>> thank you, greta. >> any time. the 116th congress comes into session today. a few minutes ago, we saw the ceremonial swearing in of new and re-elected senators. and later speaker of the house nancy pelosi. we'll have live coverage at 3:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span3 as well as online on c-span.org. we continue today with our week-long series, author series seven days featuring what we think of the most interesting books of the year and joining us to talk about "sex matters" how modern feminism lost touch with love, science and common sense is columnist mona taran. thanks for being here. >> thanks for having me. >> what's this book about and what prompted you to write it? >> it's about how we went wrong, a little overboard in the feminist movement and the sexual revolution. the feminist movement was necessary and did some terrific things for our society, but i

believe that it spurned very badly misunderstanding one of the basic things that women and men, but especially women need which is love and security and those things are best obtained through traditional marriage, and unfortunately, feminism portrayed marriage and family as traps for women when in fact, they are very necessary for the happiness of women and the fulfillment of women and also for the stability of our society at large. >> what prompted you to write it and when and how did the feminism movement err to make marriage look like or sound like a trap? >> first let me stress that this doesn't apply to all feminists. there are women that identify as feminists and believe in equality which i do, too. absolutely, but what prompted me to write it?

i came of age back in the 1970s when radical feminism was really gaining a foothold and i go into the history of what was happening in the culture in the 1970s and of course, it was a very turbulent era. many things were going, but the feminism that came out of that era the so-called second wave feminism was different from its predecessors which had stressed the right to vote and the right of women to be full participants in middle society and serve on juries and so forth and it veered off into a quasi-marxist critique and everything about the bergeron society including all sexual standards and including family life. the feminists of the '70s and i'm thinking here i go into it in-depth in the book and who was portrayed on the cover of "time"

magazine in the 1970s as the chairman mao of feminism. jermaine grier, gloria stein steinemand others who attacked courtship and roamance and all of those things, we're done with all that and in the process they sort of joined forces with the sexual revolution which was also happening at that same time in our history and the sexual revolutionaries tended to be men who were tired with the standards that you had to court a woman and had to have a relationship, at least a marriage, before you can expect sexual intimacy. they were all about tearing down those standards, too, and in a way, as i argue, if the feminist his not joined forces with the

sexual revolutionaries then the 1960s which of the time was counter culture and would never have become what it is today where is a dominant culture where we have a free for all about sexuality and it has led to tremendous pain and dysfunction. there are millions of kids growing up in homes without two parents. there are millions of men who are disconnected from their children, from their families and even from work because they don't have that fundamental building block of a good society which is a family. that's where we all begin. >> what is the impact of that and do you have data that backs it up? >> oh, absolutely. in fact, in working with my editor he cut a lot of the data out. you made your point. there's so much.

the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that the best place for children to grow up to be happy and healthy and high-functioning citizens is in an intact family. the rise of inequality that people worry about so much in the last 50 years is driven in large measure by changes in family structure. so kids who grow up with only one parent which is now almost 50% of american children these days will spend at least some part of their childhood between 0 and 18 in a single-parent home, and of course, many single parents do a fabulous job and they are to be commended for their tremendous work, but it is very hard. raising children is hard. i've raised three sons with my husband and i hope i was a good parent, but i know for sure that if i had not had a husband who

was an equal partner in the task i wouldn't have been as good's parent. it's too difficult a job to do the best job on your own. >> so what happened to girls and boy, men and women, if they are not raised in a traditional family structure. >> so again, to stress, many do fine. many do fine, but the numbers are incontrovertible. many more children wind of living in poverty, for example, if they are raised just by single mothers. that extra income that a father provides is crucial. many more people are vulnerable to losing their job, for example, if they're single parents. why? pick one example. your child gets sick. you can't find reasonable care for your child. you take days off from work.

your employer gets provoked with you and you lose your job. there are many, many other examples. we know that young men who are raised without their fathers tend to have all kinds of psychological problems, that is they have more problems controlling their aggression. they are less connected to the workforce. they are less likely to marry themselves. they are less likely to be -- did i say this? to be employed, and to finish college. there are some really interesting data done by david otter and his colleagues looking at brothers and sisters in florida who are raised by the same single mothers and what they found interesting, and we know there are problems for girls growing up without their dad and we know the boys fared even worse the ones who were

raised without dads and they're less likely to have high ambitions for themselves, to be able to self-regulate and we now know from a lot of psychological research that the ability to delay gratification and to be self-disciplined is an incredibly important trait for success. more important, people think that. >> you write in the book "sex matters" from increasing income inequality to rising levels of depression and anxiety, from falling male labor participation rates to the climbing levels of female happiness, the retreat in from family life has reaching consequence e it is looking like the key to human thriving for both sexes and especially for children. does that model, then, in your opinion, apply to gay and lesbian couples, as well? >> yes. the challenges are a little bit more complicated if you're a same-sex couple. if you are two women, i think

it's really important that lesbian couples know about this research, about the importance of male role models. for example, fathers have a natural tendency to roughhouse with their kids and this apparently turns out incredibly important for the boys' ability to control aggression later in life and they learn rules in those early years. so it's important if it's two lesbians raising a son that they have somebody in that boy's life who can play that kind of role for them, teach them how to roughhouse and horse and all of those kinds of things. for -- for men who are raising girls or boys -- in fact, i had a conversation with a gay friend who told me that he and his husband had to learn by watching mothers at the park how you

handle it when a kid falls and scrapes a knee. their tendency as men was to say oh, you're fine and they watched the moms and said oh, are you okay? come here. let me kiss it. let me hold you and they realized they needed a more nurturing side to themselves. for gay and lesbian couples it just requires a little bit more expanding their horizons. >> what do you say to people who are critical of your thesis here and say why should we go back in order to be successful now? >> right. >> aren't we just evolving as a society? >> that's a great question and here's what i -- what i point out. look at the way the upper third of our society is behaving right now. is doesn't matter going back. look as how they're acting right now. people with college degrees which is the upper third of our society. they are following all of these

old-fashioned styles of life. they tend to graduate from college or high school or eventually college. they tend to get a full-time job and they tend to get married and only have children after they're married. so you can't say it's going back. it's what's being done right now very successfully by the upper third of our society and yet as charles murray put it in a very good fashion if our elites were better at preaching what they practice, there is so much reluctance to say this works. this is what people need, this is what everybody should do and in fact, arguably, it's even more important for people with lesser levels of education to follow those steps and to be sure that they have solid home lives and networks of family support than it is for people at the upper end because they have

more money. they have more cushion against life's shock with people at the bottom that need that support system even more. >> let's see what the viewers have to say. we'll talk to vicky from minnesota. democrat. >> hi, grechen atchen and mona. i've been waiting for a long time for a book like this to come out. i feel like growing up in the '70s. i'm 63 and feminism was going crazy and the simple things like men not opening the door for the women, you know, it's so many things went away and that -- i think that's what's hard on everybody. i was a real shy person and it seems like the sexual revolution came around and we were raised evangelist and it was hard for me to get into that attitude and way of life that so many were

living. i worked in a teen mother nursery for four years and i think we lost a lot of the morals because in a lot of ways -- i was a chemistry major and i was smart and i wanted to get out there, and do better than what i felt my -- my mother raised six kids more and worked full time. my question to the world is who is raising the kids? who's running the house? that's a full-time job. coming from the '70s to now, man, i would love to go back to being at least a half-time housewife, cooking good meals and having a garden. how do you do that when you have a full-time job or part-time job. >> vicky, is that financially realistic for you? >> when you listen to c-span, what is the big thing they're always talking about in america? we have to grow the economy. we have to grow the economy. we need to go back to simpler things. you know, there are three, four

or five cars in everybody's driveway. there are how many tvs in every room? we've got to go back to simpler times. do we need all that? i don't know. there is so much in it. okay. >> it is interesting, and i appreciate a lot of what the caller said, that women who have choices, that is they are from higher income families and they don't feel the pressure to work full time when they are asked what their ideal is, when their children are young and when their children are in school, they say their preference is for part-time work. that's what the plurality of women say and the majority of those in the upper incomes here say they would like part-time work. they're a small percentage when kids are young and this is something that you don't see mentioned a lot because the assumption is that women all want to be working full time

when they're morgues and thatth just not the case. i think you should be doing more to show it is within reach of more people, but it absolutely really is impossible unless people -- unless the marriage norm is re-established. >> when you say the marriage norm, are you talking about the mother, the wife is at home and the husband working? >> no. what i mean the marriage norm is get married before you have children. that's the marriage norm and then people work it out. they have all kinds of systems. sometimes the husband stays home and the wife works. that's rare, but it does happen more and more. very often, they have split schedules or they work out arrangements. i'll give you an example of myself. i was working full time until i

had children and then i switched to part-time. it was nice that we could afford help, but many, many women are willing to trade off and i talk about this in sex matters, they're willing to trade off more time with their families for higher income. they want the time and the flexibility and there's no reason we should disrespect that choice or say that somehow they're letting down the sisterhood. that's what they want. >> sebastian, florida. bill is watching there, an independent. >> good morning. yeah. i'd like to address the lack of unionization down here in florida and all over the country, and that as well as collective bargaining and the 12-hour workweek -- the work day, the 12-hour work days that they have in florida, four nurses that are working three days, 12 hours a day in the hospital and in sebastian river hospital, and it's an absolute

disgrace that these people are working in such primitive conditions. >> and the impact of that on what we're talking about, lower wages, maybe without union representation as he's arguing and then these hours that companies and hospitals require you to work 12-hour shifts. >> right. >> well, i've always believed that unions should be allowed to negotiate for their members. that's part of our capitalist system and will i'm not an expert on the situation in florida, and what it is. some people do prefer, i know, to have three days on, three days off. so you know, they can arrange things that way and -- but, without knowing more about the individual situations i don't really feel confident to comment. >> ron in california. republican. hi, ron. >> how are you doing, greta?

thanks for taking the call. mona, thanks for writing the book. >> thank you. >> let's go back to the fundamentals of the reasons why we are in the case we are. people forget, i happened to grow up in the day of the wonderful '60s when the pill came in. we went away from natural selection. natural selection means that you pick a guy or you pick a girl because of who they are and what they are and what they represent. when those days went away because of the pill it gave a freedom for women to do exactly who and what they wanted to do whenever they wanted to do it. as a result of that fact, you might notice in the black community immediately started losing all their men. their men because of what? economics. there were no jobs. so they put them into the army and they sent them to vietnam as they sent a lot of us others to go to vietnam, as well. that was to get us off the

streets because we were causing social upheaval along in the schools and everything else. so it's a really fundamental issue here that when you come back from vietnam as i did and you'd run into girls that had decided they wanted to get pregnant because that was the only way they figured they could get a man in those day, well, here is a little kid, a beautiful little kid and you had to date them and you had no way to feed them because you had no viable job to support a family, and now it's even worse than it is then. there's no brady bunch world that we live in now. we have to look at it and say give some people real jobs and give them some real support so they can raise a family with one income and until we --? all right. mona, do you have any thoughts? >> oh, gosh. well, there are a lot at the

feet of the pill. i am not so concerned that that was so influential. there were other forms of birth control that were available before that. i mentioned in the book the vulcanization of rubber in the early part of the 20th century probably did have an impact on birth control technology, but regarding job and the relationship to family life, i do not think, nor do i recommend that we have to go back to an era when a man's job was assumed to be supporting a family because i think that would put intolerable burdens on women who were doing the exact same job and lead to discrimination and so forth. what i am say is if we return to the idea that it is a -- it is a

disservice to yourself and your future children for either men or women to have children without marriage, that you will have many fewer children growing up without the skills and the emotional maturity and all of the other things that you need to be a successful worker. there are some really interesting data in this book about men -- there's a lot to talk about, there are no jobs, there are no jobs and you know what? men with only a high school diploma who are married are more likely to be in the workforce than men who have some college, but are not married. so there's something about being married that makes men -- oh, and by the way, married men, single women, married women and single men all make roughly equal salaries. the people who really excel in

the salary realm are married men, and it's interesting. there's something that happens to men when they get married where they seem to be much more conscientious at work, much more willing to work hard to try to get a raise. they come more ambitious and we don't really know exactly how that all work, but the data do show it. >> was there inequality there, though? because married women and single moms might be just as motivated as the married men. >> for the married women working fewer hours and they may be taking time off and they're working are part-time so that could account for that and single women are at a disadvantage. they're trying to take care of the kids, run a family and it's extremely difficult for them. mona charan is our guest, syndicated columnist and senior fellow and author of the new

book" has modern feminism lost touch with science and common sense? "sex matters." >> thanks for taking my call. i was sitting here for 15 minutes, and i got a headache listening to all of this. i don't understand for the life of me what women want and this and that. if you want to be a victim go right ahead, be a victim. >> you can find this online at c-span.org. we take you live now to capitol hill for the ceremonial swearing in of house members on this first day of the 116th congress. speaker of the house, nancy pelosi will be swearing in members. she is now officially the first and second woman to hold the title of house speaker.