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Remember the Women · Political Junkie Podcast

0:01
SPEAKER_00: This is a joint statement by the United Women's News Conference to announce action
0:05
SPEAKER_00: in response to the abortion situation in New York State.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Over the years,
0:10
SPEAKER_00: male-dominated legislatures and courts have tossed around women's rights like
0:14
SPEAKER_00: a political football.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: The current threat to the right to abortion in New York is the most serious and
0:19
SPEAKER_00: the most stark example of this kind of maneuvering with women's lives.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: If Governor Rockefeller signs it,
0:25
SPEAKER_00: the Donovan Crawford bill just passed by the state legislature would take away
0:29
SPEAKER_00: the right to abortion.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: In New York.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: We are here to make known the unity of women behind the demand that abortion be
0:35
SPEAKER_00: a woman's right to choose.
0:44
SPEAKER_02: I am a woman,
0:46
SPEAKER_02: dear my poor,
0:47
SPEAKER_02: in numbers too big to ignore, and I know too much to go back and pretend.
0:57
SPEAKER_02: I have heard it all before,
1:00
SPEAKER_02: and I've been down there on the floor, and no one's ever gonna keep me down again.
1:09
SPEAKER_03: We began this episode with a clip from a 1972 press conference in
1:14
SPEAKER_03: which Gloria Steinem protested an abortion reform bill passed by
1:18
SPEAKER_03: the New York state legislature that was designed to circumvent the feminist demand
1:23
SPEAKER_03: that women have an unequivocal right to choose.
1:27
SPEAKER_03: I'm Claire Potter.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm Neil J.
1:29
SPEAKER_01: Young.
1:31
SPEAKER_03: And this is the new season of the Political Junkie podcast, Remember the Women.
1:38
SPEAKER_03: And we're going to be talking about some really great women that we lost,
1:42
SPEAKER_03: Dolly Parton, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan.
1:45
SPEAKER_03: And a little bit about what those commemorations tell us about feminism
1:49
SPEAKER_03: and what they tell us about politics today.
1:52
SPEAKER_03: Now, Neil,
1:53
SPEAKER_03: before we get into the news summary,
1:55
SPEAKER_03: I want to ask you, where were you when Dolly Parton died?
1:58
SPEAKER_01: I was actually driving home from the,
2:01
SPEAKER_01: my parents had been visiting here and I was driving home from LAX and I got a text
2:05
SPEAKER_01: and I literally almost drove off the road and then I got home and I spent the rest
2:09
SPEAKER_01: of the day in bed because for me, Dolly Parton is the biggest.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know,
2:17
SPEAKER_01: I took this death very, very,
2:19
SPEAKER_01: there'll never be another famous person who dies that I have more of an attachment
2:23
SPEAKER_01: to and have more of a strong reaction to, period.
2:25
SPEAKER_01: So that's where I was.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: Where were you?
2:28
SPEAKER_03: I was on the beach at The Sound on Martha's Vineyard and my friend Barbara got out
2:33
SPEAKER_03: of the car and said I just heard on the radio that Dolly Parton died.
2:37
SPEAKER_03: And I was stunned.
2:39
SPEAKER_03: You know, we were on this beach.
2:40
SPEAKER_03: There weren't a whole lot of other people on the beach and we just sat I sat there
2:44
SPEAKER_03: and talked about everything Dolly.
2:46
SPEAKER_03: And all I could think about is that great shot of her where they're singing a duet
2:52
SPEAKER_03: and she has that terrific stance.
2:55
SPEAKER_03: Like it's so bold and so sexual and so strong.
3:00
SPEAKER_03: And that's how I always think of her as just sort of the embodiment
3:06
SPEAKER_03: of strong womanhood.
3:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I love the duet tradition in country music anyway.
3:14
SPEAKER_03: And Dolly's voice was so unusual that she could do anything with any piece of music,
3:22
SPEAKER_03: and it just sounded like angels from heaven.
3:25
SPEAKER_01: Agreed.
3:27
SPEAKER_03: Okay, Neil.
3:28
SPEAKER_03: So we're going to get back to the news.
3:30
SPEAKER_03: So many things have been going on this month and I keep thinking I have to talk
3:33
SPEAKER_03: to Neil and I had to like prevent myself from calling you up and saying we need
3:37
SPEAKER_03: to get back on the pod.
3:39
SPEAKER_03: But here we are back on the pod.
3:40
SPEAKER_03: It's September.
3:41
SPEAKER_03: It's post-Labor Day.
3:43
SPEAKER_03: And tomorrow we have the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks on the Pentagon
3:48
SPEAKER_03: and Manhattan's World Trade Center.
3:49
SPEAKER_03: A New York Department of Health study has revealed that That actually
3:55
SPEAKER_03: when New Yorkers were told that the air was okay to breathe,
3:58
SPEAKER_03: the air was not okay to breathe.
3:59
SPEAKER_03: Well, that's a surprise.
4:00
SPEAKER_03: But they've also revealed the results of a long-term health study from toxins
4:05
SPEAKER_03: that were released almost as soon as the first plane hit.
4:10
SPEAKER_03: Now, these are documents released this week by the Mamdani administration.
4:15
SPEAKER_03: They have revealed that although New Yorkers were actually told it was okay
4:19
SPEAKER_03: to be downtown,
4:21
SPEAKER_03: Ten months later,
4:22
SPEAKER_03: officials were still finding asbestos up to half a mile away from the site.
4:28
SPEAKER_03: Who are these people that were in the study, Neil?
4:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, half of the people,
4:33
SPEAKER_01: which there's 54,000 people in the Ground Zero study,
4:36
SPEAKER_01: like lots of them were obviously rescue workers.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: People who are involved in the recovery,
4:43
SPEAKER_01: half of those 54,000 people have been treated for cancer,
4:47
SPEAKER_01: which is just a stunning statistic.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: They've been under care for respiratory and mental health as well as for dementia.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: But I mean,
4:54
SPEAKER_01: I think a big name in this list is Rudy Giuliani himself, mayor,
5:00
SPEAKER_01: of course,
5:01
SPEAKER_01: of New York City at the time who basically lived at the site for weeks,
5:07
SPEAKER_01: if not months.
5:08
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
5:08
SPEAKER_03: Well, and people have talked about how different Rudy Giuliani seems.
5:13
SPEAKER_03: And some people say, no, he's actually the same guy.
5:16
SPEAKER_03: He's just old and more peculiar and so on and so forth.
5:19
SPEAKER_03: But you do have to wonder how he was changed by the trauma of that moment
5:26
SPEAKER_03: and how getting all of those toxins
5:29
SPEAKER_03: in his body may have actually affected his capacity to think straight, right?
5:36
SPEAKER_01: I think so.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I doubt we'll ever have conclusive evidence around that or
5:41
SPEAKER_01: that it would be made public or anything like that.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: But it's information like this that I do think feels I
5:55
SPEAKER_01: think there's a way
5:55
SPEAKER_01: to understand his behavior as a sort of development of a personality
5:59
SPEAKER_01: that was always there.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: And yet I think this sort of medical information,
6:04
SPEAKER_01: this scientific information that's been released provides certainly
6:07
SPEAKER_01: a different context that makes a lot of those aspects of him that we've seen in
6:13
SPEAKER_01: the last couple of years, I think it I find it illuminating.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: I will also say,
6:17
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you know this,
6:18
SPEAKER_01: Claire, but I worked across the street from the World Trade Center.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: Between college and graduate school, I was a paralegal for a big Wall Street law firm.
6:29
SPEAKER_01: So definitely finding out this information about...
6:32
SPEAKER_01: The asbestos and the half mile perimeter of it all is concerning.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: We didn't go back to work for a week because our building was literally and it was
6:45
SPEAKER_01: the first building that wasn't directly impacted.
6:49
SPEAKER_01: But when we finally did go back,
6:50
SPEAKER_01: they had us wear these little masks for like a week
6:53
SPEAKER_01: and there were all these air filters in our offices,
6:56
SPEAKER_01: which I'm sure,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
6:59
SPEAKER_01: We're doing hardly anything,
7:01
SPEAKER_01: but one thinks about this information in a certain way
7:06
SPEAKER_01: when you were sitting amid all this stuff at the time.
7:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and of course,
7:12
SPEAKER_03: the pile kept burning for weeks,
7:14
SPEAKER_03: maybe even months, but it was a very long time that smoke was emitting from it.
7:19
SPEAKER_03: It also makes me think, and obviously...
7:24
SPEAKER_03: Engineers and scientists learn things over time that this is a terrific moment
7:30
SPEAKER_03: to think hard about what we're putting in buildings.
7:32
SPEAKER_03: And obviously you're not allowed to put asbestos in buildings anymore,
7:36
SPEAKER_03: but apparently some of the toxins came from...
7:39
SPEAKER_03: From computer equipment that burned,
7:41
SPEAKER_03: from a variety of things that are not toxic if they are kept contained
7:47
SPEAKER_03: but become extremely toxic when they become smoke.
7:51
SPEAKER_03: Something else toxic is,
7:53
SPEAKER_03: of course,
7:53
SPEAKER_03: the I can't think of any other reason he shouldn't be there in their eyes.
8:18
SPEAKER_03: What are we supposed to do with this,
8:21
SPEAKER_03: Neil, this sort of perpetual drumbeat about Muslims being responsible for this?
8:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: And I think that like they're being pretty,
8:29
SPEAKER_01: they're quite obvious about what they're,
8:31
SPEAKER_01: you know, what they're, what the reason is he shouldn't be there.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's the politics of this is really gross.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: And I think it will continue and amp up all the more through his term in office.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: Obviously this is a moment where,
8:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
8:45
SPEAKER_01: they can really go all in on the Islamophobia that drives,
8:48
SPEAKER_01: that's like rooted obviously in this moment historically.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: And supercharged by it in American history for the last 25 years,
8:56
SPEAKER_01: and that gets to be stoked again here.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm concerned for his safety, to tell you the truth.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I really feel almost nervous even saying that,
9:04
SPEAKER_01: but the way the sort of crazed online chatter about this,
9:08
SPEAKER_01: and actually even I think in mainstream,
9:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
9:11
SPEAKER_01: mainstream, I mean,
9:12
SPEAKER_01: sort of like big media outlets like Fox News,
9:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just, it's alarming what I think they're putting in motion potentially.
9:21
SPEAKER_03: I do too, and particularly in an election that is supercharged with emotion.
9:27
SPEAKER_03: I mean, something we're not really talking about today,
9:29
SPEAKER_03: but just to drop a penny on it,
9:31
SPEAKER_03: Amy Acton,
9:33
SPEAKER_03: the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio,
9:38
SPEAKER_03: she was almost attacked by a right-wing extremist as she was speaking at
9:42
SPEAKER_03: a political rally.
9:44
SPEAKER_03: I just feel like the violence is so diffused.
9:49
SPEAKER_03: Among large numbers of crazy people,
9:51
SPEAKER_03: and for someone like Giuliani to say he shouldn't be there,
9:54
SPEAKER_03: it's like piping it straight into the brains of crazy people that say,
9:59
SPEAKER_03: okay, I'll make that stop.
10:00
SPEAKER_03: I agree with you, Neil.
10:01
SPEAKER_03: Well, speaking of toxic,
10:03
SPEAKER_03: as the midterms approach,
10:04
SPEAKER_03: Donald Trump has decided to double down on making the election about him,
10:09
SPEAKER_03: even as his popularity declines and candidates in toss-up districts seem
10:13
SPEAKER_03: to be like running as fast as they can away from him.
10:17
SPEAKER_03: A two-day midterm convention in Dallas this week is cutting the sheep,
10:23
SPEAKER_03: those already receiving funds and endorsements from this man who has
10:26
SPEAKER_03: a 38% favorability rating,
10:28
SPEAKER_03: from the goats,
10:30
SPEAKER_03: Republicans who this week couldn't make it to Dallas,
10:33
SPEAKER_03: unexpected family emergency, whatever.
10:36
SPEAKER_03: What kinds of choices do Republican candidates have in this situation in which
10:42
SPEAKER_03: the president keeps calling attention to himself and nobody likes him?
10:47
SPEAKER_01: I don't think there's a good choice to be made.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's sort of you're damned if you do or if you don't.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: There's lots of polling that show, I mean,
10:55
SPEAKER_01: so there's this Brookings Institute just released a report this week
10:59
SPEAKER_01: that has Democrats On track to outperform even previous forecasts as they and
11:06
SPEAKER_01: the predictions are they take the House by 25 to 30 seats.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: CBS News has expanded the number of Senate seats that are now in play from six to 12.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm actually quite surprised by that number.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: That's a lot.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: And so I think all of this is trending very favorably for the Democrats,
11:26
SPEAKER_01: which We've expected all along.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure we've expected this sort of favorability for them.
11:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's right.
11:36
SPEAKER_03: You know,
11:36
SPEAKER_03: one of the things I read said that the problem is
11:42
SPEAKER_03: that these Republicans are going nowhere without the MAGA base and
11:46
SPEAKER_03: the MAGA base demands Trump.
11:48
SPEAKER_03: But they actually know that Trump is going
11:51
SPEAKER_03: to drive not just independent voters away,
11:54
SPEAKER_03: but Republicans who are discontented with how Trump is handling the economy.
12:00
SPEAKER_03: I agree with you.
12:01
SPEAKER_03: I don't think there's a good choice here, but the president is making it worse.
12:05
SPEAKER_03: I mean, remember in,
12:06
SPEAKER_03: I think it was 2012,
12:09
SPEAKER_03: Obama just like campaigned for himself, but he stayed away from everybody else.
12:15
SPEAKER_03: You know, people would call and say, you know, please don't come here, Mr. President.
12:18
SPEAKER_03: We're really sorry.
12:19
SPEAKER_03: And he would be like, okay.
12:20
SPEAKER_03: But what's also Typical of Trump,
12:25
SPEAKER_03: but if you look at it like a normal person,
12:28
SPEAKER_03: very weird, is,
12:29
SPEAKER_03: you know,
12:29
SPEAKER_03: he gave this two-hour speech at his convention,
12:33
SPEAKER_03: which, by the way, it's very unusual to have a party convention at the midterm.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: I was going to say.
12:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: It's so weird.
12:39
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's so weird.
12:41
SPEAKER_03: And it's really a Trump rally called a convention, I think.
12:46
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
12:46
SPEAKER_03: But he went on and on for two hours.
12:49
SPEAKER_03: Well, if you look at pictures of this, The stadium was only half filled.
12:55
SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
12:56
SPEAKER_03: there were a number of people on X who are not necessarily Democratic partisans
13:02
SPEAKER_03: who were saying,
13:03
SPEAKER_03: if you can't fill a stadium in Texas with followers of Donald Trump,
13:08
SPEAKER_03: can you win an election?
13:10
SPEAKER_03: And I think it's a really good point.
13:11
SPEAKER_01: I don't know about these points about audience size,
13:14
SPEAKER_01: because this is not the first time this has been raised.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: In fact,
13:16
SPEAKER_01: all through the 2024 election,
13:19
SPEAKER_01: it was like,
13:20
SPEAKER_01: look at this rally that Trump is holding and look at all the empty seats, you know.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: This was an ongoing story.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: And yet what matters is not how many people show up
13:29
SPEAKER_01: to hear this insane person ramble for two hours.
13:33
SPEAKER_01: What matters is how many people then go into a voting box and vote for him.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: And I think in a lot of ways,
13:39
SPEAKER_01: his ability to stay in office,
13:42
SPEAKER_01: to be reelected to office depends on Republicans not looking.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: Mm hmm.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: To not watching what he's doing.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: And there's a sort of willful ignorance among a lot of Republican voters
13:56
SPEAKER_01: that shows up in empty stadium seats and all the rest when it comes to what he does,
14:01
SPEAKER_01: but that nevertheless still goes and votes for him.
14:03
SPEAKER_01: So I do think that that's different than how Democrats and Republicans Do on
14:08
SPEAKER_01: the ballot this midterm when Trump's name isn't there.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: He even made that point.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: He said over and over again in Dallas,
14:16
SPEAKER_01: pretend like I'm on the ballot because he knows that he does have that hold
14:20
SPEAKER_01: over these people.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's how voters are going to respond.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: But I just I sort of hesitate from making an issue of these low turnout,
14:32
SPEAKER_01: you know, public events, because that's actually been the case for quite some time.
14:36
SPEAKER_03: Right.
14:37
SPEAKER_03: Right.
14:37
SPEAKER_03: And remember how many people went to Kamala Harris events and Hillary Clinton events?
14:42
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
14:42
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
14:43
SPEAKER_03: And one of the things I think we learned from the Clinton campaign back in 2016 is
14:48
SPEAKER_03: that bringing on all these famous rock musicians was actually a terrible mistake
14:53
SPEAKER_03: because people were coming to Clinton events because of the free music.
14:56
SPEAKER_03: They weren't actually coming to see Hillary Clinton.
14:58
SPEAKER_03: And some of the numbers that came out of Election Day demonstrated that.
15:02
SPEAKER_03: But I also think the pretend I'm on the ballot...
15:07
SPEAKER_03: Well, there are all these other Republican candidates saying, pretend he's not on the ballot.
15:12
SPEAKER_03: So I'm not really sure how that plays.
15:15
SPEAKER_03: And all of the hand-wringing about a divided
15:19
SPEAKER_03: and rudderless Democratic Party I really think it's sort of out there in plain sight
15:26
SPEAKER_03: that the Republicans are kind of winging it with this election,
15:29
SPEAKER_03: unless there's stuff going on in the background that we don't know about other than,
15:34
SPEAKER_03: you know, trying to suppress the vote by ending mail-in balloting.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that's the huge question.
15:40
SPEAKER_01: Like, to what extent between now and November,
15:43
SPEAKER_01: we can trust that this is truly a free and fair election.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: I think there's a lot of runway still left.
15:49
SPEAKER_03: Right.
15:50
SPEAKER_01: There for nefarious acts to be carried out.
15:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
15:54
SPEAKER_03: And we're going to be following that story,
15:56
SPEAKER_03: listeners,
15:56
SPEAKER_03: every time there's something to really focus in on so
15:59
SPEAKER_03: that you all understand what's happening this fall.
16:02
SPEAKER_03: So just to use the convention as a jumping off point,
16:05
SPEAKER_03: there was this kind of what, well, I'm not going to say the F word.
16:09
SPEAKER_03: That's what I'm vowing this season.
16:11
SPEAKER_03: No F word, Claire.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: Good for you.
16:13
SPEAKER_03: UTF.
16:14
SPEAKER_03: Video appearance from Democratic Senator John Fetterman at Trump's big midterm convention.
16:22
SPEAKER_03: This week,
16:23
SPEAKER_03: we also learned that there's a new ex-account at Fetterman's staff,
16:27
SPEAKER_03: allegedly controlled by former Fetterman staffers,
16:30
SPEAKER_03: as it sounds,
16:31
SPEAKER_03: that plans to, quote,
16:32
SPEAKER_03: share our stories and screenshots to show Pennsylvanians exactly
16:37
SPEAKER_03: who their senator is.
16:38
SPEAKER_03: Who do they say John Fetterman is, Neil?
16:41
SPEAKER_01: Well, erratic.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: Someone who's, you know...
16:44
SPEAKER_01: And I think this has been reported out too,
16:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
16:46
SPEAKER_01: depressed,
16:47
SPEAKER_01: exhausted,
16:48
SPEAKER_01: erratic of uneven mental health since that stroke he had several years ago.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: And I think, first of all, his staff has high turnover.
16:58
SPEAKER_01: What is it?
16:58
SPEAKER_01: He's lost three chiefs of staff now in three years.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: That's not a good sign.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: And if you think the fact that they're willing to do this,
17:06
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:07
SPEAKER_01: anonymous account to Show the receipts,
17:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:10
SPEAKER_01: just speaks to how they don't think that he's fit for office and also that,
17:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
17:15
SPEAKER_01: he's in a lot of ways betraying Republican values or excuse me, Democratic values.
17:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well,
17:22
SPEAKER_03: you know,
17:22
SPEAKER_03: there's all this talk about how he might become a Republican
17:25
SPEAKER_03: and he says he's not going to become a Republican.
17:28
SPEAKER_03: But the comparison that struck me was Joe Lieberman, who,
17:32
SPEAKER_03: you know, way,
17:33
SPEAKER_03: way back when,
17:34
SPEAKER_03: when I was living in New Haven,
17:36
SPEAKER_03: I was Part of a group trying to replace Joe Lieberman with Ned Lamont,
17:43
SPEAKER_03: who is now I think the governor of Connecticut and we failed,
17:46
SPEAKER_03: but we did manage to win the primary.
17:49
SPEAKER_03: And it was an August primary, you know, about 3000 people voted maybe.
17:53
SPEAKER_03: And that was the moment at which Joe Lieberman became an independent.
17:57
SPEAKER_03: And it was right before he ran for president
18:02
SPEAKER_01: with John McCain.
18:03
SPEAKER_03: And I was,
18:04
SPEAKER_03: you know,
18:05
SPEAKER_03: I was kind of making this comparison of Lieberman,
18:08
SPEAKER_03: who was essentially,
18:09
SPEAKER_03: essentially moved from becoming A good liberal Democrat behind civil rights, blah,
18:15
SPEAKER_03: blah, blah, and who drifted to the center and then kind of drifted to the right.
18:20
SPEAKER_03: But it was something that you could track.
18:22
SPEAKER_03: There were issues and so on.
18:24
SPEAKER_03: It's unclear to me what Fetterman believes at this point.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: And also,
18:32
SPEAKER_01: isn't part of the story that he has a preoccupation with going
18:35
SPEAKER_01: on conservative media all the time?
18:37
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: And not in a way that I think anyone feels like is Pete Buttigieg being
18:43
SPEAKER_01: on Fox News all the time to articulate the Democratic position and to push back
18:48
SPEAKER_01: on conservative media framing of issues.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the fact that he appeared, why?
18:54
SPEAKER_01: Why did he do this?
18:55
SPEAKER_01: This is wild.
18:57
SPEAKER_03: Well, it's hard to know.
19:00
SPEAKER_03: Now, one of the big issues for him is Israel.
19:05
SPEAKER_03: He doesn't like it that large parts of the Democratic Party are now very critical
19:10
SPEAKER_03: of Israel,
19:11
SPEAKER_03: that they actually want Israel to change its policy,
19:14
SPEAKER_03: that they want the United States to actually deliver a set of both incentives
19:20
SPEAKER_03: and punishments to rein in Israeli violence in the Middle East.
19:25
SPEAKER_03: So that is one thing that he's upset about.
19:28
SPEAKER_03: But it's hard to tell what is at stake for him.
19:32
SPEAKER_03: Now, he does come from a part of Pennsylvania that is post-industrial, kind of conservative.
19:38
SPEAKER_03: So he came to the Senate as a populist.
19:43
SPEAKER_03: And as we know, populism can...
19:46
SPEAKER_03: Not necessarily align with right or left, Democrat or Republican.
19:51
SPEAKER_03: It appears in its own peculiar forms.
19:53
SPEAKER_03: But it also seems like he's having difficulty focusing on basic constituent services.
20:00
SPEAKER_03: Like one of the text messages that was published in a piece done at
20:07
SPEAKER_03: the Wall Street Journal,
20:08
SPEAKER_03: I think,
20:09
SPEAKER_03: He was supposed to be meeting with some representatives of Children's Hospital
20:14
SPEAKER_03: in Pennsylvania, CHOP, which is like the leading children's hospital in the country.
20:19
SPEAKER_03: And he canceled that meeting so that he could go be on Fox News.
20:22
SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh.
20:24
SPEAKER_03: And so that strikes me as just odd.
20:28
SPEAKER_03: And I think some of this behavior,
20:30
SPEAKER_03: we might like it as little as we do,
20:33
SPEAKER_03: but at least it would make sense if he Organized his thinking around specific issues
20:39
SPEAKER_03: and said,
20:40
SPEAKER_03: you know,
20:41
SPEAKER_03: these are the things I am more aligned with in the Republican Party and I want
20:47
SPEAKER_03: to remain independent.
20:48
SPEAKER_03: It seems like we're going to be cursed by one of these people forever,
20:51
SPEAKER_03: but I don't think John Fetterman will get re-elected in Pennsylvania.
20:55
SPEAKER_03: That is actually a prediction I will make.
20:58
SPEAKER_03: He doesn't come up for re-election for another two years,
21:01
SPEAKER_03: but he At least I know my mother and her entire circle are extremely unhappy.
21:07
SPEAKER_03: And they were very pro-Fetterman when we first ran.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I assume he'll be primaried, right?
21:12
SPEAKER_01: And probably successfully.
21:13
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
21:14
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
21:15
SPEAKER_03: And the guy that they're talking about is a man named Connor Lamb.
21:19
SPEAKER_03: Who lost the primary to him in 2020.
21:22
SPEAKER_03: Everybody loved Conor Man.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: And so I think he's going to be the one who steps up again.
21:29
SPEAKER_03: All right, Neil.
21:29
SPEAKER_03: So let's shift to our news focus.
21:32
SPEAKER_03: As you and I were talking about,
21:34
SPEAKER_03: we were just all so shaken on August 25th when Dolly Parton,
21:39
SPEAKER_03: who had canceled a number of events earlier in the year,
21:41
SPEAKER_03: but she kept going on Instagram and saying that she was okay and she was going
21:46
SPEAKER_03: to be back.
21:47
SPEAKER_03: Well, she lost her husband,
21:48
SPEAKER_03: Carl Dean,
21:49
SPEAKER_03: to Alzheimer's about a year ago and then sort of started going in and out.
21:55
SPEAKER_03: It turns out that she probably had this cancer for a while and because she was
22:01
SPEAKER_03: so busy taking care of her husband and very typical of people who have
22:05
SPEAKER_03: an ill spouse.
22:07
SPEAKER_03: So it seemed very quick.
22:09
SPEAKER_03: She got Got the cancer.
22:11
SPEAKER_03: She died.
22:12
SPEAKER_03: She was 80 years old.
22:15
SPEAKER_03: But then on September 3rd, 92-year-old radical feminist Gloria Steinem passed.
22:20
SPEAKER_03: And then on September 5th,
22:22
SPEAKER_03: Robin Morgan,
22:23
SPEAKER_03: an essayist,
22:23
SPEAKER_03: poet, and colleague of Steinem's at Ms. Magazine, died at the age of 85.
22:28
SPEAKER_03: These losses are kind of overwhelming, right, Neil?
22:32
SPEAKER_01: It was a lot happening at once,
22:34
SPEAKER_01: especially because I think You know,
22:38
SPEAKER_01: there's a way to think about these women as really connected to a lot
22:44
SPEAKER_01: of major historical developments of, you know, the second half of the 20th century.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: And so it just felt like a one, two, three punch for so many folks.
22:54
SPEAKER_03: Right.
22:54
SPEAKER_03: Well, it certainly did.
22:55
SPEAKER_03: And weirdly, the day before Robin Morgan died, I had just finished reading this.
23:02
SPEAKER_03: As you know, I'm writing this biography of Susan Brownmiller.
23:05
SPEAKER_03: And I think I read Going Too Far back when it first came out when I was in college,
23:10
SPEAKER_03: but I hadn't read it in years and I didn't remember it.
23:13
SPEAKER_03: And so I read it the day before she died.
23:16
SPEAKER_03: And so I was thinking a lot about Yeah, these are people who just churned out content.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: Robin Morgan wrote 20 books,
23:44
SPEAKER_01: including the first anthology of radical feminist writing,
23:47
SPEAKER_01: which is the book Sisterhood is Powerful.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: That came out in 1970.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: Steinem founded Ms. Magazine.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: She wrote 11 books herself,
23:55
SPEAKER_01: obviously always on the speaking circuit,
23:58
SPEAKER_01: traveling hundreds of thousands of miles for the movement,
24:00
SPEAKER_01: creating nonprofits that sent money to feminist causes.
24:05
SPEAKER_01: Dolly Parton You know, not just a performer, but a songwriter.
24:08
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's how she would have described herself first.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: Also self-made millionaire, multimillionaire, businesswoman, philanthropist.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: In fact,
24:15
SPEAKER_01: a lot of there were a lot of articles that talked about she would have been
24:18
SPEAKER_01: a billionaire, except she kept giving away all her money.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she was still worth like half a billion, but like.
24:23
SPEAKER_03: Right.
24:24
SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
24:24
SPEAKER_01: someone who I think,
24:25
SPEAKER_01: again, described herself first and foremost as a songwriter and aptly so.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: She wrote 5,000 songs, at least.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: A thousand of those she recorded for herself on 49 studio albums.
24:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean, all of these are unbelievable statistics for any one person
24:42
SPEAKER_01: and certainly make me feel like, what am I doing on my life?
24:45
SPEAKER_03: I know, I know.
24:47
SPEAKER_03: Well, and all three of these women...
24:50
SPEAKER_03: Came from a time where they were born into one world for women and they died
24:55
SPEAKER_03: in another world for women.
24:56
SPEAKER_03: And then they passed through all of these changes,
24:59
SPEAKER_03: which they themselves drove, but also benefited from.
25:05
SPEAKER_03: Now I want to sort of tease them apart a little bit.
25:08
SPEAKER_03: In reading Going Too Far,
25:09
SPEAKER_03: one of the things I remembered about Robin Morgan is that she really comes out of
25:14
SPEAKER_03: the anti-war left and she doesn't really commit to feminism as her political.
25:20
SPEAKER_03: Political focus until she does Sisterhood is Powerful.
25:24
SPEAKER_03: And so there's this really long period where she is caucusing with women on the new left.
25:31
SPEAKER_03: What's also interesting about Robin Morgan,
25:34
SPEAKER_03: and I don't even really know how to talk about this because we don't have much
25:39
SPEAKER_03: a framework for it, but she was one of several feminists.
25:42
SPEAKER_03: Andrea Dworkin was another,
25:44
SPEAKER_03: Kate Millett was another,
25:45
SPEAKER_03: who were bisexual women And Andrea Dworkin wouldn't say she was bisexual.
25:52
SPEAKER_03: She would say she was a lesbian.
25:53
SPEAKER_03: But they, in fact, lived bisexual lives.
25:57
SPEAKER_03: And they were married to gay men who were devoted to them.
26:02
SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
26:03
SPEAKER_03: none of that has been highlighted in either Robin Morgan's death or in anything
26:11
SPEAKER_03: that has been written about feminism.
26:13
SPEAKER_03: But there is this moment in which there are gay men who are falling in love.
26:19
SPEAKER_03: And that it's like a political task.
26:23
SPEAKER_03: And these gay men become feminists themselves and begin to explore
26:30
SPEAKER_03: what feminism means to men.
26:32
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
26:32
SPEAKER_03: Have you thought much about that, Neil?
26:34
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that's really interesting.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was the thing that really jumped out to me in her obituary.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:40
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: You know,
26:41
SPEAKER_01: just admittedly,
26:42
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know a ton about her other than sort of the public writings and a sort
26:47
SPEAKER_01: of vague sense of her, you know, biographical, like her biography.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: And so that really stuck out to me in the obituary.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: And I wanted a lot more context, historical context for that and explanation.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: I thought, well, I look forward to hearing what Claire has to say about this.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: But it seems I'm imagining of a very particular historical moment.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: One in which heterosexual marriage is still such a dominating structure
27:17
SPEAKER_01: of American society that even folks who are not heterosexual might have
27:23
SPEAKER_01: a hard time imagining themselves living outside of it.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: But I think the sort of point you're making about the radical appeal of feminism
27:30
SPEAKER_01: for these gay men and how that might manifest in this particular moment
27:36
SPEAKER_01: through marrying women is really intriguing to me.
27:40
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, marrying women and also then supporting the project of their work, which,
27:46
SPEAKER_03: of course,
27:47
SPEAKER_03: John Stoltenberg,
27:48
SPEAKER_03: who we're not talking about today, but who was married to Andrea Dworkin.
27:51
SPEAKER_03: And they were partners for decades before they actually got married for,
27:56
SPEAKER_03: I think, insurance reasons or something like that.
27:58
SPEAKER_03: But both Stoltenberg and Ken Pitchford were part of a gay men's group called the Effeminists.
28:07
SPEAKER_03: And a big piece of that was thinking about how the threat,
28:14
SPEAKER_03: how femininity was used as a threat to oppress gay men.
28:18
SPEAKER_03: And it was sort of in parallel to what people like Robin Morgan and Kate Millett
28:24
SPEAKER_03: and Gloria Steinem and Andrew Dworkin were working on,
28:27
SPEAKER_03: which is the ways in which lesbianism was used to oppress all women.
28:33
SPEAKER_03: And so there's something going on about,
28:36
SPEAKER_03: something intellectual about sex and gender in this period
28:40
SPEAKER_03: that Robin Morgan is working on all the time.
28:45
SPEAKER_03: So let's shift to Gloria Steinem for a minute.
28:49
SPEAKER_03: Steinem, she founded Ms. Magazine, as you said, she wrote 11 books.
28:54
SPEAKER_03: Sort of two things jump out about her for me.
28:57
SPEAKER_03: One is that Steinem,
28:59
SPEAKER_03: like Robin Morgan,
29:01
SPEAKER_03: Really believed that feminism needed to happen apart from men,
29:08
SPEAKER_03: but required the support of men and needed to be offered to men as transformational
29:15
SPEAKER_03: in order to succeed as a movement.
29:17
SPEAKER_03: And that was actually very controversial within radical feminism, but they both believed that.
29:22
SPEAKER_03: Do you think that happened, Neal?
29:25
SPEAKER_01: Did they achieve the egalitarian society?
29:28
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't think they achieved it.
29:30
SPEAKER_01: The world we live in today is one that Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan helped construct.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of folks would say that A good part of the success was
29:45
SPEAKER_01: the strategies that they chose in doing that, right?
29:47
SPEAKER_01: That they didn't make feminism a separatist project,
29:50
SPEAKER_01: but that in different ways they thought it should be inclusive of men so
29:55
SPEAKER_01: that it could bring about a sort of societal transformation that everyone benefited
29:59
SPEAKER_01: from.
30:00
SPEAKER_01: That it was a liberation project, not just for women, but for men too.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: And I think that was an important Intellectual aspect of this movement that,
30:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:10
SPEAKER_01: they contributed to,
30:11
SPEAKER_01: I think,
30:11
SPEAKER_01: differently and probably it meant to them different things,
30:14
SPEAKER_01: but that,
30:17
SPEAKER_01: you know, again,
30:18
SPEAKER_01: that this wasn't sort of some separatist movement in a way
30:21
SPEAKER_01: that others were advocating for at the time.
30:24
SPEAKER_03: Right.
30:25
SPEAKER_03: Well,
30:25
SPEAKER_03: and Robin Morgan actually writes a lot in her early feminist essays about both being
30:32
SPEAKER_03: at odds with her husband and And loving him so much and also loving her son,
30:38
SPEAKER_03: Blake, so much.
30:39
SPEAKER_03: And Blake became a musician, but he was sort of raised in this feminist queer crucible.
30:45
SPEAKER_03: And that also was a very big statement because there were a fair number of radical feminists.
30:50
SPEAKER_03: Well, Jill Johnston just sort of jumps out.
30:53
SPEAKER_03: Jill Johnston, who was an art critic for The Village Voice and wrote the book Lesbian Nation.
30:58
SPEAKER_03: There's an essay in that book about how she basically gives her children away.
31:04
SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
31:04
SPEAKER_03: says to her husband,
31:05
SPEAKER_03: I can't possibly be the writer and artist I want to be and also be a mother.
31:09
SPEAKER_03: So please take the children and go.
31:12
SPEAKER_03: And so on.
31:12
SPEAKER_03: And that was one version of it.
31:15
SPEAKER_03: But there was another version of it that said, you know, where men are, the patriarchy is too.
31:22
SPEAKER_03: And therefore, we have to figure out how to do this without men.
31:26
SPEAKER_03: And I think both Steinem and Morgan not only thought that was impractical,
31:31
SPEAKER_03: Morgan later became a lesbian,
31:33
SPEAKER_03: Gloria Steinem seems to have been more or less heterosexual for her entire life,
31:39
SPEAKER_03: but that it was a choice that went beyond sexuality, right?
31:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I also think like,
31:46
SPEAKER_01: that was sort of what I wanted to bring up too,
31:47
SPEAKER_01: was like the,
31:49
SPEAKER_01: and I don't know if this is the case with all the couples that you mentioned,
31:52
SPEAKER_01: but Morgan and her husband,
31:55
SPEAKER_01: Kenneth Pitchford,
31:56
SPEAKER_01: which it feels weird even sort of talking about her husband,
31:59
SPEAKER_01: but them having produced a child.
32:02
SPEAKER_01: And is that part of what we need to think about too,
32:06
SPEAKER_01: is in these couplings,
32:08
SPEAKER_01: if like,
32:09
SPEAKER_01: The desire for creating children helped shape some of those decisions
32:14
SPEAKER_01: about getting married to a man.
32:17
SPEAKER_03: That's really interesting.
32:19
SPEAKER_03: You know,
32:19
SPEAKER_03: there's a part of me that would go back to what you said earlier that,
32:23
SPEAKER_03: you know, really when Morgan and Pitchford get together, which is like 1961, 62.
32:29
SPEAKER_03: Kate Millett and her husband, who was an artist, he was from Japan.
32:35
SPEAKER_03: Fumio was his name, but I can't remember his last name.
32:38
SPEAKER_03: They all get together in the early 60s when there's really very little context
32:44
SPEAKER_03: for being a lesbian if, in fact...
32:48
SPEAKER_03: You can imagine doing something else.
32:51
SPEAKER_03: I mean, there are bars downtown.
32:54
SPEAKER_03: There are wealthy women who meet in apartments.
32:57
SPEAKER_03: There's the Daughters of Bilitis.
32:58
SPEAKER_03: There's a variety of things that are bubbling up.
33:02
SPEAKER_03: But if, in fact,
33:04
SPEAKER_03: you can imagine being heterosexual,
33:08
SPEAKER_03: probably the most available choice for all women.
33:11
SPEAKER_03: And then that changes very radically by the end of the 60s.
33:14
SPEAKER_03: But
33:16
SPEAKER_03: Yes, I think certainly for Morgan having a child,
33:19
SPEAKER_03: although she only had one, she never had another one.
33:22
SPEAKER_03: Gloria Steinem never had children.
33:24
SPEAKER_03: Dolly Parton, who we want to get back to, never had children.
33:27
SPEAKER_03: So I think there is also something with these women that...
33:33
SPEAKER_03: There were choices.
33:35
SPEAKER_03: I mean, Gloria Steinem is very famous for having gotten an abortion,
33:39
SPEAKER_03: for talking about the abortion that she got in the late 1950s in England
33:44
SPEAKER_03: when she was actually engaged to a man.
33:47
SPEAKER_03: And the doctor says, you know, I want you to do two things here.
33:51
SPEAKER_03: I want you to break off that engagement.
33:53
SPEAKER_03: I want you to go live your own life after I give you an abortion.
33:56
SPEAKER_03: But we don't know why Dolly Parton didn't have children except her own explanation,
34:03
SPEAKER_03: which was she was too busy and she was happy not having children.
34:07
SPEAKER_03: But I think it's significant that they didn't.
34:09
SPEAKER_03: And I think it says something about how difficult it was for these pioneering women
34:15
SPEAKER_03: to imagine a balancing act in which there was both conventional family and
34:21
SPEAKER_03: the freedom to build a feminist movement or have a music career.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, I saw a clip and I mean,
34:27
SPEAKER_01: I consumed a lot of Dolly Parton content in the days after she died,
34:33
SPEAKER_01: which is,
34:34
SPEAKER_01: you know,
34:34
SPEAKER_01: a big addition to a lot of Dolly Parton content I've consumed my whole life.
34:39
SPEAKER_01: But I saw this clip where she was talking about not having children.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: And now I'm remembering not remembering what if she said that she'd had
34:46
SPEAKER_01: a miscarriage or if But she attributed it in this clip to some sort
34:51
SPEAKER_01: of medical issue.
34:53
SPEAKER_01: And I had never seen that mentioned at all before.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she was asked all the time about it.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: So it stuck out to me.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: And again, I'm not remembering exactly what her explanation in this video was.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: But I think far more in the public record was her sort of saying like,
35:09
SPEAKER_01: You know,
35:10
SPEAKER_01: I just, you know, that's not something I want or that's not something I've done.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: And that really,
35:15
SPEAKER_01: and I think we can get into this,
35:17
SPEAKER_01: like there was ways that, you know, she had such a big family.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: She was one of.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: Was it 11 kids?
35:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there were lots of siblings.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there were lots of siblings.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: And I think she, I mean, she became the provider for all of them.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: And there were obviously lots of nieces and nephews and grandchildren,
35:35
SPEAKER_01: you know, and grand nieces and grand nephews that she took care of.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: In addition to,
35:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:40
SPEAKER_01: setting up these enormous philanthropies,
35:42
SPEAKER_01: many of which were directed towards So,
35:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
35:47
SPEAKER_01: she's sort of like,
35:48
SPEAKER_01: and I think a lot of ways,
35:49
SPEAKER_01: like Oprah saying, like,
35:50
SPEAKER_01: I didn't have my own children,
35:52
SPEAKER_01: but like the children of the world like became my own.
35:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
35:55
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
35:56
SPEAKER_03: No, I think that's right.
35:57
SPEAKER_03: And but I also think all three of these women,
35:59
SPEAKER_03: even though Robin Morgan does have one child,
36:02
SPEAKER_03: really sort of highlights something that has persisted despite other successes
36:07
SPEAKER_03: of feminism.
36:08
SPEAKER_03: Which is that a lot of women have a lot of difficulty imagining both having
36:15
SPEAKER_03: a successful life that belongs to them and having children.
36:19
SPEAKER_03: And, you know,
36:20
SPEAKER_03: we're seeing this in falling birth rates,
36:22
SPEAKER_03: which obviously there are lots of reasons for that.
36:25
SPEAKER_03: But we're also seeing this in dating habits that,
36:29
SPEAKER_03: you know,
36:30
SPEAKER_03: young women are often happy to date, but not to really make a commitment to a man.
36:38
SPEAKER_03: They're putting off marriage into their 30s and so on to establish themselves.
36:44
SPEAKER_03: But also, it's just not easy to have work and to have children at the same time.
36:51
SPEAKER_03: And that's something that has really persisted despite...
36:55
SPEAKER_03: The huge amount of knowledge that we can glean from all three of these women.
37:01
SPEAKER_03: I wanted to shift to the question of what feminism was and how it presents itself.
37:08
SPEAKER_03: A lot of people have talked about Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem.
37:12
SPEAKER_03: As two figures who made feminism approachable and friendly.
37:16
SPEAKER_03: And I want to add a footnote to that, which is, did Dolly Parton ever call herself a feminist?
37:21
SPEAKER_03: Because I don't think she did.
37:22
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if she ever used that word.
37:24
SPEAKER_01: And I don't even know if, you know, she was ever asked directly about it.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: But I think she was sort of feminist by association in the public imagination
37:34
SPEAKER_01: and certainly in media treatment of her of her.
37:37
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like she probably was, I mean,
37:39
SPEAKER_01: someone probably is going to send us a clip of her talking about this,
37:42
SPEAKER_01: but you can almost imagine her being the type of person who,
37:46
SPEAKER_01: if asked directly,
37:47
SPEAKER_01: would use humor to deflect the actual inquiry or answering it directly.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: But also her life,
37:54
SPEAKER_01: I think,
37:55
SPEAKER_01: is an example of a feminist project that prioritized her career
38:01
SPEAKER_01: and her personal ambition.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: And it was always about Often about busting,
38:07
SPEAKER_01: you know,
38:08
SPEAKER_01: gender stereotypes and certainly taking on the old boys network of,
38:13
SPEAKER_01: you know,
38:13
SPEAKER_01: the country music industry,
38:15
SPEAKER_01: even as it also was fueled by and predicated on and sort of constantly showed
38:23
SPEAKER_01: a particular vision of femininity that I think a lot of feminists would,
38:28
SPEAKER_01: you know, have issues with.
38:32
SPEAKER_03: Well, certainly, I mean, if you think about the No more Miss America protest in 1968.
38:38
SPEAKER_03: And then, you know, introduce a picture of Dolly Parton.
38:41
SPEAKER_03: Everything Dolly Parton would go into that freedom trash can.
38:45
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
38:46
SPEAKER_03: So but but that that artifice also played a role,
38:50
SPEAKER_03: I think, as you're saying, which I think is really important.
38:53
SPEAKER_03: She could defend herself against being pigeonholed by others.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
38:58
SPEAKER_03: By both deflecting and defining herself.
39:03
SPEAKER_03: One of the things a number of people talked about is that she often made jokes about
39:09
SPEAKER_03: the size of her bust so that other people didn't get a chance to do that.
39:13
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to do this to you before you do this to me.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: Right.
39:16
SPEAKER_03: And that was really strong and brave.
39:20
SPEAKER_03: I would also say that Parton's role in the movie 9 to 5 with Jane Fonda
39:27
SPEAKER_03: and Lily Tomlin,
39:28
SPEAKER_03: you know,
39:28
SPEAKER_03: I saw some people,
39:30
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry to say men, saying, well,
39:32
SPEAKER_03: I watched 9 to 5 and, you know, that's about as exciting as watching paint dry.
39:36
SPEAKER_03: And none of them seemed to understand that actually there had never been
39:39
SPEAKER_03: a movie made about sexual harassment before ever.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: Also, that's a really good movie, so...
39:45
SPEAKER_01: What is wrong with those straight men?
39:48
SPEAKER_03: Right.
39:48
SPEAKER_03: But it's like all three of these women, Fonda,
39:51
SPEAKER_03: Tomlin and Parton had experienced sexual harassment and they brought that experience
39:56
SPEAKER_03: to the movie.
39:57
SPEAKER_03: And and actually one of the reasons everybody loved it is that they made
40:03
SPEAKER_03: an experience that was kind of universal for women real.
40:07
SPEAKER_03: So it's approachable was not always friendly.
40:10
SPEAKER_03: Like that movie made sexual harassment approachable as something to talk about.
40:15
SPEAKER_03: But it wasn't fun.
40:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:17
SPEAKER_03: You know.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: It was made in 1981?
40:21
SPEAKER_03: 1981, right.
40:22
SPEAKER_03: First year of the Reagan administration.
40:25
SPEAKER_01: Did you see this thing where people were posting online a snippet
40:30
SPEAKER_01: from Reagan's diary where he talks about having watched,
40:34
SPEAKER_01: they had a screening or they watched 9 to 5 at the White House.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: And he wrote in his diary that night,
40:41
SPEAKER_01: basically really enjoyed this film,
40:43
SPEAKER_01: except for one scene where they smoked And like, why do they have to do that?
40:49
SPEAKER_01: They could have,
40:50
SPEAKER_01: they could have just had,
40:51
SPEAKER_01: you know, they could have just been drinking wine or something like that.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: So the just say no president was not happy with that marijuana scene.
40:58
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
40:59
SPEAKER_03: Well, and I'm sure he knew from his wife about sexual harassment in Hollywood as well.
41:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, she was famous for having techniques for avoiding that.
41:09
SPEAKER_03: But Gloria Steinem was also very good.
41:14
SPEAKER_03: Accessible and approachable and seemed friendly.
41:17
SPEAKER_03: And feminist Katha Pollitt has said that,
41:20
SPEAKER_03: you know,
41:20
SPEAKER_03: there was the occasional blunder,
41:22
SPEAKER_03: her remark that young women supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 because,
41:26
SPEAKER_03: quote, that's where the boys are.
41:28
SPEAKER_03: In general, she was witty, charming, kind, generous.
41:31
SPEAKER_03: She believed in this big tent,
41:33
SPEAKER_03: but she was also beautiful in a way that was specific to the 60s and 70s, right?
41:40
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
41:41
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think you can't talk about Gloria Steinem without sort of thinking
41:45
SPEAKER_01: about how her looks were a part of her public profile.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, and I think like there's a way that she...
41:54
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm curious what you think, Claire,
41:56
SPEAKER_01: about like what her attractiveness meant for a movement,
42:00
SPEAKER_01: especially in this period where there were sort of these different examples
42:05
SPEAKER_01: of what radical feminism could look like.
42:08
SPEAKER_01: And I mean,
42:08
SPEAKER_01: both sort of look like as a sort of intellectual political movement,
42:12
SPEAKER_01: but also like what it looked like as something that was publicly portrayed.
42:17
SPEAKER_03: Right.
42:18
SPEAKER_03: Well, and,
42:19
SPEAKER_03: you know,
42:19
SPEAKER_03: because I'm deep into the research for this Susan Brownmiller book,
42:23
SPEAKER_03: one of the things that I've noticed is on the one hand,
42:26
SPEAKER_03: there was all this conversation about what you should not be doing to your body.
42:31
SPEAKER_03: And on the other hand,
42:32
SPEAKER_03: some of the women who were big media figures like Brownmiller,
42:36
SPEAKER_03: like Betty Friedan, like Gloria Steinem, were doing all of it.
42:40
SPEAKER_03: All the time, you know.
42:41
SPEAKER_03: And so, you know,
42:42
SPEAKER_03: what I remember about Gloria Steinem is that it was a particular look that picked up
42:50
SPEAKER_03: on a lot of the fashion statements made during the Summer of Love in San Francisco
42:56
SPEAKER_03: in, what was that, 1967?
42:59
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, after that, like, I remember girls ironing their hair.
43:05
SPEAKER_03: You know, getting that sort of straight fall of hair.
43:10
SPEAKER_03: And that took work.
43:12
SPEAKER_03: It looked completely natural, but it took work.
43:15
SPEAKER_03: The aviator glasses.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
43:17
SPEAKER_03: Remember, Billie Jean King was also wearing those aviator glasses.
43:21
SPEAKER_03: That was sort of like a sort of tough new left look.
43:24
SPEAKER_03: But it's all style that Steinem is assembling in order to look natural.
43:32
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:32
SPEAKER_03: And it stands in contrast to a lot of feminists who are like going around in jeans
43:37
SPEAKER_03: and work shirts and saying,
43:39
SPEAKER_03: you know,
43:39
SPEAKER_03: I'm not going to shave anymore and I'm not going to do all this grooming
43:43
SPEAKER_03: that people expect of me.
43:45
SPEAKER_03: And so Steinem was always camera ready in a way that a lot of activists were not.
43:51
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
43:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:54
SPEAKER_03: You know,
43:54
SPEAKER_03: we're also going to link to a piece by Gail Collins,
43:58
SPEAKER_03: who has said that watching Gloria Steinem age has been a real guide to rethinking
44:05
SPEAKER_03: the relationship between the female aging process and the preservation
44:09
SPEAKER_03: of youthful appearance,
44:10
SPEAKER_03: you know,
44:11
SPEAKER_03: which is what Female aging was all about,
44:14
SPEAKER_03: controlling how old people think you are,
44:17
SPEAKER_03: and that Steinem aged gracefully into her 70-year-old,
44:21
SPEAKER_03: 80-year-old, 90-year-old body in a way that is worth admiring.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: We talked about the fact that Steinem believed that true liberation
44:31
SPEAKER_03: would include all genders.
44:33
SPEAKER_03: Robin Morgan was a little more back and forth about that.
44:36
SPEAKER_03: You can really see her working some stuff out in some of her pieces
44:41
SPEAKER_03: about what role men should have in the movement.
44:45
SPEAKER_03: But for both of them,
44:46
SPEAKER_03: I don't know whether you've been seeing any of this stuff online, Neil,
44:51
SPEAKER_03: about women from the left,
44:53
SPEAKER_03: socialist feminists and other leftist men going after Steinem and going
44:58
SPEAKER_03: after Morgan.
44:59
SPEAKER_03: Have you been following this?
45:00
SPEAKER_01: I've been seeing the Steino stuff.
45:02
SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that Morgan was also getting it too, but the Steinem one seems quite...
45:07
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
45:07
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
45:07
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
45:25
SPEAKER_01: Interesting for us to think about, like,
45:27
SPEAKER_01: what does it mean for,
45:28
SPEAKER_01: you know, to shoot your own, which seems to be just an ongoing aspect of the left.
45:34
SPEAKER_01: But I mean, you know, maybe we should talk about what, you know, the criticisms are.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: A lot of it has to do with her having worked for the CIA as a young woman,
45:43
SPEAKER_01: sort of early in her career.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: And also,
45:45
SPEAKER_01: I think the other big thing is her support for Zionism,
45:48
SPEAKER_01: which in the 60s and 70s was Really,
45:52
SPEAKER_01: in a lot of ways, deeply connected to the feminist project, wasn't it, Claire?
45:56
SPEAKER_01: But obviously, the politics of that have radically shifted over the decades.
46:02
SPEAKER_03: So a couple of things.
46:04
SPEAKER_03: One is, yes, you're absolutely right about Zionism.
46:06
SPEAKER_03: You know,
46:06
SPEAKER_03: one of the things people don't talk about that much is
46:09
SPEAKER_03: that Steinem's father was Jewish and her mother wasn't Jewish.
46:13
SPEAKER_03: So Steinem not only did not consider herself Jewish, she was not raised Jewish.
46:17
SPEAKER_03: Nevertheless,
46:18
SPEAKER_03: she did have this connection to Judaism that she spoke very little about,
46:23
SPEAKER_03: which I guess is why people don't talk about it.
46:26
SPEAKER_03: But I would also say the CIA thing is kind of complicated for me.
46:30
SPEAKER_03: Because she was working for an organization that was funded by the CIA.
46:37
SPEAKER_03: And it was an organization intended to promote art and culture and literature
46:44
SPEAKER_03: in Eastern Europe and Western Europe.
46:48
SPEAKER_03: But there was this role she was playing that a number
46:52
SPEAKER_03: of other satellite organizations that are connected to the State Department and
46:56
SPEAKER_03: the CIA are playing, which is if you can get American culture involved.
47:01
SPEAKER_03: To communist countries or countries that you think are teetering on the edge
47:05
SPEAKER_03: of communism, they will understand what freedom looks like.
47:09
SPEAKER_03: And of course,
47:10
SPEAKER_03: what's happening in the 1950s and 60s in Europe is first you have Stalinism kind
47:17
SPEAKER_03: of cracking down in 1956 on the Hungarian Revolution.
47:21
SPEAKER_03: It becomes clear that the Soviet Union has absolutely no intention.
47:26
SPEAKER_01: Of allowing any kind of freedom of thought in the Soviet bloc.
47:31
SPEAKER_03: So that's the organization that Steinem is working for.
47:34
SPEAKER_03: She claimed she did not know it was funded by the CIA.
47:38
SPEAKER_03: And I find that credible.
47:40
SPEAKER_03: Don't you?
47:41
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yes.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of things were being funded by the CIA that like
47:45
SPEAKER_01: the average employee would not be aware.
47:48
SPEAKER_01: That's where the money was coming from.
47:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that seems absolutely believable.
47:53
SPEAKER_03: And it's probably true today about ICE.
47:55
SPEAKER_03: I'm sure there's all kinds of ICE money,
47:57
SPEAKER_03: for example, going to social media influencers and so on.
48:01
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that just is how the government functions.
48:04
SPEAKER_03: I think the thing that's more troubling for me is these charges
48:08
SPEAKER_03: about Gloria were first raised in the early 1970s.
48:13
SPEAKER_03: As National Organization for Women and other sort of more institutionalized parts
48:19
SPEAKER_03: of feminism, we're making real gains for women.
48:22
SPEAKER_03: Roe v. Wade,
48:24
SPEAKER_03: the ACLU project that was run by Ruth Bader Ginsburg that is winning case after case
48:29
SPEAKER_03: after case that are giving women more rights,
48:32
SPEAKER_03: the right,
48:33
SPEAKER_03: for example,
48:33
SPEAKER_03: to have their law school application evaluated outside of a quota system for women.
48:40
SPEAKER_03: So it comes up in a context in which
48:43
SPEAKER_03: The grassroots radical feminist project sees itself being eclipsed
48:50
SPEAKER_03: by these larger political projects.
48:52
SPEAKER_03: And of course, Gloria gets involved with the Democratic Party.
48:55
SPEAKER_03: She goes to work for George McGovern.
48:57
SPEAKER_03: She, you know,
48:57
SPEAKER_03: she goes to the 72 convention as a Chisholm delegate and then switches to McGovern.
49:03
SPEAKER_03: Because she thinks she can get abortion out of him.
49:06
SPEAKER_03: And so the charges,
49:08
SPEAKER_03: the contemporary charge seems to be not only was Gloria Steinem a CIA show,
49:14
SPEAKER_03: but she pushed the feminist movement toward neoliberalism.
49:18
SPEAKER_03: And that's where institutional feminism is today.
49:21
SPEAKER_03: And that's the part that really pisses me off, I have to tell you.
49:24
SPEAKER_01: We'll say more about that because I really want to hear her.
49:28
SPEAKER_03: Well,
49:29
SPEAKER_03: so socialist feminists believe that actually what you need is socialism first and
49:35
SPEAKER_03: then feminism will follow.
49:37
SPEAKER_02: Right.
49:38
SPEAKER_03: And that for Steinem, who was not a socialist in any in any way, but for Steinem.
49:45
SPEAKER_03: Feminism was the political movement within which other things could then be brought to bear.
49:53
SPEAKER_03: For example, for her, feminism was the movement.
49:55
SPEAKER_03: The Democratic Party was the method, you know.
49:58
SPEAKER_03: And so I think there It strikes me as part of this anti-institutionalism
50:04
SPEAKER_03: and anti-elitism that we are seeing as the only analysis that's possible from
50:10
SPEAKER_03: the far left nowadays, which is everything's going wrong.
50:14
SPEAKER_03: It must be the fault of those who betrayed us.
50:18
SPEAKER_03: And Gloria Steinem's right up there.
50:20
SPEAKER_03: And I'm also seeing this about Robin Morgan.
50:22
SPEAKER_03: And if you haven't, I can tell you about it.
50:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I haven't seen it about Morgan.
50:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, my feed, though, is overflowing in the Steinem debate.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: Right.
50:34
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, it's been interesting to watch that happening, especially in this moment.
50:40
SPEAKER_01: It just, again,
50:41
SPEAKER_01: like I said a little bit ago,
50:42
SPEAKER_01: it just feels like,
50:44
SPEAKER_01: you know, not slight tendency of many on the left to do this sort of thing.
50:49
SPEAKER_01: And I think the purity of sort of or the orthodoxy of politics,
50:55
SPEAKER_01: you know,
50:55
SPEAKER_01: is just something that I recoil from so much because in so many ways it reminds me
51:01
SPEAKER_01: of the sort of very conservative evangelical slash fundamentalist,
51:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
51:05
SPEAKER_01: background I had where the sort of,
51:08
SPEAKER_01: you know,
51:08
SPEAKER_01: certainly this is not what I was directly raised in,
51:11
SPEAKER_01: but was sort of adjacent to it and had that memory of,
51:16
SPEAKER_01: The sort of purity tests that were done over and over again of any sort
51:19
SPEAKER_01: of slight deviation.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: And one sees that it's not necessarily unique to one particular belief system
51:26
SPEAKER_01: or worldview,
51:27
SPEAKER_01: but that maybe it's just a part of the human condition in which particular,
51:32
SPEAKER_01: you know, context get played out in their own ways.
51:37
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
51:38
SPEAKER_03: Well, and,
51:38
SPEAKER_03: you know,
51:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to say something that may sound a little odd,
51:41
SPEAKER_03: but there is something that Southern Baptists are better at,
51:44
SPEAKER_03: which is the whole idea that a sin once committed can be forgiven.
51:50
SPEAKER_03: And so the idea that Gloria Steinem once worked for an organization that was funded
51:55
SPEAKER_03: by the CIA has morphed into a conspiracy theory that she worked for the CIA
52:00
SPEAKER_03: for her entire career.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
52:05
SPEAKER_03: Was to steer feminism into these anodyne directions that blunted its radical force,
52:12
SPEAKER_03: blunted its revolutionary power.
52:15
SPEAKER_03: And I just have to say that is extreme BS.
52:17
SPEAKER_03: See, I'm trying not to say any dirty words.
52:21
SPEAKER_03: So I've been in the Steinem archives.
52:24
SPEAKER_03: And when people needed money for a project,
52:27
SPEAKER_03: for a collection,
52:28
SPEAKER_03: for a magazine,
52:30
SPEAKER_03: for an organization, for activism, you went to Gloria Steinem and she got it.
52:36
SPEAKER_03: And these were often extremely radical projects.
52:40
SPEAKER_03: And so Gloria's capacity to collect money and funnel it to feminists
52:46
SPEAKER_03: who needed support was really unsurpassed in the movement.
52:51
SPEAKER_03: So this not only offends me as a feminist, it offends me as a historian because it's just wrong.
52:57
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
52:58
SPEAKER_03: And so similarly,
52:59
SPEAKER_03: there's this thing going on around Robin Morgan that she basically spearheaded
53:05
SPEAKER_03: the turn of feminism toward anti-trans politics,
53:08
SPEAKER_03: anti-sex worker politics, and anti-pornography politics.
53:12
SPEAKER_03: And this is based on a speech that she gave at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in
53:18
SPEAKER_03: the early 1970s,
53:19
SPEAKER_03: the first West Coast Lesbian Conference that was absolutely splitting apart Over
53:27
SPEAKER_03: the presence of a trans woman named Beth Elliott,
53:30
SPEAKER_03: who was a music producer,
53:31
SPEAKER_03: who was actually a member of the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco.
53:34
SPEAKER_03: She was on the conference committee.
53:36
SPEAKER_03: And a group of radical lesbians said, we don't want her to perform.
53:40
SPEAKER_03: We don't want her here.
53:42
SPEAKER_03: They were actually cracking apart about men,
53:44
SPEAKER_03: period, because the conference was being held at UCLA.
53:47
SPEAKER_03: And they went to UCLA and they said, we don't want any men near us.
53:51
SPEAKER_03: And UCLA said, this is a campus and a public university and we can't do that.
53:55
SPEAKER_03: Right.
53:55
SPEAKER_03: So so there was all of this stuff going on about men.
53:59
SPEAKER_03: There is also something else going on,
54:00
SPEAKER_03: which is another whole group was protesting the presence of both Robin Morgan
54:07
SPEAKER_03: and Kate Millett and saying,
54:09
SPEAKER_03: you know,
54:09
SPEAKER_03: they were just stars and they weren't doing the real work of feminism and that
54:14
SPEAKER_03: the conference shouldn't be supporting a feminist star system.
54:18
SPEAKER_03: So in the middle of all of this,
54:19
SPEAKER_03: Robin Morgan gives the keynote and there's about a page and a half of what I read in
54:25
SPEAKER_03: which she is going after Beth Elliot and referring to Beth Elliot as a man or a man
54:31
SPEAKER_03: in a dress.
54:31
SPEAKER_03: It's really ugly.
54:32
SPEAKER_03: It's really, really, really ugly.
54:34
SPEAKER_03: It is also true that Later in her life,
54:39
SPEAKER_03: Robin Morgan said she was sorry for that and she thought it was wrong.
54:43
SPEAKER_03: However,
54:44
SPEAKER_03: what really bugs me,
54:45
SPEAKER_03: again, as a historian, is all of these tendencies, anti-trans, anti-men.
54:51
SPEAKER_03: Anti-sex worker and anti-pornography.
54:54
SPEAKER_03: They're all coming up out of the larger movement.
54:57
SPEAKER_03: And Morgan is speaking to them.
55:01
SPEAKER_03: So she did not, in fact, start these things.
55:04
SPEAKER_03: She did not make them happen.
55:05
SPEAKER_03: She is not responsible for the fact that children are being cut off
55:09
SPEAKER_03: from their puberty blockers today.
55:11
SPEAKER_03: And yet there is this desire to seize on these women and blame them
55:17
SPEAKER_03: for what is wrong, what feminism has not been able to defend.
55:22
SPEAKER_03: And it's distressing, frankly.
55:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
55:25
SPEAKER_01: the thing that really has jumped out to me in the Steinem stuff is the fixation on
55:31
SPEAKER_01: the comment she made in the 2016 campaign about Bernie versus Hillary.
55:35
SPEAKER_01: Right.
55:36
SPEAKER_01: And that's being made,
55:38
SPEAKER_01: like I'm seeing post after post,
55:40
SPEAKER_01: it's like including that along with the CIA Association and the Zionism.
55:44
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, if these are even sins to begin with, that's for other folks to decide.
55:49
SPEAKER_01: But even if they were, those are not equivalent errors.
55:54
SPEAKER_01: Or equivalent infractions.
55:56
SPEAKER_01: And it seems wild to me to pull one quotation or one statement out
56:02
SPEAKER_01: of its historical context and to hold it up in 2026 as the proof
56:09
SPEAKER_01: of some grand assessment of this person.
56:12
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's ahistorical.
56:14
SPEAKER_01: It goes against everything that we do as historians, right?
56:17
SPEAKER_03: Right, right.
56:18
SPEAKER_01: But it feels of the sort of like, you know, a lot of folks have made this point.
56:23
SPEAKER_01: You're sort of talking about in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention.
56:26
SPEAKER_01: I would expand that to conservatives writ large.
56:28
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of folks have made this point.
56:30
SPEAKER_01: Rick Perlstein is making it over and over again
56:32
SPEAKER_01: that like conservatives seek converts and liberals, liberals punish heretics.
56:38
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, or drive out heretics.
56:40
SPEAKER_01: And I think like, you know, that's a generalization itself, too.
56:44
SPEAKER_01: But in moments like this, it feels really.
56:47
SPEAKER_03: And it seems to epitomize for me the difficulty of this political moment
56:53
SPEAKER_03: when actually Democrats are gaining ground.
56:57
SPEAKER_03: Republicans are reeling backwards toward Berlin now.
57:02
SPEAKER_03: The Soviet Army in hard pursuit.
57:04
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's basically how I'm thinking about the collapse of the Republican Party right now.
57:09
SPEAKER_03: And these people on the left can't get themselves together To say,
57:16
SPEAKER_03: you know,
57:16
SPEAKER_03: we could declare victory and we could actually help make this happen
57:22
SPEAKER_03: without ripping people apart.
57:24
SPEAKER_03: And there's a piece of me that just thinks,
57:26
SPEAKER_03: all right, they're just people who are being paid to do this.
57:29
SPEAKER_03: But that's actually not true.
57:31
SPEAKER_03: And it's been going on since 2016, since, as you're saying, the big Bernie-Hillary breach.
57:37
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
57:37
SPEAKER_03: there are feminists who still don't speak to me because I voted for Bernie Sanders
57:42
SPEAKER_03: in the primary that year.
57:44
SPEAKER_03: Despite the fact that I then turned around and supported Hillary,
57:47
SPEAKER_03: worked for Hillary, cried for Hillary, blah, blah, blah.
57:50
SPEAKER_03: It's like, no, you betrayed her right at the beginning.
57:54
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I can't speak to you.
57:56
SPEAKER_03: And so it is something very troubling about our political moment
58:01
SPEAKER_03: that I wish Gloria were who she was in the 40s and 50s.
58:07
SPEAKER_03: Because I think she would have had some things to say about it.
58:11
SPEAKER_03: She would have had some things to do about it.
58:14
SPEAKER_03: And Dolly, of course, manages to stay away from politics almost completely.
58:20
SPEAKER_03: So her death seemed non-controversial.
58:22
SPEAKER_03: It was one of the few moments I've been on X in which like conservatives
58:26
SPEAKER_03: and liberals are sort of hugging each other and weeping and passing the Kleenex box.
58:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's,
58:32
SPEAKER_01: I was going to say,
58:33
SPEAKER_01: I think that like Dolly can,
58:35
SPEAKER_01: and the response to Dolly's death can help us sort of tie a bow on this conversation
58:40
SPEAKER_01: because it's such in contrast to the reactions to these figures and the sort
58:46
SPEAKER_01: of Bickering that those deaths brought about because we didn't see that at all with
58:51
SPEAKER_01: the passing of Dolly and in fact one of the biggest comments made over and
58:55
SPEAKER_01: over again was like this is a person who literally every single person
59:00
SPEAKER_01: from every walk of life is mourning and that says something about who she was
59:04
SPEAKER_01: and sort of Just the way she existed in the public imagination and
59:10
SPEAKER_01: the way she carried out her life.
59:11
SPEAKER_01: I do want to push back on folks saying that she wasn't political.
59:15
SPEAKER_01: She wasn't partisan or she didn't have a political identification that she ever revealed.
59:20
SPEAKER_01: But I think Dolly had a real clear,
59:23
SPEAKER_01: if we understand politics is not just how one identifies themselves in terms
59:27
SPEAKER_01: of registration or how they express themselves in the context of
59:32
SPEAKER_01: a two-party political system.
59:33
SPEAKER_01: But she was someone who devoted her life to giving her money away,
59:37
SPEAKER_01: to funding science, to funding literacy and education.
59:41
SPEAKER_01: She has a strong record of pro-labor, pro-union.
59:45
SPEAKER_01: She was outspoken about LGBTQ issues and LGBTQ folks.
59:50
SPEAKER_01: So there was a politics clearly that Dolly had.
59:53
SPEAKER_01: And I think she showed us over and over again.
59:56
SPEAKER_01: And I think to describe her as unpolitical or apolitical or all the ways
1:00:00
SPEAKER_01: that she's been talked about and her death isn't accurate at all.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: And it's just sort of misread.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: It's sort of to misspeak about what politics means in a country that exists,
1:00:13
SPEAKER_01: that politics doesn't have to be sort of brought down to the level
1:00:15
SPEAKER_01: of like Republican versus Democrat in every way.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_03: You know, I'm so glad you said that, Neil.
1:00:24
SPEAKER_03: And I would also, it gives us something to think about.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_03: What would it mean to have a presidential candidate who was like Dolly Parton?
1:00:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_03: Because she did the work, exactly as you're saying.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_03: And she also had these acts of generosity,
1:00:41
SPEAKER_03: not just the books,
1:00:43
SPEAKER_03: the Imagination Library,
1:00:44
SPEAKER_03: which I don't know whether you saw in one of the articles about her in
1:00:49
SPEAKER_03: the New York Times,
1:00:50
SPEAKER_03: but there were all of these people who wrote in about my children getting the books
1:00:53
SPEAKER_03: from Aunt Dolly.
1:00:54
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, and being so grateful for these books and this connection to her.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_03: But also about 10 or 15 years ago,
1:01:07
SPEAKER_03: you know, Dolly wrote five or 6,000 songs of which she recorded maybe 3,000 of them.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_03: So there are all these songs sitting in her library that she has the rights to.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_03: And 10 or 15 years ago,
1:01:20
SPEAKER_03: she said that Young people who wanted to record her songs could do so
1:01:25
SPEAKER_03: without paying her any royalties.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_03: Like these songs were just there.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_03: If they wanted them, they should take them.
1:01:32
SPEAKER_03: And it seems to me like giving away your art to young people who want
1:01:37
SPEAKER_03: to be you is just an astonishing act of generosity.
1:01:43
SPEAKER_03: Well, if we were all Dolly, we would not be having these problems, Neil.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: Preach.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_00: All right.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_03: So Neil, what do we want to go viral this week?
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: What I want to go viral is this book.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_01: I haven't finished it, but I'm like two thirds through it and I cannot put it down.
1:02:00
SPEAKER_01: And it is the most stunning book I've read in a long time.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: So I'm here to just push it on you and everyone.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_01: It's a book that came out a year ago.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_01: The paperback just came out this summer,
1:02:10
SPEAKER_01: A Flower Traveled in My Blood,
1:02:12
SPEAKER_01: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: of Children.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_01: This is written by Haley Cohen Gilliland.
1:02:20
SPEAKER_01: This is about the abuelas of Argentina,
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: the grandmothers of Argentina who worked for decades to find their children
1:02:30
SPEAKER_01: who had been disappeared by the military junta that came to power in the mid 1970s
1:02:34
SPEAKER_01: with the collapse of sort of the paranormal.
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: And these women,
1:02:38
SPEAKER_01: these abuelas, they become organized and they carried out this incredible, stunning
1:02:58
SPEAKER_01: Political act and movement to account for the lives of their children.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_01: And so many of the people who had disappeared in this time were in their 20s.
1:03:08
SPEAKER_01: They were young men and women who had been involved in leftist movements in Argentina.
1:03:13
SPEAKER_01: And so many of those women had just become mothers or were pregnant when they were disappeared.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_03: Or were raped.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
1:03:22
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
1:03:24
SPEAKER_01: they were killed,
1:03:25
SPEAKER_01: the adults were,
1:03:26
SPEAKER_01: but these children who were either quite young at the time or again were born
1:03:32
SPEAKER_01: during their mother's captivity were disappeared in a way too,
1:03:38
SPEAKER_01: but they were,
1:03:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:03:39
SPEAKER_01: they were put into orphanages and a lot of them were sent to other countries
1:03:45
SPEAKER_01: or they were given to Political and law enforcement leaders who had direct ties to
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: the military dictatorship and raised as children of those folks.
1:03:55
SPEAKER_01: And so the Abuelas created this movement to account for what had happened
1:04:02
SPEAKER_01: to their children and their grandchildren.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: And it's just a stunning history.
1:04:06
SPEAKER_01: It's one that deserves to be more known in general,
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: but one that has Just unbelievable resonance right now to be reading as we,
1:04:15
SPEAKER_01: you know, have the rise of ice and all that.
1:04:17
SPEAKER_01: The parallels are chilling,
1:04:18
SPEAKER_01: of course,
1:04:19
SPEAKER_01: although,
1:04:19
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:04:20
SPEAKER_01: the particular example of Argentina,
1:04:22
SPEAKER_01: I think, should be really understood and appreciated for this.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_01: A flower traveled in my blood.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_01: I really highly recommend this book.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_03: I so want to read it.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_03: And if I can just make a pitch for another book that was written,
1:04:59
SPEAKER_03: I think,
1:05:00
SPEAKER_03: about 10 or 15 years ago by a woman named Laura Briggs,
1:05:03
SPEAKER_03: and it's called Somebody's Children,
1:05:05
SPEAKER_03: and it is about the international adoption industry and the Yeah.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_03: And Briggs' book is a more academic study of this.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_03: But for those people who want to follow up on it,
1:05:38
SPEAKER_03: it explains the much larger context for the American hunger for babies
1:05:44
SPEAKER_03: that actually created a market for these children.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much, Neil.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_03: I will definitely put that on my list.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_03: So my viral thing this week...
1:05:54
SPEAKER_03: It was written by Gregory Barber, and it was in the New York Times last week.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_03: And it's called The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice.
1:06:05
SPEAKER_03: And it's about an elderly female professor.
1:06:09
SPEAKER_03: She's 92 years old.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_03: She used to work at Barnard.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_03: She's living on the Upper West Side.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_03: And she gets an email from this 15-year-old And so this dad brings his daughter over
1:06:19
SPEAKER_03: and they talk to each other in the lobby of the
1:06:39
SPEAKER_03: Woman's building.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_03: And the professor says, you know, you're really onto something here.
1:06:44
SPEAKER_03: And they start working together, this 92-year-old and 15-year-old, both of whom adore math.
1:06:50
SPEAKER_03: And the 92-year-old becomes sort of fascinated with this girl's mind
1:06:56
SPEAKER_03: because she says,
1:06:57
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:06:57
SPEAKER_03: I looked at her proofs and these were not
1:07:00
SPEAKER_03: the ways I would have solved these problems,
1:07:02
SPEAKER_03: but they were different and they were unusual and they were quirky.
1:07:05
SPEAKER_03: And so I was just curious about what she could do.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_03: So anyway, they work together on something that I absolutely do not understand, Neil.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_03: It's called braid theory.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_03: So they're working on this problem and braid theory that nobody has ever solved.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_03: The professor gets one of her former graduate students at the University of Edinburgh involved.
1:07:23
SPEAKER_03: They all work on it together and they solve the problem and they publish a paper.
1:07:28
SPEAKER_03: And this child has gone on to Princeton and she's now in mathematics,
1:07:33
SPEAKER_03: a PhD program at Princeton.
1:07:36
SPEAKER_03: The older mathematician is now 98 or 99 and could use a heart stent,
1:07:43
SPEAKER_03: but she decided not to get it because the doctor said,
1:07:45
SPEAKER_03: you know, there's a possibility you might get a stroke.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_03: And she's like, no, no, no.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_03: I'd rather have my heart give out than lose my mind.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_03: And these women are still working together.
1:07:55
SPEAKER_03: It's both a lovely story about math and women,
1:07:58
SPEAKER_03: but it's also a lovely story about intergenerational friendship and the ways in
1:08:04
SPEAKER_03: which a common creative intellectual enterprise became the grounds for
1:08:11
SPEAKER_03: a 15 year old becoming friends with a 92 year old.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
1:08:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's just lovely.
1:08:18
SPEAKER_03: I'm linking to it, listeners.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_03: I guarantee if you read it,
1:08:21
SPEAKER_03: you may understand braid theory because actually I thought they wrote
1:08:25
SPEAKER_03: about math very clearly and now it's all just left my mind because I'm not
1:08:29
SPEAKER_03: a mathematician.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was over my head.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right, right.
1:08:33
SPEAKER_03: I mean, who knows?
1:08:34
SPEAKER_03: The fact that I remembered the phrase braid theory, I'm actually very proud of that.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_03: But yes,
1:08:39
SPEAKER_03: it's a lovely story and it's a lovely story to read at the beginning of
1:08:43
SPEAKER_03: the school year.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_03: When everything is fresh and new and new things are possible.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_03: So Neil, on that note, I'm so excited to be back with you and I'll see you next week.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_01: See you next week.
1:09:02
SPEAKER_02: And that's
1:09:08
SPEAKER_03: it for today's show.
1:09:09
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1:09:11
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1:09:43
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1:09:48
SPEAKER_03: Political Junkie is written, recorded, edited and produced by me, Claire Potter.
1:09:54
SPEAKER_03: Today's theme is I Am Woman,
1:09:56
SPEAKER_03: written by Helen Reddy and Ray Burton,
1:09:58
SPEAKER_03: and performed by Tanya Stevens, copyrighted music licensed from Lichty.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_03: That's all for now.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_03: See you next week.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_02: Well, I don't wanna be no guy.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_02: Just wanna be appreciated by the eye.
1:10:39
SPEAKER_02: That's all we want.
1:10:41
SPEAKER_02: Please.
1:10:43
SPEAKER_02: Please.
1:10:45
SPEAKER_02: And just check it.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_02: We don't ask for much.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_02: But all is fear in love and war.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_02: And this is love.