act it's going to be women who end up paying the predominant price who have different burdens of responsibilities. we also need to make it a lot easier for women to re-enter the workplace after they have taken those leads. we make the exit ramps really simple. we make the re-entry point is really difficult and a lot of companies are now coming to realize that is not a very cost-effective use of the talent pool and what we really need to do is figure out ways to retool and retrain women who want to re-enter the workforce and give them the capacity to do so. we know forbids the women who take substantial time off want to return to full-time work eventually and yet two-thirds are unable to do that. that's a failure of our policy choices and our organizational that really needs to be addressed.

>> i had four years off and return to management consulting and that was two years after my four years off of having two children. i earned the highest amount of money over the man and i'm now doing postgraduate studies after being a venture capitalist and i'm 43. >> that's a good textbook case. thank you for sharing that. >> the women's movement is at least 100 years old now and if you go back to suffragettes and it's like the civil rights movement for african-americans which is even older, 150 years or so.

different movements of the source -- sort stagger at different times. i'm thinking about do you have any comments on gender as it relates to people, cross gender people are people of amorphous gender. that's a movement that is now maybe 50 years old at the most and it seems that it's related to the women's movement in the same historical way. >> yes i think we are just discovering the extent to which gender roles are more fluid than we once thought they were and discrimination against transgender individuals is a significant problem. there's a lot of division about how to deal with it, whether to include them and this proposed

legislation dealing with discrimination. there have been issues concerning the admission of transgender males into all-female institutions. i think we are really at a turning point there. mills college recently had a controversy over that very issue. i think we are really at a point of just discovering as we did belatedly with respect to the and movement how much discrimination really there is on the basis of sexual orientation and starting to think about some of the policies that need to address it. one more question. >> this is great stuff. a quick question. if you and i were talking say 25 years ago in the late 80s and i asked you what you would

imagine, where you imagine you would be now some quarter-century later would you have predicted the landscape of the sort we see now that you just described or would you have imagined we would have been a very different world than what we are now seeing? >> you know i don't have a lot of confidence in my own capacities for prediction. i think i would have thought there would be peaks and valleys as somewhat of a student as -- of social movements even 25 years ago. we see some ebbing and flowing. i think over the long term i am very optimistic and i still am optimistic despite having written three books on what the problems are and what the policy agenda should be because the demographics are with us. women are half the talent pool and we can't afford not to fully

equalize their contributions in the world. i think most organizations are waking up to that fact some more quickly than others. i think women are, despite some of the setbacks in terms of debates about contraception and reproductive rights programs doing a better job at putting their issues on the agenda and certainly the fact that we are having this conversation is testament to the fact that we do see some ongoing problems for women and the real challenge for us i think is not just to recognize the problem but to make the solutions a greater social priority. i think in the long-term we are going to be able to do that. so thank you all very much for coming. [applause]

>> booktv is next here on c-span2 with female offers -- authors and their books on feminism. up next a panel discussion on feminism and the 1920s until today featuring "feminism unfinished"." the program hosted by new york university in new york city is about an hour, 20 minutes.

[applause] >> good evening. i am delighted to be here. moderation is not really my strong suit. [laughter] the book launch of "feminism unfinished" a short, surprising history of american women's movements. i will introduce the authors in a little while so let me first just tell you what the format will be and then i will introduce our three speakers. we will have short ten-minute presentations by the three speakers. then we will give the authors five minutes apiece or so to respond to their comments and then we'll open it up to the audience for questions and comments. and then of course at the end at 6:30 there will be a reception with wine and chiefs. let me start by introducing in the order that they will. >> the three speakers for this evening.

michelle chen a prolific journalist who writes on economic social and political issues affecting women and low-wage workers in the u.s. and globally. her work has appeared in the nation, "ms." magazine, dissent "huffington post," the american prospect alternet, color lines the progressive and other media outlets. she is a contributing editor at in these times and culture strike and coproduces the community radio program asia-pacific forum on pacifica's w. v. i. many of her articles are relevant to our discussion tonight notably those on women's movements in the middle east and latin america sex and race discrimination in the restaurant industry, fast food strikes and other low-wage worker campaigns for better wages and decent treatment, women's reproductive rights and many other subjects. our second speaker will be jennifer baumgardner who is a

writer activist and filmmaker whose work has both chronicled in shape to the direction of u.s. feminism or the last two decades. in her best-selling book manifests a young women feminism and the future co-authored with amy richards in 2000 jennifer galvanized a generation of feminists who came of age in the decades after the women's movement of the 1960s and 70's. manifesto's bold vision of activism and his 2005 sql grassroots a field guide for feminist activism in jennifer's other books including most recently f them -- in addition to be a contributor to a wide range of magazines and other news also sees the cocreator of the speakers bureau soapbox and the filmmaker behind the powerful documentary films it was rape and i had an abortion. in 2013 jennifer was named

executive director and publisher of the feminist press. our third speaker is nancy hewitt distinguished professor professor of history and women's studies and gender studies at rutgers university and meredith. i'm so envious of that. [laughter] who is internationally known for her essays and books on women's rights in the 19th and 20th century u.s.. her inclusive histories of women's movements take seriously the voices of all women and many young and old including the authors of feminism unfinished. among her many recent recent books are popular edited edition no permanent waves, recasting history into feminism and her multiple award-winning study of women's activism across race and ethnic lines southern discomfort women's activism in tampa florida 1880s to 1920. she is a recipient of a

guggenheim fellowship was a fellow at the center for dance study at stanford and in 2009 was named the pitt professor of american history of the university of cambridge. so i'm very delighted to welcome all three of them today and michelle. if you want to speak at the podium if you don't mind. >> there are a lot of seats here for you guy standing. >> thank you. this is much more official now that i'm standing. so yes thank you for inviting me to this distinguished panel for which i am totally not worthy am really glad to be a part of this discussion. i'm sure other women whose work absorbing through osmosis or research and scholarly work over the years. so i think it's an interesting moment to be having a discussion like this and i guess i'm going

first perhaps because i'm the youngest or because i arrived last but whatever it is i thought i would start with something to keep it going. the media was abuzz this week with talk about or chatter about emma watson speech at the united nations in which she asked why is the word feminism becoming such an uncomfortable one which was interesting because the framing of her speech as well as the presentation was aimed exclusively at making the word feminism much more comfortable and it got me thinking about why we should expect in this day and age for feminism to be comforting or for that conversation to be somehow soothing or reassuring or designed to not alienate people. i think that's attention that

feminists in the feminist movement and its various incarnations has been wrestling with both within itself among its various factions and strands as well as intergenerational he and also with the wider public. and then i thought about well emma watson she kind of in invokes the whole trope of harry potter and she is a miniature sing pop cultural position because she is sort of a girl and a child and yet she is also this emerging woman and we are watching her as she defines herself in life and on the screen for us. i thought back to my first encounter with the language of feminism or with maybe the ideology of feminism. i don't think they really had a name for it back then. i remember when i was in eighth grade i had actually seen an ad in "seventeen" magazine so yes

i'm beginning of this talk with an article from "seventeen" magazine not a great way to start this lecture. it was an ad soliciting volunteer writers for a startup publication back then. it was actually on a real piece of paper called the new girl times. they were asking for volunteers. it was a short publication and i don't know how long it went on but they were asking for could she readers to their issue. i was kind of abutting writer and working on my first zine and what i thought was giving it into the world of publishing on my plus. so i wrote and then i got an introduction to the magazine on what it was intended to be as a project. i was really struck by this syrupy language that invoked and it was sort of a very what i

thought was attempt at making feminism palatable to the tweens generation when the 1990s were emerging as a consumer group then. i wasn't thinking about all of this since i was 14 years old and looking at the introduction to something struck me as off. i went to my computer and i typed out an angry screed about why i was so offended at this publication, the audacity to call itself a new girl times was trying to do this cutesy thing. they were taking women's issues and dumbing them down and making them sort of fun and carefree and "seventeen" magazine like. i published it in my zeen and i did sort of a sendup of the publication itself because it kind of took -- i was into cut

and paste then because that is what you did with a zeen and they took a logo which was a mockup of "the new york times" logo. i had this complete screed making fun of this application and i was angry and i sent it to the publisher and this publication and awaited her feedback. she wrote back with a single sentence and said no, i understand he won't be writing for us. i was deeply upset with what you wrote so that was that. i think i felt a pang of embarrassment like why did i do that but then thinking about it now i was just blowing off steam and i wanted to make a point about why feminism was silly than. now that i look back is sort of strikes me as my first encounter not just with feminism but the ambivalence that surrounds feminism and kind of the internal conflict that was

inherent in it especially in the way my generation has inherited the movement and all of its political trappings and its language and i think even though i was sort of denouncing this version of feminism that i thought was full feminism i was also at the same time claiming feminism for myself even though i didn't know what i was doing. i wouldn't have called myself a feminist then. i can think of very few instances in my life so far in which i have actively stood up and claim that i'm a feminist or anything. so with that anecdote i just wanted to think about that and maybe that will help situate where we are and may be it to where you are in terms of at what point did you encounter feminism as an idea and in what ways have you wrestled with how to define it for yourself and

take ownership of that culture and ideology because if there's one thing the book really shows is there cannot be one feminism and every time feminism as a movement was set back is when there was one group attempting to have the preeminent definition of what feminism is. and that's a historical question, it's a question of race the question of sexual identity and a question of the way we conceive of the world of work and feminism is all of these things and yet it also needs to define itself outside. inviting all those things it's also asserting the fact that it cannot belong to it in a single of those things. so moving away from the new girl times i just wanted to go back to where we are in the contemporary feminist debate. i thought about contradictions that come up now that we see every day in the media.

i wanted to quote britney cooper or recent essay at salon. she was weighing in on this sort of perennial internal debate about whether feminism is debt and we spend lots of time in the book and talking amongst ourselves. of course we no feminism is not debt or we wouldn't be talking about it. we need to go through this exercise ritual cleansing every few years or so. she talks about race and feminism and she talks about the difference in the way black women and white women will conceptualize feminism in their mind and how they relate to it in their everyday lives. she says our feminism looks like an end to police repression of minority communities access to public schools that do not expel

our children for minor infractions and an end to the prison industrial complex which locks up far too many of our men and women fracturing families and creating burdens when our loved ones are released. we need conference we need conference of health care and access to abortion clinics but we also need a robust mental health care system that can address long centuries of racist sexist sexual and emotional trauma. we need equal pay but we also need good jobs rather than being relegated to an endless cycle of low-wage work. white women's feminism still centers around equality. black women's feminism demands justice. there is a difference. one kind of feminism has policies that will integrate fully into the existing american system. the other recognizes the fundamental flaws in the system and seeks complete and total transformation. i will leave it to you to figure out which side of that spectrum you find yourself identifying with more and that is of course

completely your choice in the question of where you are in life. i just wanted you to think about it as a spectrum. she poses it as a binary here but she is not forcing issues. she's asking for an inclusive dialogue and she feels the more voice the other side is given that comes at the expense of the voices who have long been disenfranchised yes because they are women but also for various other reasons and we don't always think about that. to be conscious of that is part of what it means to truly be feminist and to claim that for yourself. in the book professor cobble writes the increased number of women at the top does not necessarily produce gains for women at the bottom. there is no trickle-down effect and i think about what my podcasting colleague sarah

jackie is said about the myth of trickle-down feminism which is we believe in this new liberal laws a fair mythology that they are sort of a logic of social justice that naturally flows out of capitalism for that the free market will come up with the most just solution. that's not really anyone's fault in particular. i think it comes from centuries of having it beaten into us that this is the way it must be done and for real change to occur there is this march of progress that every single institution has to go through whether it's the economy or domestic life or of law or systems of bias and subjugation. two thoughts i wanted to leave you with now are these questions and conflicts as i was reading a book in all three of the sections that you wrote going through time. of course we should wonder why we keep coming back to these

questions because they seem unresolvable even after more than a century of feminism. one is protection for women versus absolute equality. early efficacy and women's quality of the commission on status of women and feminism which is a socialist vision of feminism and there's this constant tension between identity of treatment so called not being actually quality and of course actual inequality not being adequately. this goes back to the question of what is justice. and the second question i wanted to leave you with is how do we prioritize right? if we accept the fact that not everyone in the world of starting from the same place that is why we need social movements of people can move from one place to another, how do we triage the struggles that we approach. that's not to say we need to choose their battles all the time but how can we have harmony with each other without forgetting about one or representing one at the expense of another.

we have this between suffragettes in the abolitionist and now we have the intergenerational conflicts of the third wave in the next wave of feminism or the post-feminist world that we live in and of course this reflects on global questions of not everything is perceiving on the timeline of economic progress and of course the progress in one country comes at the expense of the other in many cases. again it's whatever we do find it to be as we have often been told at least my generation has or is there certain ideology of feminism a moral and ethical through line that we need to keep in mind as we build this movement and make it more diverse. so that's it. [applause]

>> i just started needing reading glasses so when i look at here will have to take them off and when i look here i will have to put them on. i am jennifer baumgardner and first of all i want to thank you for making this book. i think it's meaningful and moving to me to have something that's scholarly that tells the story of people i know and things that i was a part of an kind of writes a book that i wish i had had when i was learning about feminism. i feel like i cobbled together all sorts of things because i was so hungry for the history. to see is synthesized and reframe the new information for me in new ways to think is really invigorating. i feel like i have i do think about feminism generally should like a lot. it speaks to me because i think my mom was a feminist so it really does go generationally to me. it was ms. on the coffee table and there was this whole

relationship when i was learning about feminism that was about a mom literally. i also think it's because there's this visibility issue. the most visible moments and even though you talk about in the book the most stable movement of when people think about the feminist movement they think about the 60s and 70's are often people do. that was the greatest hits time of feminism and its often waits taught. it's taught as history and all the important stuff was done correctly 50 years ago and what are you doing? that's how i experience it and i'm sure is projecting in a self negating way but i remember feeling that way. now i currently in addition to being at the feminist press iran these camps and every day we go deep into a feminist issue women in incarceration, it could be sex work. we go deep into the issue and we have lots of meetings and in on her first meeting with iss

people how they came to feminism and what their definition is. it's always fascinating but oftentimes people will say like a 25-year-old living with beyoncé and everything going on right now in their life and they will say i feel like i was born at the wrong time could i wish i had been born when abortion was illegal and you couldn't get a job if you are women. you had to take -- and i relate to that. i don't relate to that currently but i relate to that when i went to new york. i worked at "ms." magazine and i remember feeling like i really missed out on the good stuff when people were really rebellious and revolutionary and doing important things. every day their day was made up with meaningful work and i'm never going to get that opportunity because when i was born. sort of how i also wanted to be an actress and because i was

raised in fargo north dakota i will never get that opportunity because i don't know anyone in new york. handing off the volition to have the life i wanted to have too somebody else to hand to me. it has taken a long time and i think it's something every generation struggles with to just be able to frame and understand the air that i'm a part of in the community and the part part of and do something well within that that's meaningful and to acknowledge when i have done that. it was hard for me to own my ideas. one of the reasons "manifesta" is so steeped in relationship to second wave sometimes grumping about it and sometimes just really canonizing or cheerleading the second wave the reason it was so connected was because i wasn't really sure what it would mean to own what i was doing. was i allowed to have a definition of feminism that made sense to me? was i allowed to really have an opinion about abortion if i

hadn't known a time when it was illegal or was i just hopelessly narrow in my consciousness because i had never known that time. it took a long time to dig dig up maybe i had some specific points that could be useful by having been entitled to certain things. so i was kind of making a note before i came up here of all the things i have done professionally and i was realizing how connected they are to the second way. i grew up with ms. on the table and i got to college and then i discovered feminism and wrote the second wave books that i literally was like the housewives moment of truth, that's me. when you are not married and in college and don't have kids and don't do housework that i felt deeply the angst and frustration mandate unfairness. i think i was kind of putting a square peg in a round hole. i was having an experience that i felt passionate to come

experiences that were not my own. i couldn't have that outrage if i didn't have the same experiences. after that i went to new york and began working at "ms." magazine and meeting these different women that i would read about in the book. that was my "seventeen" magazine where i was like okay roxanne dunbar-ortiz i'm going to meet her. i really dig it to be a part of their stories of feminism. it gave me all of this access that i was craving in order to come into my own as a feminist. i remember when amy richardson and i were riding "manifesta" i've been writing as a feminist for years and years and she said people always say we have these complaints. we should make sure we say what it is to the random reader and we sat they were -- we sat there and we were like what is it? i have never been asked to define a dzhokhar should do the thing i think a lot of people do the first time they are asked to

define it, we took the dictionary definition for full economic equality for all people. and we decided that we could add to that. we kept adding to it and now it's 15 or 20 years later and i'm still adding to that definition for myself. to me feminism while i do think it has core strength or ideologies that it stands for its incredibly iterative and defaults. my understanding of it evolves every year gets deeper depending on experiences i'm having. my current definition of feminism at this point what we added to it in the book in the dictionary definition is access to information and resources to make meaningful authentic real decisions about your life. maybe you would choose to shave or not to shave but you had chosen. you have the ability to make a decision. since then the way i've been

thinking about feminism and what i'm grateful for with feminist theory and philosophy as i think feminism is an invitation. it's so hard to bring all parts of yourself and all the experiences you've had. society over and over is like we don't want to hear about that. we don't want to hear about your sexuality. we don't want to hear about that rape rape. we don't want to hear about your shoplifting in so many things that happen to girls and women especially are just too much. we much. we don't want to hear about it and i think feminism provides resources and space so you can bring all the parts of yourself everything that is happened to the shape you into the room with you and to tell the truth about what happened to you. that to me has always been the meaningful entry point to feminism for me. it's interesting hearing michelle talk about comfort because i have found feminism deeply comforting in a the sense that i was able to integrate

myself more. i guess that's also what i think of as my way of practicing feminism. it doesn't need to be other peoples but all the projects i've done, the abortion campaign the rape project the things i do when i'm speaking on college campuses i try to create a space for people to be able to tell the truth about what has happened to them. sometimes all in getting back is that i listen. i'm so sorry that happened to you or i will share something with someone else, some story that someone has entrusted to me. to me that therapeutic attitude is incredibly powerful and the ability to step out from the things we are free to talk about and to own this experiences has guided my feminist politics for my adult life. i continue to peel back my own denial and try to gain consciousness about what has happened to me. for instance right now i'm working on a project about slut

shaming. i've known since i was 15 that my sister was raped when she was 14 and she was called a slut and there was that transformation that happens. it took us years and reading feminist books and talking to feminist before we were able to retrieve language and say what happened to andrea my sister was not that she was a slut. this bad thing happened to her and she was blamed for it and that is unjust. we were able to retrieve parts of our lives that we shared and i'm learning how much that affected me how much i identified myself as not a slut and found ways to distance myself from andrea at the same time as trying to support her. the ways in which we are everybody decries slut shaming and how there's interest in that but how little -- little we are able to move the needle. it's because i believe we deeply

embody women's power, women's rights, women's humanity and it's an incredible thing to face. the more we can face the truth of what has happened to us to provide some sort of a path to larger social justice. thank you. [applause] >> good evening. i hope you have all found seats. it is a pleasure to join this launch of "feminism unfinished" alongside thinkers writers and activists do i have long admired. the short surprising history written by dorothy sue cobble -- diverse constituencies and controversy that marks u.s.

feminism by tracing campaigns are married organizations and actors over the last century. they offer a robust path to contemporary activists and also renewed hope for those of us who have lived for as many backlashes as advancements. i can't begin to capture in 10 minutes all the strengths and subtleties of this book so instead i'm going to use my time to suggest how feminism unfinished makes clear the need to shift our metaphors replacing the standard conception of three oc waves with a more nuanced understanding offered by radio waves. we have been thinking along these lines since the late 1990s and 2005 article based on her research on youth subcultures and new technologies she captured what we both thought quote a wave metaphor that registers different,

multiple and simultaneous frequencies. radio waves also embody explicit hierarchies of power through a lot of volume, geographical reach and taken together these characteristics allow us far greater flexibility and engaging feminist ways than does the oceanic model. oceanic framing is especially problematic for those of us who work on the 19th century. since the self-proclaimed second wave of which i was apart lump all of our predecessors the entire sweep of americans women's rights and activism from the 1840s into one long american women's rights and feminist ways. despite the incredible range of actors and campaigns in that period sojourner truth and abolitionist feminism over a phelps and the boston working women's league margaret sanger and birth control emma goldman

we can go on and on the first wave is almost universally claimed by a single narrative that carries the story from the seneca falls women's rights convention in 1942 the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920 women's suffrage. since it's impossible to add more oceanic waves before 1960s it's the second wave is a concept is so entrenched in the historical record and archives and library catalogs and popular thinking. but decades -- then we have to come up with a new metaphor. moreover the decades excluded from the standard chronology most notably 19221960 have become feminist free zones before the work of dorothy sue cobble who has made sure we know that just isn't so. in addition as astrid henry points out the term third wave

seems to stress this new wave was an improvement over what came earlier. too often leaving younger activist to describe the previous generation in monolithic lithic and characters -- character plays to present themselves as the improved version of feminism. my generation certainly pushed back against this tendency though sometimes simply by turning that on its head and care ditching the third wave so that doesn't get us too far. importantly we in the second wave invented this modus operandi for taking our 19th century for mothers is predominately white and middle-class, overly serious and respectable and focus on narrow political goals but my generation also raised important critiques of our own movement. the bridge called my back, all

the women are white, all the blacks are men and other critiques of white class and class privilege were written by second wave feminists, taught in women's studies and women's history courses redeveloped and wielded very effectively by a generation against the movement we thought we were part of. this repeated pattern of recognition and criticism of earlier feminist efforts i think is promoted by an oceanic metaphor in which each wave overwhelms that exceeds the one before it. thus obscuring the common struggles that feminists have faced from the 19th century to the present. these include the way sex discrimination has always intertwined with race and class the complicated relations between u.s. feminism and global campaigns for social justice, the conflict over the place of

sexuality, gender and men and women's rights campaigns, the role of new technologies and building a movement and so on. the beauty of feminism -- "feminism unfinished" is that it captures both the contested priorities, distinct strategies in heated debates that occurred in specific times and the common threads and challenges that feminists have faced across a century of activism. each chapter addresses the struggles that they confronted in integrating race class and ethnic issues and the campaigns focused around women and gender and vice versa. as cobble shows the social justice feminist of the 1920s to 1950s infused labor campaigns with feminist and antiracist demands. but they couldn't commence the national women's party of that same era which continue to consider sex the primary form of

discrimination and wrote that into the equal rights amendment. similarly gordon argues social justice issues drove many women activists in the new left with their work in the civil rights and antiwar movements shaping their feminist agendas and priorities. but she also notes that the largely separate white african-american american indian asian-american chicano latino and working-class organizations that develops creative distinct agendas priorities and strategies even as they often try to forge crucial alliances. astrid henry make sure to -- makes clear the central role of women of color in the third wave the heightened sensitivity to reason that the city among current generations of feminists and the demographic and technological changes that increase the possibility of truly multiracial and global organizing.

she also notes the lack of historical perspective and the continued existence of class and white privilege which is certainly not gone away lead to continued conflicts even in that movement and gives examples like the slut walk worthy leaning in that echo problems of the past. i do want to challenge one argument in the book and not surprisingly it's from the chapter on women's liberation which is where i countered feminism initially. linda gordon argues the initial separation of feminist generations between francis the national organization for women and women's liberation did not last long quote because the movement became vastly larger but coming from a small city in new york were feminist supposedly overcame their differences more easily and

embracing women's liberation in 1969 i experienced those generational and ideological divisions as significant for a very long time. in some ways i found that exacerbated a feminism's rapid growth. at the same time i agree with gordon's claim that the generative possibilities created by the distinct feminist campaigns by african-american, latina chick and asian-american feminist. she suggests these strengthened rather than weaken the movement and i would just like to argue that the same could be said with the ideological feminist groups. indeed as a scholar i recognized the efficacy of multiple movements and tagging the same issue from diverse perspectives and strategies.

nonetheless as an activist i still side with collective multiracial and cross class social justice efforts and i still have never joined the national organization for women which doesn't mean they don't do some of this work. it's just that my roots and community-based multiracial cross class organizing has always made me feel like i just can't go there. or maybe i just hold resentments for -- it may just be personality. this is a small caveat. a book that analyzes issues so dear to my heart this is my only substandard disagreement and of course it's generative as disagreements are. by offering nuanced narratives of activism over the last century "feminism unfinished" highlights an astonishing range of feminist wavelength and a richer way of transmitting organizers posters newspapers magazines web sites and blogs

that extend the reach of each version of the movement. feminist radio waves allow us to think about the movement in terms and frequencies simultaneously, movements that grow louder reach national audiences for community radio audiences, movements of frequent changes of channels and movements temporarily found out by another frequency but then suddenly come in loud and clear. moreover radiowave reminds us that feminist ideas are in the air even when people are not actively listening. and best of all radio waves are not subversive each other. rather signals coexist overlap and often interfere with one another. they can move on into new frequencies, even move on to new frequencies or you can return to the oldies station where you feel more comfortable.

rather than the first, second and third wave even the wnyc of feminism or the corporate broadcasting system that wvia or al-jazeera all of which of course are now available on line as well as on there. like feminism -- "feminism unfinished" thinking in frequencies encourages us to explore signals and echoes across time space and movement without assuming they must rank them as being superior in terms of inclusivity progressiveness or transformation and i think when we can embrace those differences are wave will become vastly larger and more powerful. thank you. [applause] >> thank you michelle, jennifer nancy and forgive me for having

to show that horrible one minute left paper to you just when you were getting to the most interesting point. we now will have brief comments from the three authors of the book. dorothy sue cobble teaches at rutgers university where she is a distinguished professor of history and labor studies. linda gordon is university professor of history and humanities at new york university and astrid henry is the chair of women's studies at cornell college. >> thank you. thanks so much for those remarks remarks. thank you for putting so much care and thought into it and i

really appreciate what you said about the book. you have also raised a lot of very interesting issues that i want us to have time to address common issues of identity, priorities language how we describe the history of feminism feminism. i want to take a few minutes just to talk about the women that i write about in my chapter chapter. i think the agenda that they pursued for the 50 years that i write about it's actually a 50 year period that for a long time people called, it was the boulder in years it was can you imagine this a whole half century of feminism when i wasn't supposed to be anything happening? it turned out that there was a lot happening from the 1920s right into the 60s. i wanted to say a few words about those women because they think what they fought for which

was then inclusive agenda of women's rights and social justice is very much back on the table today. i think the way they went about it, their strategies also we should look back to and resuscitate. i'm just going to take a minute to do that. before i do that i just want to thank a few other people. i want to thank nyu and more tend for hosting us tonight and also thank so many of you for being here. it makes me really happy to see my friends and colleagues out there and my family. i also want to extend a special welcome to rutgers prep middle schoolers who came here and their teachers to democracy prep, i'm sorry.

rutgers prep is where my daughter went to school. democracy prep is where she now teaches so if you could just raise your hands. we are very glad to have you here with us. [applause] i know that all of you have prepared questions for us so i hope you have time for them. my last thank you as to my co-authors. we have been working together for a couple of years. i had no idea what was going to be like to write a book with two other people. i just want to thank you for your sanity, your wisdom, your generosity and all your hard work. okay so i did want to save a minute to talk about some women and folks not in this room. i think we are at a very particular moment right now, very promising moment. the new republic calls this an

unprecedented moment for feminism, a game-changer, a tipping point. i think the question really is how we can take that enthusiasm that i see arresting all around. the surveys now show that women under 30 close to a majority of them identify as feminists. celebrities are coming out of the closet every day to claim themselves as feminists. so the question really is how we can take that enthusiasm and move it to the next stage. i think the women that i write about have something to teach us about this. they argue that it will take the movement. and i think that's part of what inspired this book. it's not just going to be about

individual women making into the corporate boardroom or individual women moving into politics. it's going to take a movement. they also argue that it would take a diverse and inclusive movement and so many of our panels speakers have made that clear. and most importantly or equally important is they argued that the women's movement should and will be about more than sex equality. it's about sex equality but it also has to be about other issues. they look to the labor movement at that moment in time and to the civil rights movement because those were the two huge progressive movements that were making massive changes. they engaged with those

movements. they also push for women's rights. .. in 1945. they reintroduce it every year and tele passed in 1963. they pushed president kennedy to establish the president's commission on women. that commission called for universal childcare for legislation that would make it more possible for workers to organize and challenge corporate power. a whole host of things that i think are very much back on the agenda. it was a revolution that was unfinished and what is exciting for me is to see some of those things being back with us and

being pursued. i lo >> progress on so many of these issues. corrective campaigns new attention to childcare and elder care, fast food strikes. so these issues are back with us. we need to look to that movement to look how we create movements that are inclusive. if we are going to make a better a better world for women i don't think we can do that without making a better world for all. thank you very much. [applauding] >> thanks to all of you, and particularly jessica coffee and did a lot of work in

setting this up into barbara , particularly michelle and jennifer and nancy who in some ways we invited because we saw them as representing a range of someone is doing. when the left referred to five when the left first became a political term in the french revolution when the left first became a political term and a proud political term that was in the french revolution as i'm sure you all know feminists were very importantly involved. that is because in every progressive movement since then and it still is feminism has of course developed in a variety of ways. there are even republican feminists and i have read that their tea party feminists and i

have recently learned from my own research that they were feminists in -- and these come under the rubric of feminism because they believed in equality with men. just like dorothy just said i think the three of us came together in the sense that we wanted to talk about a stream of feminism that had much larger ambitions. that's pretty ambitious because even equality with men is pretty far from where we are today. we wanted to think through the career of multiple feminism over a fairly long period of time and to do that in a short book and one that is not particularly a scholarly book. we are trying to write from a very general audience. it will be up to you whether we

have succeeded in doing something useful with that but i want to just try to enunciate some very general terms and what i think the three of us came together about and that is that we find feminists everywhere. sometimes they work only -- working groups with only one but often they work in groups with men. they were in occupied and they are prominent in the movement against climate change. they are in every antiwar movement throughout the world but they are also in every anticolonial and anti-imperialist movement. feminist actually led every struggle for child welfare public health. they met everywhere in the struggle for universal free education. they are working today to reform every religion on the planet. they have been the backbone of

every antiracist movement in the united states starting with the abolition movement in the 19th century and today women together with immigrants i think are the best hope there is for a strengthening of the labor movement. in mentioning these movements that are not usually defined as feminists not because i want to diminish the importance of the issues like rape or abortion or sexual of freedom but again i want to suggest that i think what this all amounts to is a very radical statement and that is that male dominance plays a part in all of the world's violence injustice and suppression of human potential. feminism has never been perfect. they never all agree with each other. probably agreement isn't something that they should even strive for because i think there

is plenty of evidence that a variety of different movements can have as much if not more of an impact and pull things together. the last thing i would say just hearkening back to something that michelle opened with is that it's really a time to push to reclaim and make comfortable award feminism not because of what it is as a word but because of what it is a concept and how much work there is to be done in the world. anyway, thanks a lot. [applause] >> thank you. i again want to thank especially our speakers michelle jennifer and nancy for speaking and for everyone who helped to bring this event together and i also of course want to thank linda and dorothy sue. we had many wonderful times

around linda's dining room table table. a lot of it involves good food and wine at the end of the day of her call and it was just a really wonderful intense process of putting this book together. i'm really grateful to be here and celebrating the launch of this book. like jennifer i grew up with a feminist mother and a feminists father actually and a feminists father who was also a feminist professor so i had kind of an interesting role model they are. i grew up identifying as a feminist from a really early age. my mom said she could remember me using that term at six years old. i am part of that generation who took it for granted and it was only actually later in college and in the early 90s when i started reading people like kate -- thinking a lot with all the stuff i'm rape on campus again.

thinking of generational shifts. i started realizing how intense my relationship was to feminism and identification much like jennifer's to this earlier wave of feminism, the second wave that i very much fell in love with come identified with and have that sense of why couldn't i have lived in that time? it would have been so exciting. that is where he started to get interested in this work and probably one of the things that is the most difficult about writing my section and the "chicago tribune" that came out called it a daunting task was to try to write about the present is very difficult. it's difficult to know where you are going to start it, where you were going to and in how you are going to frame it and that was really one of the challenges that i had and ever since we

wrapped the book and it was finished more or less so many things keep happening. just this last week i feel like oh my god i should've talked about that in the book. so it's hard to write about the present. i will say that. i kind of wanted to say that. we really did want to try to tell a different story and to disrupt that idea of the waves and disrupt the idea of the white middle class heterosexual feminist history and which is very much focused on entry into the corporate world, equality with white men around pay equity and things like that and i hope we have done that. the idea of radio waves that nancy talked about i really like like that metaphor is a replacement. allows us to think about the ways in which feminism is out there on different channels all the time.

people come into it at different moments. i think about my experience growing up in a feminist household and yet i work with students who are half my age are much younger than that were thinking about feminism for the first time who didn't grow up in families like that. it's this weird thing where feminism is old for many of us but it's always nailed for many many people. i think the waves metaphor prevents us from seeing that. for many people they are discovering feminism for the first time in a way that people describe those moments in the 60s. the radio waves helps us to think about that though we are tuning into different radio channels at different times. one of the goals of our book and certainly one of the goals of the chapter that i wrote was to really show how feminism today is very decentralized. it has many diverse forms. the internet has radically changed the medium by which

feminism is being explored and it's not only diverse in its forms but it's diverse and its agenda as michelle was saying. on one hand we have a figure like sheryl sandberg who is really arguing against similar message of feminism that her book was trying to critique. at the same time we have a much more radical agenda that michelle alluded to in her discussion of the brittany cooper article in salon addressing a lot of radical issues that are not just about entering into the corporate workforce. ..

thinking a lot about age and aging. i am now thinking about feminism in the 90s and was considerably younger. i have students who are nostalgic and wish that they were part of the movement. they want to no what it was like back then. i wanted to end and think it is so wonderful to say it is to have the students here and let's keep it going. thank you. [applauding] >> thanks to all of you and my imposition of strict discipline.

we we have 20 minutes left for questions and comments though i will ask you to try to keep them relatively succinct. and we have a mic. so -- >> i would really love to hear your hero's of feminism are. >> i think it means to advocate for women's rights. there are a lot of women that are denied jobs and

those are only given to men. would think that is to advocate for a woman to the have the same equal rights as a man in. >> i was that a meeting for this search for the new president and people kept referring to the future of named president as he and they were determined it would be a man so i appreciate your remarks. >> i want to be fair at the beginning of a lecture it is poignant because all of the exercise has seen on the media and the very important point that she made is the

role of men inside the feminist movement. and one thing that she said it was because of men with the women teaming up with men backs there were feminist if you were brought up by a feminist man. but i was having these conversations and then to see things of this speech speech, and the passion of my sister.

for the inclusive movement in then to know the role of man. thank you. >> talking about relationships have a question i have like gay marriage that is seen as part of a progressive movement in and it is regressive patriarchal with a mature relationship or the

options to move forward or not. >> this is very shorthand but first of all, thank you. i cannot wait to read the book. with that promise of the diversity and decentralization of multiple types of feminism how you work relates to people like the frazier so have i. du position in this book? >>.

>> as a group have a black woman feminism is different from white women feminism? >> this would be a good moment. i will comment on a couple of the questions. from the '20s through the sixties to work with other women there were in very involved in the mixed sense movements.

so to be allies is to increase minimum-wage your labor rights. the minimum wage affects men but also it is a women's issue that the majority or like 57 percent of minimum-wage workers are women. but there are tensions like sexual harassment. and one of the things i've learned is how dependent the progress of women is of lurcher progressive social movements. so the civil rights movement was incredibly important to address the needs of african-american women. women are divers so it is not a surprise so the notion of liberation of freedom and

equality would be diverse routes be better to do other issues so even when we pass coverage that was not giving all women the right to vote and that was not until the 1965. >> it is significant but it is certainly true that in some ways feminism can enhance the set of privileges that are most easily and quickly enjoyed by those who have other privileges in society like those who are wealthy or white.

but that does not mean we don't have to support those issues. i refuse to get married for the same reasons of k barrett is a problematic institution but it is clear to my friends as well that gay people have every right to to with joy every rights of the of benefits of marriage also talking about women's struggle this is not a cause that excites me been on the other hand, they do have rights to absolut equal treatment so we can separate our priorities without necessarily dimming movements that may be less radical than we might want them to be. >> on the issue of marriage

his is a long standing difference to teach sure that perkins where she basically makes a strong argument against marriage to envision something we have not yet achieved in the forms of living and the students were struck how is it compare with the more mainstream agenda today? so the tension is there and ongoing but i also love that the tensions are there and whatever feminism or a gay-rights there are today. >> i want to respond to black and white feminists of. there are sections in the book will try to summarize those were the authors who are sitting here. but there is a danger to

impose black-and-white feminism as to entities and i love pretty cooper's work but i worry there is us a tendency to redefine the categories why feminism is always less radical or justice oriented and always about the agenda that is concerned the poorest of the core among the white and black feminists there are many variations and one of the places we need to look more closely is multiracial feminist movement into racist feminist feathered world the minister for what has spent obstacles are challenges with those racial

differences are always crosscut with the differences in class or other conversation is suggested by gary terms multiple racial breakdowns and that is true in the 1840's and 1890's and in the 30's. >> ladies think it is problematic to think of anything as by gary. in to as they put on my graduate student at but there is always a consciousness with feminism that there are other parallels struggles.

there were tense moments and conflict when one is over another but now i think just does the minister should be included of men it is important to understand any conflict is more to make it more inclusive wherewith they are very -- charging definition. so that means everyone needs to rethink what is. >> it has destabilized the gender based script the genitalia you are bored with tell you your future but saw

everything we say like a week ago and i have two questions and we loved each of them i am inspired and there is a lot of resistance to our life. >> we have time for one more question.

>> what can i do to help you as a feminist? >> every day offers opportunities to be a feminist hero by fear and to look around your actual life what is going on and where you noticing that concern you? talking to you don't -- to yonder people that just codes are applied. every day we have to get dressed, what does it mean and what does it mean to have our appearance to let us express ourselves?