I'm Arnold Lehmann, I'm director of the Brooklyn Museum. For those of you I don't know. And it is actually a very great honor. I think that's the right word. And an equally great delight to have you all here today to celebrate something very important to the Brooklyn Museum, very important to the city of New York. And I think very important to everyone who is thinking about things. And that is the third anniversary of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Before I go any further, I just wonder if it would be an imposition to ask so those people scatter about there if you would be willing to move forward. If you're not, not to worry. But it just sort of is, it would just seem it's so much easier when a crowd and audiences together rather than scattered like this. And we are, as you very well know, because you got here competing with the most gorgeous day of the entire year. Not that that's a good enough reason not to be here.  Today, while we very proudly look back on three years of leadership and exceptional exhibitions, programs, and events, we also are celebrating feminism and its future. And what better way of doing that than by inviting some of the most significant voices in this dialogue from the past decade to join us here today in looking forward and in envisioning feminism's place in the cultural world of the second decade of the 21st century and perhaps even beyond. In a moment, I will invite our trustee and great friend Elizabeth Sackler to introduce today's speakers. But before I do, I'd like to take a moment to thank Elizabeth for her incredible vision and commitment to the realization of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. It hardly seems possible that it's been, I don't know if it's been a year or a decade since Elizabeth and I started brainstorming about building a center devoted to feminist art. From those earliest discussions, when we both knew that we wanted to do so and to find a permanent home for Judy Chicago's magnificent and iconic dinner party, taking that all the way to the current installation of Kiki Smith's Sojourn in the fourth floor of feminist art galleries, no one could have had a more distinct, innovative or expansive conceptualization than Elizabeth of what needed to be done. The accolade visionary is perhaps too often used today to acknowledge forward-thinking ideas, but in Elizabeth's case, visionary is perhaps actually an understatement in describing what she has accomplished here in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum and with those very many hardworking museum professionals who share this vision. And by this point in time, after these years here, every one of this museum, I believe, does share that vision. However, along with the word vision, there could be no appropriate description offered that did not also immediately and necessarily add the words vibrant, engaging, powerful, and inclusive. While these might sound like the praise given to a new film and a newspaper, here they are the very essence of what the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art was both meant to be and has to our enormous delight become. It is again, with equal amounts of pride and pleasure that I welcome our trustee, my very good friend, Elizabeth Sackler, to the podium. Every year it gets better and better. Thank you, Arnold. Before you leave, I want you to stay here. This is an anniversary. This is a birthday in many ways. I don't know whether or not we would call it an anniversary or a birthday, but it does mark a relationship. It marks the birth of a new life. And on birthdays and anniversaries, we pay tribute to partners and to children and we thank a person or people without whom there would be no cause to celebrate at all. So I want to take this opportunity to, and additionally and publicly, thank my muse, Steve Robinson, and of course the great Judy Chicago, each having actively participated at Inception or Conception, depending on how you look at what we have done, but I have to thank the man who I say has become the father of this great achievement, the Center for Feminist Art and that, of course, is Arnold Lehmann. So for me, in gratitude to you for your support, your enthusiasm, your cuddling and cuddling, your disciplining, your unconditional love, I'm going to say that because you are, you are our biggest supporter of what the Center is, what we do and how we do it.  So I'm ducking down here and pulling out a white bag and giving this to you and you'll have a chance to take a look at it more closely, but anyway, this is for Arnold. Oh, how beautiful. Yeah, well, you'll see. Okay. But I'll help you down the stairs with it. Maybe I can put it down there, but I want to thank Arnold and I think we should all thank Arnold because without Arnold there would not be a Center for Feminist Art. Thank you, Elizabeth, but it is, Elizabeth. Well, actually, it's pretty gutsy. It was pretty gutsy of me to do it, but it's a monoprint and it's a monoprint that I made actually in 2008 in Portugal when I was taking a workshop there. And when I made it, I did it and I looked at it and I drew with a pencil afterwards a little arrow that said underneath it to find a perfect man. Arnold is the perfect man. Instead of the boxing. Yeah, I'm a boxer now, so he doesn't want to mess with me. So for the scores of you and those some who aren't here who might be enjoying this beautiful day, I thank you for coming, but you know that my welcomes and introductions to all of our panel discussions and programming always begin with my saying. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is an exhibition space, permanent home of the dinner party and feminist art space. We are an educational facility dedicated to feminist art and our mission is to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art and to host lectures and discussions on feminist activism. That is how I begin all of my welcomes and introductions and today is no different than that. So I'd like to welcome you. This is a panel discussion celebrating the third anniversary of the center and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is an exhibition space, permanent home of the dinner party, feminist art space and education facility dedicated to feminist art and you know our mission. And I thank you so much for being here to support that. You know, one year ago it was our second anniversary. I introduced Catherine Morris, Catherine's here, as our then new curator. Catherine, I just wanna say it has been a real pleasure working with you this past year and I'm looking forward to many more years of collegiality. You have brought excellence, you have brought intelligence, you have brought grace and enthusiasm and I wanna thank you for all of that because it's really giving us enormous strength and possibilities for the future. And your staff including Sarah, do you have an alley, is she here? Sarah, I just saw Sarah come in. Sarah's been here practically since the beginning of time with the center and I wanna thank you and your staff for everything you do. I know you work tirelessly and it's very, very much appreciated. So I thank you. Radia Harper, I don't know if she's in the auditorium today but even if she isn't, I say to her, what a journey. And I thank her, she's head of the education department. She, I thank her for her love of our mission. She has come to support and facilitate our vision and the mission of the center in a way that maybe I couldn't have anticipated three years ago when we began and it has been invaluable. Charles, Kevin, Cynthia, Sally, Adam and the board of trustees of the Brooklyn, I thank all. We couldn't exist without the commitment of all of those people. And I also wanna add my thanks and my love for the team of security guards here. I've come to know them over the years. We broke ground, I don't know, seven years ago and I know many of them. I don't know all of them in the whole museum but there are about a half a dozen or so that I have come to know and they're very proud of the center and they love engaging in talking with people who come to visit and I consider them to be a very lively part of the center's family. So I just want to say that. On the home front, Rebecca Taffel, who is here. She's sitting next to Catherine. She is at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation and she has been brilliant. She's committed to all that she does. She knows everything that's going on and she knows everyone who's going on with everything that we're doing and she's fabulous to work with. It's been a pleasure for me. She is the future of the foundation as is her endless participation and assisting in the center's growth. She works very closely with museum personnel and it's been a pleasure and I thank you, Rebecca. This year marks the activation and organization of our Council for Feminist Art which is a very, very exciting thing for us. It's a fantastic group getting in on the ground floor to help with the center's growth and to enhance the acquisitions for the center. And as far as I'm concerned, we have a goal and the goal that we have is to collect the most important collection of feminist art in the world to have it, to house it, and to hold it for future generations. So thank you to our charter members and those of you who will or might become members of the Council. We're going to be coming up with different tiers so we hope that we will be able to incorporate anybody who is interested in supporting different aspects of the center. After today's panel, we're gonna have a toast of wine at the center for our third birthday so I hope that you'll join us. I've made a note here and I wrote it this morning and I think it's true that with this center, we have broken a glass ceiling and we have challenged others, other museums and galleries to do the same. And I'm proud and pleased that today's programming was shaped and organized by the adult programs team who worked tirelessly throughout the year in assisting and facilitating the center's programming. And that's sort of a first. I had been sort of responsible for putting together our anniversary programming but this year, Chathlin Ong and Elizabeth Koke who I'd like to thank very, very much for your activation of this program today and they've been instrumental in it and for Catherine's participation too. And so today, we are seeing, as you know, red stocking, riot girls and right now three generations of feminism in conversation moderated by Jennifer Baumgartner and Amy Richards featuring eminent panelists Alex Kate Shulman, Faray Chideya and Marissa Meltzer. Amy and Jennifer have worked together on various projects since they met in 1993 as 22 year olds at Ms. Magazine. Jennifer was an intern at Ms. and while Amy worked down the hall in Gloria Steinem's office and Gloria has been an enormous, a huge, wonderful fan and friend of the center and it's wonderful to have both Amy and Jennifer here. In October, a book they co-wrote about the state of the women's movement, Manifesta, Young Women, Feminism and the Future was published and served as the platform for a national speaking tour which brought them to dozens of community groups, countless bookstores and more than 200 universities and high schools. They founded Soapbox Inc., I love that, Speakers Who Speak Out in 2002. Their second co-authored book, Grass Roots, Field Guide for Feminist Activism, was published in 2005. Amy is the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation and we have partnered with the Third Wave Foundation and in many different ways over the last few years and she is also the voice behind as Amy an online column at, is it feminist.com or is it feminista? Feminist.com, so this is great, we have a feminist.com and we have a feminista.com so there are two.coms that are rare to go here, this is terrific. I'm sorry, I lost my spot. The project director of Anna Deer Smith's Twilight in Los Angeles and the author of Opting In, Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. That's to be read. I have to give one to my daughter, she just had my third grandchild so I have to look for that. Jennifer writes for dozens of magazines, where are you Jennifer? I'm just, there you are, hi. Including Glamour, The Nation, which we all love, real simple in Harper's. She's the creator of the I Had an Abortion Project, the author of Look Both Ways, Bisexual Politics, which was published in 2007 and Abortion and Life, which was published in 2008. She is currently working on a film and awareness project called I Was Raped. Amy and Jennifer live in New York with their families. Before I invite them to come up, I would like to just say a few words and give you some of my thoughts. I was looking at the cover of this and the title of this Manifesta and Feminista and Matron instead of Patron of the Arts. And, because when people ask me or say that I'm a patron of the arts, first of all, I don't consider myself a patron of the arts, but I say, well, if I'm anything, I'm a matron of the arts.  And I say, well, it is the literalness of words. Our literal, all men are created equal, meant then, all men are created equal. And of course, we know they meant all white men are created equal. In literature and in scholarly writing, the use of he and him meant he and him. The idea that no, no, no, it really meant she and her was sort of a way of getting around an embarrassment of what became a politically incorrect blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I won't go on, you all know it. But I think what the point is how language, the ways in which language subverts equality. And we are so accustomed to that that we sometimes don't even notice it. So to my mind, it's not about fussiness, it's really about accuracy. And I think as we attempt to take back the night, we must forever be diligent about taking back our language as well as our wall space. So with those few thoughts, please join me in welcoming Jennifer and Amy. Thank you so much. So that's perfect. Marisa, that's where you're supposed to sit. Right. And Alex, you're right there. And Verizon in the middle. And Amy's on the stage right end. I'm Jennifer Baumgardner. It's really a pleasure to be here. I'm gonna introduce the panel and say a few words to orient you a little bit more to manifest young women feminism in the future, which is celebrating its 10 year anniversary this year and there's a new edition of it. Amy and I are really excited. It was a book we wrote and it was published in 2000. And when it was published in 2000, we never dreamed that it would be that people would still be buying it and reading it. So we feel very fortunate. I'm gonna back up a little and say a little bit about who Amy and I are because I think it says a little bit about feminism and how integrated feminism is just in the water, which is the phrase we use in Manifesta. It's common in a lot of ways. And its power has been there for so long. We often don't even know what's there, even though we're benefiting from it. That was definitely true for Amy and myself. So Amy and I grew up in entirely different kinds of families or at least superficially different families, far away from each other. I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota and she grew up in Central Pennsylvania. And the superficial differences were that my parents were a nuclear family. My parents met when they were in seventh grade, got married in college, they waited until college. And my dad was the breadwinner, my mom was a stay-at-home mother of three daughters. And nonetheless, at a certain point in her life, basically Ms. Magazine came into her life. But the larger thing was that feminism came into her life. There were all these social justice movements going on.  And Ms. was suddenly at the grocery store and it magnetized a lot of the conversations or thoughts she had been having about her own life. Namely, she wondered how much she'd even really chosen that life. She grew up wondering, thinking she could be a teacher or a nurse, her mom was a nurse, so she became a teacher. It didn't even occur to her not to take her husband's name. And while she loved her family and her husband, she wondered if she had really tapped into all of the potential of what could have been a passion for her, what were her talents, and was she really expressing them. And so I was born and raised by a mom who was actively trying to figure out her identity. Amy's mom, on the other hand, left Amy's father before Amy was born. Amy's never met her father. And this was before there were MTV shows for teen single mothers celebrating it. And so Amy's mom was a single mother in a time when it didn't have that kind of, maybe occasionally positive or any sort of attention that wasn't negative. And in fact, when Amy's mother left her father, she was counseled by her parents and other people who were trying to do the best thing for her to arrange an adoption. There's no way that Amy's mother could raise Amy and do a good job. And Amy's mom said, no, I'm gonna raise her on my own. And she did. And our two moms who had women's groups and read the women's room and kind of were being affected by feminism at the same time. They also managed to express these two values of feminism that I think are very important, of second wave feminism that are very crucial. My mother, through laundry strikes and refusing to pick us up when we called her and not making cookies, even though the mom down the street made cookies and I was kind of embarrassed that my mom wouldn't make cookies for us, by refusing to, by making her labor, withdrawing her labor occasionally and making her labor visible, was making the things that women do visible, traditional women's work visible and maybe valued and maybe more understood by her daughters. And while it was embarrassing to me as a child, I now look back and I'm really grateful that my mom did do that and led us into her struggles. Amy's mother, on the other hand, showed that given the opportunity or the necessity, women can do anything men can do. She bought the house and paid the mortgage. She bought the car. If there was a mouse, she trapped it and she put the mouse in the garbage. There weren't jobs that were gendered in Amy's house because there wasn't a man. And so that was a very liberating example in a lot of ways for Amy to grow up seeing. There were other things that, other reverberations, I guess, of the fact that we were raised in these feminist influence households and the one that's popping into my head right now about Amy is that when she was about five, her teacher asked her, it asked the class if anyone knew how to sing the National Anthem and Amy raised her hand and she said, I am woman, hear me roar in numbers too because her mother had told her that that was the National Anthem. And in my household in Fargo, for some reason, we talked about abortion rights a lot. Like at the dinner table, that was like a big part of our conversation and the way it would play out in my life is that my Barbies were always getting abortions and I would go to school and we would have to do speeches where people argued different sides for a speech and I would argue the pro-choice side but I was the only person on my side and people were like, why is that fourth grader always talking about abortion? But it was a reflection of these interesting feminist conversations that were going on even in our homes. When Amy and I got to Ms. as 22 year olds, we were really both so thrilled to be there. By this point, we consciously called ourselves feminists. We weren't just kind of picking up on the reverberations. We were really thrilled to be in hubs of feminist organizing and in a way we were sort of thrilled to be the teacher's pets of the second wave. That was sort of someone called us that once and we're like, that's sort of true. It felt really great for a while. We were the younger people in the room providing the young feminist viewpoint and for a while it felt so great and it felt so powerful to get to be that one young feminist in the room or those two young feminists in the room that we kind of went along with the concept that maybe there weren't that many young feminists. It was really just the two of us. We're so great. But as we matured, we started to feel like there was more of a conflict between what we were talking about in these second wave institutions that we were really, really happy to be a part of and what was going on in the rest of our lives. And the conflict was really that we saw feminism all around us and that in fact we saw our peers, men and women, living really feminist lives whether or not they were using that language to describe it and expressing feminism in interesting ways and maybe in ways that our mother's generation would not have imagined for us. And so the reason we wrote manifesto was in many ways to reconcile that conflict, to describe the feminism that we saw around us and to document it for ourselves primarily but for a generation or to start doing that. And this wonderful thing happened when we wrote the book which is that we got invited to go give lectures at lots of colleges and high schools and community centers and we got to learn so much more from those conversations and from that touring than had even gone into the book. And so the book had this life that went far beyond what we wrote and this conversation about feminism just kept growing and growing and growing for us. And that's been really exciting and an honor to get to continue to learn by having these conversations and this relationship that feminism, knowing that you believe in feminism or trying to figure out feminism really can provide. One of the things that's been sort of interesting that's happened to Amy and I a lot as we've gotten slightly more prominent is that, I mean we're so not prominent so I'm always like, it's not so weird but slightly more prominent is that when women of the second wave who are older have died, like in the last decade actually a lot of very prominent second wave leaders have died and Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, June Jordan are just a ton of very important people who were quite famous have died and when someone passes we do often get calls from journalists saying so and so died and they were so important for this one generation of feminism, they were leaders and who are the leaders in your generation? And we always think it's so almost insulting because they're calling us but they're like, we know it's not you but can you point us or give us the phone number of who it is? But we always say, you're right, it isn't us because and then we quote Alice Rossi from the feminist papers because the public heroines of one generation become just the private citizens of the next and we can all be the Betty Friedans and the June Jordans of our community and of our lives nowadays and that's the wonderful thing but all of the progress I think that we've seen because of feminism and it's also, it's a challenge to go on and to make something with that gift that we've been given of a more feminist world. Now I'm gonna introduce the panel. I'm gonna start with Alex Shulman who's right here, the stage left person. For 40 years, Alice Kate Shulman has been a feminist activist in Red Stockings which New York radical women and other pioneering women's liberation groups and she's a writer, an incredible writer. In 1971 her biography of Emma Goldman to the Barricades was named an outstanding book by the New York Times and the following year she published memoirs of the next prom queen, a novel portraying the sexual and social predicament faced by young middle-class women in the pre-feminist 1950s. It sold over a million copies and it was issued recently under the aegis of the feminist classic series and I got to write the intro which was a big honor. Besides four novels, she's written three memoirs, most recently To Love What Is, a book that recounts caring for her beloved husband who suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2004. Besides being his primary caregiver and blogging about her for psychology today, she's working on a comic novel, her fifth about second waivers in their old age. Farai Chidea who is to her right or to the left if you're looking has combined media technology and social justice during her 20 year career as an award-winning author and journalist. She is a contributor to the public radio show The Takeaway and I listen to that all the time and a frequent lecturer and consultant on digital media strategy at corporations, universities and non-profits. She recently and for quite a while hosted NPR's News and Notes, a daily national program about African-American and African diaspora issues. She has won awards including the National Education Reporting Award, a North Star news prize and a special award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist Association for Coverage of AIDS. She's written three non-fiction books, Trust, reaching the 100 million voters, the 100 million missing voters, The Color of Our Future and Don't Believe the Hype, fighting cultural misinformation about African-Americans. She's also the author of the novel Kiss the Sky. Marisa Meltzer is the author of Girl Power which was just released, or does it come on May? Oh yeah, I was at the party. I'm like, I just finished breastfeeding. You were a double book that night, it was a busy night. Girl Power, the 90s revolution in music and she's the co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Elle and Teen Vogue and she attended Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. So she's always living in the really hip places. She is working on tons of things including I had to learn today that she has the first chapter of a novel on her blog, Marisa, Marisa, Marisa. She writes about feminism for Slate and she most recently wrote about haul videos, H-A-U-L. Do people know this, that weird YouTube phenomenon where teenage girls blog about, or they do videos basically about what they've bought at the stores. So she can talk about that. And she posts ephemera to Meltzer.tumblr.com, feminist ephemera, and she's also working on a zine with Elizabeth Sparadakis called First Kiss and is an anthology of First Kiss Stories. So that's the incredible panel and Amy Richards, my friend of 17 years and collaborator of 15 years probably is going to vigorously moderate. Thank you. And I'm just gonna start by saying a little bit of how we came to this panel today was in part the anniversary edition of Manifesta coming out, in part the celebration of the Sackler Center third anniversary and had this opportunity to sort of say, where is feminism today? What does it mean? And as much as we've evolved in our feminism and we keep sort of refining our definition, there are some staples that have sort of stayed with us and some of those staples are people and ideas and the ideas that those people create. So when we had the opportunity to do with this, I had the opportunity to do this today, it was, I was like, you were all our first choice and you could all do it and you came in part because you're all stellar in your own right but you had such an impact on us and what you were doing and specifically when we were writing Manifesta when we came up with the ideas of Manifesta in the mid 90s, as Jennifer said, we were sort of the pets of the second wave, which is code for also maybe we were just like a little too obedient and idolizing of the second wave. And Alex K. Shulman was one of those people who was both somebody who inspired us but also somebody who was sort of saying in directly or directly, create your own feminism, go out and do it. If you want, if you don't see what you wanna see, you have to write it yourself and you have to create it and so you were inspiring us then with that message and continuing to inspire us today. And Fry at the time was a friend and a colleague and it was, as Jennifer said, we were in the offices of Ms. Magazine and Gloria Steinem's office and I think feeling like that was like the center of the universe. And Gloria Jacobs and Jean Ann Panache are here colleagues from those days at Ms. And Fry was the time working at ABC News and there was a little bit of a, I can't believe she sold out, I can't believe she's at ABC. Why would you go to ABC and now work at Ms. Or why would you do something, why not work? Of course, ABC has long outlived in most alternative publications. But it was a wonderful lesson for us and it really became in some ways the premise of Manifesta when we were asked to define feminism for our generation was how do you both sustain the vibrant alternative world that feminism has created and at the same time have a foot in the mainstream and try to shake up the mainstream and Fry was at that time leading by example and though it was initially threatening, it turned out to be a great lesson and has obviously continued to inspire us in so many ways. And Marisa less so at the time inspiring us but everything she has gone on to chronicle Sassy magazine and the Riot Girl movement where we wish your books had existed when we were writing Manifesta because we, there was too few resources available that chronicled those worlds and they were such a big part of what we were trying to say was feminism today and how it was just out there in the culture. And so the ideas that you've gone on to document so well were in Manifesta and so thank you for writing that and I just wanna start by saying that when Jennifer and I wrote Manifesta we were a little bit sort of I think too dependent on how feminism was being defined by feminist institutions and so we would sort of say feminism is the movement for this full social, political and economic equality of all people and that's true but once we started lecturing and got out in the world we would get audiences of people that would say, uh-huh and how does that relate to your life and what do you mean by that and how do you live a feminist life? And so we've had to kind of evolve on our definition and when Jennifer was introducing us you know by introducing our backstory it shows the context of how we were in many ways and I think this is true for most people born after 1970, feminist from birth whether or not we were identifying that as the way to define our lives we were so born into a world that had so radically changed by as a result of feminism and so we were the beneficiaries of that and it was not until we were in college where we started using the actual language of feminism and saying, oh yeah, that's right that's why my Barbie was having abortions and that's why my mom made me sing that song it was standing up for yourself and it was about power and it was about this movement but it was not until I think we were in college where we had a language and then it was not until after college where we had each other to sort of say, oh yeah, that's it, we're not weird or at least we can be weird together and so I wanna start by asking each of our panelists where you were when you started to identify where you were in your life when you started to identify as a feminist and to sort of go in chronology, Alex if you don't mind answering first where you were and I will just say to some of the panelists as well that the title for today's talk as you know is Red Stockings, Rye Girl and Right Now and though many of us I think know Red Stockings and Rye Girl and hopefully right now maybe not everybody does so if your answer can maybe incorporate that to also fill that out for people. Alex. Well, it's so different from your lives. When I, I was very lucky, is this working? Is it, okay. I was very lucky to be right here in New York when the women's liberation movement was born and even luckier to be able to get in on the very beginning of it. I was a 30-something year old housewife, mother of two I had had to, well had to. I left my job as an encyclopedia editor when I got pregnant because there were no options at that time for child care and I felt as if my life was over. It was not from then on, I was just going to be a housewife, mother and my ambitions in the world were finished and then suddenly I heard on WBAI some women talking about this absolutely newborn women's liberation movement. The ideas that they spouted were ideas that I had secretly longed for but never articulated and they gave the telephone number of a meeting and the address. So I went to my first meeting. This was before Red Stockings had even begun. This was in 1967 and it was a life transforming meeting because there were all these women who were a decade younger than I who not only didn't, well I had been used to being dismissed from the world as this mother that was all, I was this housewife. It's hard I'm sure for people to imagine what the culture was like then.  And so instead of feeling thereafter that my life was over, I felt as if my life was just beginning and indeed it was. That's great. Fry, Joanna. And also Fry, I know that you went to, was it an all girl school from K through 12? Just high school. Oh, just high school, okay. Because I said, you know, being in an all women's college, which I was, it was definitely an experience where I had that turned back on me and I remember my graduation ceremony and then being in my boyfriend's graduation ceremony a week later where it was and tomorrow he will go out and do this and he will go out and do that and having never felt the invisibility until I had the visibility and wish I had had it so much younger in life. And so I guess you didn't get to high school either, so. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, I don't ever remember not being a feminist because my mother very much is and she's a big influence and my grandmother was as well in a very profound way where she also had to fight for her ability to be an independent woman and my grandfather, in fact, was just very negative about the fact that she wanted to work and she put herself through college after she'd had six kids and so she's someone who just, you know, made it happen and so I don't really remember a sort of coming into feminism moment but I do know that because of who my mother is and who I am and just because my family was very embracing of experimentation, you know, I would get like a chemistry set, you know, one year when I was a kid and then I would get a doll and then I would get an erector set and then I would get, you know, a jewelry-making kit and a basket weaving, you know, setup and, you know, all these things like being able to experiment with all these roles and my sister loved Barbies but what she really loved was mummifying them and burying them in the backyard so there's somewhere out in the yard there's all these mummified Barbies so, you know, and I read a lot of comic books I was looking for a new career, I've seen the bus ads yeah, exactly, mummy Barbie but in high school I started the debate club and we would debate all boys' schools sometimes and that didn't seem weird to me we had an academic to Catholic team of course an all girls team because we were all girls and that just seemed normal to me in college I was part of an improv troupe that was actually very gender balanced it was like 50-50 men and women and it started my freshman year and I did it all the way to my senior year so things like that I think the ability to experiment with roles in play and work, you know, is something that I've really gotten from my family legacy which is one where women have had to constantly fight for agency and there's many stories including one where not the most positive story but my grandmother's grandmother married a man who was much, much older and already had kids and he was so jealous of her that he wouldn't let her go get the mail she'd had to walk down the path to get the mail and if she walked down the path she might see a man, blah, blah, blah so she had gone and gotten the mail one day and he tried to raise a hand to her and she had a pan full of hot lard and she lifted and she was like you want some of this, babes? You know, and he was just like totally straight after that. You know? So it was just like That was your influence Yeah, it was just like, you know, in many ways subtle and unsubtle the women in my family have claimed their space you know, and I feel lucky that my time has been less confrontational in certain ways. And I want to say from the beginning that our definition of generation is maybe a little out of bounds there's not such a great range on the panel and when Marissa got here, she said I'm so excited to beat the young one on the panel because I'm often with much younger people where they're like what was it like in the 90s? It's true. I do remember the 90s. I came, I think I always identified as a feminist I have a feminist mom who was subscribed to Miz and who took me to protest against the Miz California pageant dressed as me, I think. Thanks mom. And she worked at Planned Parenthood when I was very young. So feminism was always a part of my life and I also come from a very long line of divorces so independent women were also sort of ubiquitous in my family. I think that, you know, I was always sort of weirdly gender essentialist. Like I feel like growing up, I was always reminding everyone around me about the supremacy of being a girl. Like I still, like on almost a daily basis feel sorry for men and feel, you know, kind of like God, it's not, I don't know. I've never, I never went through a phase of wanting to be a boy and I always was extremely happy to be a girl and express that in many ways growing up to my family. And so I think though for me that while I always identified as a feminist I think that it really became personal in my life. Probably in like early high school I happened to start high school in 1991 and that also happened to be around the same time that Raya Girl which was the sort of underground punk feminist movement was coming to fruition. And so, you know, for me seeing pictures of girls with like halter tops and slut written across their stomach felt really different from my mother's feminism. My mom like only wears comfortable shoes and keeps her stomach covered. Like wears quite a bit of Eileen Fisher and you know Icelandic sweaters. So seeing that kind of glittery, girly, young feminism was extremely visceral for me and I thought, you know, I want that. And so that also was able to both be like a personal feminism and also a nice way of my teenage rebellion kind of scene itself through. Well, your example is so refreshing because I know in my own example of coming to feminism and I know this is true of many people of Alex's generation. You first had to try out other social justice movements because taking on gender felt too mediocre or too self-serving. I mean, I think there were different ways that people interpret it but I need to sort of fight for civil rights in this country and then it was through that where I was like, oh wait, and women are left out. So it's actually very refreshing that you have been a gender essentialist and have not seen yourself. So yeah, so I ended up having like a radio, my high school had America's largest high school radio station for some reason and so I had like an all girl radio show and I organized like a women's history celebration in my school because of course they had never had one. So yeah, it just kept kind of manifesting itself in my life and now I write about it. Good, well on that question, I mean on that note, when Jennifer and I had to go back and update Manifesta, we were both a little nervous to read a book that was 10 years old and feared that so many of the examples in there were just gonna fall flat and not be current anymore and we were a little bit sort of humiliated by how many times we mentioned Monica Lewinsky in Britney Spears and though comforted by 10 years past, we actually had to define who Monica Lewinsky was for this generation and you know, we're happy that the Spice Girls broke up, although now we have Posh Spice, I mean I'm sort of like she hasn't really evolved much in 10 years and so there was the good and the bad and I was, as I was personally reading it, I thought did we actually really all know that at one point because now I can't, I mean Jennifer can't remember she went to Marissa's book party, I'm like I definitely couldn't write this book today. But we had to write a new introduction where we got to apologize for some of the things we didn't do so well in the first round but we ended by saying that how we have come to view feminism 10 years after writing Manifesta is to recognize our power to create social justice in our own unique ways and we really wanted to put the emphasis on what we uniquely can contribute to this movement and as Jennifer said, the Alice Rossi quote, there was so much attention to when you're gonna do the big thing, when you're gonna do the massive thing, when you're gonna, and we were sort of focused on when you're gonna do the little thing because it's all those little things knitted together or woven together that collectively add up to something and also we've learned however many years it's been hundreds of years in this country that people are very ambivalent about power sharing with women. Power is defined in a very traditional way and so we might make more success if we redefine what power is or re-imagine power in a way that is less hierarchical and when Jennifer and I talked to college students who feel eternally disempowered, we always say, but yeah, but you have access to, first of all, you know what the internet is and you know how to create a web log and you need to do all these things and identifying that for them and they're sort of eyes light up, they're like, really, I have power in this movement and we all do have something unique that we're contributing and I'd like to ask all of our panelists to say what you think your power is or how does Jennifer's five-year-old say it, your special ability? Well, your special ability is. Your special ability. I love that. That was good. Now I say it's also hard to ask this of women because women are always so humble and say, well, I'm not really, so I hope you can, if that was your instinct, to step out of that and share your special ability with us and why don't we go for it, do you want to go first? Sure, I mean, I think that at this point in time like many people my special ability is survival, economic survival and cultural survival and right now I'm starting a new business. 15 years ago I started a blog called Pop and Politics. I was 25 years old, I was just starting to do political commentary on TV for CNN and my career as a pundit took off and the blog took off and in some ways kind of overwhelmed me because I had no infrastructure to grow it and I have in many ways over the years as I've, I went through being a TV pundit, network news correspondent, TV host at Oxygen during startup years, went into digital consulting, went into public radio, but Pop and Politics is something where I've always been running to chase this, it was first a no profit and intentional no profit with no advertising and then a non-profit and it's exhausted me. And so basically I never took a salary, I raised a ton of money for it and if I had it to do over I would definitely take a salary because why not? But at this point in time after sort of the show that I hosted for NPR was canceled during a wave of budget cuts that were painful but not personally directed at me, three shows died during the span of one year, which is quite a lot. News and Notes, Bryant Park Project and Day to Day were all canceled in one year. I was offered different jobs and I just didn't want them and at first I was sort of like why am I not taking these jobs? And then I realized I want to be an entrepreneur and I already am and so I'm raising, I would use the F word, an F load of money to start. An F load of money to start a dual bottom line media company meaning with a for profit wing and a non-profit wing and I'm taking it very seriously and I have been hustling and doing consulting and doing all these things that are not journalism in order to learn how to be a business woman and I'm getting really pretty close to doing what I need to do and that's just, that's a huge journey for me because I miss being a journalist. I miss covering the news but right now I need to build infrastructure for media that's inclusive and diverse and where you can tell the truth. Alex, here. Yeah. I was like, if anybody wants to make an investment, give information later, okay. Absolutely.  It's so amazing to me and I feel now at 77, well almost 78 that my power has to do with looking back that the writing I do can incorporate decades of this possibility that has come to pass where all of these women and generations are born able to assert their power, become entrepreneurs, organize, it's just the most wonderful thing. So in answering your question, I think I want to speak about 40 years ago when we women had virtually no power. We couldn't have done that. There were of course the occasional exceptions who were very annoying because they said, well, I could do it, why can't you? But for the most part women didn't have power then and what was so wonderful about the birth of this feminist movement and particularly red stockings was that when you walked out your door in the morning, everything remained to be done. You couldn't take a step that didn't provoke you to want to make change. The power that we had then was being able to see everything as connected. People now have many different projects all, I'm talking about feminism. There's such a huge array and that's the most wonderful thing but the fact is that when we had nothing and had as a future everything to change, not one thing to change or a dozen things to change but everything to change the consciousness of an entire society actually world because it became a global movement, that was the most empowering thing I can ever experience to be able to think it's up to you, change the world. And so I'm just very grateful again that I was born when I was into a movement that was just beginning. I think there was, just to add and I wasn't there in 1967 but I think there was some power in being an outsider that we've sort of lost today because it was new and nuanced and so that even though it felt so disempowering, there was a power that came from that disempowerment and similarly what we hear and I'm sure many of us in this room hear it but when Jennifer and I are on campus is, it's not that people don't believe in the values of feminism but they're sort of like, yeah but what do you want me to do? What is it? Because when they take many steps before they see it and then need somebody to point out to them, oh but did you think about this? Why are all the tenured, why are 80% of the tenured faculty male and 20% female? But they don't see that because they see the entire faculty looking more diverse so I think there's also the power in being able to have it so exposed to you what was wrong or the non-power sharing that existed. What's your special ability? I think it's a bit ironic being the youngest person on the panel on saying this but I think it's nostalgia. I have a seemingly unlimited capacity for nostalgia but I think that I've done a good job of being productive with it and I think that I hope that other people will take a cue and things like the Spice Girls or Alanis Moran or Raya Girl, those things all do need to be written into history and I think so much of that is up to us to do and I've always been able to reconcile my voracious consuming of pop culture by trying to parse it out and to write about it and so I think that that's a powerful thing. It's all too easy to be drawn to culture and to feel like you should be doing political organizing or something like that but I think the more that we see feminism in our culture in a really superficial way, you see where culture needs to change along with politics. I think I look at somebody like Sarah Palin which is like the rhetoric of feminism without any of the substance and to me that's where culture needs to change. We can't just elect a woman, that's not enough. But yeah and I think it's nostalgia and feeling okay about that nostalgia and acting on it and writing your own history and not waiting for other people to do it the way that you guys did with Manifesto was incredibly inspiring to me. Well I think what you're saying too is it's not nostalgia for the point of living in the past, it's nostalgia to the point of- Although I do like to live in the past. How do we move in the past? I'm not opposed to that. But you like living in the near past, you're not like a Victorianist, you're like a riot girlist. I went through a really intense Victorian phase as a child though, I really honestly did. I subscribed to a Victoriana magazine. Yeah, I know it's so embarrassing. True secrets of the feminists. There was a study years ago and I was reading the study because I was helping Gloria Sonner with her book, Revolution from Within, that said that the more education women had, the lower their self-esteem and it's because they were less likely to see themselves included in the text, the sort of the higher you got up that chain, the less likely women's stories and examples were to be there. And I see that when we travel to high schools and colleges still that women's history and non-white people's history and is still so, it really is in the margins or it's sort of the, you know, the class that not everybody has to take and you actually have to do it on top of your regular course load and it still has not done a good job of being inserted into the curriculum, which is why some people might say to the Feminite, the Sackler Center for Feminist Art, why do you really need to put that there? You need to because it's not yet completely in the rest of history. The, you just were alluding to this a little bit, both Alex and Marissa in your answers, the sort of generations and how we can sometimes be too dependent on feminism in another generation and conversely maybe too dismissive of how ideas that were put into place years ago have manifested maybe not in the way that we always wanted them to. The writing the sled across your belly is maybe for somebody, oh, why are they doing that? But the, and it's fun for me to be in a, on a panel that's labeled generational, essentially generational feminism and not have it be so tense because a lot of times when we talk about intergenerational feminism, we're more often talking about the negative aspects of that and how it's manifesting negatively. And I interpret that and it's two sources to that problem. One, I think that young people are sometimes scared about either sounding dismissive or scared about taking on that power and that responsibility and that's intimidating. And conversely, I think it's very threatening for some older women to have younger women and younger men expressing feminism in ways that they weren't able to. And that feels intimidating and also makes them feel vulnerable. And so I don't know, I mean, Alex, you represent more clearly one generation on the panel, but I don't want you to feel like you've to exclusively talk about that. I know, I'm happy to. But why do you think from from an old, and your book is, your new book is sort of going in that direction, but why do you think young older women have a hard time appreciating the contribution that younger women are making? Or seeing it even. You've got me. I have no idea. I appreciate the contribution of younger men, women so much. I mean, to me, it's like the fulfillment of a lifetime of effort that we actually, what we did all those decades ago, bore fruit. And I'm grateful for every single manifestation of younger women's feminism. I mean, it thrills me. So you're asking the wrong person. And it really irritates me no end to hear feminists of my generation grumbling that the younger women aren't the way we were. Well, thank God, they're not the way we were.  You're doing fabulous work. It is depressing also to note that on the campuses, the work of women isn't integrated. And you know, I mean, all the things that are still left to be done, which is, I suppose in a sense, still everything in one mode or another, that's depressing. But you know, that's not, what's wrong isn't the fault of young or old feminists. It's the fault of the other people who aren't feminists. And Fri, I'm sure because I think we've been in these same rooms together where we'll be in a room sort of straddling those generations and trying to be in some ways the translator and when you're in that role of translating between the generations, what are you personally offering? Well, you know, I'm starting a new book about millennial generation politics and you know, people define millennial in different ways, but sort of at the lowest end people usually use, it's around 18 and the highest end is like 33 and some people define it different ways. But I got contacted by an organization, not a women's organization to be on a sort of youth panel. I'm like, I'm 40 years old. I am writing about millennials and if you want me to be on this panel, I'll talk about my work. But there's, because I started doing media, I started doing television when I was 25, I think some people still think I'm 25. And I think that the best thing, and you know, we have all talked about it, the most important thing you can do is stop pretending to be what people need you to be. You know, if somebody needs you to be the young person, be clear that you're not the young person if you're not that person and know who those people are, have people you can recommend. So I was like, I'm happy to be on this panel as a researcher or you know, to recommend some other people to you. And don't, you know, don't get overly invested in your own relevance and you know, that's important. Lucy, do you have anything to add? As the young person on the panel? You know, I think that sometimes the, sometimes there's a language barrier or the talking points are different and I think that, you know, I... Did you have somebody from another gen, I mean from a generation, an older generation talk to you about your books and say I learned something, thank you for adding clarity. I wasn't sure why people liked sassy in the first place. Yeah, to a certain extent, definitely.  But no, that was her, she was trying to bridge the gap for me and show her, show her support. Some mom's baked cookies, that's not Allison. And you wore an Icelandic sweater and your comfortable shoes. No, I actually wore something that she told me she thought was too racy for the, showed some bra, but anyway. But I think that, you know, now there's, I see some of the generational pull and push when I look at some of the discourse online. And, you know, I think that we were talking about this before the panel, but it's so much of maybe, you know, the fourth wave whenever that is coming, whoever that will be, will definitely have something to do with the internet surely.  It seems to be a real generational problem, but I think that, you know, trying to sort of bridge those divides is going to be a challenge for us. And I think it's a really important one.  When Jennifer and I wrote Manifesto, we practically put the internet in quotes. Like, it's probably not gonna be around that long. I really know this, yeah. I wanna say one thing that what Marissa said reminded me of. And that is, there is this, when you said about your mom kind of disapproving that you had some bra showing. Well, somehow the parents' generation is always assumed to be sexless and frutish, but I just wanna remind you that the feminists of the second wave were the ones who didn't even wear any bras and let our breasts flop around on purpose. And we demanded abortion rights, which brought out into the public discourse talk about sex. We wanted sex, sex, sex, sex. Now, there were some feminists of my generation who were against pornography and who were kind of puritanical. But there was a tremendous number of us who objected to that and who wanted to have talk about sex and equal sex.  We wanted to do away with the double standard. We wanted to be able to talk about and use birth control. So I'm just wanting to say that just because we're of a parental generation doesn't mean that we are, or ever were, puritanical. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm just gonna ask one more question of our panel and then we'd love to hear from everybody in the audience or people that wanna speak up. But one of the most successful chapters in this book is called The Dinner Party. And we were inspired to write that chapter in part because of Judy Chicago's wonderful piece and her ability in that piece to bring together women in history, as we were talking, who otherwise don't get to come together in history books the way men do. There's not that story being told there. It has to be an alternative story. And we also were inspired to write The Dinner Party chapter. Had the Sackler Center only been around then, we could have been even more inspired. We were inspired to write it because for so many people, feminism seemed to be this extracurricular pursuit. It was something you did at a now meeting or when you read Ms. Magazine or something at the Y and or a lecture like this. And then it left people confused when they left those meetings and those designated feminist spaces of how to practice feminism in their everyday lives in more mundane ways. And so The Dinner Party was meant to inspire people by bringing people together and documenting something that we had done, which is to have dinner parties over years of and using them as an excuse to just meet women that we wanted to meet and bring them together. And to have conversations about fear and what we're scared of and what we're nervous about and doing that in a relatively safe setting. And so being inspired by being so close to The Dinner Party, what are the ways in all of your lives that you more mundanely practice feminism? When you walk out the door and it's not so obvious, what are the ways that you do, besides wearing your comfortable shoes or writing a sled across your belly that make you, what are the feminist decisions you make? I'm like, you don't have to go first.  And I'm like, and not only do I say, girls can play basketball players, I get out the book and I say, look, here's the New York Liberty. Look, there are girls playing and they're professional and they get paid. And so there's things that I do like that. And then there are other deliberate things that I do and I can downright be, I mean, you used the F word and the B word, where if I just feel like I have shuttled the kids back and forth to school one too many times, I will just say to Peter, I'm not gonna do it today. And when my kids were little and they would cry, mommy, mommy, and still today, I won't go. Because not only do I want them to not be overly dependent on me as the caregiver, but I don't want them to not see their father in that role as the caregiver. And so a lot of what I do is not do stuff and not have things expected of me. Hi, do you want a Monday? Yeah, I was just thinking, listening to Amy, I relate to that a lot. And one of the things I think, the most important thing I think I do now is just when people younger, people are, they're usually younger than me. But if anyone reaches out to me by email or calls or meets me somewhere and asks for something, if I can provide it, I do. And I always follow up because it's such a small thing, but it may, I know that when I first moved to New York, the fact that I could call you or I made these, that they made these alliances with feminists that were inspiring to me or just made me feel less alone, made all the difference in terms of me feeling like I was powerful and could make change. Alex, you wanna? Can I use my time to tell a story about Judy Chicago and the dinner party? Sure. Well, one of the early things I did as a feminist, when I became a feminist, was I decided to stop giving couples dinner parties for my husband and his business associates. And I said, no more. And for about, I don't know, six or so years, I did not have a single dinner party. Everything was couples then before the movement entered my life. And then Judy Chicago was coming to town to present the dinner party. It was its first opening and I broke my rule and I had a dinner party for Judy and there were 10 of us because my table could seat 10. And she was a friend of mine. Well, in those days, all of us knew each other. I mean, in the very beginning, the movement was so small that we all just made all these connections together. So Judy and nine others, no, Judy and eight others and I all sat down to this table together. And it was a huge change in my life again because it meant I was now free to have dinner parties whenever I wanted just with my women friends. I mean, I just think that right now, one of the things that I do that goes back to the translation role is that I think that there's a lot of intersectional drama between people of different races, people of different genders, people of different sexual orientations. And to the extent that I can, I'm trying to observe and inspire dialogue. And that's really what the next book I'm working on is. And I think that that is something feminist where you can observe how people act and not constantly react in a negative way to other people's negativity. I got into an argument with a cab driver last night and I was disappointed in myself because it was so avoidable. I mean, he was, yeah, exactly, exactly. He was just gonna be an annoying guy and there was no point in me going there. But I see right now a lot of times when, I think of Proposition Eight, I was living in California during Proposition Eight and it was just a disaster.  I was at this thing called the Ballot Brunch where a friend of mine hosts this brunch before any election where there are ballot initiatives and everyone has to study the ballot initiatives and present recommendations.  It was like a small little cluster of us and we were all like, yeah, Prop Eight is gonna pass in part because there's been no coalition building. People who are against Prop Eight have not been trying to really market to communities of color. We just saw the train wreck happening and then it happened and people are still mad at it. And so I think that one thing that needs to happen, it's just like, is some traffic copying of different agendas based on people's identity because I think, the good thing is that you can be whoever you want, but the bad thing is if you don't communicate then you can cancel out each other's ability to make social change. And I think that right now things are just too serious for us to be for no reason across different identity-based lines and so we need to pull it together. And so right now I'm watching and then I hope to play a constructive role at some point. I have a fair amount of teenage friends for somebody my age, whether they're friends from the internet or whatever. And I take a great amount of pride in trying to curate the cultural and political choices in their lives because they're young and so impressionable. And so I do like to send them manifesto and old copies of Sassy and everything that Winona writer movies and everything that shaped me so much when I was a teenager. But I also really love hearing about their love lives or things that annoy them at school and trying to plant as many feminists sees, encouraging to call themselves feminists. One friend read my book and then tried to get a feminist club started at her school the next day, which was so amazing to me. Her principal said no, but that's a whole other story. And then I also think especially amongst writers in New York who are women, there's so much competition and I think that there's a lot of, I think the first instinct is often to see one woman do well and to think that there's no opportunity for you or something and I really make an effort in my life to have like a network of female writer friends and that are very real relationships and to help each other and to be genuinely proud of each other and to realize that one person's success is not gonna take away from yours. Just hopefully as an example that that will catch on because that's something that bums me out to no end that you see again and again women picking on women in the media. So. You know the movie thing, I just had dinner with a friend and she got a Netflix subscription for three high school women that she's friends with and sends them movies and then she and then they can send her movies. And I was like, that's such a great way to communicate. It's like a modern day version of a book club but even easier. So now we'd love to hear from the audience. There are microphones on either side. If you are feeling lazy or you're feeling too trapped, we can just repeat your question. Mike. Hi, something came up I'm really interested because it's an intergenerational group of women about Alex brought out with puritanical view and sexuality and pornography. And I was informed my analysis of pornography came from Dworkin and Susan Griffin's pornography in silence. So I just didn't, I was wondering about having it stay in the air that the analysis of being concerned about how women are portrayed in pornography is not coming under the rubric of puritanical. And I was wondering to see what people would say about that. The first thing you just need to think of is how how much that conversate or the the seemingly competing tensions in that formulation is do we care about the fact that there's violence against women and then does that, does dealing with that anxiety or dealing with eradicating that injustice do we have to give up freedom, certain freedoms in order to do so. And that's been the conflict the whole time and I think the way it's being re the really painful debate that's going on right now is about sex work versus sex trafficking and people talking about sex can be work that a woman chooses and she should be able to be legalized and decriminalized and there should be all these ways to have it be a form of expression and way of making money versus no we have to absolutely eradicate it because the potential for abuse has been just proven over and over to be kind of overwhelming that's where we're at right now and so I think the conversation has changed a little bit from being about pornography and I know that that was an unbelievably painful split and debate in the 80s for activists and I think we're seeing it again right now with people who are working around sex work versus sex trafficking. I think people thought by changing the language to being about sex trafficking it would get them out of that debate and sort of what seemed like an intractable place but it's right back where it was and I think it's really hard and for I's point about being the traffic director is there are a lot of otherwise allies out there who aren't able to come together and the consequence is going to be that everybody loses and yet I understand why they can't come together because they only see the other person's position as a total utter compromise and not something they can support and I mean there are wonderful groups out there and actually you did a wonderful panel at Sackler about a year ago on sex trafficking you know but Dorsch and Lidhold who's at Sanctuary for Families has done a lot on this issue and Equality Now has done a lot there's other sort of more localized group there's a great film out now called The Playground Project and it's about sex trafficking within the borders of the United States and I think it's such a resting film because it's very it's it's we're more sympathetic when we see the Southeast Asian young girl woman we're not quite sure than it is to see the white 16 year old from Kansas and we're like wait you chose that you didn't choose that where's the so it calls into so there's a lot out there right now and there was that movie trade that was a more popular so there's a lot out there and hopefully that by having those cultural moments and things to hold on to we can set them to our 16 year old friends on Netflix we can have more of these conversations and try to get past the intractable place yeah I think that you know as far as pornography goes I think that you know pornography and so many other things that are are related to sex acts and how we view them really have to do with agency and to me that's always the standard is like does a woman have agency because I have friends who are in the fetish community and their form of agency involves doing things that other people would consider humiliating painful you know oppressive but it is a form of their sexual expression and although I don't choose the same expression I appreciate that it is for them it's their choice you know and so I think all of us have different reasons that we do different things but I think at the same time ultimately when I think about when I think about the conversation I think about agency do you have agency in this decision and also is it an informed consent you know because you can consent to things verbally or even on paper and it's not informed consent so I think to me when you think about issues like pornography, sex work anything controversial I always think what's the level of informed consent what's the level of agency of the players involved hi I think this is an amazing panel and it was amazing to hear I love hearing about the different milieu over decades like Alex your stories about going to the meeting and then having the dinner party are so wonderful and then of course Marissa and I pretty much share a milieu where the same age and came up through most of the same cultural forces and what I'm interested in that was harder to get at in this panel because Marissa is the young one is the right now aspect of the title right and that's something that I think probably Amy and Jennifer and Marissa especially would be really well equipped to talk about because of either your speaking tours or Marissa your extensive online networks what you know we know that the num like compared even with like my and Marissa's generation the number of young women calling themselves feminists continues to drop right although I talk with my friends who it's actually statistically up it's up and it's always been up and younger people are more likely the age range of 18 to 24 are more likely to identify as feminists than any other age and more likely now than the same age group 10 20 years ago okay so already there's many more people now who I mean it's also true that they ask the question I think of men and women now and they used to only ask it of women so that's some of it although I think that's probably not a huge percentage but I guess my question is just precisely about that like what's going on feminist wise with like the actual youngest people with people who are in high school and college and around that age now and how is the internet affecting that that's it that's my question well it's interesting too with the whole concept of right now because of course we're we're all still living so we're part of right now everyone in this room is part of right now but it's true that it does you do sort of think like what about the kids who were born in 1995 what are they doing and I think one of the things they're doing that's really important is around abortion rights reproductive justice in general so pregnancy decisions and supporting all decisions and one thing that I'm particularly excited about lately is our projects like the doula project so these are women who are trained to be to attend births but they also attend abortions and they also attend adoptions so they are supporting they think that every pregnancy decision deserves support to me that's like a really important exciting feminist thing that younger people are pioneering and Amy and I when we do abortion related like screenings of that and abortion film and do discussion specifically about abortion we have been seeing tons of younger women and men come in who are from the birth community really trying to make that link between abortion and birth all of those pregnancy decisions as being crucial and truly linked and then similar to that a much broader or more complicated more nuanced understanding of what of what abortion having a baby or raising kids might or placing a child in an adoption of what those decisions might mean in an individual's life and a lot more respect for how diverse and how everybody's circumstances are going to dictate what that experience is and not really not using words like pro-choice or pro-life very much or saying things like I am a feminist but I am also pro-life and then going on to define what that means and it's typically not and I bomb abortion clinics it's usually like and I believe that it is a life and it's taking a life and here's how I practice my feminism to support that value system without taking away another woman's opportunity to make decisions meaningful decisions about her life I think trans issues will be really prominent in you know future feminist discourse the fourth wave whatever it's however it's going to play out I think that we've already seen some bits of how it's impacting like all female colleges and I think in the way that when I was in high school they were starting to be it was becoming more common maybe for you know teenagers to come out and for gay straight alliances on high school campuses I think we're going to start seeing how you know trans populations will sort of change and get younger and in high schools I think that that's something that will affect feminism for the next generation a lot you know I mean I won't go into too much detail but you know a friend of a friend there's you know basically a 10 year old girl who is already living as a boy and very firm in her gender identity and I think that one of the things that that raises is just questions for parents I mean I'm not a parent you too are parents and I just think of like you know how parents now that's a lot to process how you choose to you know when your child has a gender identity that other people may not support how do you as a parent navigate that I mean it's nothing profound that I'm saying here but it just strikes me that that's a big burden and that's you know you want to have luckily she does have feminist parents both her father and mother but it's just you know one of those modern challenges that I think you know I think about like in an intergenerational sense you know every generation of parents also has to think about how they do and don't critique the behavior of the children they're raising and sometimes there's not easy answers you know to how you try to guide a child whose experiences are very different from yours you know and I do think that gender fluidity just in general is much more we certainly see the moments when it's not allowed and it's prohibited but it's much more acceptable and you even see it like in snowboarding I mean I hate that now the Olympics is you know you have the female heat because when snowboarding emerges a sport you couldn't tell the gender of the person it was a sport that was just out there and available and I think young people grew up watching that and you know I will see you know kids that put on tutus one day and then they put the tutu on and they push the dump track you know and I think that you just see that and you see people being okay with that I think what they're okay with is when both things are happening I think it's harder sometimes when there's that sense of transitioning or abandoning and you see it among sexuality too early on you can already hear kids being like is that your girlfriend, is that your boyfriend and even though there's definitely still danger and discomfort with same sex relationships it's much more likely that kids see that as something open to them and the other thing that I see with a lot of younger people is and this is Jennifer and I host it's Feminist summer camp in New York City but we hosted Feminist winter term where we bring students from all different colleges is more and more what I was sort of threatening fry with all those years ago is people sort of I'm a women's studies major and I'm a philosophy major and I'm an art major and bringing their feminist politics and starting from a really young age and being an artist but then within the context of that trying to explore what it means to be a female artist and how to be a feminist and picking up on that at a very young age you said a young woman was unsuccessful in starting her feminist club in high school but we do see tons of young people that are starting feminist clubs in high schools and they're often around things having to do with women's history month or we want to do AIDS awareness day or we want to celebrate national coming out day they're often linked to some sort of theme and then the other thing we're seeing which is I think more common we go to this program every year that Barnard College does and this 40 or 50 students are just stellar and they've already raised like $40,000 for cancer research and they've already painted a children's wing of a hospital but they're just starting to have that moment and these are high school juniors and seniors of wow that's great that we raised $40,000 for cancer but what about women cancer specifically you can see the light bulbs starting to go off they have the instincts toward social justice but not yet the gender awareness around it and they're starting to get that I promise this will be next and then Thank you so much so much of what you said has been very thought provoking and has brought up a couple of interesting points one was Amy the question that you asked about competition among women I find that one trick that I have used and it's not a trick it's truly heartfelt is to compliment my students who how do you say outgrow me if they have done something exceptional that I myself have not done or even thought of I do say thank you so very much I'm so glad that I was a part of that process and I do expect you to excel me in many ways and I'm so very grateful to have been a part of you moving forward in ways that I will not so but you know I guess that brought up to me that I too was brought up in a culture of men competing as opposed to completing and it's for me to change that that women who do outgrow me in certain ways are complimenting my contribution do you find that when you take the risk of saying that then somebody says oh and thank you you get more information not that you're fishing for it but do you get it well I don't get it verbally but I see them relax and light up and I see them so very grateful that I can take a back seat even though I look like I'm in the front seat I'm not I'm in the front seat of what I've already accomplished but I'm in the back seat of what they are yet to accomplish and their whole attitude lights up and that to me is they're thank you not like verbally they're able to even put it into words they're so happy I've said it my question because I've been dealing with this very harshly lately is that I came from a background of art and healing and spirituality where not to be immodest but I was how do you say thought of an exceptionally lovely woman lovely and funny and spiritual and kind and yet those things were often how do you say connected with weakness I haven't changed completely those things are still there but I certainly have become more how do you say assertive and clearer and I don't take crap when it's put out at me in a rather obvious manner and I yet still am around a lot of women who are not equal to the men in power, money and prestige that they are working with and I find myself of course needless to say having to move on but now that I'm in a position of having shifted my identity into one that is perhaps stronger a lot of attention is often viewed toward me of well am I or am I on my way to being a dyke or a transsexual or otherwise generally much more obnoxious than I used to be so I guess this is something that all of us have to deal with this level of seriousness and dignity and strength and how is it still that we are wonderful and lovely and spiritual and all of these other things that we value so very much so I guess I'd like to hear how you perceive the panel perceive that struggle inside themselves and how do you handle the kind of stuff that comes at you when you're not quite viewed in such a wonderful manner yet you know you better be a little stronger because it's not weakness and those other things are not obnoxious so that's the question what came to mind for me is just the good cop bad cop of jobs which are I think gender comes into the workplace all the time but there's also many different people who play many different roles but what you have to be willing to give up when you don't play the good cop role all the time is approval and you know that's a classic feminist dilemma is like how much can you stand other people to disapprove of your behavior even if that behavior is appropriate and that's an internal struggle that is part of the external struggle and it's still I think one of the biggest things that women have to face is how much disapproval are we willing to take even if we think we're right I think it's a question of integration integrating the various parts of yourself and that is one of the basic psychological questions facing everybody always so in a sense it's not exactly a gender question it's a question of being maybe it's a question of confidence I have a feeling that being able to integrate all of your different impulses and accept them even though they may be at war with each other is a matter of strength and confidence so that the more you can join with other people and make the world such that you get your strength I know this is a big order and it isn't a personal answer but I do think that as a movement is successful there is much less conflict that's going to keep tearing you apart I think I would just add that weren't you in a radical feminist group called no more nice girls absolutely I want to be an honorary member yes and no more nice girls went on for many many years and we could none of us have done the rebellious work that we did alone we had to do it together that's really what I'm trying to say about movement I just the one thing I would add is I think it's important to keep remembering it as a societal problem and it's not about you I try to remind myself that you really can't help but be a product of the culture that you come from and those debates are going to exist but the way that they're really not going to be solved internally or in individual lives there's something that we have to fight for on a greater level and fix the underlying issues I think we have time for these two more questions Melissa you know when you were talking about how there's not a lot of tension on the panel and I've been to so many of these intergenerational things that have been so rife with tension and as a person who worked in institutions of the second wave and I feel like as a person now I'm over 40 almost like a tween this kind of like I'm not a second generation person I kind of fit into the third but I'm really not so in general I always feel like I'm stuck and I grew up you know loving all the whole second wave stuff and that totally taught me but I'm a person who's like so fixated on culture and I write about Halloween, you're awesome and I feel like now 10 years after I've kind of like left institutions even though I've kind of dabbled in it back and forth I feel like once I discovered how to mesh my feminism with my kind of pop culture freakness then I understood my contribution to feminism because I couldn't do the whole institutional stuff anymore I just couldn't do it I was exhausted by people who were like 20 years older than me who had so much energy and I was just like I gotta take a nap so I just wanted to acknowledge kind of like figuring out your little bit and that's okay and how all our little bits are what makes it interesting and makes it redefines feminism and now that I'm writing about Hollywood and stuff the most interesting people are the high school students and the men who want to write about feminism in Hollywood and they're like why didn't a woman win an Oscar for 82 years and I'm like and they're like and it's not like me defining it but it's empowering people to ask the questions so I don't know if I actually have a question but the point I'm trying to get you guys to eliminate is kind of how the different pieces like sports has come into the floor right now in terms of redefining feminism and pop culture and music and things like that in ways that weren't necessarily acceptable earlier because it was always about kind of like dire important emergency issues which are still vital now but it's kind of broadening the scope of feminism so if you guys can talk about that there's this, just this idea that we don't just, we're not just simply political creatures we're not bifurcated that way and we exist in culture and we're interested in the world around us and we are also interested in politics and the ways in which power is constructed and worse and we actually don't have to choose and I think that that is what the daughters and sons of second wave feminism have been able to express a little bit more spread that news a little bit more or have jobs in culture where you know you're the head writer, you're Tina Fey and you're the head writer of Saturday Night Live or you create this incredible show that really expresses third wave feminism because we grew up with a lot of things having already been changed and there are moments when it is a little bit less dire and it's really important to to attack the culture too not only because we need to see visions of ourselves as Amy was saying all over the canon all over the culture but also because we need to keep archiving the work that women are doing that's why it's so crucial that the dinner party was finally given a permanent home work that women do whether it's in song writing or creating an installation or writing books tends to go away and it's important that the representatives from the feminist press are here because that's the same thing it's finally archiving women's contributions to the world and so I think if you're doing it about pop culture you're doing really important work and it's political work so I'll go to you and then over there and then you I know you guys addressed your special ability specifically but I wanted to know as was mentioned the redefinitions of power because I thought that was interesting and also how would a college student like me in New York be active in feminism and that was highly personal but maybe some ideas about the redefinitions of power and how to be active in the city of New York hmm well I just want to add on Melissa's special ability because I do think that somebody's and this is related to power some people's are powerful working in institutions some people's power is managing an institution and making that institution makes sense and other people's power is working on the outside of that institution and I think the problem with power is that we see one thing as more powerful than the other so those of us who don't have that executive director title are always a little bit like what do I do again? and it's because we're still trying to fit ourselves into a narrow definition but with more and more of us that have realized that what we uniquely contribute is the ability to make up our own careers and to stand in a different place hopefully we're giving that example to other people who can say wait there's not this neat job for me but maybe I'll do that two days a week and I'll do this two days a week and so if that's something that speaks to you I think being able to harness where you feel like you're going to be the most effective yeah I think that you know I think that there are a lot of different ways to express feminism and I think the most important thing for me as a person has been this sense of beginner's mind and lifelong learning and college is a great place to be someone who's learning because you're learning on an interpersonal level you're learning about power dynamics you're learning from books and you know lectures and all this stuff but I think that one thing that you can do as a feminist is to observe power and understand the history of power and university bylaws university practices like hiring practices the way that universities are power structures incredible power structures that anchor large parts of this society and one of the things that you can do is just observe what's going on at your university and have a sense of how the money that you're contributing to the system of the university is being spent I mean I remember in college we had you know protest over women being excluded from these clubs these things called finals clubs and then protest over South Africa and all of them had to do with on some level with university policy about private space public space, university dollars I mean it's a great thing to observe I think Hi I'd like to congratulate the panel we're in such a wonderful place and I also wanted to say I saw your film I had an abortion and I loved it and I think one of the reasons why I loved it is you can't have an abortion on network TV and not be sorry so just talking about it is one of your people said and so I teach here every little girl loves the dinner party and sometimes and they've seen it before I even take my classes there so this is just such a wonderful place to be but I came from Planned Parenthood this morning and speaking of train wrecks I just want to say we were talking about Proposition 8 earlier I just want to mention the person's name is STUPAC in health care reform there are petitions to sign put out by Planned Parenthood this is going on this weekend and one of the interesting things I'm doing is investigating crisis pregnancy centers and I hope there's some journalists out here that can do it and write about it and also but what I wanted to do since in so many feminist organizations with the younger women and you've talked about this a lot is the difference of generations I'm seeing is the internet like I am on email all day signing petitions but then I'm also actually escorting people to Planned Parenthood and they are going past some stuff that you would not believe is not a hate crime you know for a doctor to be shot in his church and it not be a hate crime and I keep saying to the kids like we'll have meetings and everybody is texting during the meetings and I'm just wondering how we can sort of bridge that sort of cultural I mean I feel like an old lady because I feel like saying to a younger woman well that's rude you're texting right now you know what I mean I kind of feel like my mom so I'm wondering like if we can talk about the internet and stuff well I yeah I definitely don't know if there's anything that we can say that we'll get you know texting etiquette standardized amongst teenagers or college students I'm certainly guilty of it myself from time to time I do think that the internet can be a really powerful force not just for things like signing petitions but for building a feminist community I think a lot about how being a teenage feminist used to be sort of unless you were really lucky a pretty lonely thing to grow up as and now it really doesn't have to be because you can you know find people who are just like you online and you can live a life in some ways with you know online friends really supportive cohort that you might not have in your family or at school or in your town and so I think that we need to be to be not so judgmental of people particularly young people who are increasingly living their lives online because I think it can be a really powerful way to live they can be texting about STUPAC I mean I'm not that much of an optimist I don't think they probably were but you know they potentially could be but I do think that you know it can be a really powerful tool and it's something that we might not all understand particularly those of us who grew up before the internet but I think it's something that is inevitable and important and I think it's more our job to adapt versus their job to you know go to our ways of course the importance of activism you know in real life and you know showing up to things can't be underscored and it sounds like you know you're doing very important work talking to them about that but you know it's a compromise is it okay with you if I go over here and get this question I didn't see this I must tell you how thrilling it is to hear the words fourth wave and my question is probably not going to have time here for answer but I'd like to get on somebody's agenda in the future what as a strategy for the fourth wave what do you see the role of the male and can we you know encourage people more male to admit to being feminist and to become spokespersons or role models or some such thing I think that in the fourth wave and you're already sort of seeing this in the third wave there's going to be no conflict for a guy to call himself a feminist he won't be applauded for it he won't be seen as very unique and he's not going to personally feel so exposed by doing it I mean just even in Amiens and my travels we've never had an event where there weren't men and that this is hundreds of events now so I think that men see themselves as part of this and they were you know in the same way that we were you know Amy and I and everyone on this panel was raised with feminism in the water and all these important changes from the second wave of women's liberation young men were raised in that exact same environment they were raised by single moms who gave them a Barbie you know and all that you know they were raised with the same influences the free to be you and me generation and you see it in how unneurotically men claim feminism as an identity for themselves and I think the next step and this is something Amy talks about a lot is is really expressing feminism as a man on your own behalf so not just as an ally to a woman but what would it mean how would it improve your life and the life of society to be a feminist and what's your particular what's your special ability going to be and your contribution because it relates to the question about power because I think historically men have had the power but I think we've seen in this generation that men have been as abused by that power as women have and specifically some men who don't conform to traditional masculinity and so I think they're becoming invested in changing the definition of power too and and hopefully that can be even more realized in this generation that's that I just want to say I've been in a couple meetings where this has come up and I always use my Ask Amy as like a little radar and when something comes up so many times you're like and is that so much of the girl positiveness that has happened over the last couple years is being used to put boys in a state of crisis and you see it with colleges most colleges it's 60% women and then how it's playing out is at the high school level and I was just meeting among sort of the very elite private schools on the Upper East Side of New York and they were all saying boys you have to work girls are taking your spots away you have to and similarly what we see at college campuses is people saying you know boys you had to lose your wrestling program because we needed to keep the girls volleyball program but the way title nine is it's not a tit for tat it's a dollar amount and it's like no no the reason you have to lose the boys wrestling is to preserve the boys football it's not the girls gymnastics or the girls volleyball but there's a lot I think in the rhetoric right now that is trying to say to men women have taken away your power but it's in these very subtle ways of you know getting internships for college and getting job potential and now girls are so I think there's something a little dangerous out there too that we need to pay attention to and you very generously said I was actually just wanting to ask a question about sort of like young women and their sexual expression because you talked a little bit you know you touched on the idea about sex work and the idea of agency in the pornography industry and the split you know about approval disapproval with pornography and second wave feminism but I'm just curious about someone who works with teenagers and someone who goes on the internet a lot I mean there's you know I'm just wondering I feel like I haven't like I read you know female shamanist pigs when it came out like five years ago or whatever and like I haven't seen a lot of sophisticated dialogue in you know academia about how to sort of deal with internet culture and the way that women are self-representing their sexuality and using you know like sexually empowered but where does that line get flipped around to where it's in an way sort of disempowering or their agency really isn't there because you know there are entire porn websites that just draw on MySpace and Facebook for their pictures of underage girls and it's like I don't want to speak to and you know there is a lot of slippage about you know whether or not you know consent age like really represents like where agency can be and I don't want to speak to like you know that the legal definitions are entirely you know where these like ideas should come from but I'm just not sure what sort of feminism has to offer in terms of a critique of sort of like women self-representing and it may be not having to do with agency always or where that line can be drawn and how that can be explored well I think first of all you can just be honest in the dialogue and say look you may represent yourself one way and other people will see it a completely different way you may be standing against a wall and someone may see you in a provocative pose that doesn't mean that you're standing in a provocative pose but people see different things likewise a future employer of yours may see something very different when they see a picture of you it may not have anything to do I mean like you have to kind of disengage the intention from the artifact and I think we have to start talking about artifact culture you know when you take a that goes up online it may be virtual but still an artifact of a moment but how people interpret that artifact is different and I think people then don't feel as judged you're not saying that was a slutty picture you're saying this picture is interpreted as slutty by these people it's interpreted as pornography by these people it's interpreted as fun by you and your friends it's interpreted as threatening by your ex-boyfriend it's like people can put all sorts of things onto the artifact and if you understand that artifact culture leaves a permanent record and that pictures on Facebook are never deleted and that huge amounts of Facebook's budget go to preserving all of the server space to maintain every picture you've ever deleted from Facebook let alone the ones that are still up then you understand artifact culture better and it's not about judging someone's individual artifact the intention behind it it's about talking about the realities of it and how people get that you know teenagers can get that well thank you so much for coming thank you for coming and thank Sackler for hosting us in the Brooklyn Museum and now we can continue this conversation at the reception which I'm assuming will be self evident how to find? fourth floor fourth floor in the center itself so hopefully we can continue talking there but thank you