the author is debora l. spar who also has a day job as president of renard college in manhattan. ora l. spar are you a feminist? >> guest: if you asked me that question five years ago i would have said absolutely not. the combination of taking the job i have now and writing this book has made me a die-hard feminist although i think the word itself is a complicated word and i think we can get too caught up on the word itself rather than just thinking about the issues behind them which i and i think most women are still staunchly in favor of. >> host: how do you define feminism and what are we getting caught up in? >> guest: there's a great t-shirt we have floating around barnard in the effect that some of us have the crazy idea that women are equal to men. this is the core of what feminism is about and there is no one that will argue with that anymore these days. >> host: where did you grow up and how did you grow? >> guest: >> guest: i grew up outside of new york city a fairly typical upper-middle-class whites of bourbon childhood and i grew up in the air when feminism in retrospe