The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Gail Collins

Episode Date: August 6, 2019

Lawrence joins author and New York Times columnist Gail Collins to discuss her book When Everything Changed, which chronicles the progress of women’s rights in America from 1960 through today.  Gail Collins was the first woman to hold the position of Editorial Page Editor for the New York Times (from 2001 to 2007), where she currently provides a semi-weekly op-ed column. See the exclusive, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. I've been a fan of Gail Collins's New York Times opinion columns for years. I was particularly happy when she returned for being the first female editor of the editorial page of the New York Times, a dream position for many, to again be a columnist for that paper's opinion pages, where she provides lively, humorous, and provocative takes on the absurdity of much of modern American political life. I recently read her book,

When Everything Changed, which documents the changing role of women in U.S. society between 1960 and today. It's astonishing how far things have come and also how backward things were even a generation ago. Our discussion moved beyond the ideas in that book to her personal interest in journalism and also to the state of journalism today,

as well as the future of print journalism and its fight against a world of fake news on the internet. It was a charming, insightful and illuminating discussion that was a highlight as we visited the very busy New York Times building on a day a particularly significant news story broke. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program and all our programs the day they appear at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoy the show. Well, Gail, thanks for welcoming us to the New York Times. As I told you before, I love waking up with you in the morning,

at least metaphorically. And look, since this is sort of an origins podcast, I want to talk about your origins. Did you always want to be a journalist? Pretty much. My mother really had this vision that she wanted to be a journalist. And I mean, she was the war. She had to drop out of college and all that. But I think so once I did a little teeny bit of it, she jumped on it.

And in spite of that, you still wanted to do it. I did, yeah. Did both your parents sort of at least start college? Were they college educated? Yeah, my father was an engineer. Okay. And my mother went to college but had to drop out after our first year. But she was very ambitious about education for all the kids.

Well, get to that. It's interesting. Did the fact that your mother drop out of the first year affect your view of sort of women's roles in the work world? Because I want to talk about that. No, I'm not sure that I had any particular view of women. I mean, you know, when you're a kid, I just saw teachers and they were all women. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Everybody was a woman.

Yeah. And my mother was just wildly ambitious for us. So there was never any thought about, well, you can't do that because you're a girl. Well, okay. Well, that's good. And so you went to journalism school, and you grew up in Ohio, which I used to live in. But your first job was in Connecticut? Oh, well, I went to journalism school, and then I, which is not, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that as an, undergraduate degree if anybody's thinking about it in the world. It was just, it was the only thing that nobody offered as a major in Cincinnati, so I would have to go away to school if I majored in journalism. So I wanted to go away, so I majored in journalism. But then I got a master's degree

in political science at the University of Massachusetts. So we were in Amherst then, and I got married in Amherst, and I worked there for a little paper in Amherst for a while, and then my husband got a job in Connecticut, and then we went down there. Do you think there's an ideal major for would-be journalists? No, whatever, you know, arose your boat, because figuring out how to write about it is something that I think you do more after you figure out what is you want to write. Yeah, and I've even said as a scientist that I've sort of learned a lot more after my

PhD than before. What do you think of, well, I'm all over the map here, but my feeling when I think about, when I think about journalists, in particular for science, which is my area, that I think it's almost better for journalists not to be an expert in that area because the role, partly the role of a journalist, of course, is to report the news, but to translate that to people. And if you're not an expert in it, then at least you, then you have to think from the point of view of the people who don't know the jargon and everything else. That's true, but there are certainly tons of people in my business who know so much about

the thing they're covering, that it's, you know, they're as if they've gotten advanced degrees in it, but they're still able to also take it back and write about it. So you did a master's degree in political science or government? Government, I think they called it back then. So was that, is that, is that, yeah, back then. Is that still your prime interest, do you think? I mean, yeah, that's sort of all of what I've done. I wrote my master's thesis on the student power movement and, and, and, and,

compared to the two schools that I had been to when that was going on and why they were different. But, and then, yeah, I just, you know, I spent when I was in Connecticut, because I couldn't get a job in Connecticut, I started a news service in Connecticut. And I went to all these little papers and said, I will cover your state legislators for $10 a week or something. It was ridiculous. I was wondering how you started a news service. So it was really just a necessity was the other than mention. Yeah, yeah. I started a little paper, and then they went bankrupt.

So then I just was sort of wandering around. And so I mean, by the end we had like 35 client papers. We were really covering the field when it came to the state legislature. And I was so obsessed with the Connecticut state legislature. I mean, I knew every single person there. I covered every debate. I just, it's pathetic the amount that I knew about the Connecticut state legislature. But I just so got into it then, the whole political scene there, that that just translated into everything else that I did.

One of your quotes, which I think sets the framework, a quote from your book, When Everything Changed. When Everything Changed, which was fascinating read. I mean, having grown up in that period and being not so aware of some of the statistics, I found a remarkable. But one quote from it seemed to summarize for me the whole book, which was, when history opened up to American women in the late 20th century, it did not offer them perfect bliss. It gave them the opportunity to face the dark moments.

on their own terms, and to exalt in the spaces between. I found that a wonderful quote. Thank you. And what's surprising, I think, what may be surprising, and I think it's worthwhile since a lot of people listening are probably younger, to realize how dramatically different things were in the 1960s, which I tend to think, even the early 60s, which you tend to think of as a free and open time.

But for women, one gets a sense that more women sort of have gone into the workplace since then, but you point out that in 1960, as many women were working as we're working during the peak of World War II, the difference was that most got married and then stopped working. Yes. And women were barred from flying planes. The 1961, I love this quote. The medical school dean had a quota, and I want to talk to you about quotas, that we have

a small quota. We do keep women out when we can. We don't want them here two per class. I get the sense that your own personal experience isn't reflected in the statistics that you provide in terms of women in general. No, and I think that's a piece of the whole thing. You have the amazing thing, may I just have to say this one thing, because this is what drives me just whenever I'm talking about this stuff. I wrote a book about the millennium, and someone at the times asked me to do a piece on women over the last thousand years for the big millennium issue. the magazine. And so I said, okay, sure. And he said, I just want to say, I think this is a win.

And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that the way civilization basically looked at women's role in life in the Western civilization changed in my lifetime. What was going on for millennia changed in my lifetime. I got to see the whole thing happen. And that just drives me nuts. It's so exciting. Yeah, I mean, things have changed exponentially. And I was talking to someone recently, I had pointed out that I hadn't thought about this, that in some ways the disparity between how things could be and how things are is bigger now than it was before because in the middle ages, of course, things were miserable in many ways,

but things changed so slowly. Right. But now, through technology and so many other things, things change so fast that the opportunities to do things often can't keep up with current events. That's true. But just taking the opportunity to look back over the last 50 or 60 years, you think, holy moly. And it's because of technology, it's because particularly of the economy,

everything is always driven by the economy when we get right down to it. And the great kind of transitory moment, at least to me, was in the 1970s when middle-class families who had all grown up after World War II, there was this explosion of middle classness. Everybody was making more money. Everybody's moving to the suburbs. Everybody for the first time was expecting to have a house and a family vacation,

things that nobody ever anticipated before. And suddenly in the 70s, the economy ran smack into all kinds of international problems, the oil shortage, and it didn't work anymore. You could not support that family that you were used to having on one income. And so women went to work.

It wasn't like everyone sat down and said, I'm going to liberate myself and go back to work. It was, oh, my God, we don't have enough money to pay the mortgage. You know, Susan, go, you've got to get us something here alone. Well, some of you point out in the book, which I thought was interesting, is that in that heyday era, when the economy was going really well, it was viewed that part of success in the middle class in some sense was that a woman wouldn't have to work. Of course, yeah. That was viewed as a status symbol.

Right. And it was, you were sort of a failure as a husband if you couldn't provide that. Everybody is going, sitting around, first time in history, you've got television every night. Everybody is sitting around the television and they are watching stories in which the women are housewives. And if it's a situation, comedy, they're at home, they're taking care of the kids, dad's supporting the family. And that is the vision you've got. The only other vision you're getting a lot of is men in the West riding alone into the sunset, but there are no women riding with the men in the sunset. The women are in the house

and the men are supporting them. And if they don't do that, then they've screwed up the vision. And that didn't change until the 70s, I guess, in terms of television, right? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, one of the themes, of course, in that quote is that when things change, there was a quote which I've read recently, which I like a lot, which from Mark Twain, which said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. It rhymes a lot. But things have changed, but it doesn't always give you everything you want or think you want. And in fact, when you get what you think you want, sometimes it's not what you really want.

So that there's these tensions. Going back to work, of course, provided huge additional tensions for women. But if there was this vision that you were a failure if you were a man and you couldn't provide for your family, when suddenly that changed, that must have. have also provided incredible tension for men. There must been a lot of women working, but men feeling like failures in that process. Yeah, and it was but it too was a really

fast flip over. I will never forget back in the, I think it was in the late 70s, really, it was at his high school in Connecticut somewhere talking about one of my books, but somehow I wound up in this class in this very like New Britain or somewhere not upper middle class, just normal

regular kids and a whole classful of guys, or about 15, I'd say. And, you know, they were being very polite, of course. And I said, what do you look for in a woman? Maybe if it was a different person asking, they would have thought I wanted somebody who's very sexy or something. But what they all said was they wanted a good earner. Really? They're 15, and they're already figuring, whoever it is they're going to marry, they want to make sure it's somebody who is going to also be a good earner. When was this? This was in the, I would say, the late 70s, early 80s. That's fascinating.

And I just, it had never, I knew men were adjusting and, you know, the new younger men were certainly much used to the idea that women would work. But the idea that that was a priority when you're planning your life, you've got to have that other person in there bringing home money too. That kind of. That surprises me. I mean, I was in, I was 20 and 74, I guess. And yeah, it's interesting. I wouldn't have said that. I grew up in Canada, but it's slightly different.

Wow. That's fascinatingly different. Well, one of the things you mentioned, which I surprised me, was even in the 1960s, you said social security payments were different for women, were based differently on women's wages and men's wages? Wow. In what way, I had to do, well, part of it had to do with women. We're making less money, of course, but also if you're married, you know, if you're the husband, you're getting years plus a piece of your wives. If you're a wife, you're not getting yours because the husband's making more money. So therefore, it's just, the way they figured it all out early on was just, they worked under the presumption that every family had a husband and a wife. And the wife, if she was working, it was not a critical part of the picture and the structure. So that just the idea of the working wife as a central income maker did not really factor into it when they were beginning to think about this, Jeff. Well, we'll get to equal rights amendment.

Civil rights. Was that legislated then to be different at some point? I assume it's different now. Oh, yeah, there was a bunch as they went along with. So one of the things that I also learned from your book was that the institutional changes for women were kind of intimately tied to, sometimes for better or worse, to the civil rights movement. Yeah. And maybe you could describe that a little for people. How that worked in the late 60s and up through the 70s?

Well, a lot of the women who first became leaders in the women's movement started in the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was such an amazing central story to everybody's life and thinking about it. And just, first of all, envisioning that the way society is set up is not necessarily the way society ought to be. And then that you're supposed to get out there. And then that the heroes are the people who don't necessarily run society, but who get out there and say, no, this is not right. We're going to do this. the fight for it, and all of that created the women's movement in the same way that it did the civil rights movement. And the people who were involved in the civil rights movement, who then, particularly if they were white, moved into the anti-war movement.

The guys in that culture tended to be what we would now think of as really sexist. I mean, for them, the idea of sharing power with women in the movement was, you know, chicks here, chicks there. A lot of talking about chicks going on at that period in time. And that was part of the thing that sprung the women's movement was that reaction to what the guys were doing in the anti-war movement. So you had all of these things happening at once, the learning to challenge society, the understanding that there are profound rights that wrongs

that must be righted. And then when you're there, suddenly, hey, this is me too. I've got a piece of this. This is, you know, I'm... One of the things when I reflect on this and reflect in the current times when I'm trying not to be depressed and pessimistic, which lately is frequently, I kind of hope that one of the things that's going to come out of the turmoil

we're seeing in terms of the crisis and democracy, journalism, and what's happening in this country, and we just came from England, I think that I hope that young people are getting, I don't know the word is radicalized, but we're seeing protests, climate change protests. We're just in London, and the streets were closed because young people were protesting climate change,

that when you get young people beginning to protest, it creates a culture where they realize that they don't need to accept the status quo, not just on the issue they're protesting, but more generally. So you think that sort of, I was certainly around the 60s, that culture of young people protesting the war opened up people's minds to look at every other aspect of society. It did.

But you also had a very unique time there than that you did have all this money for a while. I mean, there was a long period there in which you just didn't worry about ever getting a job. I remember when we were graduating from college, if you wanted to move to New York, if you had a degree, you could become a social worker because the city needed so many social workers. You could just come to New York and become a social worker. worker, it was like that. And there were all kinds of jobs like that that you could just simply apply to, and there it was because there was such a need in a growing society, in an economically booming society for people to do stuff. And if you come out into that kind of thing, you have a different sense of confidence than other generations do about what you can do, what you can get away with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's very, very liberating. And I don't know that there'll ever be a period exactly like that in which you can just go on for so long on, you know, just on the economy, just kind of ride and glide along. I personally like never to predict the future less than two billion years than future, because it's a lot easier. But if I ask you to predict the future, do you think there'll be a time in the next 40 years when children will be better off than their parents, when a generation will be better off than a generation before, as clearly happens sort of in the 50s? or or or and maybe 60s? Hard to believe. I mean, clearly people will have that expectation. Yeah, always.

And some kids it'll work out for and some kids it won't. But that idea that it almost automatically happens. I think we just had that one moment and may not ever come back again. Well, okay. Let's go back to 60s. One thing that I didn't realize was that the sort of the equal rights amendment came out of not quite an afterthought. But, but again, out of, out of trying to create this, the civil rights, uh, legislator

legislation. And it was kind of tacked on reluctantly or with hope that by being tacked on, it would stop the civil rights legislation itself. And that political dynamic was interesting to me. There's a certain disagreement among historians about exactly how that all worked out. And one of the sagas, which I tend to use because it's the most fun and romantic, but is that you had the Civil Rights Act going through, and you had Southern senators who really wanted to stop it. And they did everything they possibly could. And one of the things they did either as a joke

or as an attempt to just make another thing that would sidetrack the whole thing was they threw women on their equal opportunity from women in employment. And then suddenly a few women, women like Margaret Chase Smith, thought, whoa, let's grab this baby and run with it. And it was in the bill. It was in the bill as it was finally passed. and nobody thought about it at all. And then suddenly the next day,

when the federal government opens its equal employment opportunity centers, the first people in the door are stewardesses. Nobody had thought about the stewardesses. They had terrible lives. I mean, they were totally regulated. They had to be checked every day, measured and weighed. Yes. And they had to wear the same stuff.

And they had to be incredibly polite and light the cigarettes of all of their mail passengers and all this other stuff. And it drove them crazy. And they couldn't be, they could not move up. There was no place to move. You were going to be a stewardess and stay there. And then when you were 35, you had to retire because nobody wanted an old stewardess on the plane.

It would depress the businessmen. And if you were married, you had to quit, didn't you? Didn't some of them have to hide the fact that they're married? Oh yeah, they pretended they weren't married. There was a lot of that going on too. I mean, it was just, it was absolutely insane. And one of the members of Congress who was listening to this, when the airline people were trying to explain about how important it was that businessmen be allowed to see attractive young women when they get on the plane,

said, are you running an airline or a whorehouse there, sir? Yeah. Yeah, that was a great large. It was. And so it just happened. And in my paper, I found when I was, you know, doing research, ran an editorial making fun of it saying, ho, ho, now I guess the playboy bunnies will all have to be men wearing hairy legs or something like that along that line. I mean, it was just not taken seriously as a big deal until women started filing suits.

And they were very normal women. It wasn't like, you know, Gloria Stein and ran up and filed a suit. It was regular people working for the phone company in Alabama and stuff like that who had to help support their families for whom it was really important to be able to make more money to be promoted to have those opportunities started filing suits. and it just took off and it changed everything. It was an afterthought. So people, when this legislation was in,

it was just sort of tacked on, again, to try and stop the legislation, but it ended up being there. And people hadn't really seriously thought through the implication of the legislation. No, no. I mean, certainly men had, I mean, there were a few women obviously

knew what was going on there, but it was not a central thought at all. One of the things that also surprised me, given sort of current times, or at least my history in the United States, is that the Democrats opposed particularly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because they thought it would get rid of special protections

that they tried to put in to protect women. Right. And so, again, maybe you could talk about that. Well, deeply ironic, but one of the things, you know, that you had women who were working, especially during the war, you know, working triple shifts and all this other stuff, and they were working in very difficult jobs, some of them, you know, very dangerous jobs,

and some of them very inappropriate jobs for, you know, people who didn't have the physical capacity to lift large amounts of things. And there wasn't a central issue in the history of the world, but there was stuff like that. And there were certainly a lot of places where women wanted more protections. They wanted better hours. They wanted all kinds of things. And you could sell those things much more easily as it's important for the moms out there, rather than as some great cosmic equal rights thought.

So there was a lot of protective legislation for women that they worried they'd lose. special hours, you know, and stuff like that. And so they were the party opposing it more. Yeah, well, nobody was thrilled. And then, you know, it happened. And once it happened, once it just started going, you could not, Congress was passing stuff for women so fast in the early 70s. It was just like blizzard, a tornado of new legislation for women.

And then, of course, the Equal Rights Act came through, and it was a blizzard again, and then suddenly everything stopped. Now, before he gets the Equal Rights Act, because, again, that was in the 1970s, right? It was past, you mentioned Margaret Chase Smith, which would spread me. So she was the first? She was the first, well, there were other female senators, but they had all been their husband's widows. That's interesting, yeah. She was actually her husband's widow, too, but he'd been in the House. Yeah.

And then she decided to run for the Senate as a. person by herself. He was dead for a while there at that point. And she won. She was the first one who did that. Which surprised people, I think, wrote that she was running on her own. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't what you were supposed to do. But they were so used to her at that point in Maine that everything worked out fine. But it was for the country. And then she ran for president. Oh, my God, in heaven. Well, but what it surprised me was while she was in the Senate, she couldn't use the bat. The men had a bathroom, but she had to use a public bathroom. Yeah, this went on forever. I mean, Barbara McCulski, who just retired not too long ago,

but you used to talk about that, about the fight they had to get a bathroom because they're just... And that was not just true there. In fact, I found as I wandered around the country talking to people, if you went to any state legislature and you went to talk to the women there, if you just brought up the bathroom issue,

instantly they would have all these stories. Because female lawmakers nowhere had bathrooms. It was just not considered necessary. I think that's a sign of the times. Yeah. Yeah, everybody got a bathroom now. Yeah, no, it's, yeah. It's, um, the, the, when you talk about the ERA, I mean, unlike the, unlike the initial, um, um, introduction of women's rights, uh, the sense I got was that there was a more concerted effort about, I mean, Betty Ferdin seems to me to come out as a hero in, in your, in your, in your book, and, I mean, someone, and the, and the national organization of women as a, as a, as a really impactful organization that changed things.

So maybe. Yeah, and, you know, as later on, now became sort of the more conservative group and, you know, when other stuff was happening. But in the beginning, they were the ones who went to court. And that was the thing. You suddenly did have this law. You had a law saying women had the right to equal employment opportunities. But who's going to get you that right? And women all over the country were able to call on the lawyers from now to come and support them and to get these laws changed.

And that, having lawyers was, as always in this country, very, very important. But it's interesting, where did the money for now come from? Donations. Donations. Sort of anticipating small-scale private donations. Yeah, well, nobody expected it to be a large thing at the beginning, but then it just exploded. And, you know, they had all the problems of growing that other things have.

Well, you know, in the context of this, and it seems to me in lots of movements, that there's this question of whether government actually ever leads or just follows. That, again, in the Vietnam War, and I'm influenced, I took some classes from Chomsky when I was in graduate school at MIT, and the notion that the last, that in order to really have things change, they don't, the government rarely initiates it, that government follows rather than leads, that it's that you have to have a movement of people and that forces government in some sense, that, whether it's a democracy or a dictatorship. In the sense of the way that women's rights have changed over that sort of 50-year period, do you see that as a, that it was sort of always the society was ahead of government

or were there times when government was ahead of society? When this happened, it happened so fast. Yeah. So incredibly fast because of the economy and because you did have this first generation of post-war young women who had just grown up in a different kind of environment. completely because of all the money, because they could go to school, because there wasn't that sense of nervousness about what was going on around them. They were more optimistic. They came of age, and suddenly, every government in the country, you could not stop any state legislator.

Well, there's someone that you could. Or Congress, and Bella Ebson kept saying, I just can toss a bill. My God, they're passing everything that we give them now because they want to do a woman thing, and there it is. So really in most states and cities and in the federal government, stuff was just flying out for a period there, not all that long, but there was a period. What period? Well, this was in the 70s? Now, was there demographic, I mean, when you say not everywhere, was there more resistance in one area?

I mean, in the south, of course, there was more resistance one thinks to civil rights at least. Was it the same for women? Yeah, I mean, it's always, you know, the southern states tended to be more concerned. about all that stuff. And, you know, there's famous stories about, you know, when suffrage passed. You know, Tennessee was the last state. And this, everybody's sitting there, can Tennessee do it? Because everybody else was not going to do it. If Tennessee couldn't manage to come around, they'd never get the numbers. So, yeah, it was, I mean, things were always more conservative in the southern states. Yeah, you know, there are times, it's funny now, because there are times when

one sees in social movements now, and we'll maybe get to it where the right, for some reason, seems to be ahead in certain areas, in current times in certain areas, including least claim discussions of free speech. But, well, in the sense, the right, well, at least Republicans, were ahead in the sense of incorporating the women's rights in the Equal Rights Amendment, but their intent was to do it to kill, I mean, in terms of to kill civil rights. Well, that particular problem, actually was Southern Democrats who liked the idea at the beginning of sticking women in there because they thought that was the best way to get rid of it. And at that time, the Republican Party was not the Republican Party that we tend to think of today.

In terms of things like civil rights, even women's rights, they tended to be way ahead of the Democrats in many parts of the country. And it's just Margaret Chase Smith was a Republican. Lots of Republican liberals out there, you know, doing great work. It's fascinating in the context of the current Republic Party to see that. Indeed, it's too easy to label that. nowadays. I don't know if it'll be interesting to see if again in whether the pendulum swings in response to the current extreme right-wing policies of many of the Republican Party, whether you might see a swing in there or a new party created. I don't know if you if. I'm not prepared to

predict today how this is all going to work out. But it's, I mean, for our purposes right now, when you think of the Republican Party back in the 1960s and 70s, it's not the same guys. that you see there today. In the context of all this, there's another quote I like in your book. He said, it's never been an era in American which popular culture faced one direction for more than five minutes. Well, you always want to change. Yeah, so, but no, but in this context, you know, because part of this is change and then reaction to change and the attitude towards the change that's been happening and adjusting to change.

In the context of women's rights, you want to maybe elaborate on that quote a little bit? Well, when we're talking about the Equal Rights Amendment going through, and everybody was passing it, they couldn't wait. And then suddenly, right before there were enough states to vote to put it in the Constitution, it came to a screeching halt with a movement that was not really about the Equal Rights Amendment. That was just about all the women who had been raised to believe that they had a certain role that was honored the housewife, the glories of the housewife in the 50s and the 60s on all TV programs. She was the heroine woman, and that was what you wanted to be, and you were in all the magazines,

there are pictures of you doing your cleaning and stuff. And that was the thing. And suddenly, almost it seemed like overnight, everybody is saying you're a total failure, only a housewife. Yeah. Only a housewife. Oh, my Lord, what the heck is going on here? and there was a great response, a great kind of reaction against it, and it stopped the Equal Rights Amendment at that point in time.

Interesting. But then there was also an equal reaction, which I think is continuing today, which is the sense that you talk about, and that you were a failure if you couldn't do it all. Suddenly you had this opportunity to, a whole new set of opportunities open to you that weren't before. But at the same time, and I think it's still current. I mean, as far as I know, there's studies, the same thing,

that in spite women to work still do at least two-thirds of the housework. And at that time, of course, when these opportunities were open, there was one thing that was really important you mentioned is no child care. There was never, these opportunities were created without the infrastructure that could support those opportunities. And it's very interesting that even now we're just beginning to have a big national debate about early childhood education and whether families should simply have the right to quality early childhood, child care.

and early childhood education, which is the thing you need to call it, by the way. It's not daycare. We want early childhood education for all. And that's the thing. And it's, I think, going to be one of the big issues and the big social issues

that we're dealing with, certainly if a Democrat is elected, I can't think of anything that pushes right down to the core life patterns of so many people. Again, the United States is, well, frankly,

behind many other countries in terms of social, many social programs. And, you know, I grew up in Canada, I've lived in Australia, and I was kind of shocked to discover and claimed about my university when one of my executive assistant got pregnant the first time, and I saw that she got something like three weeks

paid leave, and she could take another three weeks from her sick leave or something and use that up. Other countries provide six months or a year. It's a total, from the point of view of ensuring the ability of people to effectively carry on long-term careers, having three weeks, it just seems to me to be an automatic non-starter. Well, everything about having children is not built into the system. I mean, in theory

is great, but, and people want to have it all. Yeah. And economically, women presume they're going to have to have the working part of it for a great part of their lives. But it's just, that nobody has been willing to do that. There was a couple of grand moments in Congress when it almost happened. And then just at the very last second, something fell apart and didn't happen. It's still a fact that women, I think it's still a fact, that women tend to drop out of the workforce earlier. In fact, I guess one of the things you talk about is that's becoming not just a fact, but at some sense a badge of honor that you choose to. say, I'm going to, I'm going to go to law school.

And I am planning to work for a few years and then have children and leave and stop working full time. It's interesting that that's become a kind of, for middle and upper classes, at least according to your discussion, not something you do, you resign yourself to, but you look forward to. Well, sure. I mean, millions of people have given the opportunity to go home and spend time with their kids and if they knew they could do it without suffering severe economic repercussions and they could

go back when the kids were older? Who, I mean, who would not want to spend some time with your kids? Well, that's what I think. And you mentioned men, though, but again, I want to bring men in here. So do you think it's true that men would too? And people rarely talk about men being sort of, at least from a social perspective, as being something that's acceptable or worked up to for men to say, I'm going to be, I'm going to take a career and I'm going to stop after a certain amount of time when I have kids. Well, yeah, I mean, you see it. And if you see it, probably it's made into a TV series or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's certainly not nearly as common. And, you know, I don't know if women certainly still are more adjusted to the idea of, you know, child care as being a rewarding, complete part of their lifestyle. But you see so many dads out there now, my God, in heaven. I mean, when I was growing up, you never saw a dad. out with their kids. But now it's everybody. I mean, it's just so normal. I can't, you know, there'll be another evolution. But the problem is always that with that evolution, somebody has to take some time away from their career to think about what's going to be happening with the kids and

take care of the kids. And in some brilliant families, they both do it equally. But generally, it's somebody who's... Yeah, well, I think that the implicit point, if not explicit, is that it's great when both, I know a lot of families where both people take care of the kids equally and both have two careers. But one still gets the sense, even with that equality, it's not equal. I'll buy into that. Feel free. Yeah, no, that it's still the data shows that even in those families that in terms of the other aspects of like cleaning, housework, that still it works out not to be equal.

Is that your data? Well, you know, the data has said that in the past. We'll see what it says in the future. Every year you've got a new bunch of people. coming up with new thoughts and new plans. But certainly, and the big thing, though, way more than who's sharing the responsibility for married couples at home is that so many women,

soon I think it'll be most women who are mothers don't have a spouse. They're single women raising these children. Maybe there's a guy around someplace. But the fact that women are now growing up and just having children and then just it's all their thing. is new. It's pretty new as a grand cosmic scheme. Well, that was an interesting thing, too. Of course, there's gender issues, there's class issues,

there's racial issues. But one of the things you point out is that it's a different, there's a different sort of trajectory that, at least for middle and upper class women, it's have children later, work and have children later, whereas it's for a lot of working class and lower class individuals, it's have children first and then get married. married and maybe you want to talk about that, too. What are the forces that drive those differences? Well, they were a study, I must admit, you know, it's been a while since I've last been down the world of the studies of this issue, but it was partly a matter of women not really wanting to be stuck with some of these guys unless they were really sure that they were the right. It wasn't

simply a matter of men being irresponsible, which many, many, many, many, men were. But it was also a matter of women not wanting until there was a child to be stuck with having to choose one of these guys until they could see that the guy was a good provider, that the guy would share in all responsibilities, that the guy would hang around, that the guy would not betray them. So that was a chess period that women bought into in many occasions as much as men did. Well, let me ask you, and it's not in the book, but sort of from an evolutionary perspective, from evolutionary psychology, it's not currently politically correct to necessarily argue that there are evolutionary distinctions, but the data seems to suggest at least that certainly in

terms of mate selection, attractiveness, that women have different criteria than men. And it's interesting, it causes great debate if you raise this up, especially in some college campuses now, whether, you know, to what extent things are biological or at least evolutionary, and to what extent things, things are cultural. Well, clearly, for many women, children are the priority. You want to make sure when you're of the age that you will be able to have children and that that's there for you. That's a vision that many, many, many, many, many women have of their lives,

that there will be children. And so if you're having that vision, it makes sense maybe to think, well, that's the thing I've got to make sure I got done here and then we'll deal with the man thing thing as it comes and get. And what do you think men think of? I don't know. That's your job. I don't know if they think, but anyway, it's an interesting question whether, I mean, yeah, for a long time, it was they thought about having male errors, frankly, but I guess that's a different, that's a different thing. That was a different era. Okay, so there's been a sea change, as you pointed out. So in this new millennia, it's starting 2000, you point out, 50% of law and medical schools, women,

and there were 40%, even in sciences, were 40% of the women in undergraduates. And in a trend that continues, and I see at universities now, the majority of people at universities are young women. And by far, in the high 50s, now it's going up to the 60s. and that's a sea change in a real way. Has society changed quickly enough to adjust to that sea change? I'm not in charge of that problem. I know, I know. But you write opinion pieces so you can have a viewpoint.

I can have a opinion about everything, but I don't always. You know, it's a huge, huge change, and it is true that the society we have developed right now, particularly the middle class part of it has a routine and a ladder of success that seems to work better for women often than it does for men and everybody worries about young men and what's going to happen. It's interesting that this quota thing has come back

in a different way. There was a quote originally sort of keeping women out of medical school. There are quotas now that some people question. One of the ones that I've read about a lot lately it happens in Canada where I grew up. Justin Trudeau has spoke openly about women's equality need to do equal rights, and he chose 50% of his cabinet to be women. 20% of the legislatures and the legislature were women at the time.

And some people have said, well, that doesn't send a good message for women, because it suggests that women are being chosen because they're women. The cabinet is not representative of the people who have seats in parliament. How do you view that? It's, I think, a difference in the political system rather than the picking of the cabinet system. It's the way we elect people to office has always been a difficult route for women to take, partly because it involves so much effort and so much hanging around with people at night when you've got, you know, kids and other stuff to do.

And it's just, and it's not, it's always a sideline. It's not usually, it's not your main sort of. of income until you've moved quite a way up there. And there's a lot of still organizations that working in the political atmosphere that are still kind of male-dominated. And it's going to change. It's interesting that's going to change. I mean, you point out that, you know, even the statistics in 40 percent of women undergraduates and science, 20 percent in positions. Some people would argue that that's a demonstration of discrimination. Other people, I remember I was the Nobel Prize ceremonies in 2004. And there was one woman who was getting Nobel Prize at the time. And interestingly enough,

on stage, the head of the Nobel Prize, the big presentation with the King, said, look, we recognize there's only one woman on stage, but Nobel Prizes are given for work that was 30 or 40 years down the road. And so we are hoping that in 30 or 40 years, because more women are coming into science, that you're going to see more people, more women on state, you know, more women gave the Nobel Prize. But that's going to come along. So 40% of undergraduates now, or at least in 2000, whereas 20% in positions, in academic positions may not be description. It may just be a representative of the fact that over time you have to wait for those

undergraduates to go to graduate school. I have to say in areas of science, science is very, very tough for women. I've known a lot of women scientists who came up through the system and suffered. I mean, just it was really tough, a lot tougher. than a lot of other areas of, you know. It certainly was. I mean, one of my favorite examples, and I was thinking about this in your book,

is Vera Rubin, a wonderful woman astronomer. I knew her. She, I think I once I nominated her for the Nobel Prize. I know she was. She's deceased now. But she, her story is kind of amazing because she wanted to go to Princeton

and Princeton didn't take women. This is in the 60s, or late 50s or early 60s. And at least in PhDs and astronomy, she went to night school. She didn't know how to drive. Her husband had to drive her and it was a series of one thing after another. Of course, she, you know, through determination, managed

to make it through. It's an amazing story of a dedicated and remarkable woman. And that there's that. But now, how do you feel about quotas in general when it comes to the civil rights movement or in terms of gender quotas in the workforce? Well, people, you don't need specific quotas to be aware that there are some places where women are thriving and some places where it's a lot more difficult. And obviously, you've got to figure that out. If you're a person who's in charge and you're looking at your department and there are no women moving up, there's a problem there. It depends on what you're talking about. Well, I'm wondering as a woman, I mean, you were the first woman who was the editor of the opinion pages, right? Can I tell you about that?

Yeah, good. I was going to ask you about it. This is a thing. This is a thing. that I, when I go out and talk about women's stuff, that I like to talk about, there was a generation of women who came right before me, who went to court, who fought in this company too, who found that there was no pattern,

there was no way forward, there were no women editors, there was no way a woman could move into the top, the most exciting, the most profitable parts of the company. And they went to court, and they fought. filed suits, and the company responded, but when the company responded, they were never the

ones who got the reward because they were the pains in the neck who had gotten all the trouble. It was people like me who were walking in the door right then, who had not pissed anybody off because we were just in college, who got all those advantages. And there is a generation of women who you know about the great leaders like Lori Stein and Betty Friedan, but there are all these women who nobody talks about who just filed suits and who never got the stuff themselves and who filed suits for pensions. And the people coming into the workplace then got equal pension opportunities, but they never got their pensions. It happens all over the place. So it's just, you want every time you talk about this stuff to talk

about these people who opened up all the doors but never got to walk through them themselves. And then, so you view yourself as a beneficiary. Absolutely. I assume it's, I mean, for many movements, for the civil rights movement, I suppose it's, I mean, Obama would say the same thing, right? I mean, at least he said the same thing. I think it's useful if you're a person who, I mean, I got to be editorial page editor in large part because of the people who were conceivably qualified to do it. I was the woman. And they wanted that to happen. They wanted that to happen. Did that bother you? No, and it doesn't, I mean, what bothers you is when you feel like, oh my God, nobody thinks I can do the job. Well, that's what worries me. When you say, when you're always referred to as the first editor of the editorial page, it doesn't, you know, that implicitly suggests, first female editor of the editorial page, that people are asking that question.

I got to tell you, when this came up, Hal Raines, who was the editor before me, who was moving downstairs to become the executive editor, came in to see me and said, we've talked about this, and we think that you should take. my job. And I was not really in the line for it. And I was a columnist. I was really enjoying that. And I said, gee, how? I remember thinking how sad I was that you were leaving as a calm. I was sad, too. And I said, how? I don't know. And he said, look at it this way. Look at where you are on the course of the history of the world. There are not many first women jobs left out there. And unless you think you're going to be baseball commissioner, this is the one you take to be the first woman to do something. And I thought, yeah, that's cool. I could be the first woman. So that, that, was an argument for me.

Okay, well, look, let's, you know, I want to switch the direction a little bit about, I mean, I must say partly in your columns, but also in this book, that another person who you view to some extent of beneficiary, but I get the sense of immense respect for Hillary Clinton and what she, you know, in a time when she was, you know, running president and has, was vilified by many, I mean, not just being the first, actually that book was written before she was, she was a candidate, but before she'd gotten the nomination, which was, which happened after that book. Hillary Clinton, tell me about...

Just to stick it out and have such a messy history, which had to do in part with just being the first woman at this and that this and also trying to have a career when her husband had this career, all the stuff that went into her life, part of which is the exact history of the women's movement, part of which is totally peculiar to the Clintons and what they did, she's stuck it out, she strode on forward, and whatever else you think about what she did and now, it's very popular.

Oh, my God, she's terrible Canada. I'd run around. She made it normal. And the person who makes stuff normal, and this country is very adaptable. And once you get used to something, it's fine. I remember the first time when Katie Couric became the first on-air anchor at night, and everyone was going crazy. It was such a big deal.

And 10 minutes later, Diane, and so he became the second one. And everybody was like, well, yeah, of course, that's what we do. Here it is. And now nobody would ever know human being. Would ever think is that a man or a woman sitting there giving us the news at night.

It's just Americans are very adaptable. And now you're saying it this year. You've got 200 million women thinking about running for president. And we'll spend this whole next period looking and saying, oh, wait a minute, you're doing this here. Are you considering the women too? And how are you treating them?

Is it the same all the way to the line, it's going to be very subtle and very strange, and we're going to do another thing, and we're going to get used to another thing. And within, you know, 10 years, it just, you know, men, women, whoever, you know, it'll be something new that we're worried about. It's amazing how fast that switch can happen. And again, I think, I tend to think it's young people. I mean, in this case, if I think of same-sex marriage, it's just sort of 20 years ago, would it seemed impossible. And then when I talked to young women

in my daughter's generation, it was obvious that they didn't see any issue there. And it was obvious to me, therefore, that the change was going to happen because they didn't see it. It was just like... You know, when Hillary Clinton became a senator, and there was a big, huge deal about that at the time,

and my niece was then, you know, just a little kid. And she... My sister said she's watching all these programs about, you know, Hillary Clinton, and she turned to my mother and said, can a man be a senator? And she was eight, but that... point in her life. She was not really aware that that was a job that you wouldn't naturally have a woman doing. So it moves fast. It's all good. Well, and I guess you might say, well,

she's not going to be unheralded, but Hillary Clinton didn't get the benefits, but one wife said that that she got some benefits. She got a lot of benefits out of it, I guess. But, well, let's talk about Ben, I want to talk about you now in a different way. I mean, from being, why did you go back to So you had this position. You went back to be a columnist. Why? It was my decision. I did it for five years.

And it was a great adventure. I mean, oh my God, 9-11 happened like the day I became the editor. It was, and I learned so much, and I watched this place operate. And I can't tell you what a privilege it is to work for the New York Times. It's just the greatest institution in the universe. And so I had all these great things happen. but I never in my life ever kind of imagined that my goal was going to be. I was always a writer.

So once I did it for three years, now five years, I went out to dinner with Arthur Salzberger, and I said, you know, it's been a great five years, but I think now, you know, let somebody else start to write. And he said, never in the history of this paper has anyone voluntarily given up a position of power. This doesn't happen. And he's, but, you know, whatever you want to do.

So, well, you know, I guess, except for the continual pressure. And I know when I've written you periodically say, now it's not a good day because my columns do. But I just think a columnist is like the ideal position in a way. Oh, it's the best job in the world. Yeah, a columnist for the New York Times is definitely the best job in the world. Absolutely.

No question about it. Yeah, you get to say what, more or less, as far as I can tell, whatever you want. Oh, yeah. Nobody, you know, reads you or goes over you or says, oh, my God, what are you doing tonight? You just stick it in, and there it goes. Yeah, it's interesting.

see that. And it's interesting to see for me to see sometimes, therefore, how two columnists can be saying the same things, because they don't, I mean, and it's, because it's a common things people are thinking about. It's kind of interesting when that happens, because you see it's a current idea that is certainly, there's an undercurrent in a lot of people's thinking.

Yeah, there have been many meetings over the years about how can we make sure there's a diverse topics every day, and it's challenging. The point is that you can't ensure, well, when it comes to diversity of gender or racial, I mean, I think the idea is that, is that you want the best ideas to the best people to be able to do their thing and just let them go.

And I think there's a lot of value in that in terms of encouraging excellence, I guess, generally. And hopefully, I mean, do you see that as, I mean, the ideal being ultimately a world, which is racial, blind, gender, bry. The point is it's not an issue that people think about. They think about what people are saying rather than new they are. Yeah, but we'll think of some new thing. Yeah, we'll think of some new way to label people. in a way that makes...

Now, the interesting thing is, we spent a lot of this time talking about, partly because I've been reading your book and fascinated by it, but in terms of your personal interest in what you write about as a columnist, what things interest you most? Well, in terms of policy and things like that, issues like your early childhood education, you know, reproductive rights, there's gun issues, there's lots of stuff. But my...

if I had a mission going through forever, it was sort of to try to make people interested in this stuff without making them want to throw themselves out the window. You know, just to try to have a way of looking at stuff that made you committed to it, interested in everything else, but not suicidal. So what I like, because humor is important to me, there is most times an element of humor, which is sort of the absurdity of life rather than the dismal nature of life. So absurd versus dismal, I guess. Yeah, yeah.

If you start out working with the New York City Council, you have to work on. How can we make people not want to kill themselves when they read this story? Well, in the current times, it's a challenge to that. Yeah. Yeah. Now, so if I were to pick, say, presidential politics,

religion, women's issues, science, climate change. If you, you know, when you think about, if you were presented with all those and you had to write a column tomorrow, which one, aprior, based on your sort of personal predilections, maybe it's a property of the time at the day or what intrinsically is your biases. Which would you pick? It's all those things. I mean, I do politics mostly. So the next generation of young Democrats coming up is really fascinating right now. Donald Trump, I've had relationships with since the 1990s, for God's sake. And so that's always a question.

Yeah, it's a two-way thing. He thinks so highly of you. Yes, I'm a dog and a liar. That was what you. He wrote on my column one day. That wasn't it? Yes, it's, well, that's, I'm sure it will be a bad for honor. You weren't a member of Nixon's hit list, but you've at least certainly. No, I was telling somebody the other day when I was in Connecticut, somebody said to me, the great thing about our job as reporters is the governor knows my name.

And it was such a big deal. And I said to somebody the day, the president knows my name, and he called me a moron in a capital meeting. Well, you know, but on the other hand, I worry, to me, the major hope of democracy is a free press. And I've been disappointed tremendously over the years at times in journalism. And during the Iraq war, I was disappointed, frankly, in the New York Times in the sense of not openly saying this is just nonsense. This is, this is, the president's lying. There's no evidence for, in any case, I've been worried about, especially in this time of celebrity, where journalists become celebrities, especially television journalists, whether there's

a hesitancy to then do the job of confronting because if you know you confront the politicians, you know you lose access. If you have a cozy relationship with them, particularly Fox News right now with Trump, if you actually then say, hey, this is reality and it embarrasses the politician, you suddenly lose access. Do you want to comment on that? I've been disturbed about that. Oh, it depends on who you're talking to and what the problem is, but I can only tell you really about the shop here. there's a great desire to have diverse opinions and show all the different sides. Sometimes it's really tough.

It's really tough with this administration often to come up with these great news moments that we talk about. You know, this is on the other hand, because very weird stuff is happening right now. But it's the desire to be fair and impartial. and reasoned about everything except what we call the core positions, which are things like we believe in racial and gender equality and free markets and trade, lots of whole different things. We're liberals and we tend toward the tax and spend end of things as well.

But within that core, everybody wants everything to be known and everything to be talked about. Well, Norm Chomsky said that Trump has played the press. I mean, that we just constantly hear about that Trump can say something and do something that's outrageous and constantly be in the news. And it distracts from the real news, the important issues. And the press just seemed to buy into it. Yeah, that's true. But I've been doing this a long time.

No matter what's happening, there are many people who will say you're paying way too much attention to this thing here. But you've been on TV. In fact, in Connecticut, I think you had a, maybe a TV. And sometimes at PBS, there's a difference between print journalism and television journalism. One gets a sense that television journalism is, well, is more fixated on news of the moment and maybe a celebrity than print journalism. And that print journalists are a little freer. Do you get that sense at all? Yeah, but you're right.

But my goal in life is not to have a fight about, you know, there's so many hardworking people working. in the electronic media that I'm not going to have a fight about who's doing more work or what. Speaking of print journalism, a lot of people say it's dead. Haven't you gotten the news? No, it's just, it's a new place. I mean, my God, look at the web. What do you do on the web? You type things, and you know, it's not. Well, yeah, but here's the problem then. I mean, it's, the web has changed things. So it used to be that for many people on the left, say the New York Times would be the source of their news. And the Wall Street Journal may be a little bit on the right. in the old days when there were three television programs, ABC, NBC, CBS. And then the web came out and

people like me thought, great, this means uncensored news. But what it also means is uncensored fabrication. And how do you see this issue, this famous fake news issue? It's a long, obviously. This is a very, very long conversation. Yeah, so we know, I know, and we could spend an hour on it. We're not going to. But what worries you most? Oh, there's so many things that worry me in the world right now. Climate change worries me right now. More than fake news? More than fake news. Okay, well, that's interesting. But the reason I wanted to end with it is that, as I say, I find what you said, you motivate people to not want to jump out the window. And the absurdity of life,

to me always, I think maybe it was Catch 22 when I was a young person, that made me realize that it's the absurdity of life that, of course, if you look at life as absurd instead of dismal, then a sense of humor helps you get through at least the fact that maybe this two shall change, or maybe only seeing that it's absurd, can we change it? I'll buy into that. Well, I'll buy into it because one of the things that I think you do so well and I appreciate so much is to point out those absurdities that get us thinking about things that we may think are normal, that shouldn't be normal.

And I want to thank you for doing that. Well, thank you for having me. And I encourage you to continue doing that for all of us. Thank you so much. Thank you. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krauss, Nancy Dahl, Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, and Rob Zeps, directed and edited by Gus and Luke Holwerta, audio by Thomas Amison, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.