that president lyndon johnson even as he signs the first federal and international family planning acts into law refused to bestow the medal of freedom on sanger, he feared reprisal from the catholic church. ellen told me that when she looked at sanger's private history papers at smith college, i'm proud to say the biggest archive of women's history, she found a poignant little handwritten note from sanger asking that her body be buried here next to her husband but that her heart be removed to japan, the only country in the world that had ever bestowed a public honor on her. so i hope this is retroactive in honoring the work of margaret sanger. i hope she would celebrate this recognition that reproductive freedom is a human right at least as crucial as freedom of speech.

and that no government should dictate whether or when we have children. [ applause ] whether we are male or female, the power of the state must stop at our skins. she might also say the backlash against reproductive freedom by a right wing extremist minority especially in state legislators they unfairly control by redistricting is proof of panic of their racist and immigrant fearing efforts to keep this country from becoming as it is about to be no longer a majority european american nation. it is becoming one that looks more like the world and better understands the world. so sanger might say as i do that there is no president of the

united states who is more responsible for understanding that reproductive freedom is a basic human right than president obama. however, there may be a movement problem with me as a recipient because of my age. i'm trying to absorb the fact that i'll be 80 next year. [ applause ] i plan to reach at least 100, but i am really worried about i mean a little worried about mortality but i'm also worried that my age contributes to the current form of obstructionism. all of the people who say that movements are over and use ridiculous terms like post-racist and post-feminist. excuse me? right. i can testify personally that

the very same people who were saying 40 years ago that feminism was unnatural and well, it used to be necessary but it's not anymore. just to name one parallel to show how ridiculous this is, if it took more than a century to gain legal and social identity for abolitionists and suffrages as human beings for all women and men of color, now that we need legal and social equality and no power based on race or sex or ethnicity or class or sexuality, that's likely to take at least a century, too, don't you think? and we're only 40 years into it. also as original cultures say, as wilma mankiller said, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. so truly we are just beginning. so i would like to contribute a

few examples of the adventures before us and unlike david letterman, i'm not going to try to put them in any kind of order because each one is crucial. and anyway, they're all just reminders for people in this room. one, women's issues aren't separate from economic issues or vice versa. paying women equally for comparable work done by men would be the biggest economic stimulus this country would possibly have. the institute for women's policy research tells us that paying women of all races equally to white men would put $200 billion more into the economy every year and would be way more effective than propping up banks and wall street because this money would get spent, not put into swiss bank accounts.

it would create jobs and help the poorest kids who are those who depend on a mother's income. but do we hear economic stimulus and equal pay in the same sentence? no. i don't think so. and after we do that, we also need to value caregiving work, caregiving work, which is a third of the productive work in this nation at replacement value and make that sum tax deductible if we pay taxes and tax refundable if we don't. we could do that. two, a woman's ability to decide whether and when to have a child is not a social issue. it is a human right. it is the biggest indicator of whether she is educated or not, can work outside the home or not, is healthy or not and how long she lives. this country has the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies, teenage pregnancies and medically complicated births in the developed world.

it last has the least sex education which allows web pornography pretend to be sex education though the truth is present in the word. porna means female slaves. we have shown as a movement that rape is not sex, it's violence. we haven't yet been successful in showing that pornography is very far from erotica. three relates to two and one, because women with children are less likely to get hired or paid well, while men with children are more likely to get hired and paid well. this is just the tip of the iceberg. nothing else is going to work in a deep sense until men raise children as much as women do. deep. children will keep on libeling men by thinking they can't be loving and nurturing, and they can, just as well as women. and libeling women by thinking they have to be loving and nurturing. this is huge. read "the mermaid and the minotaur" by dorothy dinastein, a book long before its time and i think we're finally ready for her. four, the u.s. is the only

modern democracy without some national system of child care and now the average cost of child care has surpassed the average cost of a college education. five, we're also the only advanced country that indentures our college students by saddling them with debt at the exact time they should be free to explore and women pay the same tuition as men and get paid a million dollars less over their lifetime to repay those loans. that reminds me of the fact has been made that women outnumber men on college campuses but many are trying to get out of pink collar ghetto and into the white collar ghetto. meanwhile, men in new collar union jobs earn more than the average college educated woman so no wonder men are choosing not to run up all that college debt. six, the digital divide is pretty good proxy for power. for instance, more than 80% of internet users are in

industrialized countries and the fewest on any continent are in africa. it tells us something here at home. though men and women are only about 2% apart in computer use, 67% of white non-hispanic households use the internet while only 45% of black households have access. it is about power, and it is serious, and it is polarizing. so let's hear it for the librarians who are the only ones i know of systemically fighting to democratize computer use. seven, while we're celebrating marriage equality victories, great, let's not forget that 51% of us in the united states say "homosexuality should be

accepted by society." that was the question in the public opinion poll. but 69% of people in canada do. are we not comparable at least to canada? and 83%, 83% of people in germany do. on campuses, students still ask me why the same groups oppose say lesbians and birth control. [ laughter ] i think many of us don't yet understand that the same groups oppose all forms of sexual expression that cannot end in conception. sometimes i fear that our opposition understands our shared interests better than we do. nine, do enough people understand that racism and sexism are intertwined and can only be uprooted together. think about it. to maintain racial differences in the long run, you have to control reproduction which means controlling the bodies of women. those of the so-called superior group are often restricted and

those of the so-called inferior group are often exploited but both suffer. this is true for sex and caste in india just as it is true for sex and race here. it is a universal global truth that these two things can only be uprooted together. and still i think our common adversaries sometimes know our common interests better than we do. ten, here's a final shocker just for anybody who says it's post anything, right? violence against females in the world has reached such a peak due to son preference which produces son surplus and daughter deficit to such practices as fgm and sex trafficking, to sexualized violence in war zones, to child marriage and pregnancy which is the biggest cause of teenage

female deaths in the world. that for what may be the first time in human history, females are no longer half the human race. on this spaceship earth, there are now 101.3 men per 100 women so before we think of causes as distant, of that cause as distant, let me also remind you that even by fbi statistics, if you add up all of the women in the united states who have been murdered by their husbands or boyfriends since 9/11, and then you add up all of the americans killed in 9/11 and in iraq and in afghanistan, and you combine all of those numbers, more women have been killed by their husbands and boyfriends since 9/11 than all of those americans who were murdered in 9/11 in afghanistan and in iraq. we pay a lot of attention to foreign terrorism but what about domestic terrorism? what about crimes in our houses, schools and movie theaters that are 99% committed by white, non-poor men with nothing to

gain from their crimes, nothing to gain from their crimes but who are addicted to what they got born into. they did not invent it, but they became addicted to the idea of masculinity and control. those crimes, i think, we might refer to as supremacy crimes, which is their motive and really think about the why of it and the cost of the falsely created ideas of gender. but here's the good news. thanks to a landmark book i've been talking about to some of you about for a year at least called "sex and world peace" by valerie hudson and other

scholars, we now can prove with 100 countries that the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent within itself or will use military violence against another country, the biggest cause is not poverty or lack of natural resources or religion or even degree of democracy, it's violence against females. it is that that is experienced first and that that normalizes all other subject, object dominated, dominator, conquering, superior, inferior relationships. and, you know, in my list, i haven't included everything we know. i mean, the equal rights amendment would be nice if we had the constitution, right, don't you think? [ applause ] the fact that three-quarters of all immigrants now fighting a great battle in this town are women and children. you know all of those things. but those are ten. i just picked arbitrarily, so i

dare anybody to say that this revolution is over because now we are on to the ways of denormalizing violence and dominance. we're understanding that we'll never have democratic countries unless we have democratic families. we're understanding that the idea of conquering nature and women is the problem and not the solution. we're returning to the original and natural paradigm of 95% of human history which was the circle, not the pyramid, not the hierarchy. as bella abzug would say, our movement came from a period of dependence. we were dependent. so we naturally had to get up there and become independent and self-identified, and now we're

ready for a declaration of interdependence, of interdependence among our movements and within each other. we are discovering that we in this room and everywhere else and we in nature and we human beings are linked. we are not ranked. so moving forward, if we just do it every day is not rocket science, and it's actually fun. and it is infinitely interesting. just for one simple example, those who are used to power may need to not talk and those with less power may need to learn to talk as much as we listen, right? in both cases it is all about balance and understand the end doesn't justify the means. the means are the ends. the means become the ends. so if we want, at the end of our

revolution, not that there is an end, but in our imaginable future progress, if we want to have dancing and friendship and laughter and work we love in the future, we have to be sure to have some dancing and friendship and work that we love and laughter along the way. this is the small and the big of it. and we've just begun. [ applause ] >> thank you. we're here at the national press club so we'll start with the media question. how do you think the representation of women in the media has changed since you first got involved in the industry, and where do we still need to go? >> how long do we have? [ laughter ] no. >> we have a while. >> well, it has changed. i mean, because there are smart,

competent journalists and all kinds of specialists on television that we didn't see before, i remember that the -- just to show you how bad it was. there was only one woman who did the weather and she was rising from her bed in a satin nightgown saying, well, it's going to be stormy tomorrow. you can't make this stuff up. [ laughter ] all right. so we have progressed, but obviously women are still something like 15 years younger in order to be on camera, so just as you get experience, you're gone, you know, and there are fewer, and we're more diverse than we were but not diverse enough and think how important it is. think how important it is. i mean, who would have thought that a little girl named oprah

in the south, you know, would have looked at barbara walters and thought, i can do that. you know, we need to see people who look like us. so i would say we have token victories. we've realized the problem, and as the women's media center always points out, part of it is not on camera but a big part is who is making the decision about what story gets covered and that's, you know, more like 3% women in the clout positions, so i would say we've made symbolic victories, and we know what's wrong, but we're not even halfway there. >> given how far we have to go, does calling attention to the disparities both of women in the media, as well as women sources create change, and if not, how do you create change? >> no, it does because consciousness, as we all know in every social change and revolution on earth, consciousness comes first. the understanding of what's wrong and what could be, and we

and i know other people here, i mean, the women's media center have she source, so there are endless lists of experts if you want to find somebody who is an expert who is a female human being, you know, we need those sources and we need to not just accuse the media but help the media find other folks. and we ourselves need to do it. you know, sometimes i think that men get up in the morning -- not the men here who are exempt from everything i say, but get up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, i see a public intellectual. women don't usually do that. we need to go to each other and say, hey, you're an authority on this. get training at the women's media center or somewhere so you are comfortable on camera. i can tell you from calling people up to get on camera, it is harder, you know, for -- to get women to do it because of our self-image and because, of course, we think we have to do our hair and all of those guys have a blue suit hanging in a closet and put it on and go racing off. so there are both internal and external barriers. >> is it incumbent on journalists to seek out more

women sources or is it incumbent on women to empower themselves to be sources? >> you know, it's so interesting that anything that is only two choices is wrong. have you ever noticed that? [ laughter ] i think it comes from falsely dividing human nature into masculine and feminine and so we need, of course, both. we need both, but it gets to be ridiculous when you survey all of the people who are writing about reproductive issues and 80% of them are guys without the organs they're writing about. you know, so this -- so this is not something you're supposed to -- you're not supposed to say the "o" word here. so the answer is both of responsible. i think that when we are looking at a story that arguably has more female experience or more experience from a particular racial or ethnic group, sexuality experience, you know,

we ought to understand that at least half of our sources, at least half of our sources ought to have that kind of experience. >> this questioner says she, maybe he, but probably she saw you speak at the university of utah in 1975. the questioner asks if you could go back to tell yourself to chill out about one issue what would it be and what one issue would you tell yourself to get more fired up about? >> hi! >> hi! [ laughter ] well, i think that the issues that i was chilled out and should have been more chilled out about had to do with self-criticism, and it is still

a problem i think for a lot of us because i walk around after i have spoken i'm sure in utah thinking, you know, and another thing or i should have done or something, so i wish i didn't do that so much to what i should have been more in an uproar about is monotheism or religion. i mean, religion is too often politics you're not supposed to talk about. spirituality is democratic and in each of us it's a different story. but institutionalized monotheistic religion, if god looks like the ruling class, the ruling class is god. let's face it. so we have refrained from speaking about it in spite of all of the history of say colonialism where they were very

clear, the bible and the gun. that's what conquered -- you have to take away people's feeling that there is something sacred within themselves. that there's authority within themselves and get them to submit to other authority and not only for reward in this lifetime, but for life after death. excuse me. i mean, you know, unprovable, so, you know, very useful. no, i am much madder about that and wish i that i had talked about it there because i do remember at the universities in utah there was an enormously high rate of suicide because of the strictness about sexual expression and so on. and still i probably in my

memory -- maybe you can tell me -- but i don't think i was saying this at the time. >> what keeps you going? what keeps the fire burning? and have you ever wanted to just hang it up and why didn't you? >> well, where would i hang it? no, i mean, first of all, first of all, people say to me, well, aren't you interested in something other than feminism? and i always try to think if there is anything that wouldn't be transformed if anything matter and so far i haven't been able to find anything and it's so interesting. it's like a big aha. you figure out what could be and you know, it's just constantly, constantly interesting. as to what keeps me going, it's you. i mean, it's our friends. it's -- you know, we're communal animals. we cannot do it by ourselves. and i'm so lucky that because of the magazine and the movement and many other groups, i have a community. so when i am feeling crazy and alone, i have people to turn to and we cannot, we cannot keep going without that. actually, sometimes people ask me what one thing would you like for the movement? and i always think a global aa. that's what i would like. so that wherever he went, you know, any place in the world by a river, in the school basement,

wherever, we would know that we could find a group that however different shared values and was free and leaderless and sat in a circle and talked, spoke their own stories and listened to each other's stories and figured out that we are not crazy, the system is crazy basically and supported each other. >> as you reflect back on the women's movement so far, what would you design as the seminal moment? >> well, it would be an ovarian moment. [ applause ] i think each of us has a different one probably.

each of us had a first or maybe several memorable ahas, oh, that's why. i was a journalist and worked freelancing in new york, and even after we started "new york" magazine, i was the girl writer. they were very nice guys. jimmy breslin and tom wolfe, and all these nice guys would say, you write like a man and i would say, thank you. and it wasn't until -- i mean, the experiences in my case, maybe yours too, had to pile up before i saw the pattern. and then i had an epiphany related to my own experience which is maybe true for each of us that i covered a speak-out

about abortion and i realized that i had not told the truth about having an abortion myself at 22 and why not and why? you know, if one in three american women approximately has needed an abortion at sometime in their life, why not? what was secret about it. you know. and then as soon as i started to speak about it, you know, then i discovered that it was often part of other people's experience or their family's experience. i remember sitting in a taxi in boston with flo kennedy. the great flo kennedy. right? and she had written -- flo had written a book called "abortion wrap." which was totally about this -- and we were talking about her book, and old irish woman taxi driver, very rare probably as a taxi driver, turned around to us and said, honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. and that's where that came from. i mean, i didn't make that up.

so it's that kind of experience of telling our own stories. >> what do you think about the fact that women in your home city of toledo can no longer obtain an abortion without driving over an hour. >> yes, we are moving backward not in public opinion. if you look at properly phrased -- who should make this decision, the government or the individual, overwhelming majorities say it should not be the government, it should be the individual and the physician so we're not moving backward in public opinion, but we are moving backward in -- as we can see, the anti-choice forces have not been too successful in washington, so they've moved to state legislatures. though they murdered abortion doctors and firebombed clinics, that has proven not to be as successful as what they're doing now, which is getting state legislationers to make

impossible to fulfill rules for local clinics. and the only way we can change this is to pay attention to our state legislatures. i believe that president clinton just said this last week. you know, if we don't want a divided washington, we have to vote as much in off-year elections and for state legislatures as we do in presidential elections because as long as some, many state legislatures can -- i mean, they're in control of the insurance companies and people who build prisons and then put people in them who don't deserve to be in prison, and then they redistrict in order to make that control permanent, which is why the house of representatives is as it is and the senate is not. you can't redistrict a whole

state. you know, you can only -- so our response has to be organizing and knowing who -- most americans don't know who their state legislators are, and that's why they are able to -- an anti-choice right wing minority is able to do this state by state. and it is very much about backlash against the changes in this country. i mean, they're very clear. white women are not having enough children, they say to me. you know, and it's why the issues all go together. so, you know, anti-immigration, anti-birth control, anti-abortion and so on. so we have to take back our