 I'm Ann-Marie Slaughter and I'm the CEO of New America and welcome to the new balancing act and it's great to see you. I see lots of people I know and lots of new faces and we're delighted to have you for what should be a very interesting afternoon and really a launch for a set of conversations that we're going to be hosting over the next year and that we hope will be happening in lots of places. So Gloria Steinem in her sort of breakout graduation address to Vassar in 1970 which was later published as an op-ed in the Washington Post. It is what race announced Gloria Steinem as an icon of the feminist revolution in the same way that Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique had in nine years earlier. She gave this rousing commencement address about the need for a revolution for women and one of the things she talked about was the ways in which the women's movement or what I did grow up calling women's lib, women's liberation just to date myself. You're not entire but you're much too young. That's what we originally called it. She described the liberation of women as part of the revolution that was sweeping the country which was of course not just a revolution of women. It was first of all a youth revolution right. It was a revolution against the establishment. It was a revolution for civil rights. It was a revolution that had a big class dimension of working classes in terms of democratic participation and her speech and her later op-ed says the women's revolution is a bridge to this larger revolution because women are sisters and so women of color and working class women and women of all different ethnic groups and religions can be sisters and can help fuel this larger revolution and interestingly she then also said women won't be liberated until men are liberated. This is 1970. She gets the patriarchy. She understands that this is a revolution against the patriarchy but she says you know men are confined to essentially the organization man. The Gray Flannel suit, Madison Avenue, anybody's watched Mad Men that's the stereotype and she says men need to be liberated from that role just as much as women do. So two big points. One, the women's movement is a part of a wider social revolution, a revolution in race and income that really strives for equality of all human beings, not just the advancement of women and second that the women's revolution will not be achieved until the men's until we liberate men. So this afternoon we're going to talk about half of that. We're going to talk about the ways in which the women's movement has been a movement for all women and the ways in which it has not and I will start by saying this book, Alison Wolf, the double X factor. Alison Wolf is a distinguished sociologist and it says how the rise of working women has created a far less equal world. Now I'll just tell you as a feminist I don't subscribe to this in lots of ways but what she's saying is as women largely white women of privilege have advanced and our lives have been completely revolutionized right my life looks nothing like my mother's life in terms of the the options that have been over to me have been open to me as white women of privilege have advanced not far enough but nevertheless have unquestionably advanced women of color have filled the jobs they used to have taking care of their children and so her argument is actually all women used to be share the same experience we grew up we got married we had kids and that pretty much defined our lives the divide between working women and women who are doing traditional women's work has just gotten greater and so she argues we're actually less equal now I'm not going to debate her statistics and I think you know again from I women as a whole have advanced but I want to raise a number of questions and I do also want to give you a preview from my own book which is coming out September 29th and is called unfinished business women men let me say that again women men work family and it is about the unfinished business of the women's movement and what we have to do to actually get there and critically what we have to do to get there for all women and for men but today we're going to be talking less about men but it is an equally important part of the conversation so the way except that you know the feminine mystique was about white suburban women and that's hardly news from much of the 70s and the 80s women of color uh wrote in Alice Walker talked about women womanism that to talk about you know being bored because you you you were you know stuck in the suburbs taking care of your children was to speak to a particular class of women without question but I think there's a there's a sort of a deeper structural problem with the women's movement to date which is that we focused on advancing specific women to the positions men have traditionally held that's very important and I don't think we could have done it any other way but that's been our focus and the way we did it was to liberate women and again these are mostly white privileged women but not exclusively to be our fathers and when I grew up the message was really clear my mother was a homemaker my father was a lawyer if you wanted to be a liberated woman you became your father that's what it was about right I mean that and that was the measure of your worth as a feminist as a woman who was fighting for other women and that made sense because my father and all the fathers like him held the power in society so I'm not saying it wasn't a good idea to do that that's if I didn't if I couldn't become a lawyer or a doctor or a banker or a politician and maybe even a president we weren't going to change the power structures of the society and we still had a long way to go there and we know that we're still in we're 15 percent of leaders in a good industry 20 at most five percent in a bad industry like finance or lots of the sciences so we still have a long way to go on the project of liberating women to hold the positions that men once held and still do hold but along the way we fought we valued women only to the extent they could become men and we devalued women's work traditional women's work my mother's work didn't want to do that right no way you didn't want to be a homemaker to be a homemaker was to be an unliberated women and then we had the mommy wars and all sorts of things too we won't go but the overall I mean I was raised to think that being competitive and winning and being you know succeeding and making an income that was the measure of worth being a caring person investing in others taking care of children taking care of parents taking care of siblings and spouses and friends that work was much less important than the work of competition that caregiving was much less important than bread winning and note that winning is built right into the way we think of earning a living all right we call it bread winning and caregiving that has to change because in fact society only works when you both earn an income and allow people to pursue their passions and their goals and compete and competition is a great thing right it drives all sorts of great outcomes it's terrific right without competition the human race would you know still be probably living in caves that's equally true about care right we would never have gotten past the first saber tooth tiger if we did not take care of each other we of all species right we depend we are social animals we care for each other that is the key evolutionarily if you go back and and read either anthropologists and paleontologists and look at how we actually evolved but you can think of it much more simply than that think about this so I so I earn an income and I bring it home and I put down those dollars on the table they don't do anything they sit there until somebody turns them into food and shelter and clothing and that's just the physical needs nurture coaching discipline being present anchoring a family you have to have both they're equal parts of human nature they're equal parts of human history and they're equal parts of any well functioning society so my proposition is that to go forward we still need to advance women in traditional men's positions absolutely but we equally need to value the work that women have traditionally done the work of care and we need to value it whether women or men do it and believe me if we start valuing it more it will be more attractive to men to do right I mean why would why is a guy who is in a job earning an income going to want to become a caregiver if what that means is he just stepped out of the social hierarchy right as many women describe when they stop working for income and they stay home or work part time and they say what are you doing I'm taking care of my children you just became nobody that's the way people describe it so we have to value that care as an equally important part of human nature of an economy from the point of view of society investing in our children and taking care of our old people is absolutely as important as managing money right from the military point of view it's more important because you actually you need to raise the next generation and from the economic point of view so let me just so let me talk about care and and bring that back to our theme for the afternoon if we value care that is an experience that privileged women working women poor women still have in common very different consequences but they're all negative so if you are a woman who is in a career and you're highly educated and you're heading along and you have a child or your parents are ill or a spouse is ill or whatever whoever somebody in your circle of the people you love and let me make clear constructed families or every bit as much families as biological families this is not a claim about who you happened to have been born with if you take time out for care you just that was a major black mark on your resume right it's a black hole if you take time out you don't put caregiving it's a black hole you and even if you're still working you just took yourself off leadership track because you're clearly not committed to your career because you're spending a day at home with your children so obviously you know you're just not on the fast track you don't have what it takes so you've you immediately hurt yourself if you take time out for care if you're in the middle class you are trying to work and take care you've got an income but you're absolutely on the edge and if anything goes wrong you're likely to tip over right because you're you're doing both and you're holding it together this is Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amy Warren Chiagi's book that points out that the the middle class is now much more fragile in large part because mom is now working before the if you had a non-working woman when the father lost his job or something else happened she could go into the market it was like an insurance policy now you're you're both working flat out trying to do both and you're very vulnerable if you are a poor woman you are overwhelmingly likely to be trying to be a caregiver and a breadwinner at the same time and you are getting no support on the care side right we want you to work we overhauled welfare so that you could work we are not giving you decent daycare uh any kind of of affordable after school any kind of recognition that you need you know if your child is sick you're the only person who can stay home you are your extended family we are not valuing care if we value care and all the policies that go with it and as i said obviously it's prenatal care it's really high quality and affordable childcare as other advanced democracies manage to provide it's all different kinds of of thinking about how we manage school like maybe we could start with school schedules and move beyond the late 19th century wouldn't that be nice you know we have a school schedule that is aimed for the agricultural economy of the late 19th century uh but it's also mental health right it's all the ways in which we have to care for people not just physically but also mentally and critically for a society where 10 000 people are turning 65 every single day and where the baby boom's becoming an elder boom we need elder care if we valued all those things then women at the top and men who took time out for care would be valued i actually respect someone enormously if that person says you know like my sister-in-law i could be this and i could get all that prestige and all that money but actually my child needs me maybe you have a child with special needs maybe you just have a child with extra needs i'm going to invest in that child rather than in my own career i think that's a sign of character i certainly think that's a person i would hire is that a person i'd promote as fast as someone who hadn't taken time out no because the other person is doing that job faster okay that's fine but is it a person i'd promote and hire and value you bet it and man as well as woman so if you value care it actually does reunite the experience of all women even though we experience the care penalty differently and obviously women at the bottom much more severely it unites you politically it unites elder care and child care and gradually and this is where i will end because we're going to move on to our panels if we value care we will value care when men do it just as much as when women do it and we'll value it and this is the last thing i'll say not just because it was a good thing to do when somebody else needed it as a you know this is like an altruistic thing you invested in somebody else will understand that caring for someone else and doing it well is just as much an enhancer of personal growth and development as learning how to win that learning how to invest in somebody else it's not so easy right think about as a parent you know can't you can't just be making your child a mini me even if that would work and it certainly won't with mine but it's that combination of investing and teaching and nurturing but also holding firm and knowing when to be tough and knowing when to push and giving that person what that person needs to live up to his or her potential that teaches you every bit as much as it teaches the person you are caring for and we could go through the same thing for elder care for care of peers so if you want to know all the ways in which you grow and all the implications there's a book you can order it's available on amazon but i'll stop the the infomercial and i do want to then just say this this conversation then to me is an incredibly important conversation that we need to have independent of my argument we need once again as gloria sninum said to ask how it how can the women's movement advance all women we need that because politically we're not going to get what we need without a much broader coalition but we need that because that's the spirit of what equality means it doesn't just mean equality between some men and some women it's a much broader conversation and with that we're going to turn to our first panel which is the act across communities and i will call up i think it's bridged moderating the panel i'm looking out for somewhere come on up that the members of that that panel after that panel we're going to hear from tyra mariani who's going to talk about stepping back who can't get in on the act and then we're going to have a final panel on off balance at work thanks very much