>> hinojosa: while the feminist movements of the '60s and '70s generated major victories for women, our guest today believes that much work remains to be done to achieve women's equality. former president of planned parenthood and cofounder and president of the center for the advancement of women faye wattleton. i'm maria hinojosa. this is one on one. captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> hinojosa: faye wattleton, thank you for being here. >> thank you. it's my pleasure to be invited. >> hinojosa: so people know you because for over a decade you ran planned parenthood federation of america. you were the face of that organization and of that movement for many, many years.

and then you left and you created the center for the advancement of women. and you recently released this report basically on the status of women, what's interesting to them, what matters to them. and i have to say, i was just fascinated with this statistic-- 92% of the women who you asked said that the biggest issue that they face, that they're most concerned with as women in america today, is domestic violence and sexual assault. >> we were surprised also. we performed this study as a benchmark to the beginning... for the beginning of the 21st century to measure where women stand on a range of issues. and the question was asked whether women believed that a women's movement was necessary. and there was surprisingly strong support for a new women's movement. and then we asked what should be the priorities-- what are the issues that need to be addressed urgently? and we were really quite stunned

that domestic and sexual violence should be addressed, basically a statistical dead heat with equal pay for equal work, which has been the mainstay of women's concerns. >> hinojosa: but, you know, the interesting thing is that when you are involved with activist women, the issue of equal pay is front and center. but it's not like you're meeting activist women and they're saying, "we are really concerned about the issue of sexual violence." >> well, this is a ver... i'm glad that you raised that discrepancy. because this is the reason why the center for the advancement of women was formed and founded a little more than a decade ago. because we realized that a lot of the data, a lot of the assumptions that those of us who are activists, who have worked on the front lines for a very long time, and we think that we know the truth and the holy grail is not always where women are. and it's really important to have accurate data to know how to address the issues that really matter to women.

and what we found in our survey is that... we did follow-up research on it. we traveled around the country and talked to hundreds of women around the country, and it was tantamount almost to being a woman that they either lived in an abusive relationship, had been... had had the experience, had been in an abusive relationship, or knew someone who was. and so it was really more... it was really endemic to the relationship issue between men and women than we had ever expected it to be. >> hinojosa: so if you were talking to women in the developing world, you know, you could imagine them saying, "i am afraid of being attacked all the time, i am afraid of being a victim of violence, i'm afraid of being sexually assaulted." but for american women, where we have equality and access to police and lawyers... >> well, it's interesting that this is a universal problem that you raise, because the world bank did a survey a number of years ago, and their statistics

paralleled the us statistics, which was another surprise for us, that women in the developing world also found this as a major issue. what we found was that women said they know a lot about the resources in their community for physical violence-- that if they are beaten or if they are physically threatened by their partner, they know where to go for shelter and how to seek shelter for them and their children if they are mothers. but the psychological violence is another aspect, another dimension of the violence against women for which there is very little support, very little aid that women can turn to in order to escape the syndrome before it becomes violent. >> hinojosa: so what do you think that's about? what do you think is going on there? i mean, is it because... i mean, because, of course, you have studied the women's movement in this country, you've been a part of it. you helped create it. so is your thinking, well, there's a lot of reaction from men against women, speaking up,

speaking out, saying, you know, "i'm here"? is it a reaction? >> i think it's really we should be very circumspect about assuming one or two reasons for the violence that women encounter. it's a very complex issue. it can be issues around women earning and men feeling somewhat threatened because their traditional role is threatened. it can be about the value that women hold in society. think about it-- we have resources for women to turn when they are physically violated, when they are beaten or in other ways threatened. it's the leading cause of homicide among pregnant women. but if a woman is being psychologically abused, even her family is very often not a source of support for her. so it really does speak, i think, more broadly about the status of women and how far we still have to travel before we

are valued in a way that says that at no point should our psychological or physical being be threatened or in any way intimidated. i think it's really important not to submit to very simplistic reasons for the violence that women face, because we found in our qualitative research that women told us that the reasons were quite vast and often very complicated. >> hinojosa: all right, so let's go back to the issue of equal pay, which is also... you know, it's not like you've seen rallies of hundreds of thousands of women or people at the capitol saying, "equal pay now." a lot of people kind of think, like, "wait a second. things have gotten better." but in fact the equal pay issue... >> is still a very important issue. and i wish that the days would return when we would go to the street again and raise visibility about the continuing inequity. because what we see in the research that we've done to follow up is that there's a perception that women have made

it, we have equality. and yet the association of university women found that the wage gap opens immediately after college, and it never closes. >> hinojosa: what's that about? >> the catalyst also found research that among mba graduates, the earning capacity opens immediately after the mba is earned among men and women, and it never closes. opportunities are not offered with equanimity. and so the value system... and you know, it's really easy to change laws. look at what it took us to get the lilly ledbetter law enacted in order to report discrepancies in pay, when a women discovers that her male counterpart is earning more than she is earning. that took a major effort in congress and a new president to expend fairly significant new capital in order to get this legislation passed. so we really do have a struggle.

i think that the big part of the reason for women not joining together and marching in the streets against what should be a no-brainer is that there is a perception that "it's just me. maybe it's in my mind." >> hinojosa: well, isn't it because women are never talking about this? it's not like we're sitting there and saying... >> and we don't talk about violence against us. it's the great... there's a great stigma, a great secret that women keep to themselves. they don't acknowledge it until often it's too late, and their physical being is threatened or in some cases actually killed. >> hinojosa: so is it about women who just, at that moment when they're talking with their boss about the raise, that they just don't know how to... because on the one hand, you know, we have so many women who are leaders. we're supposed to be leaders, we're supposed to be powerful if we're in a position... we're in a professional negotiation. is it that women just are uncomfortable about saying, "look, i need you to pay me more, i want you to pay me what i'm worth, i want you to..." what's that...

>> very perceptive once again. we're conditioned not to value our work in the same way that men value their work. men go in and say, "listen, if i don't get better pay or a raise or a better consideration i'm going to walk, i'm going to go on to a better opportunity." women tend to devalue the importance of their work, and don't give it the same kind of importance that men give to their work. the other problem is whether a woman putting herself out there is going to be the sacrificial lamb. very often women do not cling together when there is strength in numbers. and this sense of isolation, that, "i'm just struggling with this alone," is one that very often holds women back to accept a secondary status in pay and other career opportunities. it's not just the compensation, but it's the promotions, the opportunity to have higher status within the corporation or

within the workplace. and that feeds all the way up to the corporate, or the c suite, that women are not... are even less represented at the very higher levels of the workplace, where the decisions can be made to assure that these disparities do not consent... do not continue, and that they're rooted out. and very often we see that the claim is, "well, we have to train women," even though these are the same women that sat next to men in the mba courses, "we have to train them, we have to put them in the pipeline. we have to get them ready." >> hinojosa: so are you feeling like maybe we need to have a business school, a masters and ph.d. level business school just for women? it's kind of silly, but... >> no, i don't think that we need to have a masters just for women, because that continues to perpetuate that somehow women are inadequate, we are deficient in a way that men do not suffer, and therefore we need something special done for us, as opposed to the system needing to change

to recognize that there is gender disparity, women are not represented in the proportion to our presence in society, and that we must continue to acknowledge it and set goals to assure that women have a fairer representation and a fairer opportunity to achieve and accomplish at the same rate that men do. >> hinojosa: so i'm wondering, you know, you in your book, life on the line, a wonderful, wonderful book that is about your life, but also within the context of the american women's movement, you quote often from sojourner truth, because sojourner truth basically said, "take those rights." >> exactly. >> hinojosa: "take them." >> "if they want more rights than what they got, why don't they just take them and not be talking about it," she said. >> hinojosa: well, so what do you think about that in this moment in history? are we... where are we in terms of the talking and the taking of women's rights and... >> well, i think that a lot of the legal barriers have been broken, and there is a perception even among women that

"all i have to do is find a way personally to make that journey." that's really a misperception of the reality, because an individual struggle is far less powerful, far less successful, than a collective. and i think that's the message that sojourner truth was trying to offer the people of that... or the women of that day, white women primarily. and she was an ex-slave, and she just simply could not understand why they continued to talk about it, because in their numbers they had the power to make change. and that's also where we are today. in women's numbers, we have the power to make change. we have the power to change the political landscape. there's no reason why congress should only consist of 17% women when we account for 51% of the electorate. there is no reason why there are only 15% women on public company boards when we make up the

majority of the marketplace and the consumer decisions in this country. we have to make a decision within ourselves as women that change has to continue to be made until there is true equality and equanimity and fair treatment. but that isn't to say that it is hostile to men. it is a better balance of women's participation than we have had in the past. >> hinojosa: so what do you think... and i'm thinking as i ask this question about your great grandmother, who you talk about, who was born a slave. >> yes. >> hinojosa: she said, basically, "i am not going to let you take my son and work him as a slave." speaking up to a white slaveowner. >> i knew my great grandmother who was born a slave. she died in 1957. and so i knew her not as some, you know, mythical figure, but really i was... i mean, i was about to go into my teens. and she was really quite known as a woman with tremendous

gumption. she had a certain sense of herself. but don't forget that she was born a slave. she came of age during reconstruction, when blacks were entering civic life, when there was a great desire to achieve equality and respectability in this new society, in this new order in which they were being thrust. she actually lived and died... was born and lived and died within a 20-mile radius in mississippi. so these were times in which blacks were challenging the old order, before the jim crow laws. i suspect that those years influenced her attitude about herself and her sense of self possession that women sometimes do not demonstrate and do not evoke today. >> hinojosa: so you have a fascinating life story. and one of the things that i found so interesting was the fact that your mom, who is a preacher... because when i would look at you and i'd see you, you know, representing planned parenthood, and you were just

always just owning your power and owning your dynamism and your voice, and it was so revealing to find out that your mom basically had a lot of problems about the fact that you were doing this, that you were talking about reproductive rights. >> my mother was a fundamentalist minister. she sought the ministry, or she felt the calling to the ministry, at the age of 17. so the bulk of her life, 70 years... she retired from the ministry at 87. and she believed literally in the teaching of the bible to be fruitful and multiply. >> hinojosa: so how had was that for you to negotiate, to basically say, "mom... i love my mom, i love everything she represents, she's part of this history of powerful african american women, but mom is not liking what i'm doing"? and this is your life. >> well, i did not have to negotiate it any more than she had to negotiate her life with her parents. she felt her calling. i was trained as a nurse.

i think my mother hoped that i would become a missionary nurse. but along the process of becoming a professional nurse and receiving my bachelor's in nursing from ohio state, i learned a lot about a world that was much broader than the one that i had been taught and raised in. i learned that people do make decisions that are not religious based, and that my care needed to be nonjudgmental of their lives and their values and their decisions. it was... that was the journey that i traveled that ultimately led me to the head of planned parenthood. i did not need to feel that i wanted to convert or that i should convert my mother to my point of view. if i truly believed that i was working for a society in which each of us needs to come to that position for our personal lives, framed by our personal values, then i had to walk the walk in my own life and in my own family. my mother prayed for me a lot, and i think that she was in faith assuming that someday i

would no longer do that work. it took a long time, because i spent 22 years all totaled in the planned parenthood organization. but we did not negotiate. it was not a matter of negotiation. i was doing my work, and she was doing hers. i respected her. she was certainly the mother who had taught me the values of respecting others' points of view, the power of persuasion... because she was a preacher, she persuaded people to a different point of view. the hope that i believe is in the legacy that i left planned parenthood is that i persuaded a lot of people that the circumstances of women's lives should not be the business of government, should be the personal circumstances that women make decisions about which none of us can fully judge, nor should we judge, but that women be given the widest possible opportunity through knowledge and through access to services

to make the best decisions for themselves. >> hinojosa: so when the election, the primary election for president was rolling around... and you've written in several places, you've said, look, you never imagined that you would have to face this reality of voting either for a woman who actually had a shot, hillary clinton, or voting for an african american man with a wife who's a powerful african american woman, what happened in that voting booth? >> well, it's very interesting, because i went to the voting booth not really knowing whom i would vote for. and i really just thought, this is really such a historic moment. i mean, i was sort of taken aback by the power of the moment in history. because whom of us thought... or who of us thought that we would ever encounter a black man at the same time that we were looking, in the primary, for the possibility of a white woman earning the nomination? i finally made the decision that i knew that i was a girl before

i knew my racial classification, and i voted for hillary. >> hinojosa: which is so wonderful for people to just kind of see that there is so much complexity. and another child may have seen herself as black before she saw herself as a girl. you don't know. but let's talk, just in the last few minutes that we have, about the state of reproductive rights in this country. what is your biggest concern? >> my biggest concern is that we have slipped back in a very tragic way, and that there is enormous complacency about the certainty of reproductive rights. we have, as women, stood quietly as activist organizations not called loudly for the restoration or roe v. wade. >> hinojosa: do you really feel that they're... because a lot of people would say, "look, there has been..." you know, "there is a call, there are demonstrations." do you feel like it has just not been strong enough, or... >> when was the last demonstration decrying the supreme court's decision to allow states to ignore a woman's health in criminalizing a method

of pregnancy termination later in pregnancy? >> hinojosa: which is happening right now. >> which has happened. >> hinojosa: what states now? >> it has happened. i'm not sure about the number of states, because i now am not involved directly in a day to day concern with these issues. >> hinojosa: but several. >> but about 30 states at the last time i looked at it had some form of legislation in process to criminalize late term abortion procedures without consideration for a woman's health. in 1973, the supreme court said that states could outlaw late term abortions, but never if a woman's health or life were jeopardized. the supreme court now says that states do not have to consider a woman's health. now, there should be an uprising about that very critical part of roe v. wade now being overturned. and so i say roe v. wade has been overturned.

women do not enjoy the same reproductive rights that they enjoyed in the days in which we were worried about whether the government would interfere because we didn't think at the time that roe v. wade was strong enough. but over the 30 years of its enactment we have seen it chipped away and chipped away. and in the last decade or so the assault on roe v. wade has been pretty phenomenal. not only do we see waiting periods being enacted all over the country, legal prohibitions for minors giving their consent, which is a great complexity to me, that a minor does not have to gain their parents' consent to continue a pregnancy, but consent to terminate a pregnancy. given the relative balance of those decisions, what can we make of that, other than to say they're political decisions? >> hinojosa: so one of the things that i've heard which is quite disturbing is that when you have women who are finding it more difficult to have access to reproductive rights clinics,

and these are younger women who are, you know, not in major urban populated areas, and what they're turning to if they can't get a legal abor... if they can't get an abortion, access, that they are now buying stuff online. they're creating their... they're basically creating their own forms of trying to induce an abortion, which is making... i remember this, because you talked so much about being a nurse and seeing women who were coming in with botched illegal abortions. >> well, i'm old enough to remember the days before roe v. wade when the court did not invent the attempt of women to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. it legalized it, and recognized that it was a private decision, and that no woman should be injured or killed in an attempt to terminate a reproductive function. and so i do remember in the years in which i trained to become a nurse/midwife, which i ultimately used in my career as

a reproductive rights advocate, those women who did not have that choice, the women of the '60s, who did not have the choice to a safe pregnancy termination. and yes, they did turn to means that would kill them. yes, they did turn to potions and shadowy figures that promised them a safe pregnancy termination that often resulted in their sterilization, if not the death of the woman involved. why anyone could devalue women in such a way that would allow us to return that day to any woman, why any woman in this country should encounter the prospect of having an unintended pregnancy, an unwanted pregnancy, and not have the capability of turning to a safe, legal health provider and seeing that pregnancy terminated... 90% of them terminated in this country now in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

why we as advocates are allowing these conditions to develop as they did before 1973 is just absolutely baffling. >> hinojosa: so what does the new modern women's movement need to look like? is it about going out onto the street? is it about, you know, internet activity? what does it look like? paint a picture for us. >> it looks like marshalling and mobilizing the political strength that we have. maybe it does look like going to the street, because that is a visible, physical presence that people understand. it does connote that "i care deeply, physically about this issue." but it also recognizes that we cannot elect politicians to office to give them a pass on these issues. just as we would not elect a person to office that ran on a platform of press censorship,

there ought to be a dividing line about women's rights and women's reproductive rights. it's really as fundamental as our right to be, and not to be controlled and dictated in our decisions about our most personal and intimate lives by a government that cannot make that decision that is often very complicated. and so i would call upon women, and i would call upon activist organizations that have the power, the collective power to press politicians, to hold their feet to the fire, to hold our president to the fire when he says that we're going to advance prevention. mr. clinton used to say that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. i say that unintended pregnancy should be rare, abortion should be safe and legal. and that's the country that we ought to work toward-- more education, more prevention, and then leave it to the physician

and the woman involved to make the best decision for the circumstances in her life. >> hinojosa: well, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, faye wattleton. it's good to see you. >> thank you for having me. continue the conversation at wgbh.org/oneonone.

steves: the galata bridge spans the easy-to-defend inlet called the golden horn in the very heart of istanbul. a stroll across the bridge offers panoramic views of istanbul's old town, a chance to see how the fishermen are doing... and plenty of options for a drink or meal with a view. for fast food, istanbul-style, we're grabbing a fishwich, fresh from the guys who caught it, at one of the venerable and very tipsy fish-and-bread boats. oh, man. [ speaking turkish ] [ speaking turkish ] this is istanbul fast food, huh? now, this is what kind of fish? fresh mackerel. steves: from near the galata bridge, it's easy to hop a tour boat for a relaxing sail up the bosphorus and a chance to see

the city from the water, with europe on one side and asia on the other. you'll pass massive cruise ships which pour thousands of tourists into the city for a frantic day of sightseeing and shopping. the boat passes homes of wealthy locals who can afford some of the priciest real estate in turkey -- bosphorus waterfront. the dramatic bosphorus bridge was the first bridge ever to span o continents. and the rumeli fortress was built by the ottomans the year before they conquered the city of constantinople. tour boats share the bosphorus with plenty of commercial traffic. the narrow and strategic strait is a bottle neck busy with freighters, including lots of ukrainian and russian ships, since this is the only route from ports on the black sea out to the mediterranean. for more crowds and urban energy, you can join the million commuters who ferry over and back every day from the asian side of istanbul. ferries shuttle in and out from all directions as seas of locals

make their daily half-hour intercontinental commute.

>> funding for "overheard" with evan smith is provided in part by mfi foundation. improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialization. board certified attorneys in your community, experienced, respected, and tested. also, by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy. and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. and viewers like you. thank you. >> i'm evan smith. he's the most famous science fiction writer in the world, the best-selling, award-winning author of "neuromancer" and ten other novels over the last 30 years. his latest book is "the peripheral". he's william gibson. this is "overheard". [ cheering and applause ]. >> actually, there are not two sides to every issue. >> so i guess we can't fire him now. >> i guess we can't fire him