 Hello, Susan. Hello. So I want to welcome our virtual audience and hope that you will enjoy and profit from this conversation that we are about to have about Elizabeth Cobb's new book, Fearless Women. And I always like to start off these conversations by asking the author how it is that she came to write this book. And it's quite an ambitious book taking on feminism and from all the way from the American Revolution, literally up to the present. And just tell us a little bit about the backstory of it and also what you hope that readers will take away from your book. Well, Susan, thank you. And thank you to the National Archives for making this possible. You know, I wrote it. It wasn't a book I'd ever thought I would write. I had written a lot on US foreign relations. My previous books have been, you know, and other kinds of topics, really. But then I just started realizing in the last several years, as the country has felt so divided, that there was this awful myth or series of myths about feminism, which I just think is very destructive to us. And one of those myths that I hope to bust is a kind of a myth that arises on the left, in which is that feminism is racist or old fashioned or transphobic. And on the right, there's this myth that it's a cult of, you know, crazy man haters that's out to harm the country. And those things are so untrue historically, that I just felt it was really time to tell what I think is actually quite a wonderful story of American values and American progress. Why do you think feminism has gotten a bad rap? I think you're absolutely right. People are just afraid of it. I always think of it as the other F word. And why do you think that's happened? You know, I think it's a divisive thing. You know, when people, you know, want to make claims, we've all seen this in so many ways, where people make exaggerated claims about things which are just absolutely untrue and it gets them some sort of political capital. But I started writing this book because partly I'd been talking with some women colleagues who were, you know, at the top of their profession, a profession they couldn't have even been in 100 years ago when women weren't really expected to speak publicly even. You know, and of course, you know, even farther before that when women did not have the vote and when women couldn't really even go outside their houses without their husband's permission. And so I thought it was so strange that we all take advantage of these wonderful things that feminists fought for for us. And yet, you know, we've been made to feel that if we claim that American value, that deep American value that goes back to Abigail Adams, that somehow, you know, we're doing something wrong. And that's just silly. And that's what your book hopes to challenge and change. But I think it does make it necessary for you to share with the audience a little more what your definition of feminism is. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Well, again, I think part of the way that people divide us is to say, well, feminism means this and it means that. And if you don't believe this, then you're not a feminism and a feminist. And that's just not true. And I like to use Eleanor Roosevelt's wonderful description that she wrote in 1935, the first lady, the first lady at the time of the United States, married, of course, to Franklin D. Roosevelt. And she wrote, I'm quoting from this book, the fundamental premise of feminism is that women should have equal opportunity and equal rights with every other citizen. So is the idea of equal opportunity, equal rights, equal dignity? And I think that that's something which Americans really all share most of us anyway. In fact, one of the most recent polls found that 91% of Americans believe that gender equality, equality between men and women is very important. So if 91% of us think that, why is it so hard to use the word that means only and just that? Yeah, no, that 91% statistic was just really took me back because it is much more widespread. Now, part of me wonders, well, people say they're in favor of equal rights, but we look around and realize it hasn't really happened. But it does, I think, demonstrate one of the points of your book, which is that over the course of American history, there has been this convergence towards the acceptance of the idea that equal rights for women is something that is a valid and important part of American history, which gets me to the other part, other definition that I think you need to share with our audience, which is the use of your phrase or use of the word patriotism or as you use it in your subtitle, feminist patriots. And those two words are not usually put together. Yes, and in some ways, it's that juxtaposition that really makes out of a way my point. Feminism is a value, it's a very foundational value in the United States that was controversial when it was first introduced as was the idea of equality between men since there were quite large numbers of men who were enslaved in the United States. So any ideal that's stated in a certain moment in time is something that evolves over time as people come to understand it and implement it and fight over it. What does it mean? How do we apply this thing that we basically do agree on? So with patriotism, patriotism just means the defense, the willingness to defend national values. And that's an old definition that goes back to 1500. If you look in the Oxford English Dictionary. So the fact that some Americans feel that, oh, patriotism, is that a bad word now? Does that mean that I'm willing to defend extremism? Cause some of those people use it as a patriotism is extremism and it should not be any more than feminism needs to be. All right, just one more definition, audience bear with me. This is one that took me a little while to get used to and it's the idea of an anti-feminist feminist. So Phyllis Schlafly, yes. Maybe, how would you, how else would you define that? Well, you know, as you can see from the book cover, which has women in these sort of the stars of American history, the stars in the American flag, it's important to remember that every person is complex. All of us, I am, I know you are. And so what we've seen sometimes is what Roxanne Gay, who's an important American writer today, sometimes calls a bad feminist, meaning that, you know, you're a complex person. So Phyllis Schlafly, who is probably, you know, for people who are old enough to remember this would be considered the arch enemy of feminism in the 1970s and actually helped to did a lot to stop the Equal Rights Amendment from being passed, from being ratified. She at the same time was absolutely a feminist. She said publicly and in print, now we're tired of the men in the Republican party expecting us to pour coffee. The men in leadership want us to just do the menial jobs. She openly professed her support for the Equal Pay Act of 1963 signed by John Kennedy for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex. One of her chief lieutenants, praise Ruth Bader Ginsburg for winning the first sex discrimination lawsuit. So anti-feminist feminists, and we've had them from the beginning, are people who will say, yes, this amount of progress is good. Like, let's say it's okay for girls to go to high school now. That amount of progress is fine, but please don't let the clock tick forward anymore. And so that resistance to change, which anti-feminism is, you know, can be seen sometimes in the most ardent feminists. Well, I think that, you know, the way that you described this in the book, which I have read, and I certainly hope everyone in the audience will either have already read or will quickly go out to buy, it shows the way that you use biography to tell your story. And that's really what I want us to talk about because that's what's so special about this book is that it really is able to put human faces on these larger moments of forces of social change. And really able to tell stories that people can relate to and really show how feminism shaped individual lives as well as the broader society. And I think, Elizabeth, maybe you could share with the audience a little bit about how you structured your book because that's central to how you're telling the stories. And I think one of the things that readers will especially enjoy when they sample your book. Well, thank you. And, you know, I mean, there's a wide number of women. I'm one of the first, of course, is Abigail Adams and, you know, who's married to John Adams or another First Lady. And I felt like what we lacked, although you've done yourself, I want to say, I want to acknowledge, Susan, you've done so much to put a face on these things with your own wonderful biographies of Amelia Earhart and, you know, Billie Jean King and others. But I thought what we really lacked was a sense of how feminism from the very first, from the birth of our nation shaped individuals' lives. I wanted to create an intimate history, if you will, that would say, well, you know, who were the people who thought change was necessary? And who were the people whose lives showed why men and women alike could, over time, recognize the need for change. And so what I did is in each chapter and there are eight chapters, these eight chapters are kind of like the rungs of a ladder. Like, how do we get to where we are today? No, and so the first chapter is about the right to learn, which Abigail Adams did so much to campaign for. And then the next chapter is the right to speak because women weren't supposed to speak in public. They weren't even supposed to speak in private if men were around. John Adams, married to this lovely woman, you know, complimented once the wife of John Hancock. And as he told his wife, he said, well, because she is completely silent in company. When men are around, all she uses are her eyes to show that she's heard a comment or is interested. So that idea of muteness is something that was overcome in time. And so every person who's in the book and there's basically 16 biographies tells us the story of somebody whose own life and heart and fortunes and children and marriage often were shaped by these profound ideas of equality. And so in the first chapter, you have two Abigail's. You have Abigail Adams who really has her moment in your book. She is a starring character because she sort of sets the tone with her correspondence with her husband to remember the ladies. But you also have another Abigail who Abigail Bailey who I think serves a different purpose than Abigail Adams being the public face. That's right. So we don't have a picture of that next Abigail. So we're just gonna have to imagine her. But Abigail Adams was a woman whose life was really pretty good. By 18th century standards, only one of her children died in infancy, only one. Often it was many more than that. So she, and she had a lovely husband who most respects was respectful. But she's paired with Abigail Bailey whose life was just the kind of horror show that a woman could endure if, because the laws allowed it. So in the case of Abigail Adams, the other story I thought it was fun to tell Susan was what happens in this dialogue between her and her husband. And many people will recognize a number of, some viewers at least will recognize the phrase remember the ladies. And it's sort of famous because it's the first time we have somebody in American history saying to a prominent individual, in this case, the man who's kind of responsible for helping to cook up the American Revolution and push it forward almost more than anyone else, as many historians would argue. And she's saying to him, you are writing the new laws and when you write the new laws, remember the ladies. So that we are, we're not treated by the law as merely the vassals of your sex. By vassals that means the slaves, the serfs, the underlings and what she meant by that. And she even said, not all men are this way, many aren't. But if you give a man absolute power, every man would be a tyrant if he could. And that's a double entendre because they're all also talking about the King of England. And the idea that you should not have a monarchy, why? Because if you give absolute power to any one person, that person is corrupted, can be corrupted by it. So she was saying this to John, totally reasonable observation. She was saying women don't have a voice in the law. And he blew her off. He said, I cannot but laugh. I cannot but laugh. And he said, basically I'm paraphrasing. He said, women always get their way anyway and they rule the roost and so George Washington will have to fight off petticoat Amazons if these kinds of things change. And he put her down pretty abruptly. And he also implied she was being disloyal. And this is where you see that first intimation of anti-feminism or a woman who's expressing a feminist idea is accused of being disloyal, of being a troublemaker. And he compares her with other troublemakers. And he says the enemy, meaning the British are trying to stir up trouble. And by the way, he mentions the enslaved. He mentions indigenous peoples. And he says, the enemy's trying to cause trouble here. So now women are next. So it's that idea that if you are a feminist that somehow you should just pipe down. By the way, he made it sound like it was a big joke. But he wrote a month later, Susan, a month later to another man, a male legislator. And this time he was absolutely sober. And he said to this, a judge, he said, be careful how far we extend the franchise to men without property. He said, because depend upon it, sir, women will ask for the vote. Now John Adams warns that women will ask for the vote before the Declaration of Independence is signed. They don't get the vote for another 150 years. But men like Adams understood that it was a part of the American promise that really, that was the meaning of the American Revolution that all humans are created equal. So I kind of went on about that. But let me just put in a word about darling Abigail Bailey. Here was a woman who had 17 children and who was married to a veteran of the American Revolution. And he had under the law absolute power, absolute power over her and her children. In fact, her children did not belong to her because children did not belong to their mothers. They belong to their fathers under law. And when Abigail's Bailey's husband, Major Bailey in the American Revolution, when he got outed for trying to seduce women servants in their household, they got rid of the servants and he started, he abused one of their daughters. He sexually assaulted one of their daughters. And what could she do about that? First of all, she was so frightened to even think it could be the case that she became clear that it was. But she also knew if she divorced him, Susan, that daughter, all of the other daughters, all of the children would have now belonged exclusively to her husband. They would have passed entirely from her care into his exclusive care. Care is the wrong word, really, abuse. And so for a woman like that, and he kidnaps her, oh God, the story goes on, she has to get a horse, she has to ride across 200 miles of wilderness to save her children. It's one of those stories that will curl your hair and knock your socks off and make you go, oh, I see, this is what people like Abigail Bailey, Abigail Adams were talking about when they said we need to rewrite laws so that women are not just the vassals of men. Yes, and I think that the Bailey story really does confirm a key theme in your book, which is how disadvantaged women were legally throughout much of the 19th century and what an important priority that was for the feminist movement or the women's rights movement. And I think that skipping ahead to one of your 20th century characters, one of my personal favorites, Frances Perkins, I think she's a good example of how many feminists and reformers really brought their concern with economics and poverty and really thinking about what the government should be doing to help people out. And Frances Perkins ends up as our first woman cabinet member. And as you point out in the book, she does a lot of things that we now take for granted. She does. And I wanted to show one other little slide first. I'll just say this, just a minor diversion here. The kind of rights women didn't have and they're conveyed in this particular picture and Frances Perkins comes right next. It's this idea that women were legal non-entities and as you can read in this, you know, the thing that shows underneath it says enforcing the non-entity principle. This was a man who had committed his wife to an insane asylum. That was one of the things you could do. I mean, you had total control over the children, total control over the women. And she said, I'm not gonna walk. So you might commit me to an insane asylum but I'm not gonna walk. And she was the kind of person who was challenging laws that really just treated women as truly as objects. And so Frances Perkin who I share your love of Frances Perkin, she was such an amazing person. And she was one of these people who, her basic idea was that women she felt were at the bottom of the heap. Now, she was a person who really cared tremendously about the poor in general. And she felt that if you could start with what was going on for women and sort of see that as a model for how you needed to change laws that then you would kind of work up the chain of command if you will. So she was Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor's, we'll call them Eleanor's husband. How about Eleanor Roosevelt, one of our first explicitly feminist feminists as she called herself that. So, Frances Perkins was asked by FDR, will you come on to my cabinet, the first woman ever to sit in a presidential cabinet and be secretary of labor. And she wanted to turn him down. She thought, who's gonna accept a male, female rather secretary of labor. And so she suggested to him all kinds of, she gave him a list of men he might ask that she thought would be more acceptable. He threw out the list and he said, no, I want you. Now, part of this reflected this great division amongst people who, some people who thought in the labor movement, especially that, well, real men didn't need laws to predict them, they didn't need social security or unemployment insurance or disability insurance or anything that they just could stand up for their rights. But what they meant by that was that men in the skilled trades, not by the way, African-American men, certainly not women, not nor the unskilled. So they rejected the idea of any kind of law to protect workers. Any law which said, what's the minimum wage or any law which, you know, might set aside retirement funds for people. So, Frances, when FDR asked her to come on, he said, well, okay, I will do it, but only if you will let me fight for unemployment insurance, for social security, for a minimum wage, and for a couple of other things. And he said, well, I have no idea how you're gonna get that stuff, but sure, you know, I'll encourage you to do that. So look at her face in this slide. Look at this determination. She didn't want the job, not only because she thought she might not be accepted, but she was also a very private person. And her husband was ill, her husband was, he was mentally ill. She was the sole support of her family. She had a daughter who was in high school, and she didn't wanna do it because she knew she would be attacked, she would be vilified. And in fact, she's the only member of Roosevelt's cabinet who's brought up on spurious charges, false charges by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accuses her what? Of a lack of patriotism. You know, feminists, again, oh, you're just not the real patriots, that's us human here. Anyway, so Francis Perkin, if you've ever, you know, if anybody in this audience, virtual audience has ever collected unemployment insurance or social security or worked for them in a wage, this is the woman you have to thank. And it came out of her feminist values as a suffragist before women got the vote and as somebody who had been fighting for women and for people in poverty her whole life. I wanted to have you introduce next a character that probably is not, well, is not as well-known as I hope Francis Perkins is, Muriel Siebert. Tell us more about her and what drew you to her and what her story adds to yours. One of the rights that I, you know, as I came to define this sort of ladder of rights from the right to learn, the right to speak, the right to petition government, the right to vote, the right to earn. And one of the rights was the right to compete, to compete with men and to just compete openly. And so one of Muriel Siebert was such a, you know, so much fun. She was the first woman to sit on the New York Stock Exchange and that shows her reading a ticker tape, you know, coming off the stock exchange. And this idea that why do we write, there were so many laws that prohibited women from ever competing with a man. So for example, you know, Arizona had a law saying a woman couldn't be governor of the state. And there were laws in other states which said women could not cut men's hair. And there were laws which said women could not apply to be firefighters. So in the case of Muriel Siebert, she just always found that she earned about half that most, sometimes only a quarter of what any man did working for one of the major stock, you know, one of the major stock brokerages. So she decided to start her own company and she decided, she went back to the bylaws of the New York Stock Exchange and it did not have a specific provision saying women could not be on the stock exchange. No one had ever done it. No one had had the, as the men would have said, the gall to even think that they should do it. But she was encouraged by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which said that you could not discriminate on the basis of sex. And so she went to the board of the stock exchange and the head guy in charge of membership. And she said, you know, is this just a country clobber? You know, can anyone apply? And he said, well, by law we can't stop you. So it's just wonderful. She said, well, okay, I'm gonna do it then. And she came to New York with $500 in her pocket and an old used car. So she didn't have money, she didn't have connections. She didn't even know people. She was from Ohio and she was a, as they would have said at the time, a girl. And so she's just one of the, she's a Republican by the way. She runs for the Senate. She's defeated by another Republican on the issue of abortion, by the way. She was also known as, she was also very, very well known because she served after this as the head of the New York banking in New York. She was called the superintendent of banking. Now, by the way, she is totally hilarious. I mean, that's one of the best things about writing any book or finding the funny lines. And Muriel Siebert, whose nickname was Mickey, she said when she got into the stockbrokerage, brokerage, you know, line of work that the men in the field only respected her if she could swear as well as they did. You know, and so she would say things and they would be, I'm trying not to do that here on, you know, the National Archives, which is a very sedate place. Although there's plenty of racist stuff in the National Archives, thank you very much. But the acronym for superintendent of banking is SOB. And she knew she had to be a real SOB at times to get these New York banks to play by the rules, because that's what she was. She was a person who felt the rules should be fair. And like Frances Perkins, this just wasn't about her alone. It wasn't just about, hey, I should be able to compete as one person with other stockbrokers and be entitled to make as much money as they can make. She also said, if you open a door, you need to hold it open for the next person. So one of the things she did with all her millions, she didn't have children, she founded a foundation to educate young people both men, both boys and girls in finance so that people in the public schools could figure out how do you make a living? How do you get ahead? And she also very much encouraged women to come into the profession. So the other thing she did is that she was the first, the very first American stockbroker to take advantage of a change in law, which said, hey, how about if the stock exchange is open to fair and free competition as well? Because the New York Stock Exchange was a cartel. It basically said no brokerage can charge less than any other brokerage. So what it meant is that everybody had to say, any participant had to pay the same high price for trading stocks. And when the law was changed, it was Muriel Siebert who hopped on it and he said, I'm gonna discount my brokerage services so that everybody can participate in the stock market. It offended her that her father, who was a dentist made less in a year than she made in one day. And she wanted people like her father and her mother to be able to participate in this wealth generating institution in America. Well, one of the themes that runs throughout your book is pushing back on the idea that feminism is only for white women or has only been put forward by white women. And as you tell that story, a very important character is Mary Church Terrell, who I think of as a, since this is sponsored by the National Archives, even though neither Elizabeth or I are in Washington at the moment, the archives are. And Terrell was very much a Washington community fixture, played a very important role in the African-American community throughout her long life. And she plays such an important role in your book as well. Yeah, you know, I'm so glad you brought that up, Susan, because I think that part of the slander of feminism that gets going is that feminism has been a racist movement or a white movement. Of course, there have been white women in the movement in the United States. The majority of the population for a long time was primarily white. But from the very first day, feminism has been the word that we would use now, wasn't used before, it's kind of a new word, intersectional. Abigail Adams in the very letter where she wrote John saying, remember the ladies, she also said she was worried about Southerners, would they be as ardent in the fight for liberty because they were used to enslaving others. They were used to depriving other men of their liberty. So the idea that, you know, black and white Americans have as much right to all the benefits of being human was there from the start. And also there were just so many wonderful women of color who advanced feminism from the start. Maria Stewart in Boston. And of course, as you mentioned, Mary Turrell. And she, as this amazing person, she was highly educated. She was educated not only in the United States and, you know, at Oberlin College, the first college to admit women and men at the same time, blacks and whites. But she had also gotten her master's degree in Britain, pardon me, when she was in Europe. And so she was highly educated person. She was married to this wonderful man who's hysterical on his own, right, very funny but eminent, Robert Turrell, who was a black judge in Washington, DC and a very important jurist in the United States. So his records, those are the kind of records that are available at the National Archives. And Mary Church Turrell, she was a very, very prominent suffragist, a dear friend of Susan B. Anthony who helped to bring her to fame, actually. It was Susan B. Anthony who first invited Mary Church Turrell to address women's suffrage conventions. And at some point, Mary Church Turrell becomes the leading American suffragist to speak at the Berlin Conference on Women's Suffrage. What happens in 1904? So she's an international figure. And she also picketed the White House with Alice Paul. So these things where we say feminism excluded black women is not true, of course there were some feminists who were racist. There are always in any group of people, some people with values and attitudes which we won't support. There were some civil rights activists who were sexist. That's just the nature of human diversity but there has always been a super strong thread throughout feminism of respect and understanding that these issues are very, very intertwined. And Mary Church Turrell is just a beautiful human being. And the story of her husband, I mean, it's one of America's most interesting romances. Well, also I'm thinking of another character in your book, Martha Cotera who was new to me and I think also represents your Texas roots which come through, there's a strong Texas component to this book but instead when you got to telling the story of second wave feminism instead of choosing someone like Gloria Steinem, you chose her and it adds so much to the book. But again, it provides a broader vision of feminism and also one as you point out was she got, she was widely noted turns up on magazine covers and really played an important role in the movement and has not gotten the credit until now that she deserves. Yeah, I know I think and I know you know this very well that often there are times there are people who are really well known in their era who do extraordinary things, women I mean, who then very shortly afterwards are kind of wiped from the record. There's not an effort to say these women are American history, it's not women's history which is a little side dish or maybe it's the dessert that you bring out at the end of the meal when people are already too full to have anything else. This is American history. So that in the same way that Francis Perkins just to double back for a second, I found when I was doing research on her that she was much more in the newspaper than a lot of the men that we now talk about as being major forces in the New Deal. Hers was the name that was at the top of paper after paper that I read and sometimes multiple times on the front page and now people are not even aware of her. Similarly with Martha Cotera when I was looking at second wave feminism which is I think for a lot of people they say, oh, that's feminism. Which I say it's much older, longer, broader, deeper phenomenon than just Gloria Steinem. So people have this idea that there was this kind of big flap in the 1960s and 1970s and women got a few more rights and what's the big deal? So when I was looking at that I thought, well, what we need to understand here is how feminism is not just the value of a few people who are well known but it's a value that has deep roots throughout American culture. And the only way to really appreciate that is to look at the ways that it has been advanced by a number of different people. So if we wanna understand how in the Hispanic community and Martha Cotera, you know, as a Chicana that's how she would always introduce herself. She's one of the people who says this is a Hispanic value. This is a Chicano value. This is something that we fight for all the time and don't tell me that it's a white value because that's how people try to divide women is often say, oh, well, that's what white people do. And she's like, no, that's not what white people do. That's what women who respect themselves have always advocated for, which is the right of self-defense, the right to respect, the right to equal opportunity. And so Martha, who's still alive and by the way running circles around me and pretty much anybody she meets, she is a Texan and she was a political figure in the 1960s and 1970s. She was one of the primary founders of the first Hispanic political party in the United States, which was called La Rasa Unida, La Rasa Unida. And she ran for office in Texas, but she also worked very closely with Lady Bird Johnson, with Anne Richards, she knew Sarah Weddington. These are well-known names in terms of women's rights. And she worked with them because she knew that she had to bridge always the Hispanic community, which at that time was only 3% of the American population. I mean, today it's huge. In some states it would be the majority or close to it. So that was a growing population. And Martha Coutere, who wrote a book called The Chicana Feminist in 1976 and who had been a primary organizer of women before that, she's one of those people who makes it as much a Hispanic value as it is what we might call an American value. Well, I have another, more of a writer's question that I just am eager to ask you. The audience I'm sure knows or should know that Elizabeth has also written two novels. She's written about Harriet Tubman and Alexander Hamilton. And I just wondered, how is it different writing about women's lives in a non-fiction book and how is it similar? And I was thinking about the contrast between your novel about Harriet Tubman and someone like Harriet Jacobs, who's practically her contemporary, who is one of the featured people in your book. Right, so it's an interesting question. I find that both kinds of writing make the other richer. Obviously, if you're a historian, you think differently even about fictional events, you think, well, you know, I can't introduce something that as in a fiction way that would not be at least probable or highly possible. But in terms of writing non-fiction, I find that fiction makes, it does make things more intimate. So when I describe, for example, in chapter two, I talk about Harriet Jacobs. And as I said, each chapter has somebody who's kind of the face of feminism, a person like Abigail Adams who had a good life but who thought the laws need to be changed and who was civic minded. The other person is somebody you go, oh, holy cow, what would it be like? So Harriet Jacobs is sort of like America's Anne Frank. She's a woman who willingly walks into a kind of imprisonment. She wiggles herself into a garret, a crawl space in the ceiling of a small lean-to where it's only three feet high at the top. So all you can do is sit up and she's there for seven years. She's there to escape a sexual predator who owns her, at least by law, but she says, well, never own her body. And so she hides, but she also hides because she knows it's the only way to protect her children that without getting too deeply into the story, it enables her children to become free. And so in a way, she goes into this kind of imprisonment to save her children. In the end, she escapes, I mean, that's part of the story. And she flees north and she writes this book, the only book we have that describes what it's like for a woman to be enslaved because it's a different story than it is for a man to be enslaved. And she lets us know that, she describes it. And by the way, that was part of the chapter which is about the right to speak because the thing that made her book so scandalous but so important to us today is that she was willing to say what happens to women in slavery. And that was considered, something that you shouldn't say in polite company. Rape should never be acknowledged. The problem isn't so much doing it, even having suffering it, it's talking about it. That's really wrong. And she challenges that. So, she's so important to us today. And being a novelist, you know, there you're like, okay, let me think about what's it like to not ever be able to stand up? So then I look for the clues in what she writes to us and what other people later wrote about her like one abolitionist who saw her right after she got out, he said she can hardly walk. Her joints are so stiff from disuse that she's almost crippled. Now, she went in when she was about 20 years old and she gets out when she's about 27. Imagine spending your 20s basically lying down or maybe sitting up. There's no prison in America which is as confining as the prison into which she voluntarily walked. Well, if I can put in a plug for the book, it's that kind of attention to detail and storytelling that makes it really come alive. That these stories, you really care about the women that make up fearless women. And when you get to the end, my takeaway was that this is in many ways a very optimistic book. You talk about the changes that have happened and yet it's always the glass half full, half empty. The last chapter talks about areas where there is still so much to be done and really confronts the Me Too movement. At the same time, it takes on Beyonce and I just have to, I don't think I could have written a chapter on her but you obviously really got into it and it comes alive at least to me who hadn't really known that much about her. Right, so there are two parts to that chapter like every other one, which is the person who seems to have a pretty good life and let's go back to Beyonce for a minute. Seems to have a pretty good life and in fact, had loving parents, a lot of support early in her career and yet uses her position to really put forward the idea of equality, she really does. And I know I had a number of people who said, Beyonce, are you pandering to the crowd there? Here is her, by the way, singing at the Super Bowl. She's saying it more than one Super Bowl, she's saying it three presidential inaugurations. She's a woman who really has said she's here for all of America. That's patriotism, right? It's not a partisan thing. She's here for all of America. And she has always asserted the idea that women body positivity is the third wave feminists talk about the idea respecting your body, not thinking it has to be a certain way or the idea of women should be self-sufficient financially. That's been almost so many of her songs. She said, you know, stand on your own two feet, which by the way is what Susan B. Anthony said, it's what Alexander Hamilton said to go back to that novel. But the third character, the sort of the other people I talk about in that last chapter are people who are part of the Me Too movement. And I love this picture of, those are the three of the many gymnasts who came forward and who addressed the US Congress and Simone Biles on the left, of course. And there are two other gymnasts who are in this picture as well. And, you know, they had been attacked by 500 young women and girls had been attacked by one man, the Olympics doctor, who was never, you know, who was basically allowed to retire honorably by the US Olympics Association later, of course, came up and his arrest and now is in prison. But these women in some ways, it's like what you're saying about, it's an optimistic book because look at what these three young women have. They have the right to learn. They're all educated. They have the right to speak and there they are doing it. They have the right to address their government as they're doing in that very hearing. They have the right to vote. They have the right to earn money. They have the right to equal treatment. They have the right to compete. And boy, do these women know how to compete. But what they didn't have was the right to physical safety. You know, and that's what they were coming forward to say, this is our work. This is the next thing we wanna do. And gosh, I tell you, I'm reduced to tears whenever I see Simone Biles testimony, which you can see on YouTube where she's crying and she's trying so hard to maintain the poise for which she and all of these women are famous. And these are people who are willing to do death defying leaps in front of a billion television viewers and who are reduced to tears by talking about these personal events where they were assaulted and nobody cared. So that's the work that remains. But we also have to remember, and this is where the optimism comes in, we stand on a wonderful foundation. We stand on top of a beautiful story, if you will. And we need to appreciate that. It's time to appreciate that. It helps us to appreciate that because it gives courage to all of us in our forward quest to live up to our ideals as a country. Well, I think as a final word, one of the sentences in the book that really has stayed with me is one where Elizabeth says, feminism, and this is the quote, is our only universal word for the global effort to achieve equality between the sexes. It's our word, we should use it. And fearless women really tries to reclaim that word and along the way it introduces us to a fascinating and fearless group of women who are determined to make equality a reality. And as what we finished with the Me Too movement, there is still much more that needs to be done. Feminism will always be necessary. But when you read this book, you realize there's a history that it's important and that we should all reclaim the label. And so thank you, Elizabeth, for writing this book and good luck as you spread the F word around the world. The good F word, right? The good F word, the feminism word. And again, thank you to the audience for joining us today. We hope you've enjoyed our conversation. Thank you again.