00:08:07.360I actually just moved here from the Upper West Side and am stunned by how much bougier it is here than there. And I love to ski. That is my insane passion when I'm not working or taking care of people.
00:08:24.760And now that I don't have to take care of people because my children are all grown up, which is extremely exciting, and that will happen someday to you, I get to have real free time and do fun things occasionally with my life.
00:09:04.240I just booked a trip to Paris by myself for my best friend's 50th birthday.
00:09:11.420And I'm attempting not to feel guilty about any of that because I'm a better mom when I can show up as a real human being in the world.
00:09:19.900That is so smart. And I feel like everyone loses track of how important it is to pull the oxygen
00:09:26.920mask down, put it on your mouth first. Totally. And we hear that advice. That's the only way you
00:09:31.380can save your children. Exactly. We hear that advice all the time and we don't take it.
00:09:35.740We don't. I recommend it also for your marriage. Yes. Force yourselves to go away together and
00:09:41.980leave the kids behind. Oh, yeah. That ultimately will be better for the kids too. Absolutely.
00:09:47.640Absolutely. Absolutely. Everything we just talked about has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about today. We are going to talk about what you do for work and about this brilliant new book of yours. Tell our audience about it.
00:10:01.960So I've just written a book that's coming out this week, actually, called The Movement, How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963 to 1973. And it's an oral history of the women's liberation movement.
00:10:19.540So for this book, I interviewed about 100 women who were veterans of this second wave feminist movement, as we call it, and have pieced together a narrative arc of the story of the birth of women's liberation of second wave feminism.
00:10:41.380And it's all told through first-person anecdotal stories, and it reads almost like reading dialogue because it's an oral history.
00:10:53.060And what I think is different and exciting about this book is we are hearing from these very intimate stories from women who were on the front lines of change.
00:11:04.800And the fact is, it was the first time in thousands of years that women changed and were able to actually seek and achieve a certain degree of equality.
00:11:19.940And so it's just a fascinating, I think, story of how women broke through this endless thousand-year barrier of being considered second-class citizens and rose to a point of passing legislation, changing the culture.
00:11:43.660And the book also goes into sports and art and how it was really a universal perfect storm that happened all over the country in so many different segments of society.
00:11:59.800And I now realize it's when I wrote it, of course, as a history, it took five years and I had no idea that we might have a woman of color running for president.
00:12:13.120and that when I first started, I also didn't know that we would lose our constitutional right to
00:12:18.860abortion. So, so many things have changed since I started the book and have made the book much
00:12:26.180more relevant to today. Yeah, you never know how important a book is going to be in the world when
00:12:35.220you start writing it because it takes so long for books to come out. But your book feels more
00:12:42.520important than ever. And, and I feel like it's going to fly off the shelves given where you're
00:12:47.720falling in the news cycle, which is not always the case because usually our crazy news cycle
00:12:52.720buries the best of books. But this one feels very, very important. Let's hope you're right.
00:13:00.660Let's not let it, no, we're not letting this get buried. We're not, we're not, we're not letting
00:13:04.080that happen. We are not. Okay. Okay. We're visualizing. We are manifesting. I manifest
00:13:09.900all the things. I'm going to light some freaking sage right now. Right now. Yes, we do all the0.87
00:13:15.380things. But there's so much that I want to dig into. This book is coming out at such an interesting
00:13:21.700time when we are seeing feminism beat up a lot in the media and in the culture, dragged through
00:13:31.360the mud. We're seeing a lot of cultural forces out there claiming that feminism was a failure,0.83
00:14:02.600as you're getting ready to launch this book, Baby, into the world,
00:14:05.160What your thoughts are on that world that we're seeing right now?
00:14:10.060Well, I just find it completely fascinating and also a regurgitation of exactly what was happening in the 50s before feminism took place, before second wave feminism occurred.
00:14:27.720And it's an age old argument and it's gone through so many cycles and it comes up almost every generation. So that's why I think my book is an important document because it gives almost a blueprint of what it used to be like, how it changed, why it changed and and can be used now as as a important cautionary tale.
00:14:53.540So, I mean, we have, I feel like I've been listening to your amazing podcast and it's really helped me understand the trad wife phenomenon. So we have trad wives and influencers and the whole social media scene that is that, at least in that world, is very hostile to feminism. And then, of course, we have J.D. Vance and Donald Trump.
00:15:21.860Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. Exactly. And you're all a piece.
00:15:25.680They're all a piece. They are. And I say a lot on this podcast that we are in many ways repeating what we saw happening in the 50s. I went to a talk by St. Margaret Atwood, and she said similar things.
00:15:45.280But, you know, you are the expert at this. Can you walk us through what was happening in the 50s that is similar to what we're seeing today?
00:15:55.680So the similarities are pretty mind-blowing.
00:15:59.900I actually went back and looked at The Feminine Mystique, which is the first few chapters of my book mention it as well.
00:16:10.360It was a book written by Betty Friedan, published in 1963, and sold millions of copies very quickly and launched her into a level of celebrity and also helped to launch the second wave movement.
00:16:28.840And in it, she describes something called the Feminine Mystique, which was a creation of mostly the advertising industry to encourage women to go home and achieve a certain mystique stature magic as housewives.
00:16:52.560And this was all happening right after World War II. So we have World War II. It ends in 1945. During the World War, a lot of women went into the workplace and were taking over jobs for men.0.59
00:17:08.200But then after the men came home, it was very they all the women went back home and were told that they needed to completely change their identities back to being housewives.
00:17:19.960And there was there was a huge amount of prosperity in the country. Many, many white people moved to the suburbs and everything started to change for women because in the even the 20s and 30s and 40s, there seemed to be some progress.
00:17:39.780suffrage was one in the 20s, and women started getting educated and joining the workforce to
00:17:47.520some degree. And then World War II, of course, was a big boost. But then after that, there were0.64
00:17:53.080several factors that kept women at home in a new, aggressive way that hadn't existed before.1.00
00:18:01.660One of them was the Cold War. It became quite political to be against communism. Communism at the time was all about collective living. And women in communist countries were working. There was state-run child care.
00:18:20.340So being able to prove that women were at home and happy and taking care of their children was a capitalist sort of policy in a way.0.51
00:18:32.060Then the other thing that was very capitalist and had a lot to do with this was women at the time held 75 percent of the purchasing power in America.
00:18:41.640And so after World War II ended, consumer sales would need to take place of war contracts.
00:18:50.340And so advertisers, the mad men that we watched so much who were on Madison Avenue, began aggressively selling new processed foods, cleaning agents, waxes, polishes, detergents, labor-saving electrical appliances that were all coming on the market.
00:19:11.080And there was a lot of research behind how to sell these products.
00:19:21.380And Betty Friedan went deep into that research, and it's fascinating.
00:19:26.780And her chapter nine is called The Sexual Sell.
00:19:30.020And she interviews advertising execs all about how their goal was to help women feel that their identity as mothers and wives and house homemakers was something they could be very proud of and therefore go and buy all of their items that were advertised relentlessly in the women's magazines and on television, creating the feminine mystique.
00:19:59.260But, of course, what Betty Friedan found out when she went back to her Smith class and interviewed her classmates, albeit all of them white, privileged, educated, and all of them living in the suburbs and married, she discovered they were miserable.
00:20:18.160And many of them were in therapy and they didn't have an identity.
00:20:22.440They felt that they were being swallowed up by their children.
00:20:26.780And so she then went and looked into the statistics, which are quite amazing. And this is something that I really think is so important for today's followers of Hannah Needleman, for example, to know.
00:20:44.280that the number of women who were in college in 1920, it was 47% of college students were women
00:20:56.440in 1920. That dropped to 35% in 1958. And in the mid-1960s, 60% of female students dropped out of
00:21:06.760college to get married. Whoa, whoa. The purpose of college was to get an MRS degree.1.00
00:21:17.140So, all right, all right. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to stop you on that. We're going to,
00:21:20.200and we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're, I mean, just, I'm going to
00:21:24.080end you on a wow. And then we're going to come back with some more wow. Okay, we are back. You
00:21:35.420just told us those staggering, staggering statistics about women in college. And I mean,
00:21:44.200look, past is prologue, I think. And we have so much to learn, so much to learn from the so-called
00:21:53.540tradwives of the past. And I constantly say that I think the tradwife movement now really embraces0.98
00:21:58.820of false nostalgia. And I think you really identify that in your book. Because what did0.99
00:22:06.040this, how did the so-called trad wives of the 50s and 60s, how did they feel about their lives?0.53
00:22:12.980Well, many of them who Betty Friedan interviewed and who bought her book with alacrity all over
00:22:22.020the country were absolutely miserable because the ones especially who were educated felt as
00:22:28.640if they weren't able to be themselves, be who they needed to be. And this is something that I
00:22:35.900think is so important. It's fine. If you want to be a housewife, go for it. If you have a husband
00:22:42.020who can support you and your family, who isn't going to leave you, who isn't going to die on you,
00:22:48.760who doesn't beat you, who you happen to be happy with, and you have the money to stay at home,
00:22:56.020That's great. But proselytizing that sort of behavior and moralizing it, as, of course, J.D. Vance does to such an extreme degree, is so dangerous because it's really all about privilege.
00:23:12.240And one of the things that Betty Friedan has been criticized for is she was really only writing about white privileged women who were educated and lived in the suburbs.
00:23:23.360And, of course, meanwhile, women of color, black women who didn't have as much money were living the, quote, double day, which is they were taking care of their own house and children and doing everything and then going and working and taking care of a white woman's house and children.
00:23:38.840So that so much of this new retro concept of the traditional wife is really just about white privilege, first of all. And I think it's also incredibly ignorant because what came in the 50s and 60s with women staying at home, not getting educated, not working, was they were not part of the power structure of America.0.59
00:24:05.980I mean, for example, in 1970, only 7% of all doctors were women. You could almost never have an OBGYN who was a woman.0.77
00:24:19.320Which is bananas because I never want a man all up in my vagina.1.00
00:30:01.200And the point of view, the thing that I think were feminism.1.00
00:30:07.100fail, but I wouldn't blame it on feminism. I would actually blame it on conservative backlash1.00
00:30:12.020forces. The big failure here is child care. 100%. And that is why being a working mother is0.58
00:30:21.220the scarcity of child care. And the fact that America is the only Western society that doesn't
00:30:27.980have paid maternity leave and paternity leave, it makes being a working mother incredible.
00:30:37.100hard. And it is a hard juggle. And in 1971, the feminist movement on Capitol Hill managed to pass
00:30:48.420both in the House and Senate with large majorities, a universal child care bill that would have
00:30:54.920changed the lives of women for generations, working women. And Nixon, the president at the0.99
00:31:01.900time vetoed it. And this was actually this moment was that I think the beginning, it signaled the
00:31:09.820beginning of the backlash that would take place during the later 70s and 80s. But his reasoning
00:31:18.080for vetoing this very popular bill that was bipartisan was that it was universal child care
00:31:25.580was, again, a communist concept. It was socialist. It sort of reminds me of how Trump likes to call
00:31:33.380Kamala Harris a radical socialist. Part of the idea of socialism is, and why it's so terrible
00:31:40.940for the Christian nationalist conservatives, is that it takes women out of the home and gives
00:31:48.580them a freedom to actually do what they need to do economically to survive. So a lot of this is
00:31:56.380really about survival and how women can get the support they need. And childcare is the number
00:32:01.480one way. Also having husbands and fathers play a much bigger role in childcare and have corporate
00:32:08.100america be more lenient about um flexible you know flexible hours and support and daycare and
00:32:19.040things like that so it is it's it's terribly hard it shouldn't be as hard as it is to do this juggle
00:32:25.360and it is because we're america you know i think yes if you go to this if you go to norway norway
00:32:31.760and sweden you'll find that there's much more available child care and that women are you know
00:32:37.260participating in higher percentages and in a lot of society because of that.
00:32:43.140So but the answer isn't, well, let's just go home and stay at home because that really isn't the answer.
00:32:50.760There's no safety there. You know, you never know what's going to happen.
00:32:56.240We're going to take one more quick break. And when we get back, I want to know why the answer, why the answer is not just go back, just go back to the home.
00:33:07.260I want to know why the answer, why the answer is not just go back, just go back to the home.1.00
00:33:14.920Well, the reason why it's not the right answer is when women go back to the home, they have no agency.1.00
00:33:21.080They have no economic independence.1.00
00:33:24.220And therefore, especially, and they generally don't have a lot of agency over their life choices.
00:33:30.800And it's beautiful to have children and take care of them.
00:33:35.380It's beautiful to be in a loving marriage.
00:33:37.560Everyone, many people, not certainly not everyone, but many people want that.
00:33:42.360And but it doesn't always work out so well.0.99
00:33:46.280And if you talk to anybody in their 40s or 50s who are a lot farther along this path, you know, shit happens.0.98
00:34:00.420You have to leave them, even though J.D. Vance doesn't recommend it.
00:34:04.920Well, and you know, and job and we might not be allowed to for much longer because no pop divorce may go away as well.
00:34:11.340So, yeah. So marriages aren't necessarily the answer.
00:34:15.760Men also die. OK, you know, shit happens.1.00
00:34:19.360Life happens. And then to be left with no skills, no ability to to earn a living, it makes women incredibly vulnerable and then and poor ultimately and and stressed out.0.99
00:34:33.920that's the most stressful thing ever is poverty let's talk you know it's really talk about that
00:34:39.580yeah absolutely and when i talk to women who are on the other side of this women who were in and0.51
00:34:46.520i don't even like to call them traditional relationships again because this is a false
00:34:50.660nostalgia for a world that really only existed for a very small amount of the population but
00:34:55.900you know women who did allow their husband this kind of autonomy in their marriages and when they
00:35:03.760get divorced, when they get left for a younger model, they are just stuck. They have no options
00:35:12.940and their warnings for young girls are so heartbreaking. And I don't know if a lot of
00:35:20.400young women are listening or if we're kind of screaming into the void. I will say that
00:35:25.940conservative forces and the trad wives have done a very good job of making that life look
00:35:33.160aspirational on social media, because I think that it's hard to make the reality of it look
00:35:38.500aspirational. I'm sitting here right now making a podcast, essentially without pants on, and my
00:35:47.380hair is not washed, and I have to take the kid to the doctor for an ear infection at three, and
00:35:53.960I'm exhausted, but I'm also exhilarated and a best-selling author, and I love my career,
00:36:00.020and I love my children and I love my husband and all of it is hard and wonderful and terrible,
00:36:03.980but it's really hard to show that in a single picture. And also no one wants to see me in my
00:36:08.140underwear right now. Well, this is the problem with social media is it just flattens everything.
00:36:13.720It just makes everything so fake and it's just there's no reality to it at all. And but it can
00:36:21.300have so much power. So I really I just think it's important not to have historical amnesia
00:36:29.200And the young women who have this, you know, have this desire to stay at home and not develop themselves professionally or really emotionally because developing some sort of profession, some sort of avocation beyond bearing children usually gives women, and this is something Betty Friedan talked about a lot, a sense of identity.
00:36:56.420And when you limit options for anybody, it is soul destroyed. And that's ultimately what happened to women in the 50s. They rebelled. They couldn't take it any longer. But I love to talk about, I think the original trad wife was Phyllis Schlafly.
00:37:48.200she wanted to get ahead in the Republican Party, but she had supported Goldwater, which made her0.98
00:37:56.840unpopular when he lost. And she was looking for a subject that would help launch her sort of new
00:38:04.720political career. And lo and behold, something called the Equal Rights Amendment turned up.
00:38:10.280And the Equal Rights Amendment, which, as some of your listeners probably know, never became
00:38:17.920part of the Constitution. But it was a very simple one-liner, which just said that women,
00:38:25.320equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by
00:38:31.380any state on account of sex. That's it. That's all it was. And it passed with flying colors,
00:38:38.220just like child care. Lots of Republicans voted for it, too, in the House and the Senate.
00:38:43.900And Phyllis realized that this might be a topic that she could take advantage of. And she started attacking women's lib and said that it was an assault on the role of the American woman as a wife and mother and on the family as a basic unit of society.0.99
00:39:04.080and that women would be forced out of the home if the ERA became law.0.99
00:39:10.920They would be forced to go into the military and be in combat,1.00
00:39:15.560and their husbands would no longer take care of them financially.0.95
00:39:19.920She just sent out all of these red herrings, all of them lies,
00:39:23.560none of them real about what the real impact would have been of the ERA.
00:39:28.500But she ignited a very important part of the party, which later, of course, thrived in the 80s, which was a Christian conservative part of the movement.
00:39:43.000And in the end, she won because the ERA needed to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. And by the early 80s, they couldn't pull it off because Phyllis had used this propaganda so well and scared so many.
00:40:02.700She enlisted a lot of housewives and they would go to different state legislatures with homemade buns and cookies and give them out to all the white men who, of course, everybody in the state legislators, everyone voting for the ERA were all men because there were very few women in politics and in any sort of form of leadership in public.0.92
00:40:26.720So men were making these laws, and Phyllis became the perfect lightning rod for them, and they would hide behind her thought and her propaganda that women libbers, as she called them, didn't speak for a majority of American women, and that American women do not want to be liberated from their husbands and their children.
00:40:52.020wow wow wow and wow yes i mean it is but i what i think is very interesting is that i do talk to
00:41:03.240a lot of young women and they've never heard the name phyllis shaftley that's the problem
00:41:08.080and a lot of this history is being forgotten um and i don't know how to continue to amplify it
00:41:18.900Your book is such a good way to do that, but also how can we amplify it to all of the young women who are not reading who are simply on TikTok all day, which is a lot of people.
00:41:30.560It's TikTok. The content of TikTok needs to get better.
00:41:44.100It's brainwashing. And it's consumer culture, as we know, as you've done such a great job of pointing out. And consumer commercial interests are also behind a lot of it. As influencers get so much money from different products and brands who, you know, want to encourage women to stay at home so they'll buy what they want to sell them.
00:42:10.700exactly exactly i mean so much of this is about capitalism it's about politics it's not about
00:42:17.220what women want and women deserve and we've seen this happen before uh and we'll see it happen
00:42:22.440again so that is why your book is so important i'm gonna buy it for five young women i'm gonna
00:42:27.360buy another five copies and put them in little free libraries oh thank you because i just think
00:42:32.840you know it's very important to remember where we came from and that the struggle the struggle now
00:42:38.440is real. The struggle has always been real. Feminism is not to blame. And no one's life
00:42:45.560is beautiful, covered in white linen and laying in a bed of roses with clean children and nice
00:42:54.040chickens. Chickens are usually assholes. Okay. I've never met a nice chicken.1.00
00:42:59.560Exactly. So yeah, yeah, exactly. Like that is it. The reality is not what you see on the social
00:43:06.800media. It's not. I loved having you. Tell people where they can find you and your brilliant book.
00:43:12.420So they can find my book starting July 30th in any store, we hope, in your neighborhood. And
00:43:19.220of course, on Bookshop, which is my favorite place to buy books online because it supports
00:43:25.320independent sellers and Amazon. And the Amazon, it is there, but I love Bookshop. I do. I do. I do
00:43:31.900a lot on the Bookshop. And yeah, we're going to shout about this from the rooftop. I'm hitting
00:43:36.660order right now. You're amazing. Thank you so much for being here.
00:43:40.480Thanks for having me, Jo, and thanks for all that you do for women.