successful saying here's where i

screwed up otherwise we're selling you all of the build goods and we need to stop doing that. related to that, and this is something you can start thinking about, not today but over the course of the next few years, think about what areas of your life really matter to you. what do we really want to be good at. where do you want to put your energies and then this is the crucial second part. where else are you going to pull back? so if you are going to focus on x you have to stop doing less of why. that is a really crucial distinction and set of decisions to make. life is about trade-offs. i think men sort of understand this more naturally. perhaps because they haven't been subject to the same shift over the past few generations.

he's sort of same stuff space inouye i have to do this. women try to do it all. so even at the next presentation they want to make sure your queen before they go. she spent hours cleaning her kitchen before the housekeeper came. we all do this. we really need to stop doing that. we also need to recognize and this one is more provocative but i threw out there and it's a fairly big argument in the buck the we have to realize that biology matters. one of the mistakes i think feminism did make is that it's sort of tried to push biology over to the side arguing that women really need to be seen as the same as men. i can understand historic we've why people made that argument, but i think it's done with a

disservice because women biologically are different than men. those biological differences are not relevant in most cases they are relevant into the picture because right from the first moment as soon as a woman has a baby if she doesn't go back to work, her life is different than a man who has just become a father. i had this conversation that is fascinating to me even if it is to when men and one of them has a the end of the other one doesn't it is in a fundamentally differently because having a baby is actually a big deal. it doesn't destroy your life but it affects things differently. the work place doesn't recognize that and women tend not to recognize it and they don't want to recognize it yet it has to be part of the conversation although it is an awkward one but unless we recognize that fact we are never going to fix the workplace because we know where they tend to follow off is

after the second child. we have to bring men into the conversation. if you go to the women's networking events that's never going to solve the problem because if they are often a corner by themselves they are running the world next door so we have to bring them into the women's diversity conversation. and make sure that they are not spending too much time just in the women's networking group. most of the man i know now from personal interest or because they are running corporations for whom this matters they want women to succeed. they just don't know how to make it happen. so each and every one of you will have a million opportunities in your life to help the men in positions of power make it easier and to me to put them into the conversations in the room into

their own careers and own lives. we need i think to go back to the earlier goals of feminism because feminism and the incarnation that i sort of mess was really about liberating women. it's a word that has fallen off of our vocabulary. and it is a crucial word. feminism wasn't supposed to tie when into making halloween costumes and bird feeders. it wasn't supposed to tie them to another more constraining set expectations. it's supposed to free up the women to give them the opportunity to meet their own traces. it was supposed to give them as a group civil rights, protected rights, the ability to fight for broad social ills. we need to get away from this personal focus on and my having it all and doing it well to what can we as a group of concerned people women and men to make the

world a better place and we need to go back to the goal reminding ourselves along the way that this is supposed to be fun. we are supposed to find a chollet ennis and if you are finding yourself beating yourself up to try to achieve some goal of having it all be perfect you're blowing it and what this was supposed to be we can find a little bit of happiness, a little bit of joy and everyone along with us towards hopefully a happier place. to hear any questions or comments or thoughts or criticism sibiu might have. i would love to hear your thoughts.

>> you talk about how the women don't have to have it all. so does that conflict in any way with your position here which is extremely competitive as a women's liberal arts college? >> it is a great question. and i think that it's one that we as administrators and you as students have to constantly struggle with because i don't think that either dena or i or anyone that stands up says each and every one of you has to be perfect. and yet somehow you are hearing that. and i don't think that this specific. you can find it at any of the colleges for better and worse. i think the struggle is for us to make it okay for deutsch realize that you don't have to do everything. you shouldn't be doing everything and you need to legitimize that among yourselves >> also with incoming freshmen

for high school playing the colleges there is such a huge focus on doing it all. how would you address that? >> i have a little paragraph and the book that i hope he will have a chance to see where i just began ranting that said when you apply to colleges we really don't need to hear that you started the for ngos before you turned 18 and you've been the captain of 42 separate varsity teams. what we are really looking for is who you are. tell me you have a passion. tell me you are in love with something. that you have given a chunk of your life to pursue something that you cared about and that's actually how we make a lot of things but we don't look for perfection. and i think somehow not just here but all of the college's i think we have a responsibility to get that across. i say this at every opportunity i have we are not looking for a perfect people.

we are looking for real people. and somehow we have to try to get that message across to the high schoolers because as you all know you are killing ourselves to get into college and that doesn't do any good. >> i was just wondering what got you interested in writing this book like what makes you decide to write this book? >> that is a good question. thank you. so, i -- as i indicated in my work, i didn't study feminism in college even though i was a political science major and i had a phd in political science i could have never read the feminist theory. i could have traced it for sort of imagining what my life would be like. i really didn't have any interest in being part of the women's groups or any of that stuff and it was only later in my life when i all of a sudden -- really sort of of a sudden

began to notice that i was the only woman left standing. that many of my college friends, female friends had left the work force. that most of the women that started with me at age bs as faculty members were gone. most severely that many of my students at the harvard business school who were smart and accomplished ambitious women were not staying in the workforce. and i started just wondering as one does what has gone wrong? right around that same time because i was the only woman left standing i was increasingly being asked to help people think about the women's problem at harvard or wherever it was and i became convinced there was a women's problem so i began working on this book before i came and the title at that time was confections of a reluctant feminist which was a title all of the publishers told me i couldn't possibly use but it captured a large part of what the book was about and that was

the personal piece talking to somebody you didn't think feminism was important and realizing leader on that my life as a woman and my friends lives as women had unfolded fundamentally different than men and i wanted to try to understand that. >> one more thing. do you think that may be working is better than being a housewife because i feel like i've talked to a bunch of my by friends and girlfriends and the guys say what's wrong with being a mom and why the of the world make it seem like being a housewife is not -- to meet a housewife doesn't mean that you are giving all your potential and the best you can being a working mom is like the better option. >> and i don't mean to sound trite, i think people -- first of all incredibly lucky if they have the ability to make that choice. most working mothers are working mothers because they have to be working mothers and that is a crucial point. if you do have the choice, i

think women really should be trying to do what feels right for them. and one of the things women do a bad job that is not legitimizing other women's choices. one of the things you will see -- and durell too young -- anyone that is old enough to have sat on the playground with their kids, this little scenario that is played out a million times do you work? do you stay at home? there's a lot of judging going on and i think that if women want to be home with their kids and that's what they want to do that is what they should be doing. they should be aware of the fact it's going to be hard to get back into the workforce if that's what they want to do. they need to be aware of that. women that want to work and have kids should be aware of the fact it's going to be really hard but that's what they want to do that's what they should do and we should stop judging each other. >> sinnott one way or the other? >> nope. but you shouldn't choose one of these because somebody else is pushing you to do it. you should actually make the choice to beat >> thank you. >> yes?

>> so, a lot of these problems are problems with women of extreme privilege. and i'm just curious about the way that you -- first of all whether you chose to sort of target a very mitch group of women when you were writing this book and how much and whether you deal with issues of race and class with all of these issues of perfection to disconnect that is a really good question and i know it's one i'm going to be getting a lot. the book is largely about white women, women of privilege and straight women and it's that way because that's who i am. i made the decision early on in writing the book that that for me was the only honest route to take. if i tried to include chapters about and this is what it's like to be poor, black, i would have had to write a very different book. so i decided to do what is honest to me and say this is the world that i've experienced and it's a very elite world. i mean i'm not struggling to

feed my family thank goodness, but i think it's worth at least conveying these problems even from the elite if that's what most of us in this room are because i think what i've heard at least in the early sort of versions of this which has been very reassuring is that women who are struggling more, they feel more validated. even the women that are well figure and have had more opportunities are struggling, too but we are not any more perfect. we may have high year levels of education that we are not perfect. >> i'm curious about whether you think it is the goal of feminism shifting depending on what social stratosphere you come from. >> and again, this is very much an interloper into this area theoretically has feminism has devolved if there has been any

sort of subgenre within feminism and some of the job was agree in some of them do not and we tie back to the last question and i think at the end of the day you don't want to get too personal about but we do need to realize people's lives are going to play out in fundamentally different ways. but i wrote a related article in newsweek about a year ago and received a ton of mail and the one that stuck with me the most is from a young woman she's a coast guard officer off the coast of alaska. she lived a fundamentally different life than i do and that she wrote your article described my life perfectly. how is that possible? you are in the boat. the issues about equality in the marriage she was struggling with whether or not to have children. i think those issues deutsch transcend race and class and gender to some extent.

>> thank you so much for doing this to the and you talked a lot about having children and the trace of having children and what it is to be a mother. i was wondering what do you think about those women for whom have any children is not a choice and the way that it inherently affects the perception of your femininity and value of the woman and do you think we are past the place of a woman being lonely as valuable as her ability to reproduce cracks >> these are all great questions. i have a chapter or subchapter that i call pregnancy porn which i like as a title but it's also quite important. we fetishize pregnancy in a way that is quite detrimental and i think it's worth all of you just giving some thought to. we still value women as producers of children.

despite everything else again to denney magazine off the shelf. how many times has jennifer anniston been pregnant? to 15 years as far as i can tell there's a sense that unless she produces a child, her life will not be complete. i've been very lucky to have children in my life but i don't think it's what defines me. and i think once again -- i have a number of women in response to the last question say what's the book, this kind of book is for single women or childless women, that wasn't a book i could write but i think somebody should write that book because i think that is yet again another kind of choice that we need to validate. and i know it's one of the sort of ugly bit of truth out there. if you look at why men that have achieved the highest levels of power, particularly the women that are a little bit under many of them if not most of them don't have children. so they made that choice.

we need to validate that and say it doesn't reflect on your sense of worth to not have been another. >> and sorry to keep taking the time. i'm asking specifically about women for whom they don't make a choice, women who can't have children and the level of pity that comes with that when you say that to another woman. your life is so incomplete you poor bear in seoul. [laughter] >> i wrote my last book on reproductive medicine so this is something i've given a lot of thought to. we absolutely -- again this is another expectation that we have lobbied on. if you go back 40 or 50 years before the emergence of the reproductive medicine, 15% of women are in the trial. that is the natural rate of infertility. 50 years of devotee were in for a file you just kind of moved

on. sometimes you adopted and most times you didn't. and there wasn't actually that much of a stigma in american society. again, tragically now because we have assisted reproductive technology we have raised the expectation that of course you will get a surrogate and of course use donor eggs. the success rates are not as high as the media what have you believe, so the women and need to be careful not jumping on the particular bandwagon if it is and where they want to be. that is still a really good option that sadly has fallen out of favor because people jumping to the assisted reproduction.

what are the sort of decisions that we can make with our employers to negotiate and fighting for the things our employers can do to make our lives easier and make us work and also take care of our kids and also sort of this conversation about people not wanting to hire people of our age or with an engagement ring on our finger because you might be having a beebee into years as well as how we balance that? >> 28 most sophisticated employers today don't engage in that kind of bad behavior anymore. take the train and come here. but employers are very conscious of not having enough when. so i think in general and actually does work a little bit to your advantage to be a smart

hard-working young woman and overlook the engagement ring on your finger. after that point once you've gotten in the front door it's really important to think about at this point in your life what kind of careers are going to give you the kind of flexibility that you want because it is easier to juggle life and work up some jobs more than others. it just is and again that isn't always great popular to say that i think it's really important to say. medicine is an interesting field. a lot of very successful women doctors. over 30 or 40 years women have been in medicine and serious numbers and shifted in terms of what field they are in. it turns out it's easier to be a female emergency room physician because you have regular hours an emergency practice. somewhat ironically it's harder to be in ob/gyn because babies come when they do. as we've seen women in the ob/gyn and they've actually

shifted out. alana is another interesting one. if you are going to be a corporate lawyer it is hard. actually for about your career because of you're going our. look at women judges. these are a lot of women judges because judges actually have regular hours. so even within fields, you can't cut all of the onus on the employer. think about what field is easier. it's not what i went to academia. it's i knew i could kunkel my schedule which i still do. i work hard but i know at the end of the day i'm judged on my output rather of and how many hours i am at a desk and that is crucial flexibility. then in terms of employment is first to be good at your job and it sounds pass it to say that if you're good at work to become what you do they will keep you regardless of what it takes and the second thing is you go through your career and make sure that you have the kind of relationship you can go to your

boss and not ask for everything. i want to take six years off and come back at the same pace but this is what i need. i need friday afternoon and monday morning. and again if the boss wants to keep you because you are valuable, in most cases they will do what it takes to accommodate because presumably you are in one of those careers or the billing hours is tough but most of their careers they want to be flexible. you just have to help them think through what works for you. let me take one last one. >> thanks. i guess i just wanted to ask i really terrified to make the decision on what to pull back on, and i equally want a career and family and i am terrified of making a decision of well if i have one child and not to is that pulling back or putting this child in an only child situation and that is awful for her and then what if i pull back in my career.

these are things i think about and i am 20. [laughter] i guess i am asking you how do you know what to pull back on because i agree that i can't do it all even now. but i just don't know where to even begin with that process. >> first of all i don't think there is one right answer. clearly there is and one right answer for everybody. what works different for you. i don't think you can explicitly make these decisions when you are 20. i think it's great to be part of them. you know, if you know that at least in the ideal world you would like to have the work life and a family, then choose a career or subfield within a career that opens at that possibility of flexibility kid and i'm not talking about necessarily a 15 hour week. but maybe career a where you have to work 90 hours a week that isn't the right one for you.

so give yourself the possibility of the flexibility. and it's way too early to think about whether you want one kid or two kids or whatever but start even now learning to say no and learning to say no to things you like. we are all going to say no to things we don't like that figure out what are the parts of your life that you are not willing to give up and what are the parts of your life that even though you like them you can cut back a little bit. don't make yourself crazy doing this but you're all busy. you know, think about i love this i can't give this one up if you like this one the media have to cut back on that one. maybe you would love to get straight a's but getting straight a's will come at the expense of your social life, a b plus is okay. yes, put that on the front page. [laughter] unless you're planning to go to a graduate school where you

absolutely have to have an a. but start to get comfortable. there is a sort of mosul memory. learning to say no to the things you like is one of the most valuable skills you can develop. the earlier you develop that, the better. let me in there and turn it back over to mckee. thank you so much for being here to take comments. [applause] when did the u.s. slave trade start and how did it start clacks >> while the u.s. was involved in the trade from the moment that we sort of began as the colony of britain. and indeed one of the interesting things about u.s. history is that in the constitutional convention there was a compromise between the states that had slaves and it didn't. the constitution said the

federal congress couldn't take action against the tree until 1808. and the u.s. of the first moment it could in 1807 president jefferson sought legislation up to converse the band of the participation in the slave trade by u.s. ships and u.s. persons and congress passed that 718 await the u.s. prohibited the trade which is a long time before of course slavery itself ended in the united states but the issues were seen as different and even southerners were in support of banning of the slave trade. >> why were southerners and support? >> there were a lot of different reasons. one is it was perceived as the more on just part of the traffic but also they had an economic self-interest. they already owned slaves and the environment was such that the mortality wasn't as high in southern plantations as it was in other places like cuba or brazil where they didn't live for very long because of the environment and the disease.

in the u.s. if they were well treated as they could be, they would live for a decent life span so the slave owners received by banning the trade bill would increase the value of the slaves of the already owned because it would end the influx of their devotees of their neighbors. as it was a collision. >> you have a chart in your book that shows -- and i want to use the word importation of slaves, correct cracks what is this showing? >> there is a strong spike in the number of slaves in the u.s. right before we ban it because everyone knew that as soon as the clock turned in 1808 that congress was granted and the slave trade. >> the of the half of your book is about the international human rights law. when did the human rights law will start becoming part of this discussion on the slave trade? >> around the turn of the

century but what's interesting is people think that international human rights law is a product of the 20th century in most of the conventional accounts people say was right after world war ii. so the holocaust happened. as news of that came out, things happened after world war ii. there were the nuremberg trials and nazi war criminals. the u.n. was founded, universal declaration of human rights. that's the moment everyone says this is when the international law started to look at the human rights issues. in my book i said it was earlier. it was in connection with the slave trade that the international law was used for the human rights purpose. so in the early 19th century starting in 1807 or 1808 when countries like the u.s., britain was another country to ban the trade around them and it began to spread throughout the countries that had been engaged in the trade but this is no longer practice that they want to purchase feet in. it was perceived as violating the natural rights and the same

ideas of the rights that underpin the u.s. revolution and the revolution in france, the declaration of independence as we hold these truths to be self-evident. all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights. obviously there was a tension between that and the existence of slavery but those ideas were spreading throughout the atlantic world and also there was some religious movements. the quakers among other religious groups were very active politically and they perceive to the trade to be wrong. as those groups became more active in the society they start to put pressure on the government to say we have to stop the trade and because a was an international problem, all the countries of europe that were engaged in the troubles on the ocean were participating. it wasn't something just one country could stop so even if the u.s. said we are banning the trade or even if britain said we are banning the trade that

wasn't going to be enough because spain, portugal, france, the netherlands these other countries were still going to pick up the slack. they were going to begin picking up the sleeves from africa to the new world said it quickly became a panic that in order to eradicate this practice there was went to have to be some international cooperation. and so, the abolitionists put pressure on governments and especially the british government was receptive to that pressure and the began lobbying other governments to enter into treaties that would prohibit the trade. and the first those treaties like many modern international human rights treaties will what we might call an international relations cheap talk that is the said slavery is wrong we want to ban the trade that included no enforcement mechanisms. pretty quickly the tide turned and they said this isn't going to be enough. the british government are pushing for enforcement measures and so they created the treaties

starting in 1817 that not only band the slave trade but created international courts to enforce the ban. more than a century before the nuremberg tribunals these workloads created by treaty to promote the human rights objectives of ending busbee eight trade and what they would do is if the ship were caught, engaged in that he legal slave trade it would be brought before the international court and it was covered by the treaty it was a spanish ship for example between britain and spain saying i am in the slave trade, then what happened is the slaves would be freed and the ship would be auctioned off and the money would be split between the sea captain who had brought the ship in and the governments that were involved. so the international courts as i recount in the book heard some 600 cases and freed 87,000 slaves of of the ships. which is a huge number in the scale.

>> all post 1808. what was the name of these international ports as you call them? >> the treaties gave them different names so there were bilateral treaties between britain and other countries. spain, portugal, the netherlands, where is aware the initial countries and the u.s. joint during the civil war, which i will tell you about in a minute. but they were called the next commissions or sometimes the next courts. the reason they were called next is because they involve the judges from different countries so there would be a british judge is a brazilian judge for example and if they couldn't agree they would toss a claim and they would take a third judge from one of the two countries to help decide the case. >> next on book tv "after words" director of the rand washington office. this week erik schlosser on that the damascus accident and the illusion of safety. the author of fast food nation argues the most unlikely of

accidents with nuclear weapons can have an easier than we think. the program is about an hour. >> welcome. so here is the book. it's a fantastic cover. >> guest: i know and that's true. >> host: and its 600 pages. >> guest: a lot of that is footnotes. >> host: 400 or 500 regular pages. tell us in a couple of words what your reader needs to take away from your book. >> guest: the book tells a story. it tells the story of a nuclear weapons accident in damascus arkansas that occurred 19 eda. and i use that narrative as a way of looking at the management of our nuclear weapons, really since the first nuclear device was invented in 1945.