Feminist Detective: The Case of Body Positivity

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Is the body positivity movement a good thing or a bad thing for feminism? Ruth Whippman joins Lauren to discuss.

Take a listen and let us know what you think about the body positivity movement.. and anything else you want me and Ruth to uncover. Email us at info@inflectionpointradio.org. You can write OR record your question in a voice memo on your phone and send it.

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Solo Swimmer Kim Chambers: "Surround yourself with people who believe in you."

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Kim Chambers is only the sixth person ever to complete the Ocean’s Seven challenge... solo. That's seven open water channel swims. Think summiting Mount Everest in a bathing suit x 7… hours upon hours upon hours of swimming in critter-filled, often quite cold water. Kim is also the first and only woman in the world to solo swim the thirty miles of shark inhabited waters from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate of San Francisco. We spoke about taking risks, jellyfish and body image--as well as how important having a team who believes in you is for "individual" success. Listen to our conversation and check out Kim’s documentary “Kim Swims”.

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How To Plug Into The Green New Deal - Rhiana Gunn-Wright

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Meet the woman who helped develop The Green New Deal--and hear how you personally can make a difference in the climate crisis. Rhiana Gunn-Wright is the former policy director for New Consensus and Abdul El-Sayed’s 2018 Michigan gubernatorial campaign. She warns that without a shift in our policies and systems, we could become a nation of "fortresses" and "sacrifice zones". We’ll hear where she came from and how can the way she thinks about solving problems, can solve the biggest crisis of our time. A 2013 Rhodes Scholar, Gunn-Wright has also worked as the policy analyst for the Detroit Health Department, was a Mariam K. Chamberlain Fellow of Women and Public Policy at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and served on the policy team for former First Lady Michelle Obama. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 2011 with majors in African American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Listen to Rhiana’s Toolkit for how you can make the Green New Deal resolution a reality.

Read the Green New Deal.

Take action with the Sunrise Movement.

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How Actor Amber Tamblyn Created Her Own Role: Feminist Activist

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In this episode we’ll hear how Amber Tamblyn went from being an actress to being an activist--defining her own role in the feminist movement--and how we can all play a role in leading change.  Amber's  book is called "Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution." It's part memoir, part manifesto, part call to action. We sat down together in San Francisco while she was in town as part of the release of her book in paperback.

Back in 2017, Amber wrote an OpEd for the NYTimes, called "I'm Done With Not Being Believed" in which she tells what happened when a well-known actor almost as old as her dad tried to pick her up when she was 16, and then called her a liar when she outed him on Twitter. This was before the Weinstein revelations, before the #MeToo movement caught fire and before Times Up, which Amber went on to co-found.


TRANSCRIPT. We do our best, please forgive or let us know any errors.

Lauren Schiller:

Do you remember there was an op-ed that came out a few years ago in the New York Times and the headline was, I'm done with not being believed. It was before the Weinstein revelations, before Me Too, before Time's Up. But just after Trump's grab them by the pussy tape. It was written by...

Amber Tamblyn:

My name is Amber Tamblyn, and I am an author, actress, director, producer. I am many things.

Lauren Schiller:

By the time Amber wrote this op-ed, she'd been acting for over 20 years since she was 11. You might know her from General Hospital, Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants, Joan of Arcadia. She also directed the movie Painted Black, and has published a novel and several books of poetry.

Lauren Schiller:

In this op-ed, She tells what happened when a well-known actor, almost as old as her dad tried to pick her up when she was 16 and then called her a liar when she outed him on Twitter.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so I wrote the piece which really looked at that exact idea, which was that I was really, really, really effing done with not being believed, with being told that my story was not going to matter, that it was always going to be, "Let's not believe her first. And let's believe him First," just because that's the narrative. That's the way things go.

Lauren Schiller:

After the piece came out, Amber attended a Hollywood party. She'd been to many times before, filled with bold face names.

Amber Tamblyn:

So many people in our industry, not only incredibly famous, but powerful, really powerful executives, women who run companies who I've never talked to who I would normally never really not have an interaction with, coming up to tell me how much that piece meant and many of them sharing some stories.

Amber Tamblyn:

That was the part that I didn't really realize... I mean, I knew that it had sort of set this fire on everyone reading it on social media and in that world. But that was a really powerful evening in which I sensed that something was coming.

Lauren Schiller:

And then in quick succession, we all learned about Harvey Weinstein, felt the full force of the Me Too movement, and saw the creation of Times Up of which Amber is a founding member.

Amber Tamblyn:

And now we've seen in so many ways, especially with these incredible silence breaker women who have come forward and testified and given their stories about what Weinstein did, but not only that, not only the violence, but the silencing and the stalking and hiring these companies to follow them and plant evidence against them and everything that's happened. You understand how far predominantly men in positions of power will go to keep us quiet and away from that power. So, to me it was it struck such a nerve and it just felt like an opening.

Lauren Schiller:

In the wake of all this, Amber wrote a book called Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution, which is part memoir, part manifesto and part call to action.

Lauren Schiller:

We sat down together in San Francisco while she was in town as part of the release of her book in paperback. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, the stories of how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:

Today we'll hear how Amber Tamblyn went from being an actress to being an activist, defining her own role in the feminist movement and how we can all play a role in leading change. We'll be right back.

Lauren Schiller:

I'm back with Amber Tamblyn. I'm curious about how you got into acting in the first place at such a young age. And how that shaped your view of yourself, your sense of yourself.

Amber Tamblyn:

This question has always been a very easy answer for me since I was very young. I had a stump speech that I was able to give. My dad who was in West Side Story, his agent saw me when I was in a play when I was very young and she said, "We've got to get her into acting."

Amber Tamblyn:

And I went on some auditions and I got a role when I was 11 on a soap opera. I had a stump speech version of that answer for a very long time. And I think it wasn't until I hit my own, to use the phrase Era of Ignition and my own sort of existential crisis that propelled me into the person I am today. Did that question become very complicated and require much deeper thought and explanation?

Amber Tamblyn:

Because I don't know when you are a child, if you are choosing to act, you're not making that choice to yourself. Adults around you are making that choice. And it's taken me a long time to think about what I lost in the course of that what you lose as a child who is not only working for a living and taking care of your family for a living, but also playing other people for a living, taking on the personalities of other people, telling your body on a daily basis from one part to the next. Today you're having a heroin overdose. Today you're raped. Today you've been murdered today. You're crying all day today. You're incredibly happy. It takes its toll.

Amber Tamblyn:

So I don't know how much choice really ever came into that part of it for me, but it's certainly been... it's a story. My story is not one I would change for anything in the worlds because it has produced the person that I am today.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, it's interesting all those roles that you just reeled off, none of them were of powerful women or girls taking charge or even, I mean, any of the roles that were sort of starting to see today. I mean, how did that make you feel about yourself? I mean and even did at the time how you felt about yourself? Or is it really only kind of in hindsight that you could reflect on that?

Amber Tamblyn:

I think as a young woman, I had many of the same frustrations that I couldn't pinpoint, or put a reason behind the way that many women do or have in their given fields in their industries. A sense of being emotionally extorted, a sense of having your value, not feel seen or utilized a sense of there is something greater for you. There is something bigger for you, a calling that you don't know how to manifest for yourself though it's there, it exists.

Amber Tamblyn:

That's universal. That is every woman's experience. That is my mom who's a retired school teacher of three decades. That's her experience. And my grandmother who was a piano teacher and vocal coach and it just every woman I know has had that at some degree.

Amber Tamblyn:

So I think it's, right now we're going through this really, really wonderful time in the entertainment business where things are not feeling like they're going as fast as they should be as far as change is concerned. But still at the same time, you are seeing an unprecedented number of women and people of color and voices that have traditionally been left out of artistic, cultural point of view, now becoming very much a part of that landscape both in television and film.

Amber Tamblyn:

Not as much as I would like and that many would like, but a lot more than before. And so there is a real... it's very bittersweet for me. because I went through a time where like the women who came before me, all of them were speaking out was really dangerous and where it didn't matter how good the movie is that you made or directed or poured your guts and life into and the reviews, how fantastic they were. It didn't matter.

Amber Tamblyn:

You were still going to be seen as less than, and therefore your work was going to be seen and valued as less than. But I think we're kind of in a different space now. I feel that. Again, with the caveat, not as much as I would hope, but we're getting there.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I'm learning is that change is just a lot freaking slower that I would like it to be. Sounds like you might like it to be as well, especially when you really start to recognize the problems and put your fingers on the problems. And then its like, "Well, what's taking so long? Why can't we just fix that right now?"

Amber Tamblyn:

Yeah, I mean Rome wasn't burned to the ground and built back up in a day and it takes a minute. It really takes a minute to... we're still in the phase of people trying to get on board. We are still in the backlash phase. You have to remember that we are literally dismantling something that dates back to the Bible, that dates back to Roman Empire to all the ways in which women have ever tried to gain access or use their voice for a platform or find themselves in a position of power and have found themselves shut out. We are trying to dismantle thousands and thousands of years of that and you can't do it overnight.

Amber Tamblyn:

It's just not going to happen and it has to be slow, and it's going to take time. And what I always say to people is the most important thing is that we practice patience and perseverance. Those two things together. Because what we can't do is get frustrated and back off and go, this isn't working, we're still getting attacked, we're still being silenced. These things are still happening and go be upset about that. I mean, you could be upset about it, but we have to keep moving. We have to keep pushing forward.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, in some ways, seeing the news that comes out every day about the latest egregious a front it is frustrating, but it's also a good thing, right? Because we weren't necessarily hearing about these things before on the front page of the newspaper.

Amber Tamblyn:

I'll give you a great example of that. That's actually really smart that you brought that up because for instance, even if you look at the Academy Award nominations this year in 2020 and with full transparency, I am one of the Academy voters. I was one of the many women and people that they brought in and this huge attempt to try to balance out their membership and make it more representative and diverse.

Amber Tamblyn:

And even still, you see no women directors nominated, you see women's sort of shut out and especially people of color shutout in major categories. But I think it's fascinating and says a lot about where we're at that the conversation about who was shut out was almost more loud and profound and took center stage over who would... who was actually nominated for the Oscars this year. And that's really not something that we have seen before.

Amber Tamblyn:

We've seen outrage here and there about certain things, but the fact that this took center stage, this became the conversation, says a lot and it's really important. That type of a pressure is very important.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. One has a vision of, at least when I was growing up like child actors and actresses flameout in their teens and twenties whether they succumb to drug use or alcohol or other forms of self-harm or other people's harming them. And you somehow were able to avoid that fate and in fact grapple with and then get on top of your situation.

Lauren Schiller:

And I'm curious you go into it in your book, Era of Ignition, but I'm curious to just hear how that self-awareness came to be and how you climbed out of it.

Amber Tamblyn:

Well, firstly I would say that it just didn't happen to me publicly. So I think one of the most difficult things to see with young actors and especially actresses, is when this happens to them publicly in their dealing with the combination of their privilege and their sense of having no identity, yet having to be responsible for an identity that that was given to them by a public when they are coming to terms with the realization that they have only been an object for a living at a time in which you are most delicately trying to create your central nervous system and your sense of self and your ID.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so that I think like my two books before this one was a book called Dark Sparkler, which looked at the lives and deaths of child star actresses. And that was a really intense and difficult exorcism for me, looking at all of those young actresses who had died. Again, either at the hands of stalkers or fathers or the things that they did to themselves. But it was an examination, not just of my culture but also I think the sense of my own need to die at a certain level.

Amber Tamblyn:

And not literally, but to have a... I have a real metaphorical death. I was craving an ending to this type of person that I had been for so long, which was not an ending of acting, which I've always loved. It's a great work. But an ending to the not having any control and to not being able to be the bigger version of yourself you had imagined. The person who controls her own content, who writes her own words, who interprets her own art.

Amber Tamblyn:

Those things were not available to me. As they are not for many women and in many different industries. And I think I had to go through my own version of that existential crisis to come out on the other side, which again is something I think all women go through, whether you're in your late 20s or early 30s. It is that Saturn Return, which I talk a lot about in the book.

Amber Tamblyn:

This idea, I call it in the book an Invisible Alphabet, where you are at A or B or C and you see that bright, glowing Z in the distance, but you have no idea how to manifest the alphabet in between. You just have no skill for it.

Amber Tamblyn:

And our culture doesn't give us a skill set for that. It really doesn't, if anything, it tries to keep women distanced from their own potential. So for me, I think it was about feeling like if I didn't come out on the other side, figuring out how to manifest that alphabet that bridge then I wasn't going to survive.

Amber Tamblyn:

So, this was an act of survival for me. And again, this is not me talking about a literal death. This is talking about, I don't know what I would have... where I would have ended up, who I would have been, what kind of career I would have had, if any had I not pushed through and done what I had to do, which didn't feel like a choice. It felt like an act of survival.

Lauren Schiller:

But you had the presence of mind to be able to step back and say, "This is just not working for me." And I'm trying to dig into that. I mean, I love the concept of the Saturn Return and I want to talk about that more because I feel like that happens... It just keeps happening. I mean, I'm older than you and I feel like I'm having that question right now.

Amber Tamblyn:

It's supposed to happen, by the way.

Lauren Schiller:

What is my Z, right? Like I've done all this. I've gotten... maybe let's just say I'm at... what's the middle of the alphabet? L.

Amber Tamblyn:

Like around your T. An S or a T.

Lauren Schiller:

So, just to try and understand how when you have that clarity or that recognition that you do need to start reaching for a different direction.

Amber Tamblyn:

I write again in the book about how much I believe that women have been taught from a very young age, from when we were girls to confuse instinct for anxiety. I think that's very real. And the pit in your stomach, the thing that makes you sick every day that makes you question and then we are just so used to putting that away, is the thing we should be listening to the most.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think there's a great Henry Miller quote that says, "All growth is a leap in the dark." And I believe that to be true at any age. And yes, it's true that a Saturn Return, this reconnecting with your new self and pivoting to whatever that new trajectory of your life is supposed to be happens on a cycle. And it's going to happen to me again and I'm going to be in my forties probably going, "What am I doing? What have I done? What is this life I have built?"

Amber Tamblyn:

And that's the journey. I mean that is the finding the joy in that darkness and the excavation of that darkness, not shying away from it is where I have learned to find power. I think that is what some people would call, "The leaning in." There is many different ways of looking at it, but I really think it's important for us, especially as women to find safety and comfort and growth from leaning into those dark, painful questions.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. Leaning in started again kind of a bad rap, but it really is the right term because of-

Amber Tamblyn:

I don't know. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:

... moving back from you really need to push into it.

Amber Tamblyn:

I don't know much about that or the author who wrote it. I know that it was controversial because I think it was also... it comes with that same cliché of like women can have it all, that's not really what the question is. The question is, are women allowed to be? Period.

Amber Tamblyn:

Are we allowed to be? And does that mean... and if we are allowed to be, are we supposed to be this version of ourselves? Are we supposed to sound like this version of ourselves? Are we supposed to act like this version of ourselves? Who is controlling the narrative of how women are allowed to show up in their own lives and be powerful?

Amber Tamblyn:

And that is the age old question that seems to at every level continue to be a huge underlying problem. I mean, we're even seeing it now in the 2020 elections still, this idea of who is electable, who isn't, who is trustworthy and who isn't. I mean the afterword in this book that I wrote in Era of Ignition, I wrote it maybe six months ago and when I read it the other night at the book release party for this.

Amber Tamblyn:

I did this wonderful in conversation with a journalist, Jodi Kantor. And as I was reading it, I had to pause and like address to the audience and say, "This is scary how relevant this is right now." And it will always be relevant and tell we are having those deeper, more difficult conversations about why this continues to happen, about why we can't even agree on a definition of what misogyny or sexism is before addressing how to fix it.

Amber Tamblyn:

We are putting... we are just continually putting Band-Aids over things instead of dealing with the wound.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, before we get too far away from this, could you explain this... Your concept of the Saturn Return? I mean folks can read the book but let's give them a little taste of what, what do you meant.

Amber Tamblyn:

Well, the argument that I make in the book and the title I should, I guess I should talk a little bit. The title really to me is talking about this condensed time of palpable rage and frustration that we are all feeling that has propelled us into uncontrollable action.

Amber Tamblyn:

This sense of we're not going to wait for permission anymore. We are going to do, which is very much what Me Too and Time's Up have done over the last several years. But the book really looks at my own trajectory and my experience going from being a child actress who felt very much out of control over her own trajectory in life, and felt like she had been pigeonholed into this one area in which she could only go into other people's rooms, step into the threshold of other people's art and interpret their work without ever having her voice be a part of that interpretation.

Amber Tamblyn:

And the book chronicles my experience, learning how to forget about that room and that door and just build my own damn house, and my own space and my own room in which to exist and be, which is dangerous and scary and doesn't always work. That's sort of the micro look of the book while looking at the macro, which is the world we're living in is sort of having its own Era of Ignition as well.

Amber Tamblyn:

It is also having this Saturn's return, this idea that every 20 to 30 years, we are coming back to a space of beginning for ourselves, which very much is without going into like a deep thing about astrology. And about the way planets are aligned. We can maybe agree, maybe not. It might be philosophical, it might be spiritual, but agree that each of us are uniquely born in the moment we are born, the universe and planets are aligned in a certain way.

Amber Tamblyn:

I am not so narcissistic and egotistical to say, "I know what those planets, what that any of that means." But I believe that each of us have a unique story to tell. And therefore some of that might have something to do with this idea that we... our subconscious and our conscious mind and our spiritual living come into this state of crisis at certain points in our life at very pivotal points in our life.

Amber Tamblyn:

And I think that the country is in one of those existential crises right now. And so my argument is to always... and in this book is to not be afraid of it, is to lean into the darkness as we talked about. And to go for what is most uncomfortable because that is how things are going to change.

Amber Tamblyn:

All these conversations that terrify you about race and white feminism and are men being canceled too quickly, anything that you can feel you are having a tough time with as a woman, as a man, as a non-binary person, no matter where you come from, it is good that this conversation is happening.

Amber Tamblyn:

It is good that these things are coming up and bubbling up to the surface so that we can address them and address them with fear. That's okay, but to not shy away and pull away from this change, which we have all demanded and now it's here.

Amber Tamblyn:

So we have to push forward and go through that. So the book looks a little bit both at how to move through the world in this change that we're in, in this momentum, in the chaos of it. How to resensitize ourselves to these very tough conversations in which we've wanted to just be numb and give a bland answer, an easy answer, but how to truly engage with people around us and in our communities and therefore truly engage with ourselves in our own lives and re stimulating who we are, and who we are allowed to become, what our trajectory means.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. Well, you... I mean you did that so boldly and this is when I really first became aware of you in this Op-ed that you wrote in 2017. But this was before the Weinstein thing, right?

Amber Tamblyn:

It was about two months before the Weinstein article came out, which is one of the reasons, and I chronicle this deeply in the book about how Jodi Kantor had reached out to me because so many women had after reading that Op-ed, and that's when I really understood that this was part of the zeitgeist, the rage zeitgeists and that it was bubbling and it was right under the surface. And all Trump did is like put the village idiots pin in it and it popped. And that's what happened. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. Share with what the gist of the op-ed was. And I do encourage everyone who's listening to this to go back and read it. because it was, for me, going back and reading it again so prescient. I mean, clearly a lot of events were leading up to that moment, but I hadn't really seen or heard anyone just put a stake in the ground like you did at that time.

Lauren Schiller:

And then it felt like everything was cascading out of that in society, but then apparently also personally for you.

Amber Tamblyn:

So the short of that, op-ed came from a small Twitter exchange that happened online whereby I said something about James Woods picking up on me. The actor James was picking up on me once when I was 16. And of course, it became this huge firestorm. James Wood denied it, put out this thing in like the Hollywood Reporter or something. He was calling me a liar.

Amber Tamblyn:

And that was sort of the moment in which all of the James Woods's is before him. All of the men who have ever called women liars. For instance, most recently I would even look at Bernie Sanders essentially saying that Elizabeth Warren lied about this interaction they had. It is part of a narrative that women have always had to face. It is part of this idea that our stories cannot be trusted and therefore we cannot be trusted with power.

Amber Tamblyn:

It really is this logic that has been created by a patriarchal narrative and system that we live in. and it goes around and around and around and it chases it's disgusting tail. And so in that moment that was the survival thing that kicked in. That was the sense of I wasn't going to be quiet. I didn't know what the repercussions would be. And I reached out to my friend Roxanne Gay, the writer and I said, "Will you connect me with your editor at the New York times? I think I have an op-ed for them." And she did and that was it.

Lauren Schiller:

Again, even though it feels like this is so ingrained in our brains. at this point, I really, I had to go back and look at the chronology of things just to get the order of it right. So, your Op-ed comes out sometime in September.

Lauren Schiller:

The Weinstein story breaks sometime in October, a couple of weeks after that, Alyssa Milano tweets the Me Too hashtag, picking up on Toronto Burke's movement that was started in 2006. And then you got involved with a group of women and launched Time's Up in January of 2018. I mean that is really, I mean we talked about change being slow, but that's pretty rapid fire development.

Amber Tamblyn:

That is what I, the term I've coined called angronized, which when women get angry and organized and we were very angronized. That was mega propulsion of energy and being just fed up really, really fed up.

Amber Tamblyn:

And what the experience... and again, I will only speak for my own my personal journey with that was that women were getting in rooms together who had never really been encouraged to be alone in rooms together and talk in the entertainment business. You had very famous women like Reese Witherspoon, and that's not me speaking out of terms.

Amber Tamblyn:

Like she's been very much in front of this movement and, and a really wonderful proponent of change and you have America Ferrera and Natalie Portman and you had these women, then in the room with women like me who's not a huge movie star, but known in her own way, in a separate way. And then you had women who were also there, who were agents, who were assistants to agents, who were producers.

Amber Tamblyn:

You had women just from across the landscape and just... and nobody knew what to do. There was no roadmap for this which is what always makes me laugh when I hear people say, ‘Well, the punishment doesn't fit the crime." And my argument is always, well, who invented the punishment for the crime?

Amber Tamblyn:

And we don't know that yet. We are actually in the center of figuring out what fits what now according to this new world we live in. And you don't get to dictate it. And I don't get to dictate it. And this is a much larger than any one individual and certainly much larger than the feelings of men who have predominantly been the ones who are terrified of all that has happened, and been very scared and frustrated and angry about it. And, and have not had a sense of how they can help or how they can stop it.

Amber Tamblyn:

And to them I'm always like, ‘Well, welcome to feeling out of control," because that is how women have always felt. And here's where we are and things are changing whether you like it or not.

Amber Tamblyn:

No one is asking you anymore. So, my advice is always just get on board, get on board because this is the way it's going. And in that moment, it was this incredible experience. And it was messy. It was painful, it was a lot of crying. It was a lot of sharing of stories and revelations about people you had worked with, men you had worked with women you had worked with who were awful, who had taken care of predators, who had silenced women who had blacklisted actresses.

Amber Tamblyn:

I mean it was all just coming out. It was coming out everywhere and it was really a very difficult time, but it was making us feel alive. And from that place is where Time's Up was born was this idea of we need to declare something. But that declaration needs to be matched with an action.

Amber Tamblyn:

It cannot just be, "Hey everyone, we're angry. Here's a letter." It had to be paired with something which is where the time's up. Legal defense fund came from.

Lauren Schiller:

This is all taking place. This is actually women physically present in a room together.

Amber Tamblyn:

Yeah. There were meetings happening all over LA and in New York too. Just everywhere. Anyone that had a sizable house that could fit 30 to 70 women at any given time and there was no... nobody knew what the hell they were doing, and people's feelings got hurt. It was not great for a lot of the times.

Amber Tamblyn:

White women were just dominating the rooms. Famous white women were trying to lead everything and make everything about them, and women of color were not having their voices heard in those rooms.

Amber Tamblyn:

And this was... this is all important to say though, because it helped us work on this conversation, which has needed to happen amongst women. This is the micro, micro, right? This is the meta, meta, that it's not only just about systems of power around us and men who are in... who are dominating those systems of power, but it is about the, what I call The Susan Collins Effect. So it is about the women who are adjacent and aligned with upholding that white privilege and that power, who are also themselves equally as responsible. And part of the problem.

Amber Tamblyn:

Well we can sort of put down our defenses and examine that, we're still going to be a part of that problem. And so, we had to have a lot of really tough conversations. They're still happening. This is a huge, huge community building exercise that has been led with a lot of passion and pain. And people want answers and they want justice. And sometimes those things don't come swiftly or swiftly enough. But I think we are seeing as I've said, at least things are changing. At least they are moving. And that to me is something

Lauren Schiller:

I'm Lauren Schiller and I'm talking with Amber Tamblyn, whose book Era of Ignition is out in paperback now subscribe to the Inflection Point Podcast and make a contribution toward our production at inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:

We're back with Amber Tamblyn, actress, director, women's rights advocate and co-founder of Time's Up. So what are you seeing that's changing that you're feeling good about?

Amber Tamblyn:

I think one of the most wonderful things I see is and again, I'll maybe I'll just speak for my industry because I think that's an important place to come from of what I know. There's a lot more engagement and conversation and public discourse and dialogue about women as directors, women running things, women being able to be the ones to green light, to decide the point of view, the narrative that's going to be told in a film or a TV show. My friend America Ferrera just executive produced a show called Gentrified which is coming out on Netflix.

Amber Tamblyn:

And you've got women like Janet Mock, trans women of color who just had an overall deal at Netflix, the first woman of color ever to have that there. And you're seeing sort of these unprecedented moves as far as whose voices are being able to be in the room, who is getting to be able to create content.

Amber Tamblyn:

You've got the Lena Waithe. You've got these incredibly powerful queer non-binary trans women, women of all kinds who are making huge strides in the business. And while it's still not enough, while you still look at for instance, I think the Annenberg Institute just came out with a huge... they come out with their annual Annenberg Institute study, which looks at gender inequality in the workplace and in our business and specific in the entertainment business.

Amber Tamblyn:

And you still look and there's still just low numbers. It's still something around like 4% for women directors and it's still really low. So there's still just a lot of work to be done. But I do see that changing in the business. I do see a greater need for women in writers' rooms, women behind the camera, women running the camera, women producing entertainment, all of those things. It's happening.

Lauren Schiller:

One of the many things that I loved about reading your book is that I felt like, I don't know if it was at the end of each chapter but definitely interspersed throughout each story, was what I the reader can take away from this and what I could go do to make a difference.

Lauren Schiller:

And some of the things that I pulled out from it are this idea of opening the door for others and offering access that others don't have. And the plus one-

Amber Tamblyn:

Isn't that great?

Lauren Schiller:

So could you elaborate on... I feel like those are all kind of mixed together, but you can parse them if you want. But could you elaborate on this?

Amber Tamblyn:

So plus one is something that came out of Time's Up which was an idea that we have in our business again, but it's been carried over into Time's Up healthcare and all kinds of different industries, where the idea is anybody at any level whether you're the most known powerful person or whether you feel you have nothing to offer does have something to offer.

Amber Tamblyn:

And sometimes that is often just access. For instance, I just talked about these Hollywood parties right? How much I hate going to them. Most people hate going to them. They really do. Except for this one Jeffrey Katzenberg party. But to think that I could squander the invitations that I get to an elite Hollywood party where you might be able to rub elbows with some of the most important showrunners, executives, people who are creating content is a privilege for me to have.

Amber Tamblyn:

And that is an access that I have always had. But I have never thought that that would be possibly interesting or important to anybody else. To a young budding writer, a young woman who came out of college you would love to be staffed on a show. The idea that I would squander that. And I think it took a long time for me to realize like that is one thing I have to offer.

Amber Tamblyn:

There are so many things I have to offer. For instance my novel that came out before this book called Any Man, a thing that I'd never considered before was book tours. I go on these huge 30 city book tours for a book. I get to read in front of these big amazing audiences. And I've never once considered taking, inviting someone to open for me or to read with me in that capacity.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so I did that on that book tour. And in every city, I put out a basically like an open call and said, "If you are a woman identifying, a woman of color. If you identify as a woman in any capacity. I want you to read with me. I want you to be able..." And I would give different women 10 minutes something like that to read with me during those shows in every single city.

Amber Tamblyn:

And it was awesome. It was great. I got to meet new writers, young women whose voices. My jaw was on the floor thinking, "You've never been published? I can't wait for the world to know your work". So it was also a gave to me as well getting to lift up people who would normally not have a platform like that.

Amber Tamblyn:

And I've asked that of other friends of mine who have done the same thing for me, who have been the Amy Poehler's of the world, the Roxanne Gays of the world women who are constantly giving, the America Ferreras of the world who constantly giving to other women around them, even if they're exhausted of doing one more favor, of one more help, of one more. Whatever that is are always there saying, "I get it because I always wanted someone to pull me forward and I'm going to pull you forward."

Amber Tamblyn:

And each of us has something to offer in that way. So, in the book I talk a lot about asking ourselves what we have to offer especially men. What do men have to offer? Even if it's something small, like we always will have something that we can offer. And we think that that doesn't mean anything but it actually does. Because one of the things we say with the plus one model is, you can't be what you can't see.

Amber Tamblyn:

And if you don't... if you have never been in the room where it happens, if you've never been in a pitch room pitching something or trying to get something sold, you don't know. And so the fear manifests itself into creating a closed off space for you where you don't want to go out and put yourself on a limb.

Amber Tamblyn:

And oftentimes if you are brought into that room, even just to be able to see how it goes, how a meeting goes, you might be surprised how much you could affect someone's life.

Amber Tamblyn:

So that's like one of the many things that I talk about in thereof of thinking about what each of us individually has, and not taking for granted the access that we have at any level. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:

And that's I mean and it's another form in the business world of mentorship and advocacy and bringing others up along with you. something else that you address in the book is the concept of white feminism that white women, myself included. I will put myself in this very bucket have cringed at the notion of that there is even such a thing that we stand for all women.

Lauren Schiller:

And you actually break that notion up quite well. Can you speak to that and why you felt like it was something it was important to address?

Amber Tamblyn:

To me this is a very important thing to address because I think all of us need to own that term. And even though it is a negative of a pejorative term, it's something that we feel like we don't want to be. But the fact of the matter is we are. Every white woman I know at some form has used her privilege to not help somebody, to make things worse for someone, to protect themselves and their own feelings over those of someone who couldn't have that protection.

Amber Tamblyn:

So, I talk a lot about that examination. And again, for each of us if we are ever called in, that's a great by the way a great term that black feminist women use which is instead of calling somebody out, you call them in. I love that so much.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so if you are ever called in confronted about something that happened for us not to immediately become defensive, in the way that... in the same way that white women would really love for men not to be defensive when we speak our truth.

Amber Tamblyn:

And when we call in somebody and say this happened it was hurtful. Instead of becoming defensive to maybe take a moment, take a beat and think about what happened and absorb what the person is saying and asking of you.

Amber Tamblyn:

So, that chapter is really difficult because I talk about my own experiences in white feminism, and my own experiences as putting myself front and center in an activist world, and an organizing world and the privilege to be able to do that. And to consider though that maybe always our voices not necessarily the one that should be in the front and center of certain conversations, especially when we're talking about racism and things like that. And we should be amplifying and supporting women around us who have real experience with that.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think everything stems back in this book to the idea of letting ourselves be uncomfortable, of letting this chaotic moment in our culture in this time that we live in happen, let it happen. And it's okay to be afraid of it. It is okay to be terrified, to feel all the feelings you're going to feel of that discomfort, of that anger, of that frustration. But to never shy away from it and certainly to not to disengage from the conversation. That to me is the most dangerous thing.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, there was talk this year the Women's March recently happened. And there's always something bubbling up in the news about how badly it's managed or who's in charge and what's the point. And yet thousands and thousands of women still came out. Have you had any thoughts on the role of the March?

Amber Tamblyn:

I think that this is something that the world wants for women which is for us to tear each other apart and to fail. They want these movements to fail. We have to always remember that at the end of the day, the world we live in doesn't want this to succeed.

Amber Tamblyn:

It doesn't want the Women's March to succeed. It doesn't want Elizabeth Warren to succeed. It doesn't want any organization that is run predominantly by women. It doesn't want a fair fight to succeed. Stacey Abrams organization, you look at that and there are real palpable present ways in which our culture and the society around us tries to disband women and pull them apart and make them hate each other.

Amber Tamblyn:

That's what's happened in the entertainment industry for generations as well. This idea of you are always in competition with your sisters. It is not about who is the best for their work, who is going to get chosen that there is enough work for all of us. because that's never the case. There isn't. So it becomes this scarcity mentality of seeing other women as your severe competition in some way. And that can be said for organizing too.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think it's really important that the Women's March exists. I think it's really important what they did. Sarah Sophie Flicker, Paolo Mendoza, Melanie Stamp as well, Yadda Trabioso. They all went and did this last [Lastisus 00:41:42] dance in front of the White House. And there is nothing more powerful to me than angry women with these bandages over their eyes yelling these lyrics, and pointing at The White House and saying, "The rapist is you. The rapist was you. And it's not my fault. It's not where I was not how I dressed."

Amber Tamblyn:

And when you have this giant choir of women screaming that that's really cathartic, but it's also very moving and important and being able to March, being able to show dissent and to be able to show up and resist against these forms of government and this form of oppression and language is a Rite of passage for especially for Americans.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so to me it's important that the Women's March still exists in that capacity. I don't know what's going on for their future. I don't know much about the inside politics of that but I do believe it's important for women to continue to show up. Even when it's most difficult, even when we are ripping at each other's throats and angry and frustrated and feeling erased. I think we have to keep showing up for each other.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, so here we are. We had six female candidates running for the current election. We're down to two as of this recording.

Amber Tamblyn:

And the New York Times couldn't pick one. So they think both.

Lauren Schiller:

I'm kind of I'm like always the silver lining person. My take on that was yeah, that was kind of weird. But also, hey two for one. I mean they both got Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren both got some words behind them and in for the record.

Amber Tamblyn:

I mean I record I think it's fine. I think it's fine but I still just question that idea of one is not enough. One is not enough. One can't be trustworthy enough. One can't be perfect enough to do this work. So, I think that's a little frustrating, but it's also... we're just we're in a different world and whether or not Elizabeth Warren wins the nomination, that's my hope anyway. I'm a big supporter of hers.

Amber Tamblyn:

But if it doesn't happen, we are going to continue to have these conversations about sexism, about this idea of perversing women's narratives and leaning into age old deeply sexist propaganda.

Lauren Schiller:

Your book opens with you talking with your newlywed husband, newly wedded husband about the fact that you are pregnant and that you want to terminate the pregnancy. And as we sit here, the president of our country is speaking at the anti-choice rally that happens every year like a week after the Women's March. And you conclude your book talking about choice and Women's Choice and choices of women.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think we have to just forever push against the idea that that choice belongs to anyone other than the body in which that choice is being inhabited. Abortion is normal. Animals do it. Humans do it. We are a species that has a conscious mind. We have the ability to understand things in a way that other animals do not. And abortion is normal. Abortion is normal, abortion is normal, Abortion is normal, Abortion is normal.

Lauren Schiller:

More broadly speaking around this idea of women's choice, I mean what is your... what would you say your vision is for women? Where would you like the imagined future in your lifetime?

Amber Tamblyn:

So, I think the best way to answer that question is to sort of paraphrase Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which when she was asked how will she know when there's enough women on the Supreme Court, she said, "When there are nine."

Amber Tamblyn:

And I think that that's just something for people to think about. And I think everyone will come away with a different feeling about that answer. Some people will think that means Ruth Bader Ginsburg wants men to be erased. Some women will understand that, that means we just want a seat at the table, a full seat at the table for a little while until things are balanced out.

Amber Tamblyn:

We want to know what that feels like to not be questioned. For that not to be a strange thing that only one voice, only one color of skin has been the only voice that has literally created this country. And so, I want people to think about that.

Lauren Schiller:

I love that. What's the best call to action that someone else has shared with you that you'd like to share?

Amber Tamblyn:

The best call to action. Oh, there's so many different things but I think that came from America Ferrera, who to me is just such an extraordinary human being and created this organization called Harness, and really has worked in these organizational spheres for a long time now and is a really brilliant mind. She's a great actress and a great producer and all those things, but she's a brilliant mind.

Amber Tamblyn:

I cannot wait to work for her presidential campaign someday. I'll do whatever. I'll wash your laundry. Just tell me what you want. I'll rub your feet. It doesn't matter. I'll do it. But I think there was in the frustration, a lot of the frustration that came out at the end of 2017 during that time when Time's Up was being formed and all of that and there was many women were feeling very much like they weren't being seen or weren't being appreciated for the work they were doing.

Amber Tamblyn:

I myself had some feelings around that. And I remember that America said, "If you are waiting for other women to give you a pat on the back and give you a reward for trying to change the world, you're going to be waiting a very long time," which is a simple thing to say but this idea of don't wait to be congratulated. You don't need to do that. You don't need permission to be angry about something and to go out and find out a way to do it.

Amber Tamblyn:

That tells me, go find three or four girlfriends that are your friends that you might have something in common that you feel like needs to change whether it's in your workplace, whether it's within your social community like whatever that is and start talking about it, and start talking about what each of you has to offer and to remember to not let your ego get in the way of that work, of needing to be front and center of everything.

Amber Tamblyn:

Sometimes deferment is the most powerful thing we can give, is to be able to step back and learn from someone else. I would say this again, it's always usually predominantly like America women of color. You can learn a lot from women of color, which just means step back and listen. Do more listening than you do the talking. But to remember that to not let your ego get in the way of it.

Lauren Schiller:

That was Amber Tamblyn, actor, director, poet and advocate for women's rights. Her latest book is Era of Ignition. I'll put a link to it and Ambers original op-ed on my website at inflectionpointradio.org. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:

That's our inflection point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, Radio Public, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to. Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:

While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point society. Our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on Twitter LASchiller.

Lauren Schiller:

To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go, inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:

Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Laura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host Lauren Schiller.

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Amber_Lauren

Gail Collins and the Adventures of Older Women in American History

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Jane Fonda. Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Nancy Pelosi. Elizabeth Warren. Maxine Waters. Are "older" women taking over? By 2034 there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18. And by and large, women are outliving men. So what might all these older women mean in terms of a possible power shift, historically speaking? Listen to my conversation with Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and the author of the new book, “No Stopping Us Now. The Adventures of Older Women in American History” We explore how attitudes toward older women have shifted in America over the centuries – from the Plymouth Colony view that women were marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age," to quiet dismissal of post-reproductive females, to women’s role as perpetual caretaker (even when she might need caretaking herself), to the first female nominee for president.

Lauren spoke with Gail on stage for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco in October of 2019.

TRANSCRIPT: We do our best, please let us know any errors!

Gail Collins:                          My first book about women, was about women in American history. And we could not think of a title for it. Finally we called it America's Women, but that was so pathetic. The subtitle was 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, which is a desperate attempt to make America's Women sound like a better title. And while I was doing that one, when I just came across a bunch of stuff that I wanted to go back and look at again. And one that sometime at some point along the way I came across was this letter from one of the very early colonists when they were first here, they were all guys. And so they're writing back to England saying, please send us some women. Please, please, please. And they wrote down their description of an ideal wife, who was a woman who was civil and under 50 years of age.

Gail Collins:                          So I thought, wow. And then I was wondering through some other point, I guess when I was doing, When Everything Changed and I ran across that famous hair coloring is from the early, the early seventies that said, you're not getting older, you're getting better. And I looked at it and the copy within that said, these days any woman over 25 is old. And I thought, holy moly. Wow. And you look right now and there's Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the gym and then running the Supreme Court, and everybody's applauding. I thought, wow, what makes all this stuff go up and down like this? And it seemed like a fun thing to look into.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller, and that is Gail Collins, New York times columnist and author of a new book called No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History. We spoke on stage for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, in October of 2019. By 2034 there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18, and by and large, women are outliving men. So what might all these older women mean in terms of a possible power shift, historically speaking? Well, look at Jane Fonda. Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Look at Nancy Pelosi. My goodness, these women over 25, they're everywhere. And they're all in the book. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  Gail's book covers American women from the 1600s to today, which is a lot of history to cover. So I started our conversation with a challenge. I asked Gail to give us the 60 second recap from the 1600s to today.

Gail Collins:                          May take two minutes, however.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay, you get two minutes.

Gail Collins:                          There were two things. One was scarcity, as we've just seen. If you were the only women coming into some town in the wild west, really you could be 95 and they would be throwing themselves at you, and make no difference whatsoever. But the other thing that seemed to me such a big pattern, once I looked at it, was whether they had an economic role. Women who have an economic role are judged the way men are judged, and women who are seen as only mothers are pretty much out to pasture once their children are grown. And that was the great, great cosmic difference that I saw. And it came and went and came and went. And I won't tell you any more right now, because that's my two minutes, but we'll get back to it.

Lauren Schiller:                  No, you've got more time. Keep going. You talk about that with World War II, how everything really shifted.

Gail Collins:                          It shifted. You start look... Two seconds to the colonies. In the colonies wives were all farm wives, and they're growing vegetables, making candles, making... One woman, I just wove 33,000 balls of yarn this year. Just went on and on, the stuff that they could do, creating wealth. And everybody knew that the housewife was creating all this wealth, and young women wanted to come and hang out with them so they could learn how to do it. So at that period, it was a great period for being an older woman, then when everybody moved to the cities. And middle-class women had a much shrunken role that had nothing to do with economics. That was suddenly when, if your kids are gone, why are you still here? But it was very cruel and mean.

Gail Collins:                          And then as you go back and forth in history, whenever there's an economic call for older women, then they become very popular. And during World War II was the absolute perfect example. You had all the guys are gone and young women with children really resisted the idea of going to work. So there was everybody, a clarion call, and every all eyes turned older women. Here they are, Oh my God. And you suddenly, not just had Rosie the Riveter stories, but you had these stories about Josephine the 80 year old riveter. My God, is she great. And I remember reading one in a magazine at the time that was going around during the war saying, we were so touched today, we went to a restaurant and saw a 65 year old woman carrying a tray of dishes with a gleam of happiness in her blue eyes. I'm not sure about the glass, but that was the moment when women, older women, nobody complained about them at all. They were the heroines because they were doing all the work.

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller, with stories of how women rise up. I'll be right back with Gail Collins, who shares how economy shapes what men look for in a woman.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, you tell a story in the book is about some guys you're interviewing in Connecticut about what they were looking for in a woman.

Gail Collins:                          Yeah. This was the humongous discovery that I made, somewhere along the way. My greatest thought was about the economic participation of women, and during... After World War II, the economy exploded, and everybody thought they could become middle-class. Everybody's going to the suburbs, they're getting their own houses, their kids are going to go to college, we're going to go on vacations. It was a humongous explosion of expectation for family life. And then the '70s came and all that... The oil... You remember a lot of you, I'm sure the oil boycott, the awful, awful economy of the '70s, and suddenly many, many, many families could no longer support the life they thought they needed to live with one income.

Gail Collins:                          And that was really the absolute change, because suddenly all the women who had been consigned to the role of mom and nothing else, were drawn back into the workforce. And younger women started thinking about what their role would be. And my favorite story about that period is it was actually later, in the late seventies or the '80s, but I was at a college in New Britain, Connecticut. And for some reason I'm talking to an entire room full of guys, and I do not know how exactly I got there, I was doing a woman's book tour, but they were lovely guys. And I said to them, what do you look for in a wife? And nobody was going to say to me, a really hot woman who I... So they all said, a really good personality.

Gail Collins:                          And I said, oh, that's nice. And then one kid in the back said, and a good earner. And they all said yes, oh my God, yes, and a good earner. Got to be a good earner. And I thought then, wow, this is a whole new vision. Guys really need their wives to be good earners, and women are being integrated into the economy in the same way. And they're going to get old in a totally different way.

Lauren Schiller:                  What's so interesting to me about that is that, why does the gender wage gap still exist?

Gail Collins:                          Very, very, very good question. It goes on forever too. One of the great things, after the invention of the birth control pill, suddenly the number of women in graduate school, law school, medical school skyrocketed because you could suddenly control and make sure you were not going to be getting pregnant and having a baby while you were doing your preparation for your career. Stupendous numbers. Now there are more women in law school and medical school than there are men. And the income and average of doctors and lawyers has dropped. What does this mean? It's a pattern that goes on and on and on and on and on. I believe we will overcome it at some point.

Gail Collins:                          Another problem is that women often like to go into the helping professions, which instantly, when you hear the word helping, you know they're not going to be making very much money. It's just... And because of that, they want to teach, they want to go and do work. They want to help out in different ways. And those are their income from those professions are not as high, and good for them. So a little bit of booth going on there.

Lauren Schiller:                  And then, right. And then when there is a male profession professionally teaching that women started to take over, it just, it happens over and over again. I just think it's bizarre that they want good earners, but they only want them to make, I don't know, 72 cents for every dollar they make.

Gail Collins:                          Not the husbands. I do not know anybody who believes more in equality of pay opportunity than the husbands of working wives. They are really for it, 100% yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. So, older women do better when they can generate more money. That's one of the things that you told us. And women's power seems to fluctuate depending on what's happening with the economy overall, how much we're needed, but also who's got political power. Are those the two main drivers of where a women do or do not have power, is who's who is in charge politically, and how much are they needed economically?

Gail Collins:                          And the political part is very interesting, because you can't quite figure out where it goes with women. Women got the vote in 1920, and they had a vision of a new society that would be created with the women's vote, in which there'd be clinics for poor women and their children, there'd be all of these things happening to make society better, kinder, more woman-like in orientation. And none of it happened at all. Women voted like their husbands. Warren Harding was elected president instantly, and we got prohibition. That was about it. And so, voting by itself is not nearly enough to make a difference. You have to be an aggressive voter, which we're seeing more and more among women, that the women are inclined to vote differently from their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, everybody else. Much more than they were, say 10, 20, 30 years ago. And that's a real lever of power, and we'll see where that takes everybody.

Lauren Schiller:                  So can we talk about prohibition, since you brought that up?

Gail Collins:                          Nobody has said, can you talk about prohibition for a long time? I really love this. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller:                  Who here wants to talk about prohibition? Show of hands? Okay, we got one. We got one person who, okay, so we're going to talk about for you. But you talk in the book about how prohibition, while it was pushed by older women, was actually really bad for all the women, because of what it meant is that their husbands were not going to these elicit nightclubs and hanging out with the flappers, who are generally in their 20s. I had a bad backlash.

Gail Collins:                          The whole liquor thing was very weird, because it really did separate men from women. Before prohibition, one of the reasons women were so antagonistic to it, well one was that, truly, important neighborhoods, the saloons desperately tried to drag men in on pay day and take away all their money. So it was a legitimate, legitimate crusade. But beyond that, middle-class women didn't drink. And after dinner, and sometimes on weekends and whatever, their husbands and the men would go away places and drink and leave them behind. And it was a real division between the sexes, and women resented it and thought it was bad. And so, that propelled the way to, right along the way.

Gail Collins:                          And then there we were, and nobody liked it once it came. It really did not work out well at all. And it's true that then men off... Women, middle aged women, housewives, mothers, are not going to be going off to the speakeasy used to be hanging out and drinking. So if the men go, they are going to be meeting a whole new group of young women who are hanging out there. And women got very paranoid, housewives at the time. What the hell is going on? Where are these men going? And even if they weren't going anywhere, they were still looking at their husbands, is this going to happen? What's happening here? So it didn't work out nearly the way people thought it would.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, there were, eventually, some good things that came out of women getting the vote, and women actually getting political power.

Gail Collins:                          I do not want to say this was not a good thing to do, by the way. But yeah, go ahead.

Lauren Schiller:                  That it was not a good thing to do-

Gail Collins:                          To give women the vote. No, it was really, really, really good idea.

Lauren Schiller:                  It was just a slow cook, right?

Gail Collins:                          It wasn't nearly the revolutionary moment that women thought it was going to be.

Lauren Schiller:                  But eventually, out of having women in power, we got social security, we got better labor laws.

Gail Collins:                          The New Deal. Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh my God.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. Let's talk about Eleanor Roosevelt.

Gail Collins:                          Eleanor Roosevelt I think had the greatest middle age of any woman in American history, by far. God help us, she's all over the place. She is visiting places that nobody else at the top of government has ever gone to, ever. To see poor black families, to see Appalachian families. She's going to see the troops overseas. She's driving around by herself. It was driving the Secret Service, so crazy that they taught her how to use a revolver. So there she's in her car with her revolver for going to see people in Appalachian. I just, Oh my God, what a woman. And because of her influence, and because of people who are hanging out with her and because of people who had begun to move into positions of power locally anyway, you got the New Deal women, like Francis Perkins, who was the person you most remember as being responsible for social security. So no badness at all in that development, I would say.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'd love to talk about the parallels in that moment in time, to the moment in time that we're experiencing now.

Gail Collins:                          Wow, okay.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, just in terms of-

Gail Collins:                          There's Franklin Roosevelt.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay. Not those guys. The women. We have a historic number of women in Congress now, and they're in positions to make a lot of change. And I think we all tend to get frustrated. Clearly we've got an issue in the White House that is preventing a lot of things from happening, but that we get frustrated with the pace of change. That why does it take so... Now we've got all these women, so how can we see more things happen more quickly, around education and health care and the so called more feminine interests.

Gail Collins:                          You really wonder if we had a different president, what this last election would have brought forward. But things are so crazy now that, just the ability to get up in the morning is about everything they can accomplish. And I find Nancy Pelosi very interesting. People complain constantly. Why isn't she doing more? Why isn't she doing more? But she is handling this thing that's happening now. I can't imagine anybody else doing, any guy up there that I've watched doing it, cannot conceive of them doing it anywhere better. You see the committee chairman, the guys, it's just not, they were not going to do any better than Nancy Pelosi. She's really controlled this thing, handled Donald Trump as well as a human being possibly could. And I like to think that's part of the future.

Gail Collins:                          And once we get past this time, will be very interesting to see what these very large number of women moving into Congress, although still a minority, and hardly any women governors, there's still a long, long way to go. Still, see what happens next. It's going to be great.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, and they are, we were talking about this earlier, they are, the majority of women, are Democrats. There's very few female, Republicans.

Gail Collins:                          Very few. It's amazing how they could even manage to avoid having more women. It's just incredible. Gosh, darn.

Lauren Schiller:                  Imagine what could get done though if there were more women, Republican politicians?

Gail Collins:                          They do work until this recent unpleasantness of the last couple of years, the women in Congress worked together very well. They had their regular things they would do, they would do softball games together. They would go out to dinner together. They had their own special place where they would hang out, and they were capable of behaving in a much more bipartisan manner than the guys were. And if things had, I think the place where they did, I'd probably still, if they still get to do it, the place that they hung out was the Strom Thurmond Room. Which I just find so... The idea that Strom Thurmond gave his name to this, tickles me so. But once this passes, we'll see what happens. It's going to be a whole new thing for sure.

Lauren Schiller:                  I like the affirmative way that you just said, once this passes. All things must pass. Well actually, let's talk about you for a minute. You're a woman with power. You write this... You look at you, you're sitting on this stage in front of all these people.

Gail Collins:                          Thank you.

Lauren Schiller:                  I feel the glow of you right here. And you write your column every week for the New York Times, and you have the opportunity to sway a lot of public opinion. And do you, this is such a weird question to ask, but do you think in those terms, if I write this, and this happens? I have this power and how must I use it?

Gail Collins:                          Not exactly. My thing has been, I've been a columnist for a really long time, before the Times I was at the New York News Day and then the Daily News before that, and somewhere along the line in the Daily News period, I was writing a local column is about local government. And at that point, New York local government was so bad. Oh my God, it was terrible. And I'd write these columns every couple of days saying, oh my God, look what they did now. Oh my Lord, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And I would go on and on like that, trying to rile up indignation and fury.

Gail Collins:                          But after a while, I was thinking, oh my God, basically I'm causing people to get up and want to throw themselves out the window. There's got to be a different way to do this, where I can tell people what's happening, without depressing them mortally. So at that point, I tried to make the columns more fun to read. So that my goal has been, for a long time now, to just get people to know about stuff in a way that doesn't make them suicidal.

Lauren Schiller:                  It seems... So far so good. I chuckle every time I read one of your columns, even though what you're conveying is just so horrible underneath.

Gail Collins:                          We're getting the votes in now, we have a contest now named the worst cabinet member. Many, many votes are coming in, I've got to tell you.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, let's talk about what it means to be old. This is a question that's in question, right? This, a certain age-

Gail Collins:                          And not argue about your age, now. Lie about it, now that we have Wikipedia. You're just stuck. Whatever age you are, you really are for sure.

Lauren Schiller:                  I feel like there's no good answer to the question, how old are you? Or you look younger than I thought you were, or you look older than I thought you were. That used to be a compliment, but now not so much.

Gail Collins:                          No, I'm 73 by the way. The story of it.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, okay, so one of the things that you... That I found in the book is that in the 1950s only about 3% of the population was over 65.

Gail Collins:                          Very tiny bit. And then the amount has just, I trust your numbers because I've completely gone blank on them.

Lauren Schiller:                  I got them from somewhere.

Gail Collins:                          But it was tiny. And it's exploded. And one of the reasons I think it's so important to talk about women maintaining careers, and men too, in their later years, is because there's going to be so many of us very soon. This world is not going to be able to support us, unless we do more earning on the side to try to keep things going a bit because it's just... And the number of people over 90 is skyrocketing. Most of them are women. And it's going to get more and more and more so because thank you, the medical profession.

Gail Collins:                          Which by way, doing history, I have to say, teeth. I think back about history, oh my God, there were no teeth. Nobody had any teeth. They found the body of a woman at Jamestown just a few years ago when they were digging around, and she was about 30 years old, and she had five teeth. That was all. So when I think about history, I do wonder off, and I'm sorry, I just changed the subject completely. Every once in a while I think, my God, teeth. Oh my Lord in heaven. This is so amazing. We've all got our teeth.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well there's been a lot of medical advancements since-

Gail Collins:                          Even more profound than that, but I just-

Lauren Schiller:                  We'll get to plastic surgery, and all the other stuff in a few minutes. Hair dye. I know that's not a medical procedure, but. So is retirement passe now? Is that not a thing anymore? If people... If 65 was the retirement age-

Gail Collins:                          Well many people do retire at 65. And to be fair, many, many people look forward to retiring at 65. It's not like the entire world is out there saying, let me stay in this job for another 10 years, this is what I really want to do. But the vision that when you stop doing, if you stop doing what you were doing when you turn 65 or whenever, that you're then going to go home and sit around is, I think, really passe. There were just so many things people are doing now. There's so many people who are working as volunteers. There's so many people doing community service. There's so many people who are just going out and doing things they always wanted to do, take a boat around the world or whatever, that they couldn't do otherwise. But that's the vision. The thing is that you don't have that sense of, okay, we're done now, we're going to go home and it's all over.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, because you get to be sticking around for another 30, 40 years.

Gail Collins:                          Damn straight.

Lauren Schiller:                  We've got to come up with a good routine. It's also in this time, it seems like a great opportunity to get involved in, say, some activism. Right? And thinking about women throughout history who have been involved in activism, and bridging that gap between the younger activists and the older activists, how those two worldviews might come together or push apart. And that's something that you talk about.

Gail Collins:                          Can I tell my Elizabeth Cady Stanton story?

Lauren Schiller:                  Yes.

Gail Collins:                          This is one of my favorite stories. This is before the civil war, and women in the North were the ones who were very, very conscious of the evils of slavery, I think, more than the men were there. They were very into the idea that it was a woman's issue, because you're talking about families being broken up, and young girls being at the mercy of slave owners, and became a very passionate issue. But you couldn't go out and talk about it in public, because the idea of women speaking out in public was just not accepted. They would throw stones at you, they would burn down your auditorium, they would call... They thought that you were all promiscuous if you were to speak out in public, you were a harlot. That was the thought that was going around, and so nobody did it. You really did not have any women getting out. Even African American women who wanted to speak out against slavery were really discouraged by their communities in many parts of the North.

Gail Collins:                          So Elizabeth Cady Stanton is right there in this point and she's dying to go out and talk about this stuff. So she suddenly announces, well, I'm going to come out, because I am a grandmother, gray hair, looking dumpy, wearing frumpy clothes here. I am a grandmother. I'm going to come and talk to you about grandmother things, our boys and our home. And I'll throw in a little bit about slavery, maybe, and a little bit about women's rights. And I've got ideas about divorce for forum that I made. And she got away with it. And she went around the country giving speeches all the time, sleeping over night in railroad stations when she couldn't get a train. Playing cards with soldiers on her way from one town to the other. She got away with it all because she presented herself as a grandmother, and her friends saw this going on and suddenly they started writing odes to menopause. Oh happy day we get to go out. This is all great. And it was a great liberation, and it was liberation through gray hair, basically.

Lauren Schiller:                  So the menopause thing comes up a lot, for obvious reasons, but that it either is going to make you sex crazy, or sex neutral or completely be the beginning of the end. Can you talk about some of the things that you learned about the change?

Gail Collins:                          Doctors didn't discover a menopause until the 1800s. Did not occur, and they didn't care. When they did discover it, they instantly decided that it was terrible and it led to your death, or insanity or something. It was just, it was never a popular. And when doctors did start to think about it, they started to think about ways to avoid it. They started with chimpanzee glands, allegedly at least, injecting women with a chimpanzee glands to save them from menopause and keep going. And of course that didn't work, but you did, as time went on, get to what led to a hormone replacement therapy, which for 20 years, it was the absolute thing that was going on in this country. Tons and tons and tons of women were doing it. And that was all about eliminating the evils of menopause.

Gail Collins:                          And it took all that time, really until they realized that hormone replacement therapy was bad for you, and you can't do it anymore for a long periods of time, before people were really willing to sit down and talk about, well, hey, this is a normal part of life. You can just do that and move on, and everything is fine. It was a bad moment for the medical profession that went on for a long period of time. But I think it's pretty well over now. It's been a long time since I've heard anybody say, oh my God, I'm going through menopause, my life is over. It's been forever.

Lauren Schiller:                  I just hear, oh my God, I'm going through menopause, I'm sweating all the time.

Gail Collins:                          That one does still come up, I've got to say. That's true.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, okay, so on that topic, the amount of work,

Gail Collins:                          I'm sorry, guys, whoever's out here, it's just-

Lauren Schiller:                  Hey, you know what? It's just, it's part of the package. There's also, I love all the stories about hair dye, and the reactions to women who dyed their hair, that the horrible dye that was actually available when it first came out. And even today, women of a certain age, or women who are going gray. Have to make this vital decision. It's a life, it's really a life altering decision. Am I going to dye my hair?

Gail Collins:                          Well my friend, Nora Ephron said, that the history of women superseding the limitations of age was not about feminism or about better life through exercise. It was all about hair dye. I was just totally into that idea, and I grabbed it. Because it really is in many ways true, that if you have the choice of deciding whether or not you're going to go gray, and either one is a perfectly logical choice. It does create an end to that whole idea that there's a particular point in life when all women go gray, and that's a marker, because clearly, two thirds of the women are not having that marker anymore.

Gail Collins:                          It was a 10 year period, I think it was from the beginning to the end of the '60s, but maybe the '70s, when the first time that women could, that was really easy to do hair coloring. You could do it at home. It was easy to go to a hair shop and get it done. 7% of women used hair coloring at the beginning of that decade, and by the end, they had to take hair color off American passports because you couldn't tell anymore. You had no idea what color people's hair really was. So it's just eliminated. It's a big thing.

Gail Collins:                          And in the early days, women, first of all was against the law in many States, allegedly, to dye your hair. Or at least they tried to pass a law. State legislatures will do anything, basically. And there was a long period of state legislatures talking about banning, or making it illegal to dye your hair, because the theory was, you could trick people into marrying you, trick men into marrying you by looking younger than you really were. A, the dyes were so terrible then that nobody would have been fooled anyway. And if you use them, your hair would fall out, or you get mercury poisoning. It just was not a reliable thing to do for anybody. But there was this paranoia on the part of state legislatures and people, guys in general, that somehow women would be able to trick you into thinking that they were much younger than they really were.

Lauren Schiller:                  There's got to be a politician who just had a terrible experience, and he was like, I am not letting this happen to any of my other male friends.

Gail Collins:                          State Senator, Fred. And he told everybody about it, it was horrible.

Lauren Schiller:                  I was also thinking about, I can't remember if this is in your book or not, but the quality of mirrors used to be not that good.

Gail Collins:                          Right.

Lauren Schiller:                  And if you've ever stayed in an old house or whatever, and you try and do your makeup, pluck your eyebrows, forget about it. So, but as the quality of mirrors got better, I'm guessing, that also intersected with the proliferation of magazines, and all of these different ways that you could beautify yourself, and all the makeup that was available to do it with.

Gail Collins:                          It's absolutely true and it was very fast, that suddenly this all turned over, and women went, hey, this could happen, that could happen. And then once it became possible, every magazine in the entire universe was warning you, if you don't use that, or that or blah, you are going to look like such a hag. You will never be able to go outside again. There was one ad I really loved. It was from I think the '40s maybe the '50s, in which a young girl is saying to her mother, mom, you're looking so young these days, because of blah, blah. And mom looked really young because she had exactly the same face as her daughter in the ad.

Lauren Schiller:                  In addition to the epiphany around the mirror. I was also just thinking about how much, these magazines, many of them, especially as the years went on, were run by women, and women perpetuating these beauty standards, which were, are, impossible for most real people who don't have Photoshop or a stylist and to make a person and a fitness trainer and yada, yada, yada to actually live up to. And that it has caused... And you can see I'm wearing lipstick, I get my hair cut just the other day, but that it has caused us women to spend so much time and money worrying about these things, and also being judged by them, and that it has been perpetuated, in a sense, by other women, women who had the possibility to change the way we think about ourselves.

Gail Collins:                          It's a great business. And I worry about cosmetic surgery, that the places at which it goes to. Crazy lengths, and you just see poor women cutting themselves up every year to try to look more and more young, and I find that very disturbing. But I have to say I've gotten used to the cosmetic thing. And I see a lot of guys who I just think, well, if you had the opportunity [crosstalk 00:32:21]. It's not my biggest worry, anyway, in the cosmic scheme of things.

Lauren Schiller:                  Coming up, Gail Collins tells us her adventure to becoming the first woman editor of the editorial page of the New York Times.

Lauren Schiller:                  Join our supporters by making a tax deductible donation at inflectionpoint.org, and clicking the support button.

Lauren Schiller:                  We're moving away from hair dye and makeup, and all of that, into the civil rights movement.

Gail Collins:                          Fantastic.

Lauren Schiller:                  Where women did, when they went to march, dress quite beautifully, and wear their hat and their lipstick and you even have a story about lipstick and suits.

Gail Collins:                          The Women's March for Peace, in particular. That was the first really anti war anti nuclear proliferation movement, that was created by middle-class housewives. And their idea was, that if you marched around wearing a shirtwaist dress, and maybe even a mink coat and high heels picketing the White House, that you would confuse people, and then they cause them to think, maybe mothers really do care about these issues, and it's not really the three crazy people down the street. And it worked, to some extent. And for a long time, younger women in the movement, were always being yelled at for not coming in with the right clothes on and stuff like that, because they thought that was a really important part of the story.

Gail Collins:                          Can I just tell one civil rights thing that-

Lauren Schiller:                  That proceeded, that was leading up to the civil rights... Yes, go.

Gail Collins:                          The thing about the civil rights movement that... I thought so much about the trajectory of African American women, which was different because they were working all the time, mostly as domestics. But when you got to the civil rights movement, when we think about the civil rights movement, we think about young people getting killed or risking their lives down South. And then we think about Martin Luther King, and all the other men who were leaders. But if you look at, say the beginning of the movement, the first person that most Americans heard about was Rosa Parks, who was a middle aged woman. And then that gave birth to, when she refused to go to the back of the bus, that gave birth to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was really the thing that caused America for the first time to think, what's going on? For the first time, really focus in on this.

Gail Collins:                          And the Montgomery bus boycott was organized by middle aged black women. They were the ones who had been out in the community forever doing social work, helping people, taking care of stuff that was going on, working on the schools, registering people to vote. And they were the ones that had those kinds of connections, who could go right in there and organize people very quickly. And nobody gave them any credit. And Andrew Young said that it was because it was, they were too much like their mothers, so they therefore it didn't want to do it. But nobody has celebrated the work of older black women in the civil rights movement nearly, nearly enough.

Lauren Schiller:                  And he specifically said that about Ella Baker.

Gail Collins:                          Yes. Ella Baker was my hero. Oh my God.

Lauren Schiller:                  Tell her story.

Gail Collins:                          Ella Baker was a great organizer in the civil rights movement, and she started out, and she spent her most heroic years working with young people, black and white in the South, trying to give them a vision of community organizing that didn't involve just having a big strike and that everybody goes away. But organizing the whole community so that people are able to take up the cause themselves, and set their own goals. And it was hard to do, because of course the kids wanted to come in and...

Gail Collins:                          But she spent her great years working on that kind of organization, and she would spend all of her nights on trains going from town to town, sitting, listening all night long to young people talking, trying to help them by listening to them think about ways to move forward. They called her their Gandhi. She did this when she had terrible asthma, and all these kids smoked the whole night long. She would sit there with respirators, listening to them with an oxygen mask on, listening for hours and hours and hours and hours, patiently, to these kids talking in order to help them to move forward. I think she's the great unsung heroine, hero, of the civil rights movement forever.

Lauren Schiller:                  Ella Baker was a middle aged woman who went and hung out with young people, and helped them rise up. But sometimes, the young people don't necessarily want the old people around.

Gail Collins:                          Don't trust anyone over 30.

Lauren Schiller:                  Exactly.

Gail Collins:                          I must admit, I was in college for that. We actually did trust many people over 30, people who are professors, men and women, and our lawyers. But it was just so cool to say that, that you just did for a while there.

Lauren Schiller:                  We would say in high school all the time to our parents. You wrote in your book, it was about the 1950s. In the 1950s, the Population Reference Bureau was a research book that warned that the country could be taken over by elderly women, since their numbers were increasing so much faster than that of the men in terms of voting power, ownership of land and corporate equities. The US could be seen on the road toward a geronto-matriarchy, control by aging females.

Gail Collins:                          Ready to go. Okay.

Lauren Schiller:                  What happened?

Gail Collins:                          Worse things could happen in the world. I can name one right now really fast. And part of it is, went with women's suffrage, and why it didn't work out the way you expected, is that women's interests are so intermingled with their husbands, their sons, their brothers, that it's very seldom that you see for any prolonged period of time women separating themselves from men and saying, we're just going to do this on our own. It's just not going to ever happen. And that was part of it. And the whole women, older women, taking over the world thing, which I'm looking forward to, has clearly been a lot slower than some people might've expected. But I think that's just paranoia. There's just a ton of that out there. People being, statisticians and poll takers, becoming paranoid about stuff that they didn't need to become paranoid about.

Lauren Schiller:                  Remember the statistic about people over 65 being such a small percentage of the population. So apparently, by 2034, there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18.

Gail Collins:                          The population is just exploding all the way up. And as, I think I said before, the answer to that, one of the answers is that older people are not going to be able to drop out anyway, even if they want to. They're going to have to chip in there, do stuff to help keep the rest of the country going. It's our responsibility, for heaven's sake. You just can't let these things slide and say, I've done mine. I'm gone. This is all you. That's one of the reasons I just see this incredible change, and what's going to be happening.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. You'll probably tell me that it's always been this way, but there is a movement around activism for mothers, and often, mothers in their forties whose kids are old enough, they're at school and they have time available to push forward things around ending gun violence. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the first one that... Okay, ending gun violence. Yes, thank you. I'm thinking specifically of Shannon Watts for Moms Demand Action, and then Moms Clean Air Force is a great environmental group, but Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the first one that I have a memory of. And just thinking about these women who are old enough to have a skillset, and a focus and something that they want to see change, and not just go along with the status quo. That is such a huge asset to our country.

Gail Collins:                          It's always been this way No really. But there've been so many people like that who have talked about that throughout our history. Jane Adams was the famous leader of the first social work movement, really, among women in this country. And she worked until she really was almost ready to die, and wrote many articles as she got older about how older women were getting back in there and they were doing... It was all volunteer work, but it was very serious volunteer work in their communities. They were starting women's clubs that everybody thought were, oh my God, they're going to be writing papers about Julius Caesar and his wife's dresses or whatever, it's going to be really silly. And very fast, they went from, we're going to do study groups to, we are going to do prison reform. We're going to go and help working women in working class, working women. We're going to do stuff to pasteurized milk, for God's sake.

Gail Collins:                          So this, this has been a movement that comes and goes and comes and goes, but I think it's coming again now you. Do really see, although I talked to Anna Quinlan about that, who's been working for Planned Parenthood for a thousand years, just the rock of Planned Parenthood, and she said that she finds now that's so many older women are still working, that they're volunteers, more and more, tend to be younger women who are trying to get college credit for it or something like that. Which is a very weird and strange thought that never occurred to me before, but I'm just putting it out there. Because if Anna Quinlan says it, it's probably true.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. And those interns should get paid. Well one of the things that I, the main thing that I explore on my show, is how women rise up. So since you've studied 400 years of women rising up, is there an answer out there? Could we just put a nail in it?

Gail Collins:                          There are many, but I can tell you one from your very own life. When people ask me a lot, how did you get to be the editorial page editor at the Times or whatever. And the answer is basically-

Lauren Schiller:                  First woman.

Gail Collins:                          First women, there were some before me, but they were all guys. There were many before me, but they were all guys. And I have to tell you this, as totally in passing, and I'm sorry I'm getting off the subject, but at the Times, there is a room where the editorial board meets and they do all their deliberations and discussions. And when I was around, there were pictures on the wall, it was in the old building, of Henry Raymond, who was the first editor and editorial page editor and a few of the other really famous editorial page editors. And of course they're all guys, and I used to, once in a while, if I was feeling really sassy, I just go in the middle of the day and I'd say, guys, I've got your job. It just knocked me out. I really just always enjoyed it, always enjoyed that.

Gail Collins:                          I wanted to tell a story that has, I was talking so much about how the economy changed what happened with women and everything else, but it was also the women who changed what happened with women. Women who filed lawsuits, and who went on strike for equal opportunity, and they were almost never the people who got the rewards. At the times, the women who, was before I got there, but the day that I think the publisher or the editor, it was while back, posted a thing saying we have three new openings for editors. Any guy that's interested should just come over here and apply or something like that. But whatever it was, it just drove the women crazy because they had all had desires. They had hopes and dreams of becoming, say foreign editor, or national editor or whatever. And they were all getting shunted away to assistant travel page editor or whatever.

Gail Collins:                          And they were so angry, and they fought, they started fighting and protesting and threatening lawsuits and terrifying the management, until all these changes were made. And I guarantee you right now, the New York times is the most diversity conscious place I have certainly ever worked. They're very, very conscious of that. But this change, when it happened, didn't help those women, because they had been spending so much of their lives fighting for this stuff that they were like... They'd been... She was the travel editor, or travel deputy for 15 years. What the hell? We're not. And they were older, and they'd gotten in everybody's face. So they were thought of as a pain. The people who got all the rewards for people like me, who walked in right after that. And we were the ones who got all of the opportunities.

Gail Collins:                          And I know so many of these women. And the thing about them that just knocks me out is that they weren't bitter about it. They were so happy that they had done something that had opened up these opportunities. When I got to be editorial page editor, they were thrilled. None of them ran around saying, I could have done that, for God's sake. I didn't have the chance. It's not fair. And that to me is the definition of a great heart. Somebody who takes joy in somebody else getting the thing they fought for that they didn't get. And that's what these women were like. And I never pass up a chance to talk them.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's it. That's the answer, right? We help each other step up.

Gail Collins:                          You help each other.

Lauren Schiller:                  So when I first got the book, I thought to myself, No Stopping Us Now, is that ironic or sincere? But I feel like by the end of reading the book and this conversation, I think it's our rallying cry.

Gail Collins:                          It is totally sincere. I just look at the history, and when I think that I got to live through the point in history that changed the entire way women survive in western civilization. That changed the role of women, the role of men relating to women that had gone on forever. It changed in my lifetime and I got to see it happen. How can you not be optimistic when you think about something like that?

Lauren Schiller:                  Could you feel it? Could you feel it as each change happened? Obviously as a little baby, you're maybe not feeling things, but as you as a tween, and then in your twenties thirties and so on?

Gail Collins:                          I was really completely out to lunch about it. I had gone mostly to all girls schools and so, and they were Catholic schools, so really the male thing did not enter the equation a whole lot at all as you were coming along. And then when I was in college, we were having the free speech movement, and it was a very open movement and I felt fine about that. So it really wasn't until I got to graduate school, and there were a lot of other women organizing around women's issues. And I had no idea, and there were, there were no women faculty members in the graduate school where I was at UMass at that time, but it had never occurred to me. I was so stupid, and so dumb and I'm just every day thankful that when I was there, I ran into all of these amazing women and on and on throughout my life. They were all always way ahead of me, and it was just a privilege to come up behind them and learn stuff from them.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and author of No Stopping Us Now, speaking with me live on stage at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. I'll put a link to Gail's book on my website, inflectionpointradio.org, where you can also find future events by clicking on the events tab. I'm Lauren Schiller, this is Inflection Point, and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  Today's program was produced, in part, by the generous donation of Ellen Olsen in honor of her late mother-in-law, Margaret Nicholson, a woman Ellen says, was way ahead of her time.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, Radio Public, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review, and subscribe to the podcast.

Lauren Schiller:                  Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible, monthly, or one-time contribution, when women rise up, we all rise up, just go to inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  We're on Facebook and Instagram @inflectionpointradio. Follow us, and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on Twitter @LASchiller.

Lauren Schiller:                  To find out more about today's guest, and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go, inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Inflection point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco, and PRX. Our community manager is Laura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller.

Speaker 3:                              Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

 

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How Stephanie Lepp Makes Room for a Reckoning (+TOOLKIT)

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Stephanie Lepp is the creator and host of a podcast about how people change their hearts and minds-- it’s about people who decided on their own to completely change their world views. It’s about people who took a look in the mirror, and realized they did not like what they saw. How do you do that? Her show is called Reckonings...and it sure feels like our society could use a reckoning right about now. But do things need to change on an individual level first? I invited Stephanie to share what she’s learned about how personal change can lead to positive societal change.

RESOURCES:

https://www.sandiego.edu/soles/restorative-justice/campus-prism.php

http://www.againstviolentextremism.org/

TRANSCRIPT. We do our best on these, if you see an error, let us know!

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller. And today on Inflection Point we want a lot of people to change their ways right now. How far are you willing to go to let them?

Stephanie Lepp:                It's amazing what a gesture can do and are we willing to let alone give the person a job, just let the bad guy change?

Lauren Schiller:                  Join me and Stephanie Lepp of Reckonings. Stay tuned.

Stephanie Lepp:                I am Stephanie Lepp. When I feel comfortable with people I would say that I'm a tuning fork. I would say that I am a gentle mirror.

Lauren Schiller:                  Tell me more about the tuning fork.

Stephanie Lepp:                The tuning fork.

Lauren Schiller:                  I love that.

Stephanie Lepp:                I mean, I just came out right now. I guess I am seeing the gravity of the situation or sensing the gravity of the situation but also responding to it in a way that is hopeful and creative and maintains imagination and maintains humor.

Lauren Schiller:                  But it seems like both of your metaphors are about being in touch with the world and wanting to kind of play back what you're seeing.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes, because I think that's part of the idea of in order to get to anywhere we have to start from where we are. Part of it is yes, must see the nature of the situation clearly in order to go anywhere, but cannot stop only at seeing the nature of the situation clearly. That can also just lead us to stagnation and depression. So there is both a seeing clearly and a dose of creativity and imagination and hope to move us forward.

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller. And that's Stephanie Lepp, the creator, and host of a podcast about how people change their hearts and minds. And this isn't about changing your mind on the small stuff like, "Oh, I wanted to cook dinner in but instead let's eat out." It's about people who decided on their own to completely change their world views. This is not an easy thing. I mean, when's the last time you did that, or I did that or made room for someone else to? Her show is about people who took a look in the mirror and realized they didn't like what they saw. As someone said to me, it's like they took their own hearts out of their bodies, took a good look at them, moved things around a little and put them back inside. How do you do that?

                                                      The show is called fittingly Reckonings. And it sure feels like our society could use a reckoning right about now. But do things need to change on an individual level first? I invited Stephanie to share what she's learned about how personal change can lead to positive societal change. So where did you grow up?

Stephanie Lepp:                I grew up in the North Bay [crosstalk 00:03:41].

Lauren Schiller:                  Of California.

Stephanie Lepp:                Of California. Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  Did that influence the way you think about the world do you think?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah, my mom is a yoga instructor. My dad is in technology. I'm a Mexican Jew. I was raised very much... Spanish was my first language and my mom is an artist who would always kind of take us to every single museum within a 25 mile radius of wherever we were traveling I feel like, grew up in an area and in a family that was definitely very much about being open and available and thinking freely and asking questions. And Judaism also has kind of a practice of asking questions, right? There's kind of like the reinterpretation and re-reinterpretation of every single thing in Jewish history. It's kind of like we continue to ask questions about the same old things forever and ever and ever.

                                                      I think I've just been aware of my evolving consciousness from a young age. I mean, I remember in second grade waiting for the school bus for second grade. And I remember thinking, "Last year I didn't know anything. Last year was first grade. I didn't know anything. Now I really know what's up. I'm going into second grade." And then having that same experience going into third grade, and having that experience enough times that I was like, "Wait a second. I'm noticing a pattern here. Maybe I don't actually know everything there is to know now that I'm going into fifth grade. Maybe my mind is actually just in a process of changing and growing and evolving." And that stuck with me.

Lauren Schiller:                  So this concept of how people change their hearts and minds, I mean, why is that something you decided you really wanted to explore?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah. So that was through my earliest experiences with activism and social change in college and early into my professional life the question would always come up am I changing anyone's mind? Am I actually moving anyone on climate change or mandatory minimums or whatever issue I happen to be focused on at the time, which then of course, begs the question, how do people actually change their hearts and minds? And that question just kind of became a little bit of a fascination of mine. But I almost didn't even know what am I even researching here. What's the search term in my googling worldview transformation? Is that even a thing? I know behavioral economics is a thing, but I'm not looking to find out what makes people floss their teeth more often. I'm looking to find out what moves people in fundamental ways.

                                                      And it finally just kind of occurred to me that that question might be really powerful to manifest in the form of stories of people who have made these kinds of transformative change as a podcast. And so that's where Reckonings comes from. It is an exploration of the question how do people change, and really kind of more specifically, how do people change in ways that connect to or scale into broader social and political change.

Lauren Schiller:                  And so when you think about your role in bringing this understanding to light, I mean, how do you think of yourself?

Stephanie Lepp:                I mean, a mirror actually is very apt. That's really what I'm doing for the person I'm interviewing. I'm just being a gentle... I deliberately don't do interviews in person. Because a lot of what I'm asking people I'm asking people to talk about some really sensitive stuff sometimes. Sometimes it's the thing that they are the least proud of, the thing that they are really reckoning with. And I find it more helpful if I can just kind of be a little voice in their head that holds up a mirror to them such that they can just see clearly what they have done, the impact that they may have had on other people, and then how they have learned from that and grown from that. I want to make an uncomfortable experience like a tiny bit more comfortable, just a tiny bit, so you can just hang out in it longer and speak from that place.

Lauren Schiller:                  From the standpoint of the listener or the person who you are talking to?

Stephanie Lepp:                The person telling the story. Are we just going to keep taking the mirror metaphor everywhere? We might. I mean, yeah, the listener, there is kind of maybe a collective mirror of us beholding our own capacity to change. That's certainly part of what I'm doing, because I believe that we can at least even just for me personally in producing the show it's like what does it do to us to wander through the world with the belief that the people around us can change? It just creates more room for new things to happen that haven't happened before.

Lauren Schiller:                  Have you ever wanted to turn the mic on yourself? I mean, is there a reckoning of your own that you've been wanting to explore?

Stephanie Lepp:                I find that so intimidating. It's amazing that no one... I've been interviewed a little bit, a couple times. And it's amazing to me that no one has asked me the question of what I'm reckoning with, which I dread, which is so amazing to me or just hysterical to me because yeah, I mean, obviously, that's what I'm asking my guests to do. But I'm kind of just in total awe of all of my guests. I think what they do is so hard. It's like basically asking you in some ways to have a public therapy session. I mean, you're just letting out the hardest things. Have I wanted to turn the mic on myself? No. That sounds really scary. Which is part of why I'm so in awe of my guests.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, what are you reckoning?

Stephanie Lepp:                So therefore, you're going to ask me the question.

Lauren Schiller:                  What are you reckoning with?

Stephanie Lepp:                What I am reckoning with is put really simply my relationship with productivity. It took me a long time to understand what I want to do. And so I feel like I've wasted all this time. And I have all this kind of old regret, and so therefore I must use all of my time super productively. And so I'm in this tug of war with time and I just hold my time accountable to... I mean, even just my understanding of what productive even means it prevents me from really just kind of being inside of and experiencing my life, is what it's preventing. And it became much more apparent to me once my daughter was born.

                                                      I thought she was going to start challenging me when she turned 13. It started immediately. It's like the second she came out of the womb, she was like, "Let me hold up a mirror to you mom and show you how addicted you are to crossing things off your list of things to do, because the second I need something from you have a really hard time diverting from whatever your plan was for what you were going to do in the next 10 minutes or the entire day." So it's just become that much more apparent to me as a mom, and I feel I am reckoning with... I mean, I guess it's also just the way I relate to and then have in my life and I am wanting to feel less like I'm struggling against my life or struggling against time and more in a experience of gratitude and awe for my life.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller being fully present with Stephanie Lepp, host of the podcast Reckonings, a show about how people change their hearts and minds. You can cross one thing off your list when you subscribe to the podcast and make a contribution toward our production at Inflectionpointradio.org. Coming up, Stephanie will share clips from her show, including the reckoning of a former neo-nazi. And she'll share what she learned from a sexual abuse survivor and her perpetrator, both of whom managed to work through it using restorative justice.

                                                      I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point. I'm here with Stephanie Lepp, host of the podcast Reckonings, and we're talking about how personal change can lead to positive societal change. Well, let's talk about some of the people that you talked to on Reckoning. I would like to start with your episode 19, which is about violent white extremists, because that... well, I mean, we can't walk away from it. So in this episode you talk with two different men-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... Jesse and Frank.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  Why don't you tell us a little bit about each of those guys and then we'll play the clip.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah. So Frank is a former white supremacist. Jesse is a former jihadi extremist. And I weave their stories together. And part of the reason I do that is because I guess on the one hand we kind of think of those ideologies as somehow kind of like opposite or something. But you get to see how when you need something, when you are just feeling broken, and don't have many options and it's like you're going to reach for heroin, or alcohol, or white supremacy or jihadi extreme, whatever it is that helps you cope. And either one of them could have gone in the other direction. And there are times in the episode where you may not even be able to distinguish between their voices, but that's kind of part of the point.

                                                      So this is when Frank, he just got out of jail. He's looking for a job. He can't find a job. He has swastika tattoos all over him. And through a friend he manages to get a gig at a trade show with a Jewish antique dealer. And the Jewish antique dealer knows that Frank is a neo-nazi, but he says he doesn't care what Frank believes as long as he doesn't break the furniture. And so this clip picks up right after Frank has worked to this gig at the trade show with this Jewish antique dealer.

Lauren Schiller:                  And this guy Frank is the basis for the-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... character that Ed Norton plays in American-

Stephanie Lepp:                American History X, yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  1998 for those of who are wondering when did that movie come out. Yeah. So if you've seen that movie or if you go see that movie that gives a instantaneous visual-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... from what we're talking about here.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Frank:                                        He gave me a ride home that night. And when he gave me the ride home and then as he's dropping me off he just goes, "Hey, what do you do for a living?" I said, "I don't do anything." He goes, "Why don't you come work for me?" And I'm looking down at my Dr Martens on my red laces, which meant I'm a neo-nazi. And I keep looking down at the boots as he's talking to me, this Jewish man, and I'm trying to hide the boots underneath the other part of the seat. I'm just looking at him like, "Thank god this human being is in my life."

                                                      It's fear. I was full of fear. I was full of absolute fear for everything. And so I got with a group of people who also were fearful people, their fear for losing their homeland are going to lose their women to the black man. You name it. And my fear I felt made me weak. And so what they did is they turned my fear into an anger. And they made it to where it was my strong point. I was embarrassed. I was completely embarrassed of my beliefs. I was wrong, and I'd been wrong for the last seven years of my life. I'd been completely wrong. This is all [inaudible 00:16:42]. I believed in something that I was willing to die and kill for, something that is [inaudible 00:16:48].

                                                      I had so much seniority in this group. Seniority was important to me because I had nothing in this world. I cut everything and everybody that was not part of the movement out of my life. So that's all I have. So the car ride is coming to an end and he drops me off. And he goes, "I'll see you Monday, right?" And I took my pay and I went home and I could not wait to get home and get them boots off my feet. My whole image of me is gone. And I got to build something new.

Lauren Schiller:                  So for this episode the overarching question that you ask is what happens when we look past ideology.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  And, I mean, this guy that gave him a job, this Jewish guy that gave this neo-nazi with swastikas all over himself a job. I mean, it's kind of incredible.

Stephanie Lepp:                It's completely incredible. It's completely incredible. I mean, it's both incredible that he was willing to do that, and it's also incredible how much that does, how much a gesture like that can do. And yeah, it poses the question back to us if we were that Jewish man would we have given Frank a job? I mean, even less than that, like giving someone a job, even talk to people being willing to talk to people. So yeah, it's amazing what a gesture can do, and yeah, I take that back to are we willing to let alone give the person a job just let the bad guy change?

Lauren Schiller:                  I mean, one of the things that this episode made me think about and even just that clip is the responsibility of the person who is going to change or wants to change or maybe doesn't even know yet that they want to change and that it has to be a two way street. So there's the input from someone showing compassion. But then there's how is that received? How was he in that place at that time to be able to accept the work, even if he had reservations about whether or not he would get paid, which is part of what we didn't hear.

Stephanie Lepp:                Well, and it's a gradual... so Frank's transformation process actually started in jail when he started playing sports with black people and started getting to know black people really for the first time in his life. And it was coming from that experience and the confusion that that brought up of like, "Wait, actually black people are fine." Then he had this experience, so generosity from a Jewish person, and that just kind of sealed the deal in terms of revealing to him the absolute bankruptcy of his ideology.

                                                      And so it was a gradual thing. But yes, that is kind of what put him in the position and say, "Well, wait a second." Because you go through this process of like, "Okay. Fine, black people are fine, but Jewish people?" And it's like me with the school bus. After having enough experiences of seeing yourself repeat the same pattern you start to wonder is there a pattern here? Am I going to just say, "Okay. Fine Jewish people, but then the next person." Or am I finally going to say, "Actually, maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that I have been seeing the world"?

Lauren Schiller:                  So on this topic of domestic terrorism and white supremacism and the attacks in El Paso and Dayton and Gilroy, and you reference in this episode the Oklahoma City bombing. One of your characters, I wouldn't know if it was Frank or Jesse.

Stephanie Lepp:                It was Frank. It was Frank, yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  So Frank, the same fellow has insight into the bomber.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  Timothy McVeigh. And so he wants to go and talk to the FBI-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... about that. So can you just share a little bit about what happens as a result?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah, he watched the bombing or he watched kind of footage from the bombing on TV. And it was one scene in particular of a firefighter carrying I think a very young girl who looked like she might have been killed. And he just realized like, "I actually understand where this bomber was coming from, and I need to help. I need to use that understanding I have to help us prevent this from happening." So that's when he showed up at the FBI and he kind of... I think they first kind of were a little disarmed, but he showed up, he was like, "I need to talk to you about the bombing." Like, "No, I don't know information about the person but I understand where that person was coming from. And I need to help you understand where that person was coming from."

                                                      First I think he worked with the FBI and then even started working with the Anti-Defamation League and talking to Jewish audiences about what gives rise to these kinds of ideologies. And I guess this is kind of the concrete thing if you want to share with this episode. Actually both he and Jesse are part of this... It's called the Against Violent Extremism Network. This is unbelievable too me. It's a searchable database of former violent extremists. You can literally search for the kind of violent extremism you're looking for, so that you can find someone, a former extremists, who can then talk to current extremists or their families and basically help people exit lives of extremist violence, because they can speak to, they were there, they can speak to who they are coming from and kind of make the bridge to where they have come to.

                                                      And yeah, it's unbelievable to me that something like that even exists. But that's basically what they have made themselves, both Frank and Jesse and the others who are a part of it, made themselves available for is available for people who are still in those ideologies to even just kind of explore, experiment, or conceive of the possibility of moving in a new direction.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. Which gets back to this question of when is someone ready? How can their path change sooner before the violent act?

Stephanie Lepp:                I don't know if I have a specific answer to that question. But certainly making it possible, making it available for them. I don't know if the Against Violent Extremism Network has an anonymous hotline or something where you don't have to... yeah, I don't know. But at least having that be... and I don't know how it's promoted. And actually, here's a kind of a similar example. Are you familiar with Footsteps?

Lauren Schiller:                  No.

Stephanie Lepp:                And I do not want to equate these things at all but just kind of an analogy in the sense that... now I'm almost hesitating. But it's an organization that helps Orthodox Jews explore the possibility of leaving the orthodoxy. That's really all it is. And I don't know how they promote themselves, but even just knowing that there's somewhere you can go, maybe it's anonymous or the person doesn't have to know you where you can even just dip your toe in the water of change, just see how it feels, try it on, don't have to commit to anything, don't have to change your public identity about it yet. But yeah, I mean, it's like if we're going to ask people to jump ship we need to give them a ship to jump to. So to the extent that there can be ships out there, that is helpful.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, let's play a clip from another episode. This is episode 21, a survivor and her perpetrator find justice. For this one, you pose the question what does it sound like for a survivor to get her needs met? And what does it sound like for a perpetrator to take responsibility for his sexual abuse of power? Before we even play the clip I'm curious. How did you get answers to these questions? How did you find these people who are willing to talk to you?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah. So I was looking for them for a long time. I knew I wanted to find a perpetrator and survivor of sexual assault who managed to work through it using restorative justice. Because I just felt like that's what we weren't hearing and would be really helpful to hear the voice of a survivor who got her needs met and the voice of a perpetrator who actually graciously skillfully takes responsibility for his sexual abuse. And so I just reached out to and bugged all the practitioners of restorative justice for sexual assault violence that I could find, which, by the way, the fact that that's even a job that people have is amazing to me that that's some people's job, what they do for a living. So I reached out to as many of these practitioners as I could find. And someone named David Karp kept my name and got back to me a year later, and said, "I think I found your guests."

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, let's see hear this clip. So you've given names to these people. These are not their real name.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes. These are pseudonyms. They gave themselves their pseudonyms.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay. Great. So just introduce us to who these people are.

Stephanie Lepp:                Unwin and Sameer. Yes. So Unwin and Sameer met freshman year. Sameer was into Unwin, and they started kind of seeing each other a little bit, but then Unwin kind of blew him off and one night they ended up at the same fraternity party, which is when Sameer convinced Unwin to come home with him and then coerced her into sexual activity. So that was freshman year. And then their senior year, and you're going to have to listen to the episode to find out what happened between freshman year and senior year, but their senior year Unwin invited Sameer into a process of restorative justice.

                                                      Restorative justice basically is a response to crime that engages offenders and victims in repairing the harm that was caused. So Unwin invites Sameer into this process, and I also want to be really clear that in this episode we hear from both Unwin and Sameer, although in this clip we're only going to hear from Sameer. So this is kind of in the middle of the restorative justice process. This is right after Sameer reads Unwin's written testimony of what happened that night.

Sameer:                                   I thought in my brain I had asked her to take her shirt off. I didn't. I told her. I did not remember emotionally manipulating her to coming back to staying with me. I thought from my perspective I was being a potential teacher when it came to oral sex. Turns out, I was basically coercing her into doing this even though she wasn't comfortable. For my end I was like, "Oh, this was just a fun hookup." But then from her end it's like, "This guy is like pushing himself on me," and it didn't sound like me. It sounded like a monster. But that was the hardest part was that this guy who forced himself onto this girl is me.

                                                      I think it was combination of desperation, validation, wanting to finally get the girl that I've been after forever. I wanted to have fun and run around and just have a bunch of sex because that's what I thought college was. But now I wish I could just go back and talk to the kid and just be like, "Hey, dude, your heart is may be in a good place right now. But here's some things you need to know before you start engaging in sexual activities with other people that will prevent a lot of pain. You're a larger guy. You can't just go ahead and ask things and then expect people not to be intimidated by it. If it's not an enthusiastic yes don't do it."

                                                      I've made it very difficult for her to enjoy many parts of intimacy. I absolutely terrified her for years just being around. She would spend every day or at least once at some point almost every day trapped in that night and basically reliving it and she's had to think about it every single day. And I'm not sure if the wounds are all the way healed. I doubt they are but it's a pain that I can't take away no matter what I do. I can't take that away, and I know I've said it 1000 times but I am sorry.

Lauren Schiller:                  I've listened to that so many times and every time-

Stephanie Lepp:                Me too.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... it just gets me the same.

Stephanie Lepp:                Me too. Me too. Yeah. Me too. Me too [inaudible 00:32:00].

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. I mean, what was your takeaway from what they went through and what people who are listening to this could take away too?

Stephanie Lepp:                Well, first of all it's just so refreshing to finally hear a man take responsibility and do it in a... he did kind of at first get a little stuck in this whoa it was me thing, which is not... this isn't about you. You can't get too stuck in self pity because then you're not actually helping the other person. So it's not just about hearing someone kind of like grovel. It's see clearly what they did and then be inspired by it, take that as, I don't know if inspiration, but yeah, it's motivation to help and to heal and for Sameer to work on this issue in particular. And so it's really refreshing to hear a man do that gracefully.

                                                      And it actually sounds... I mean, that's part of what I feel like my job here is, is to make it sound more stunning, more powerful, more manly I could say, to take responsibility, and to, let's say even be also just communicate around sexual intimacy in an open and mature way than to do the other thing where we're just kind of aloof and don't know how we affect other people or maybe don't care about that. Part of my goal here is to make it sound more beautiful and powerful and sure, manly to do what he did. And it does actually sound beautiful and powerful to take a look in the mirror and grow from what we see.

Lauren Schiller:                  In kind of the bigger picture of social change and being convinced that there's a better way forward if we think things are going arise, say, I don't know, with our society [inaudible 00:34:07] people who we might not agree with on a whole host of issues from the political on down to the biological let's say. They think they're right and they don't need to change, and we think we're right and we don't need to change, and finding a way to open the conversation and communication feels like the hardest task of all. So in terms of the kinds of things that you've learned from hearing these stories, these stories of change, I mean, is there kind of an anatomy of change or a way to take this personal change and think about it in terms of how does that scale-

Stephanie Lepp:                How does that scale.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... to social change?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah, and that's kind of precisely what I'm playing with here, is the relationship between personal and social change, this idea that big change out there in the world can start in here, inside of us, and that therefore we can be the change. But how does that actually happen? What does that actually mean? Well, we can look at these episodes as example. How does Sameer's personal change translate into social change. It's one less dude who's just kind of going around engaging in sexual activity in kind of a mindless way and one more mindful dude who has done this thing and has really learned from it and grown from it and can talk to other men about it.

                                                      Frank. It's one less white supremacist and one more advocate who can talk to people who still live lives of violence and can also kind of help us understand where he was coming from and where people are coming from and what would speak to them. So part of it is, let's say, growing the cadre of advocates or allies, and these people are kind of like uniquely effective advocates because they are kind of these bridge people. Sameer can speak to guys. He's a young guy. Frank was a leader in the movement.

                                                      So part of it is growing the team. And I tend to think about things in terms of power. And we all have the power to change ourselves, but some of us have more power in this world than others. And put crudely, their personal change would therefore translate into even broader social change. There have been guests of mine, for example, who have a lot of influence. So let's say for former congressman Bob Inglis made a really dramatic shift on climate change. He has a lot of power, and so his personal reckoning had that much more kind of social impact.

                                                      Jerry Taylor was a prominent... he was kind of like the spokesperson for climate skepticism. And his transformation also can lead to... So when I think about my wish list of guests I kind of think about who are the fewest number of people that if they had a personal reckoning that would lead to the biggest social change? What if Charles Koch had a reckoning? But that's still kind of coming from how does personal change lead to social change. We can also kind of think in the other direction, how does social change translate into personal change? How does or should the experience of participating in social change kind of change us as individuals when we have participated or when I have participated in activism and social change? Has it made me more angry? Has it made me more compassionate? Has it made me more hopeful? How does even engaging in social change or how do we want it to kind of change us personally?

Lauren Schiller:                  Have you heard from any of the people that you've spoken with... Well, you know you can kind of like feel a cold coming on? You get a little tickle in the throat or whatever, have they ever talked about feeling a change coming on whether it's a mental or physical sign that I am about to think about something differently? And how do you recognize that?

Stephanie Lepp:                I love that question. I've never heard a guest say that. And also for some people, they hit a rock bottom and clearly something needs to change. A white supremacist I interviewed a while ago, he hit a point where he said he was sitting over a bridge with a gun in his hand, and he said, "Wither I'm going to kill myself now or I'm going to change." For other people there's also kind of a house of cards thing that happens where... because a lot of our ideas are kind of like interconnected or held up by each other.

                                                      And so once you start dismantling one thing the entire house of cards just comes crashing down. So there was a young man I interviewed who he was in the military. He fought in Afghanistan and he became a conscientious objector. And once he started dismantling his ideas about the military and war all of a sudden his ideas about religion, politics, everything came crashing down. So sometimes there's also just an initial change that is kind of like, I don't know, canary in the coal mine or the kind of like a sign that more change is coming.

                                                      A third thing I'll say is we kind of create opportunities for ourselves or at least we can for I'm thinking specifically of Yom Kippur in particular. Is my favorite Jewish holiday. It's a holiday where you basically take a day too fast and reflect on how you affect other people and how you want to affect other people. And thank God I could definitely use that once a year. It's really helpful. Thank you God.

                                                      I mean, that's kind of like planting opportunities for change in your life. So maybe it's not like I can feel it coming on like a cold, but I at least want to make a little space in my life for it to happen if it needs to happen, and it probably does need to happen on a somewhat regular basis throughout my life with intention.

Lauren Schiller:                  What are the lessons that you have learned from all of these stories that you're gathering?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes. So I used to have this extremely unscientific list of things that I thought radically transformed people. So falling in love, near death experiences, psychedelics, sometimes very rarely information because we usually just trust information that confirms what we already believe. And from what I have seen from the hours and hours of talking to people who have made transformative change, it's not that those things make us change. What those things have in common, or what they do, is that they reveal to us the difference between who we think we are and who we actually are, or the difference between the impact we think we're having on the world and the impact we are actually having on the world. And it's seeing that difference. It's seeing that gap. That is what initiates the process of transformation.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, what's the best advice that you've ever been given about how to change?

Stephanie Lepp:                How to change myself?

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah.

Stephanie Lepp:                What's coming up for me is a quote by a philosopher named Ken Wilber, which is, "Any good theory helps you get to a better one." So to kind of just treat where I am, what I believe as kind of the provisional on my way to where... it's not the end all be all. I haven't figured it out. It's just the next step. It's what's going to help me keep moving forward in my pursuit of unimaginable happiness, joy, understanding, peace, love, all of it. So yeah, to just treat what I believe now or where I'm at now as the provisional and part of the movement forward.

                                                      I'm not all for like peace, love compassion, always. I'm a mischievous, pragmatic pluralist. Within the context of restorative justice, restorative justice and traditional criminal justice are not mutually exclusive. Just because someone is sitting in jail doesn't mean they can't work to repair the harm that they caused somebody else. So people should enjoy the consequences that are appropriate to whatever they did. And if we're also interested in having people also learn from and grow beyond what they did well, then, restorative justice is really helpful. It's not compassion or consequences. It's all of the above, under the right circumstances, in pursuit of our collective liberation. We have the punishment thing down. We know how to do that in this country. Actually then learning from the thing we did, that's the thing that we like, have it totally engaged.

TOOLKIT

Lauren Schiller:                  If you're considering a change stick around and hear Stephanie Lepp's toolkit for how your small personal change can lead to greater societal change. I'm Lauren Schiller. And if you're wondering what personal change you can make that can lead to positive societal change here's your toolkit with Stephanie Lepp. First things first, Stephanie says we need to make room for change.

Stephanie Lepp:                Over the years of producing Reckonings I have been able to witness our human capacity to change. We are capable of all kinds of extraordinary change, and we need room. We need room to change. And we are such a punitive culture. It's like even after perpetrators have taken responsibility or let's say kind of healed things up with their survivor or their victim, which in my humble opinion that's the most important stakeholder here, we often are still not even willing to see them kind of beyond the worst thing they ever did, or let them help. I mean, Sameer is a perfect example. He tried. He reached out to local public high schools and tried to kind of tell his story as part of their sex ed program. And they didn't know how to let an ex offender help.

                                                      And so the personal change, I think we can make, that could translate into broader social change is yes, to make more room for each other to change and grow, to make room under the right circumstances for perpetrators to become allies, which might sound like a blasphemous thing, but then when you hear it within the context of Sameer that can make sense.

Lauren Schiller:                  Stephanie says to keep a conversation open try not to respond with judgment or shame when you hear ideas you disagree with.

Stephanie Lepp:                I mean, if you think about Me Too as an example let's think about how have we each kind of participated in the Me Too conversation, how have we talked to the older men in our lives or even the younger men in our lives, or what have we liked online, or shared online, or commented or tweeted? Have we kind of adapted our ideas about someone to the way they actually behave to whether or not they have actually taken responsibility? I mean, I can give a personal example. I had a really long conversation with my father-in-law recently. We ended up in a car together for a long drive. And he heard Unwin and Sameer's episode and he responded in, I hate to say it, but it's kind of like the typical way that men his age kind of respond which is like, "In my day that wouldn't have been sexual assault. And so is that really sexual assault?"

                                                      And my response to him is like, "Just because there wasn't sexual assault in your day doesn't mean it's right. It doesn't mean like someone wasn't hurt." And so I think in our conversation I guess I didn't respond to him with judgment or shame. I made enough room, I think, in our conversation for him to kind of expand his mind on this and in a way that actually made me want to talk to his siblings, like my aunt and uncles in law. They kind of came into the conversation at a certain point, and I decided I'm going to talk to them over Thanksgiving, which is the whole trope of not talking about politics at the Thanksgiving table. But yeah, I guess the question to ask ourselves is am I engaging in the issues I care about in a way that makes enough room for my adversaries To change.

Lauren Schiller:                  And number three, the easiest way to remove barriers is to make connections. Ask questions and understand where someone is coming from.

Stephanie Lepp:                What I have found is that you may actually have similar values or similar intentions or similar... My father-in-law is and example. It's like he would not want anyone to be hurt either. And so if we can agree from that then we can kind of reverse engineer how do we get there. The LGBT Center in LA, this is a story, but I think it'll help answer the question, the LGBT Center in LA so after Prop 8 passed in California, which anti gay marriage, there was this whole reckoning really like how did that happen in California, in a state like California.

                                                      And so they did this thing, which apparently is really rare and political polling, where they decided to talk to people who voted against them, who voted against gay marriage, to understand where they were coming from and kind of with this idea of like, "Maybe we're going to change their minds." And so firstly knocking on doors and talking to people and kind of like shaming them a little bit. And of course, that didn't work. And what they learned, what they realized was that all they have to do is ask people open ended questions. And you can actually watch these conversations. They have videos.

                                                      So you watch this person knock on someone's door. It's like, "Oh, how did you vote on Prop 8?" It's like, "Okay, do you know anyone who's gay?" And the person's like, ""Oh, yeah. My cousin is gay." It's like, "Oh, tell me about your cousin. It's like, "I love my cousin. We have Thanksgiving at their house every year. And he's amazing with my kids. And I love him," whatever. "Okay, great. Are you married?" Like, "Yeah, I'm married." Like, "Well, tell me about your marriage." It's like, "I have the best relationship. I'm in love with her. We've been married for 50 years," whatever. And it's like, "Does your cousin know how you voted on Prop 8?" It's like, "Well, no. I haven't really talked to them about it." "And so how do you think they would feel about how you voted?"

                                                      You watch this person in real time, a stranger just asking them open ended questions about their life. And what I've learned about what moves people to change it's really just about seeing the difference between who you think you are and who you actually are. And it's seeing that difference, seeing that gap, that is what initiates. So all these people are doing is just holding up a mirror. You think you are, whatever you think you are. Frank thought he was this defender of the white race, but here is what you actually are, Frank, You were just an angry and violent and bigoted individual. And that person can make their own determination based on that. And so yeah, I mean, this isn't like a short tip or trick but hold holding up a mirror showing people themselves asking them open ended questions about themselves. People can come to it.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Stephanie Lepp, mirror, tuning fork, and the host of the Reckonings podcast. I've got a link to her show on my website at Inflectionpointradio.org. You'll find this episode in the Inflection Point podcast feed in two segments. One is the full interview, and the other is the toolkit you just heard. With three ways your personal change can lead to positive societal change. Find Inflection Point episodes in any podcast app, or go to Inflectionpointradio.org. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is how women rise up.

                                                      That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to? Let us know at Inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to Inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on twitter @Laschiller.

                                                      To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go, Inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco, and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Lane. I'm your host Lauren Schiller.

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How Kate Black is Getting More Women in Office–and how you can too (Interview+Toolkit)

 

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Former Chief of Staff for EMILY's List, Kate Black, just published her first book, written with the actress June Diane Raphael. It’s called “Represent The Woman's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World.” She shares the attributes of successful candidates, the stories of women who rose to office against all odds, and how to respond when you hear someone say this country isn’t ready for a woman president. Plus, how to determine if you have the time to get out there and run.

Be sure to check out Kate’s TOOLKIT FOR ACTION.

TRANSCRIPT: We do our best on these, if you see an error, let us know.

Kate Black:                            My name is Kate Black. I'm a policy advisor in the federal government and the former chief of staff and vice president of research at Emily's List.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm just thinking about what position does a woman need to be in in her life to either afford to run or have the time to run? I'm thinking about all the things that are stacked against us. We're the primary caregivers, all the things that we're up against in terms of attaining leadership positions, you know, in a corporate setting let alone in a public setting. Is there kind of an ideal situation that you're in that says, "I'm equipped, I'm prepared, I have what I need to make it happen."

Kate Black:                            Well I think first and foremost it's really important to think about a couple of words that we say over and over in the book, which is that men are not waiting.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah.

Kate Black:                            Men are not waiting for that next, you know, promotion or for their children to grow up and move out of the house. They're not waiting for maybe an aging parent to finally get well. They're not waiting for that next training or webinar. Men are not waiting. I think to your point, is there a perfect time? I say no. I think you have to kind of understand where you're at currently and evaluate that. You're absolutely right, women are doing the majority of caregiving in this country whether it's paid or unpaid and we wanted to be really thoughtful about how we were addressing them but we also wanted to address self care and I think that self care gets a little bit of a buzzword these days but you have to really think about what you need to be successful and to bring your whole self, your whole, healthy self to a campaign.

Kate Black:                            If that looks like going to therapy, if it looks like taking a bath in some really nice lotion, if it means going to church, if it means going for a long walk with a friend or reading a book or doing some art. Whatever it looks like you need to make sure that you're making space for that in your campaign.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to imagine. I'm trying to imagine Elizabeth Warren out there taking a long bath. I feel like-

Kate Black:                            I bet she does something. She has a dog, you don't think that dog goes for walks?

Lauren Schiller:                  I don't mean to create the imagine of now like, you know, potentially our future president in the bathtub. That wasn't my intention.

Kate Black:                            Right, Elizabeth Warren walking her dog. That I can see. I can see it.

Kate Black:                            [00:03:14]

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller and that's Kate Black. And while of course we're guessing on Elizabeth Warren's self care ritual, when it comes to getting pro-choice Democratic women in office, suffice to say Kate knows of what she speaks. Kate Black has been on Inflection Point before and returns to us because she just published her first book written with the actress June Diane Raphael. It's called "Represent - The Women's Guide for Running for Office and Changing the World."

Lauren Schiller:                  Tell me a little bit about how you and June got together to write this book in the first place.

Kate Black:                            Sure, so after 2016 June lives in California, I live in Washington DC, but like so many, in fact, millions of people after the 2016 elections were kind of called to do something more. A lot of us marched, a lot of us went to the streets and took up in the Women's Marches. A lot of us ran for Congress and for State House and got involved in politics and June and I specifically came together to write this book. She woke up after the elections and kind of I think like a lot of people kind of asked herself, you know, "If that guy could do it maybe I should." Looked around and there wasn't really a roadmap for her, you know? There wasn't a book that she could buy online or at her local bookstore that she could find. So she kind of made her way to me and we wrote this how-to guide, basically.

Kate Black:                            We wrote the story that we thought was missing. It provides that roadmap that I think June was looking for. It covers so many of the elements of running for office that uniquely impact women, you know? Where do you run? When do you run? Do you start talking about it? Clothing? Yes, we address clothing, and we address a subject that we hear a lot which is, "How do I help other women?" Through almost about three years from an initial phone call that lasted well over an hour to me going to LA, her coming to DC multiple times, writing a proposal, then writing the book itself and editing it and designing it.

Lauren Schiller:                  Is she planning to run or something?

Kate Black:                            You know, I think if you were to ask her that question, I don't want to speak for her but I thin if you were to ask her that question she would encourage all women to consider it and I think she's a woman that's considering it.

Lauren Schiller:                  What is the state of women in office right now? I mean, we were so excited at the last election when we elected all these congresswomen, you know? It seems like the momentum is really good but like what's the reality of where we are and where do you think we actually need to get to?

Kate Black:                            You know, the reality is that the work is not done. You're exactly right that after 2018 there was a wave of new women coming into all levels of offices and that was so exciting to see and I think what's been so great about that wave of, that newness, is that it's really invigorated our politics. You're seeing, I think, especially women coming into office with young children. They're having a voice in policy where they were absent before and I think that's super exciting. When you look at just the raw numbers it still isn't where it needs to be and that's precisely why we wanted to write this book. Women are over half of the population in this country but just barely a quarter of the seats in Congress.

Kate Black:                            There are almost half of the states across the country have never had a female governor. You know, and when you look at the mayors and the state legislatures we're making improvements there but we could certainly do more and we need to keep encouraging women to step up and lead. The same barriers that exist to women running for office remain. We know for a fact that it's harder for women to fundraise, especially women of color and our campaign finance system is just as it was. That barrier hasn't necessarily gone away but what we do in the book is provide some guidance and some advice for women who see that barrier in front of them and are just wondering like, "How am I going to raise this money? I have to raise probably thousands of dollars. I don't have that. How am I going to do it?"

Kate Black:                            What we do in the book is really try to rethink what fundraise can look like in your own campaign and instead of just seeing this huge number and budget in front of you and thinking, "I can't do it" instead we say, "Here's a way to jump over that barrier rethinking what you have in front of you."

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and I want to get into some of the nitty gritty of that, too, because that is clearly like, how you actually go and get it done is so important. Imagining it and envisioning it is one thing but then actually getting on the ground and doing it is-

Kate Black:                            Yeah it's [crosstalk 00:08:11] one thing to write the book but it's still really hard and that was one thing that June and I felt so strongly about is when you're writing a book like this you want to make it for any woman who wants to run for office and there's an inherent kind of struggle in making sure that all levels of offices are kind of represented and running for city counsel in a small town is very different than running for governor of a large state. We wanted to speak to both so I think throughout the book you see this kind of pivot back and forth from federal races and big gubernatorial races to the very local races.

Kate Black:                            Trying to understand and unpack how much money it does cost to run for governor of Texas, for example, versus maybe school board in Virginia Beach. You know, those are two different races but similarly a woman could be easily qualified and feel up for the task for both. We want to make sure that both of those women have the tools that they need to be successful.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's actually something I've been wondering about and first of all, it was a great reminder that there are all these levels of positions that are available to run for. It's not just about, you know, we're more so focused on the presidency right now, for example, but it's not just about that level.

Kate Black:                            Absolutely.

Lauren Schiller:                  It can be effecting your community. The 25% that you cited, is that pretty much even across the board across all of these positions or are there positions where we're seeing more woman in-

Kate Black:                            Well let me take a step back. I mean, you brought up a great point that so often I think when we think about campaigning or running for office we think about Washington DC. That's kind of where our mind goes but the book really represents the full depth and breadth of elected offices that you can seek out. There are over 500,000 offices that you can run for in this country. It's not just the 435 in the US House of Representatives or the 100 in the Senate or even that Oval Office on Pennsylvania Avenue. It's this whole landscape that's available to women and so we really wanted to speak to that.

Kate Black:                            To your question, though, about the 25%. We kind of hover around that number whether you're talking about the federal level or state legislatures. There are some super bright spots, though. Like for instance we know that women tend to make up a larger swath of school board seats. We also know that there are some state legislatures that are majority women. I think Nevada is one of those. There definitely are some bright spots, like I mentioned, but I think across the board we need to do more so that there are not just women in some of these specific sectors but rather when you look across the kind of political landscape it's filled with women.

Kate Black:                            I want to see women everywhere. Especially if we're ever going to think about parity, you know, we really have to have a long way to go there.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and keeping the momentum going and you know, I was thinking back to like, in the 90s it was the year of the woman, right? When Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and three or four other women were elected to the Senate in a single year. That was like, a really big deal, but that was over 20 years ago. How do we make this not just surge and retreat, surge and retreat, but keep the momentum going? What's your vision for how that might come to be?

Kate Black:                            Well I think Barbara Mikulski actually has a fantastic quote about the year of the woman because she would get asked about it all the time, you know? "Is this the new year of the woman?" I feel like that narrative comes up almost every election cycle, you know? "Is this the new year?" To be honest, there has been almost a steady growth. Now, that growth isn't huge, but a steady growth of women in elected office over time. What happens, though, is that as women step up to run women who are currently serving are either leaving their seats to run for higher office, which we're seeing right now with the presidential. All of the women except for Marianne Williamson currently hold elected office. If they're successful, that means that there's no longer a woman in their current seat.

Kate Black:                            Sometimes that happens where a woman is in elected office but chooses to run for something else. That creates a vacancy and it's not always filled by another woman. Or what we have been seeing a lot, actually, on the Republican side is Republican women choosing not to run for reelection. It certainly happens on both sides where we have some growth but for different political or outstanding reasons a woman will choose not to go forward. But you know, I think going back to Barbara Mikulski, I think she would say that, "Every year is the year of the woman," right? That year was special but we should keep this momentum and this narrative alive.

Kate Black:                            It's not that it's this year, it's every year. I think that's helpful just as a reminder. It's not just about women on the ballot, it's about women voters, it's about the issues that matter to women. You know, I think too often we get so focused on a number and I think outside of all that, we strip all that away, you're actually talking about some really fantastic women who have stepped up to lead their communities. Whether it's running for city council, running for Congress or the Senate or even presidency. I mean, that is just in itself, should be celebrated.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, agreed 100%. I mean, and actually to the larger point, why is it important that we have more women in office? I mean, there's the sort of obvious like, well you know we are more than 50% of the population so we should have equal representation but beyond the numbers what are some of the advantages to our whole society for having more women in office?

Kate Black:                            Well first and foremost, you know, I think June and I fundamentally agreed from the jump when we started this book is that having a more representative government, a government that looks like the people it serves I think is a better government. Especially when we see photo after photo of rooms of men deciding things without women present that directly affect the lives of women and our children and our planet. So I think, you know, having us be at the decision making table or wherever decisions are happening about society at large, I think, brings more voices and more opinions and I think ultimately hopefully better outcomes to that decision making process.

Kate Black:                            If you look at the data, which I love, if you look at the data the data does show that when women are in office we get things done. That means we sponsor more legislation, we're more likely to work across the aisle, we're more likely to focus on issues that relate to women and families. That could look like education and health care, it could look like reproductive choice. There are so many things, I think, that women choose to focus on as priorities that make our society better. When someone asks me, "Why should I care if a woman is on the ballot or not?" Or, "Why should I vote for her?" It's like, well two things, number one, if you're tired of Washington not getting things done vote for a woman. The data shows that they just get the stuff done but also if you care about some of these bigger progressive issues we find that women when they're in office do vote and do support some of these really important issues like healthcare and like education, like I mentioned, that do impact families at large.

Lauren Schiller:                  Sometimes you hear about the talk about in terms of like, feminine values versus masculine values and that these areas of education and healthcare and social programs and reproductive choice and justice are more feminine attributes or more feminine values, you know? That's great because we can draw a line between women and those things happening. What I'm also learning and a study actually just came out today I just read the headlines of is that those things benefit men, too. I want to make sure that the outcomes feel like they are not just, "Okay we're going to get more women in office so women as a whole are going to do better" but that men are also going to do better as a result of these policies.

Kate Black:                            Absolutely. You know, I think about it all the time, even just the language that we use about issues. For example when you hear it tossed around especially in election season, "Women's issues," right? A whole bucket of things could be women's issues but that in itself kind of puts it into a segment and allows, I think, anybody, the media, candidates, pundits, whoever, to kind of segment it and park it over in a different spot where it's not part of the national dialogue. Instead of categorizing it just as "Women's issues," I like to think about it just as issues that are important to women. That is a whole host of things. It could be foreign policy, it could be domestic policy, whatever it is, those issues are central to the lives of women in this country and we should be putting them front and center.

Kate Black:                            Too, and anecdote that I would share with you to kind of color the point that you just made, I remember I was in a focus group, this was probably three or four years ago. It was a focus group in Pennsylvania about equal pay. We did a group of millennial men and I remember watching the focus group and the moderator asked a question, "Do you think the wage gap is real?" Half the room said, "No." Then she asked, she kind of explained it a little bit and by the end of the focus group I distinctly remember this one young man's opinion because he was kind of an older millennial and he was one of the few married men in the room. I distinctly remember by the end of the session he said, "So wait, let me get this, if my wife is making an equal wage as she should be, that actually helps me, right?"

Kate Black:                            I wish he could see my face behind the glass. I was like, "Yes 100% it helps you so like, get on board." I just, I will never forget him kind of having that light bulb moment of like, "Oh my gosh, this issue directly impacts me. My wife's financial security impacts me. I need to be for this." It's like, "Absolutely bro. Come to the party. I don't care that you're late but I'm glad that you're here."

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and I'm so glad you're here to listen to my conversation with Kate Black, coauthor of "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World." You can change the world right now by subscribing to the podcast and making a contribution toward our production at InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Stay tuned because coming up we'll talk about running for the highest office in the land.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:19:16]

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point and I'm here with Kate Black, coauthor of "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World." So you brought up the progressive issues. Are you saying this book is for any political affiliation or do you have a bias towards one political affiliation?

Kate Black:                            This book is for, I think, any woman from any party. We acknowledge, you know, I think on page two that June and I both come from progressive backgrounds, that we have both worked to elect Democrats. That's no secret in the book. We also say on that same page I think on the next sentence is that we hope that a Republican woman picks up this book, too, and is inspired and motivated and encouraged to run. I made the point earlier about parity but if we ever want to get to 50% of Congress, let's say, the Democrats can't do it alone. We need Republicans to do their part, too. That, I think, goes across partisan divides. I think if you're a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or a member of the Green party or just out there by yourself. I would say you can pick up this book and see not only the advice that we give, which crosses parties, or the issues that we talk about which also cross party lines, I think you can also see yourself in some of the women that we profile and that we talk to and whose advice is kind of scattered throughout.

Kate Black:                            We talked to Democrats, we talked to Republicans, we highlight Republicans and we highlight Democrats. So I think our intention with this book was to make it non-partisan, both in the look and the feel.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, well right now we're in the midst of the Democratic primaries for the presidential race in 2020. What do you say to people who say, "Well, they're really smart and everything but this country's just not ready for a woman president."

Kate Black:                            Oh man, I would say look at the data. The data disproves that. I think there was a poll that just came out this afternoon that said that 56% of Americans said that the country was ready for a woman president. I think I would also go back to 2016 and for the record, a woman won three million more votes than the other guy. I think there's a lot of data points that we could show that shows that not only is the country ready but voters have spoken about this issue. Also, for the record, I think the women who are currently running for president, they've all won elections before in their districts or their states and so I think there's certainly an electability argument there that is percolating but I feel very strongly that both the country is ready, because they've shown it before, but also that these women are women who have won elections and can hold their own.

Kate Black:                            I'm excited to kind of see where it all goes but I'm just as excited to see these women who have proven records, proven track records of getting voter support.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's kind of, sort of like a psychological game in a way to ask yourself the question, "Am I," especially in a position where I am hosting this feminist show, "Would I vote for them just because they're a woman or would I vote for the most qualified candidate who happens to be a woman or is the magic sauce that it's both?"

Kate Black:                            It could be the magic sauce. I mean, everyone has to answer that question for themselves but in that question I think I would challenge people to think about if you do value gender, if gender is for you, an unapologetic qualification, I think then the choice is obvious. I also don't think you have to be afraid of making gender a must have or value that you're looking for in candidates because this comes up a lot. This dialogue comes up or certainly the question, you know, we hear a lot like, "Yeah, are we ready for a woman president?" Or, "I just want to vote for the person who could win" or, "Her voice, just ugh, I can't." Or, "It's not her turn," or, "It's really time for him."

Kate Black:                            You do hear, or, "Why is she always playing X card," or, "She just doesn't represent me." All of those things we've heard before and what we wanted to do in the book was arm our readers with some kind of go to lines where they could interrupt some of that language. What we do in the book is provide a cheat sheet to interrupt sexist and racist, we say another word, comments about women candidates. It's meant almost to be cut out of the book and taken with you in your book bag, diaper bag, tote bag, whatever so that when it comes up you're kind of armed with something. It could be something as innocuous as, "Well tell me more about that. Why do you feel like you wouldn't vote for a woman just because she's a woman?" Or, "You say you just don't like her. Tell me more."

Kate Black:                            Sometimes I think people say these things because they've heard them before or they're kind of just memes out in the world and they're just repeating them but also I think sometimes there are real sentiments behind some of these comments and I think it's a dialogue that can happen from that interruption could be very valuable and could open up some thinking that might not have ever been kind of questioned before. We wanted to give the reader that part of the book. It was really, I think, a special piece that June and I wanted to include for sure.

Lauren Schiller:                  Actually that section is really helpful I think even as a woman reading the book. To interrupt some of the internalized sexism that we each hold within us because it's just like, baked in since day one of our birth, right, by living in this society.

Kate Black:                            Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know, I think part of writing this book for me personally was understanding my own kind of voice and value and that I am enough to write this book and you know, you kind of have to get over a whole host of your own stuff to be able to do this. This was not an easy process for me and I think I can only imagine what it's like for someone running. The levels of kind of scrutiny and socialization and bias and all of these things that are kind of taught to women and put on women from day one. You know, it's a lot to get over and I think it's a lot to get over and when I think about women running for office I just applaud them from the jump because it's such an undertaking to kind of disrobe yourself from all of that baggage sometimes.

Lauren Schiller:                  You're obviously very qualified to write this book with the multitude of experience that you've had and your role at Emily's List. What were some of the attributes that successful candidates have had that you've observed and that you could call out?

Kate Black:                            Sure. Well I think when you look at successful candidates, and especially I think one of the great things about women candidates specifically is that a successful candidate listens. They understand that to hear from voters and to hear stories and to internalize those narratives and then communicate effectively outward so that they reach people where they are but also share a story that's powerful. That intake and output is not an easy thing and it's certainly not an easy thing to sit quietly sometimes, especially if you're running for office and everyone's kind of waiting for you to speak. It's not an easy thing to sit quietly and hear, and really listen to a constituent share a problem or share something that they're passionate about. Even more so I think we can get kind of bogged down in some [wonkyness 00:28:04] and some policy and that sometimes feels good because that's our home base. Especially if you're running for office you're probably been thinking about all of these issues really seriously.

Kate Black:                            Sometimes I think the most effective candidates are the ones that can talk to you like a regular person and really break down some of these hard to understand issues in a way that I think meets them where they are but also doesn't patronize or talk down to anybody. You know, in fact, I think, Stacey Abrams is a fantastic example of this. But she's also, I think, a self described introvert. I think for any woman maybe listening to this who is thinking, "Oh, Kate's just talking about someone who's outgoing" or "I need to be really gregarious or be able to talk to anybody. That's just not me." I would tell you some of the best candidates, I think, are actually introverts. Where they are able to kind of absorb from other people, kind of sit with their own selves but also then communicate so well and emote and connect with people in such a way that when you're campaigning is such a powerful force to watch and to see.

Kate Black:                            Ultimately I think that's how we win elections is when our own stories kind of fill in the gaps between where voters see us and where they want to be ultimately. I think when you think about that quality, I think women candidates have that so innately because we have so many stories and we have so many narratives. It's so easy for us to connect. This was such an important piece of the book for June and I that we broke it into two chapters. It's called, "How Does This Work in my Real Life Part 1 and Part Deux." Part One really focuses on your professional career and it focuses on money and time. There's a question in there about thinking about what office you want to run for, do you have to quit your job and what are the implications of that? What is the implications on your financial security? What does it look like for your long term career plan? Are you able to take a leave of absence? Have you talked to your boss about this?

Kate Black:                            All of these questions are valuable questions that we kind of lead the reader through so that she's doing this exercise. The next thing that we think about is our time and so to that end, June and I both do a time log. For two weeks we map out every hour and you see it in the book. You see June's and you see mine. We're very different people. She wrote hers out in a narrative, mine's in an Excel spreadsheet. It's fine. Turns out though once you do that exercise you see kind of where your time is going and you're able to assess. "Is there time I can give away maybe for a campaign? And is there time that I need to keep sacred?"

Lauren Schiller:                  One of the many things that I love about "Represent" is that you share the stories of a number of women who ran for office and won and one of the ones that really stood out to me, which I was hoping you would tell the story of Stephanie Murphy, the congresswoman from Florida and how she came to the country, how she attained the position. Could you share that? I just think it's so poignant at this particular moment.

Kate Black:                            Sure, so Congresswoman Murphy was elected in 2016 and her story is so powerful. She was born in Vietnam and her family fled when she was just a baby. They were in a dingy of sorts, they were in a boat and the boat was going to capsize and she was rescued by the Coast Guard. She came to the United States and she worked in the Defense Department, she worked in government, she worked in private practice. She and her family eventually moved to Florida and she was a small businesswoman with two children. She decided to run for office, I would say, five or six months before the general election and she decided to take on a man who had been in office for decades at that point. She was late getting into the race and everyone was like, "Who's this person?" And "Can she raise the money?" And "He's been in for office for so long" and "It's Florida. That's tough. Is she going to be able to flip the seat?" She won.

Kate Black:                            She won with such, I would say, great support from a whole host of different sectors of the voting populace. Her story is one that I think when she goes to Congress, she tells it so well because it connects with both our, kind of, patriotism that we all feel for this country but she was literally saved by people serving in the military. So her connection to not only public service is so real you can kind of, it's almost palatable when she talks. To be able to take on an incumbent who had been in office for so long and to bring in someone so new and so fresh to the public life is really, really exciting.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and just, I mean, just her story of coming over. Fleeing a country that was under duress. Her family was under duress and being rescued and then making her way into some of the highest ranks of the US government to do more good for more people. I mean, just the full circle of it is just incredible.

Kate Black:                            It really is and I think it's a great example of one that, you know, we highlight so many different women in the book and one other I'll just share, too, is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican Senator from Alaska. Lisa Murkowski is a woman whose been in office for some time but she actually lost a Republican primary for reelection when the Tea Party was kind of hitting its stride. Instead of being like, "All right I lost that primary" she said, "I'm going to run as an independent and I'm going to do a write in campaign." Now imagine having to not only run on a different party line but also you now have to tell people, and teach people, how to spell your name correctly so that you get enough votes that count that are legitimate to win a general election. That's exactly what she did.

Kate Black:                            You know, one of her first campaign ads was literally showing people how to spell "Murkowski" and sure enough, she won that election and she's still serving in the Senate today and doing some tremendous things. Some tremendous bipartisan things, in fact. I love that we share so many different kind of origin stories of women in the book. Hopefully that shows women who pick it up and are inspired to maybe read it, run themselves or give it to someone else that they can see a little bit of something that sparks their interest and sparks maybe their own identity so they can take this on for themselves.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and I mean, throughout the book you've got this running checklist and these are the 21 things that you need to check off in order to know that, I mean, literally to check the boxes. Make sure that you've got everything from your vision, you know, down to how you're going to get support, down to meeting the requirements for entering the race, you know? Everything is on this list but there's only 21 of them so that feels actually manageable and of course, some of them are going to take more time than others, right?

Kate Black:                            Of course.

Lauren Schiller:                  What was the thinking about structuring this, you know, the book around a checklist?

Kate Black:                            Well we wanted women to feel ... first of all, we love checklists. I mean, who doesn't?

Lauren Schiller:                  Me too.

Kate Black:                            I write things on my to do list just so I can cross them off.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yes, thank you. You're my people.

Kate Black:                            Yes, yes. I also know, you know, sometimes I think we need the details and with running for office there are many steps and there's, you know, to your point some things take longer than others but to make it feel as accessible as possible, why not make it a checklist, you know? As we started kind of building out our chapters we realized like, we're asking them to do things. We're asking them to kind of check things off of a list. Why not have that list build as the book goes through so that the final chapter you're able to really cross off that final thing on your list and looking back over it you'll see how many things you've accomplished. You know, you've written your pitch, you've figured out how much money you need to raise, you've identified where you're going to run.

Kate Black:                            You've also, what I love too about the final thing is you've named at least five other women who you're going to ask to run and give this book to. That's such a powerful closer to the list and I hope that there's women out there who are writing in additional lines because, you know, surely we can all name more than five women we should ask to run but hopefully you can add names as you go because I think that's incredibly powerful to have that kind of checklist in hand. Also know that it's never done because there's always women to ask to run.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. I have to ask you a question that is sort of like a personal question because a few years ago I was asked to run for City Council in my town and I was super busy at the time. It didn't seem like the right time, I was very intrigued by the idea. I was completely overwhelmed by the idea and ultimately I decided not to do it but one of the things that was in my way is that I was imagining myself sitting in these highly bureaucratic meetings where everything moves super slow and as a person who likes to get things done, as you said, "Women get things done when they get into office." That for me was actually a barrier, thinking about the slow moving bureaucracy and procedural rules and things like that that happen in meetings where decisions do get made. Can you say anything to assuage my concerns on that front?

Kate Black:                            Well I don't think it's unreasonable. I don't think it's unreasonable, especially when you have people coming from all different types of backgrounds where they are getting things done or they're seeing change happen around them. Going into government can sometimes seem like, "Hmm, is this really the answer?" So what we do in the book is actually encourage women to think about what is the thing that fires them up? What is the passion that they're being moved by? What are they Tweeting about a lot? What is always coming up at Thanksgiving dinner? Use that as fuel to drive your campaign forward because that ultimately could be your platform. That could be small things. It could be getting a stop sign put at the end of the block so your streets are safer. It could be big things like healthcare or social security or taxes.

Kate Black:                            Reminding yourself about what you're passionate about, number one it's going to help you get through some of those meetings and some of the bureaucracy but two, you know, surely in government things take some time because you're trying to serve a whole host of the public with some of these big decisions. The beauty of being in elected office, too, is that you have a microphone. I would say to you, "You're going to be in meetings and you're going to be fighting for change and some of that change is going to feel bureaucratic and slow and granular and maybe not as exciting but the best thing is you get to leave that meeting and you have an audience and a microphone and a platform from which to speak about the things that you care about. It can be what happened in that meeting but it could also be what that meeting represents to your constituents and I would just carry that with you because there's going to be days when it's hard and there's going to be days when it's not fun but reminding yourself about why you're doing it and about the community that you're serving and about the issues that motivate you, that's what's going to propel you forward and keep you in the game."

Lauren Schiller:                  I will take that to heart, thank you.

Kate Black:                            Well hopefully you do run. I mean, you've got to do it.

Lauren Schiller:                  We'll see. I've got a different platform, right? We're talking on it right now, right?

Kate Black:                            Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lauren Schiller:                  We'll let's- [crosstalk 00:39:29]

Kate Black:                            I will say though-

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh yes?

Kate Black:                            I will say, one of the big things that we did in one of the chapters which is about qualifications and feeling qualified, we did look at all of the professions of the 115th Congress, so what they did before they were elected and radio host is on there. There are radio hosts in Congress. You, too, could do it.

Lauren Schiller:                  All right. More checkpoints, more data points. The last question I have for you, I hope this makes you chuckle a little bit, is what's the best advice that you've ever been given about how to self promote?

Kate Black:                            Oh my gosh, so in the book, this will make me laugh. In the book we have a whole thing about self promotion and I was in LA at the time, June and I, we would get together for these multi day kind of writing sessions. They were all day sessions and I knew we were coming in to do kind of a self promotion kind of conversation and chapter and I had just gotten off of doing an interview with a friend who hosts a radio show and I said to June very proudly, "I know how to self promote. Here it is" and I showed her a Facebook post that I had done. It was, June's reaction was literal laughter. I think a belly laugh might even be more descriptive. She was just like, "Kate, this is not self promotion" and she's right because the post that I had done was not about me at all. In fact, it was about the subject matter and was about my friend's show and it was not about me as being an expert at all but really just about the fact that I was on a thing and June ...

Kate Black:                            We included this story in the book number one because it, I think, shows that we all get it wrong sometimes but two, how hard it is to self promote. June gave me some excellent advice and we reworked it and I ended up deleting the post and re-posting a new post which put myself front and center and my achievement front and center, which is not easy to do. In terms of the best advice that I've ever gotten around self promotion certainly boasting about it and then being proven wrong is not a great feeling and you definitely learn from that. But you know, I think for women self promotion is just such a hard thing sometimes because not only are we sometimes taught to be uncomfortable with boasting or bragging and feeling a little squishy about that and feeling, "Are we imposters? Are people going to judge us differently?"

Kate Black:                            You know, I think about when I see men talking about their achievements and I've certainly been in enough rooms where I've heard men talking about something that they've done and I've thought to myself, "Well if he can do it why don't I do it more?" I think it takes a mentality and just a moment of pause to think, "Why am I not sharing this awesome thing that I've just done? Is it about me? Is it about other people? Is it a combination of both?" Sometimes you just got to swallow it and just do it and the more that you do it the better it will feel and also the more that you'll get such great responses from people when they hear about the cool [00:42:51] that you're doing. I mean, that's so special and so [00:42:53].

Kate Black:                            I don't know if I have a great piece of advice but I would tell you definitely sharing what you think is self promotion with your coauthor is a great way to learn what is not self promotion but also trying to do it as much as you can, as frequently as you can is a great way to just kind of get comfortable with trying that on and eventually it won't feel like you're trying it on but rather it's a part of your [everydayness 00:43:18]

Kate Black:                            [00:43:22]

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point and while we're talking self promotion, I'm excited to tell you we're trying something new on the program and that is to provide a toolkit of concrete actions you can take on the issues that matter to you. Stay with us.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:43:43]

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and we're trying something new on Inflection Point, which I'm very excited about and that is to provide an ongoing series of toolkits in our show, from our guests, with concrete actions you can take on the issues that matter to you. We created these toolkits so that when you only have a few minutes or so you can get the inspiration and information you need to do something. Today's Inflection Point toolkit, my guest Kate Black, the author of "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World" tells us how we can get more women in office. Whether you're deciding to run or supporting someone who is.

Lauren Schiller:                  When it comes to getting more women in office what are three things you need to know before you decide to run?

Kate Black:                            A couple things that I would say to anybody who's listening who's thinking about running, first things to do. Number one is to figure out what issue fires you up the most. You probably have been posting about this on social media, you might be talking about it all the time with your friends, it might come up a lot at Thanksgiving. Understanding and identifying that issue is the first thing to do because it's eventually going to be your platform.

Kate Black:                            The second thing I would say is start showing up. You know, identify how you're representing your community now. It could be looking at are you attending city council meetings? Have you asked for your local leaders to have one on one meetings with you? Are you going to protests? Are you going to community events? There's so many different ways that you can show up for your community. It's important that you start kind of being present because eventually if you run for office you're going to ask your community to show up for you and so it's important to be there for them from the start.

Kate Black:                            The third thing I would say is start talking to people. You don't need to know when you're running or what you're running for but running for office is not a solo activity. It is a team sport and it takes a village. Start telling people you want to run. This could be a small group at first, it could be your partner, your family, maybe your close friends. Our words have powerful, make powerful promises to ourselves when we say them aloud. When you say, "I think I'm going to run for office one day" that not only makes a promise for yourself but it also brings in a whole collection of folks into your journey along with you.

Kate Black:                            those are the first three things I would tell anyone who's thinking about running for office. Those are the first three things I would say to start doing today.

Lauren Schiller:                  So say someone has made the decision to run. What do they need to know?

Kate Black:                            For someone running for office the things that I would tell you to do first are identify the requirements that it takes to run for the specific seat you're looking at. You know, for Congress that means you have to have been a resident and a certain age to run. For local and state offices there might be different requirements around residency or how old you need to be to run for that specific seat. Don't confuse qualifications and requirements. You are qualified today. Your experience is your expertise. Remember that you are enough and that men are not waiting so it's time for you to step up. The other thing I would tell you to do is really think about your social media presence. Do an inventory, go through every Tweet, every Facebook post, every Instagram video. Take time, be one with your computer because you need to go through everything. Once you've done that it's time to identify, do you need to have a campaign page and a private page?

Kate Black:                            Eventually I think the answer is probably "yes" because the folks that you first talked to when you set up your Facebook account in college, are they the same people you need to communicate your policy platform with and about events and fundraisers for your campaign? Maybe, but maybe not, so think about having a separate profile and public persona for your campaign that's different from your private pages.

Kate Black:                            The last thing I would say is think about the community of people around you and how you can involve them in this new journey. That could look like your sorority, your alumni association, a professional network, your daycare pickup circle. It could look like the softball league down the street that you show up for on every other Saturday but invite those people into your journey. They can be volunteers, they can maybe host fundraisers for you, they could give you money. They also might be some of your staff. Do you know someone who's really great at organizing events? They can maybe be a finance director. Do you know the person down the street who knows everybody's business and where everyone lives? That person might be a field director. They might be there with you knocking on doors because they know who's home when and where.

Kate Black:                            These are a few first steps I would take to running but you've already done the most important thing, which is deciding to put your name on the ballot in the first place.

Lauren Schiller:                  What could we all do to support other women who are running if we ourselves are not?

Kate Black:                            This is a great question. It's one that we get a lot. The final chapter of the book is actually titled, "How Do I Support Other Women?" Voting for them is a great, cost free way to support other women running for office. You can donate your time, your money, your expertise to their campaigns. You can also help her in other ways. June and I like to say that behind every woman candidate is really another woman trying to help her get it all together. If you have a friend or you know a woman who's running, don't wait to be invited to offer help. Just step in. That could look like making sure that there's Diet Coke's in the fridge and coffee in the morning. It could look like picking up the dry cleaning or walking the dog or taking her to get her hair done or you know, inviting her to go out for a walk just to blow off some steam. Whatever it is, don't wait to be invited, just start showing up for her.

Kate Black:                            The last thing is asking her to run. We know it takes women multiple times to ask them to run for them to step up. We need to be recruited intentionally and thoughtfully and so if you know a woman in your life, and I invite you to think really about all the women in your life and consider them. Whether they're domestic worker, sex workers, teachers, bus drivers, cashiers, bank tellers because we still have those, maybe radio hosts. All of the women in your life can run for office and I ask you to consider them and share with them this book.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:51:02]

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Kate Black, who just published the book, "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World" that she wrote with June Diane Raphael. I've got a link to it on my website at InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Now for some news. When you go into the podcast feed you'll see our episodes broken up into two segments: one for when you have a little more time and one for when you're, well, on the run. Whether it's running for office or running an errand. That way if you want to hear again what Kate Black says are the most important things you can do when running for office or supporting someone who is, it's all right there in a tiny little package. Find Inflection Point episodes in any podcast app or go to InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  This episode is dedicated to my friend Stephanie Walton, who stepped up to run for office in Oakland, California and to all the other women who are raising their hands. You can do it and we support you. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:52:21]

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcast, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to? Let us know at InflectionPointRadio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to InflectionPointRadio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. Follow me on Twitter @LASchiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go: InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco NPRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver, our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:53:44]

 



Kate Black

Kate Black

Author Jennifer Weiner Writes a Radical Beach Read

The times, they are a’changin’. This week on Inflection Point, I talk to author Jennifer Weiner, about her newest bestselling book “Mrs. Everything”.

The story is loosely based on Jennifer’s own mother, Fran, who got married, had four children and ultimately came out as a gay woman after Jennifer and her siblings were out of the house. Spanning two sisters’ lives from the 1950s to the night of the 2016 political election, the story raises questions about who is really making women’s choices about our own lives...are we? Or our system? How did we get where we are, and how do we move on from here?

Jennifer shares the facts behind her fiction, what it takes to write a good sex scene, what hasn't changed since #metoo started and how the personal becomes political. We spoke at Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival on June 22, 2019 in Berkeley, California.

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Weiner

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Weiner

How to Fight Like A Mother-Shannon Watts, Moms Demand Action

There have been over 200 mass shootings in this country since 2009. Shannon Watts, the author of a new book: Fight Like a Mother, is the founder of Moms Demand Action, a group that is using research, data, and a little bit of “nap-tivism” to throw their weight and money behind political candidates who are willing to put better gun control laws into action. The kicker? They’re winning. In the last election, they outspent even the NRA. Their goal: make our country safer.

Join us this week for a look at why our kids are subjected to violent and traumatizing active shooter drills, and what it takes to pass sensible gun legislation. We talk about the root cause of gun violence, who takes the brunt of the violence when background checks get lax, “losing forward” and the very real and positive change that is starting to take place as we come up to the 2020 elections.


Photo courtesy of Shannon Watts

Photo courtesy of Shannon Watts