More drones and fences there than every and elicit trade is just as common as ever. Trying to stop it is impossible. It is the most common thing in the world and something that hasnt caused the world to end yet and probably wont cause the world to end tomorrow. So i think we should all take a deep breath and understand it is a common phenomena and it is like any crime. And it is not the panic it is made out to be and the political rhetoric you see today is for self serving hands. [applause] last thoughts, kimball . What do you want people to know about the world you discover and the tijuana border. I want to talk about bord er itself i guess. All of the decisions have been made from washington down and i wish we had a bigger voice. The people who live here. A pragmatic, energetic community and i think our say should be just as important. I want to thank both our authors. George diaz and kimball taylor. They will be signing books at the big tent and you can buy one there. Thank you so much for joining us here at the san antonio book festival. [applause] [inaudible conversations] the Fourth Annual san antonio book festival continues now. Next up, a panel on women and the politics of marriage. I dont think now it sounds like it is working . You all can hear me . I would like to welcome you all. Thank you for coming. My very good friend katie gave me a set of rules to impart to you and i know if i dont to right i will have to leave right away. I already welcomed you and on the second floor after this session the authors will be signing books and the authors are kate bolick and rebecca. And some thof were se of the proceeds will go to the San Antonio Library association which is near and dear to our arts. I would like to introduce the authors. Kate bolick is a life of spinster, making life of ones own. And an the author of an interview show. Her work has appeared in many magazines like the New York Times, slate, and vogue among others. She and rebecca both live in brooklyn. Both of these books are spectacular. Rebecca is the author of all the Single Ladies; unmarried women and the rise of an independent nation. She is a writer at large for new York Magazine and she is covering the elections so if you have any ted cruz gossip pass it on now. She has written about women in politics, media and entertainment from a feminist per speb fsh and con per spectf and contributed to many magazines. Her first book was called big girls dont cry which was about women and the 2008 election. It was a New York Times notable book of 2010 and won the ernester ballard book prize that sounds like a good prize. And as i said before she lives in brooklyn. And i thought i want to thank katie for picking me to be the hostess of this event because i have been married for 30 years and barely remember being singled. I thought we would start out with both of them talking about how they came to write these books at a similar time. Okay. Thanks. Why dont you go first . Your book was first. What happened with me is i wrote a cover story for the atlantic in 2011 also called all the Single Ladies and the assignment was to look at contemporary marriage trends and how the media is reporting them. I came across a statistic of nearly half the population being unmarried and i realized this was my way into the story. The atlantic asked me to write it in the first person drawing on my own experience as an unmarried woman of 38 or something at the time. I ended up writing this story and it touched on single women and marriage trends and it went viral. I started hearing from women and men also all over the country and all over the world and realized what had felt like a very private internal conversation i had been having about my own single life and where i fit in the world was a conversation a lot of people wanted to be having. Then i meet rebecca. We do an event together in new york which is when i discovered she had sold a book not too long ago called all the Single Ladies and i felt terrible i had inadvernently stole her title. I was relieved because publishers were asking me to turn the article into a book and i thought it was a facscinating book but not how i wanted to approach it. So i was glad rebecca was writing this important book and i could write this other book. My intent, the atlantic put me on the cover of the magazine looking like a really tough, i am scowling and it made me uncomfortable to be out in public looking like somebody i am not and somebody who had it all figured out. I wanted to show, i like many others, grow up at time with conflicting messages about what shape our life should take and how it was a confusing economic and psychological process. I wanted to make it as personal as i could to help the reader think about her own life and talk to me the way i was talking to the women with who are all dead that i write about in my book. That is how i blabbered on for too long. In my case i was a journalist writing for the website philan. I have been there writing for 78 times years. Sometimes once a week and sometimes 20 times a week depending on the news cycle. I was unmarried and through most of my 20s and 30s i was really unmarried. I didnt have boyfriends. Most of my friend who were not married were in and out of relationships and was really in and out of one relationship that wasnt wildly satisfying over a couple years in my 20s but i had not had a boyfriend in high school or college. So i was aware of my singlehood in a way that some of my friends who were in and out of monogamous relationships were not. I wrote about it as a journalist because i had written so much. I wrote stories about the role female friendship played a role and the connection i made with my girlfriends that were like spousal and the familiar relationships of my early adulthood. I covered the statistics kate is talking about. Here is the news so many more women are living single, i covered them in post and news reports and i was aware of that stuff. I wrote a book about women and politics in the 2008 election and around the time that book came out, and people started saying are you going to write another one, and i didnt know whether i was or not, but around that time i had met a man and fallen in love and was getting married and i was 35. In the months before i got married, i was doing a lot of thinking about the way people were responding to the fact i was getting married about my perplexity at getting married and what i felt deep in the my tult adulthood and so many of the rituals were like you are starting your adult life and i was like, no, i have an adult life. And this identity that stuck firmly for me for more than a decade during which i built my career, built friendships and made a home and it was an identity tied up with me being on my own romantically. And people were treating it like now it is real. And i was very discon bobilated by this. And my new york standards, in my social group, we can talk about this. No one was married. At 35, i was on the early end of my friends. Most of my girlfriends were single and not getting married and i fealt like a child bride at 35. I began to think i dont think there has been enough serious attention paid to this topic. Because again as a reporter writing about politics, one year, i believe in 2004 there was a thing about sex and the city voters who are unmarried women and comprised a quarter of the electorquate. The map of what womens lives are supposed to be like as adults seems to be reorganized and i dont know if anyone thought of that. That is when i started putting together the proposal for the book and sold it under the title all the Single Ladies. I had a baby and was out of it for a couple months. As it turns out. As advertised it can throw you off. I had a friend who called and said have you seen the cover of the atlantic . And there was for me a moment of sheer terror. It is such a good story. And it was doing the thing one of the motivations for me writing this book is nobody is taking this seriously. I am going to take it seriously. Then the cover of the atlantic had this incredible piece that was 6,000 words . It was 13,000 words. 13,000 words taking this topic very seriously and it was beautifully written and thoughtful. It had the same headline my book did. I was like uhoh. Then i read it and i was like this is a massive nation altering shift in how women live, in how men live, in how families are defined, and what are social policies need to do, and what our attitudes about sexuality and friendship. I loved every word of kates piece and it was totally different. The only thing it had in common besides the title is we were trying to put it into context. 150 people can write books about john den kennedy so there should be 150 more book os on this top. Spencer came out last year. I, too, had this feeling of this is not being taken seriously but for me it was more about the ways in which single women were writing about themselves and in a voice that was very self d depricating and focused only on dating life. And publications were hypersexu hypersexualizing single women. It felt uncomfortable. In 2000, i found this journalist who lived in the 19th century and wrote an article for vogue called the bachelor girl about her decision to never marry and it blew my mind on many levels. She was writing in this funny, sharp, critical voice that didnt sound like the contemporary woman and showed me there was a public critique of marriage and thinking about womens lives at a time in history i had not known existed. We were having similar feelings, the both of us, and i dont live in a political space and wasnt thinking about the larger political picture. I was thinking about how women think and talk about themselves and how that is shaped by the culture and era we love in. And in part, i want to go back to what kate said, the marriage patterns began shifting in the 90s and we can talk more about the timeline of how it happened but the womens movement, civil rights movement, gay rights movement, all of which were political revolutions and combined with the sexual revolution and the legalization of Birth Control and abortion. All of these things created conditions that enabled this behavioral shift away from marriage and that started in the early 90s which is when both of us were coming to age. We were sort of young adults then. It hawse happening and the numbers were shifting but there wasnt a consciousness about the shift. I write about the role anita hill made and how her testimony was discomfortable for many and alan simpson said watch out for that woman. There was a sense of threat that women were coming who were not like women we had known before and they would be in a position to challenge male power or their nomination to a supreme court. And they were maybe detached from institutions that made them comp re comprehensible to us. There was discomfort. By the time i was a young journalist, i worked for the new York Observer and wrote about film financing. My beat was money, who was funding independent features and very dry and i was paid very little so i needed freelance work. And everything freelance work that came my way, despite what i had written about, were can you write about your sex life and i had no sex life, a. It is a like a cartoon and somebody is looking at a cow and the thought bubble is a hamburger. I thought being a young professional with a pen i was a hamburger except the hamburger was a young woman who might have an interesting sex life even though i did not. People didnt know what to make of women living in these patterns except to hypersexalize them. Here are numbers and in my book proposal i had a few sentences that were like and i will locate the history of single women in the United States which i am sure had to do with the salem witch trials. I sold the book and it was going to be written in a year. As i began to do research, and discovered the witches in salem most were married or widows and didnt have to do with single women. There was this tremendous history and in terms of scope and size, the contemporary edition is unprecedented. The settlement house movement, the creation of more Higher Education and teaching and nursing probe negativeses in which women could better earn their livings. So my theory about the contemporary generation which is that were reshaping the nation in fundamental ways was true in the 19th century too, and i didnt know that, and thats why my book took five years to write. [laughter] yeah, i talk about that in my book, about the cultural amnesia that takes place, we can only remember history as far back as our parents and grandparents go. So all of us are thinking marriage is exactly like it was in the 1950s when, in fact, that was an aberrant period. I describe a, like, i make a word graph in my book where i show in the 1890s 34 of women or were unmarried. And then that number goes down, down, down and then it goes up and up and up and, now were at 53 . So its radical and enormous and hard to take in when because history has been so pushed back into the past. And we tend to think that those victorians have nothing to do with us. Although i would also argue since one of the arguments in my book is that one of the reasons people freak out about single women is because marriage has been a useful organizing institution yes. Especially when it comes to organizing gender power and who has economic, political, public power. The 1950s, i dont think its just i do think what youre saying is absolutely right, we have short memories that extend about as far back as our grandparents, but there are also a lot of cultural forces in play that made the 1950s and the mid 20th century an era of white, middle class, patriarchal, Nuclear Family the government in many ways underwrote the creation of that white middle class and the push of women to marry early again after, you know, some decades of them marrying later and less often. And also it was the moment at which a lot of our pop culture, the kinds of recorded culture came television and the ways that america sort of, in a sense, took a be picture of itself and said this is the best kind of america. That was the postwar it really was this blip in which people were married much earlier and much more often and, you know, had more kids, the baby boom, than theyd had at other periods. But it happened to be at the moment that america took a selfie [laughter] i like that. But i think for not benign reasons. I think it was a version of it was white, a lot of the same Government Forces that had created the white middle class had also worked to cut off black families from a lot of economic and Educational Resources that were helping to bolster the white middle class in the middle of the 20th century, and that white middle class was reliant on the unpaid labor of wives and pushing women out of the colleges that theyd recently made their way out of and out of the professions theyd recently made their way into. And it was the most comfort write organized white, patriarchal power structure, you know, really probably in a couple centuries. And that was the moment when we decided to say this is what america looks like. Right. Norman rockwell, paint our picture, right . So i think thats kind of why that loomed so large. Yes. I have a question for both of you. When you cite the 53 figure, how does that break down into, you know, women who have never married, women who are divorced, women who are widowed . All of them. And do you know, like, is it a third of it younger women . Is it i think i cant break down that particular statistic, but i can offer some others as to one of the reasons the marriage rate is down is because the marriage age rising. So we dont know yet because were still in flux. Theres some people including, you know, Stephanie Coontz whos a brilliant marriage historian has recently cited this to me. People still guess that around 85 of people, 8085 of people are going to wind up marriage. Its just a question of when. So some of the most telling statistics about unmarried people are about young people. So today amongst americans 1829 only 20 are married. So only 20 , basically, under 29 are married. So thats compared to 60 in that same bracket in 1960 which, again, was the height of this early marriage movement. And 46 under the age of 34 are unmarried. So it is almost as likely under the age of 34 that you are never married than that you are married. Id like to know also how you see this playing out politically. Like, if youre looking not just at this i guess ive got two questions. If your looking at how, what the impact on the elections going to be, but then how do you see sort of the world 20 years from now . How does this phenomenon may out . Play out . You want me to do it . Yeah. [laughter] no, this is very so i see it, actually, reshaping our politics practically every way, every day. Yesterday new york state passed paid family leave legislation which was monumental and revolutionary. [applause] and it becomes the fifth state to do so, although washington hasnt enacted theirs. You know, what you see so as i said, marriage was this useful organizing institution. And our government, our social policies, our economic policies, even our civic institutions have been built around it. And contained in it has been the assumption that theres one kind of american who does the public paid work, the professional work husbands and that there is another kind of american wives who are going to do the domestic work, the childcare, the, you know, the food preparation, the cleaning. And thus, in many ways, enable their husbands participation in the public spheres by taking care of all the rest of life. And also sort of it depresses their own ability to compete in those public spheres. Thats not how we live anymore. Its just not how we live. We do not live in early married, hetero units. We may live in hetero partnerships for some or lots of our lives, they may be married, they may be cohabitative, samesex partnerships, we may spend all women increasingly are earners and closer to equal earners. Increasingly we see single parenthood as a norm for women under 30. More than 50 of births to women under 30 are to unmarried mothers. And we dont have the social and economic support for how americans are actually living as opposed to how they used to live x. That means some of the policies being talked about in the president ial election on the democratic side, things like raising the minimum wage, this is absolutely key. Twothirds of minimum wage workers are women. 42 of single mothers live below the poverty line, raising the minimum wage would raise that. Also there is no paid leave mandated, federallymandated paid leave time for if you need to care for an aging parent. So paid sick day legislation, the family leave that passed many new york also has to do with talking care of ill family members. Equal pay protections that would better enable women who are now participating in the economy and in the public sphere more equally than they have been before to not have their work discounted on account of gender. Things like reproductive rights that enable women to exert control over if, when and under what circumstances they have children. And all of those are issues. You know, we hear a lot in the president ial election about the shift to the left for which a lot of people say, oh, this is Bernie Sanders whos come in, and hes a socialist from vermont, and hes drawn everybody left. It is my belief that Bernie Sanders is a conduit for a leftward move in terms of what we need in terms of our social and Economic Policy thats not actually driven by ideology as by practical need. We are not living in then configurations we used to live. We need social and economic policies that are going to better support how americans actually live which is with women as far more equal participants in the public sphere than theyve ever been before. And with men as far more equal apartments in the domestic apartments in the domestic sphere. Good luck with that. Right. [laughter] but its happening. I mean, it is shifting. And you see the policies. The policy in new york, by the way, covers paid leave for men and women. Twelve weeks. And, in fact, if you are talking about a traditionally hetero married, twoparent household to, it can be a woman takes 12 weeks and then the man takes 12 weeks. Which is six months before i mean, think of the impact that also has on family finances. You dont have to put your kid in daycare for six month instead of, you know, a week after theyre born which is what a is true or days after theyre born which is what is true for so many low income americans right now. One of the other things i loved about your book was finding these sort of role models in their work as opposed to, you know, youre always told find a mentor in your company or Something Like that. And i thought i can remember when i discovered joan didion and nora ephron, and i thought i can write the way i want. These women did it, so i can. Can you talk a little bit about that . So in my book i talk about five women who lived at the attorney of the last turn of the last century who influenced my own thinking about marriage versus not marriage both through their lives and through their works. Originally, i just was doing this as a hobby, collecting these women, reading about them, reading what they wrote and talking to them in my head. And as i describe in the book, i think this habit came out of my mother died when she was 52 of Breast Cancer very suddenly. I was 23. And we were very close and talked about everything. So to be entering my adulthood without her was terrible in a million ways, but one of them was i just didnt have somebody to talk to about what do i do . All those things i should have done with her. So i plucked these mother surrogates out of history. And while i was doing it, i kept being drawn repeatedly to the same time period that the 1890s to the 1910s. And i didnt know why. I just thought maybe i was, like, it was visually appealing to me or something, you know . It was different enough from the time period i was living in. And so it wasnt until i started researching the book that i really came to understand why that was such a significant period. I just kept being drawn to it because there was a very, a fresh way of talking about their lives that we dont have today which is partly because of the way the media has treated the single women, woman. And then also because of identity politics which are necessary but have really just made the ways in which people talk about their lives less interesting to me a lot of the time. And i liked the way these women in the 1890s and 1910s were talking about their lives. And so but your question was about, like, the work well, i thought it worked out both ways, because you got these surrogate mothers, and you also got these surrogate mentors yeah. Who showed you the way. Yeah. I call them in the book, i use the term awakeners which is a term that Edith Wharton used in her memoir to describe the books that had shaped her own intellectual journey. And i liked that term because it was important to me to separate these women out from heroines. I find heroines to have of limb9 to be of limited use. People that do incredible things i could never do. So its cool for the heroine to exist, but what i was doing with these women was looking to them and asking questions and talking to them. So i liked awakeners. They were showing me different ways of living and thinking about how to live than i could do on my own. So that included their own commitment to their work lives and also the amount of thought that they put into their romantic lives and marital lives which was all very radical during the time period they were doing it and was not at all radical during my time period. But there was a silence around what women were doing that was confusing. I thought id like to let you all ask questions now, but i anne, you had a question for rebecca that i thought was really provocative about your own daughter, and i wondered if youd ask it of both of them again. [inaudible] it was about your daughter not wanting to get married, and you said whats wrong with [inaudible] really like to push it off. Uhhuh. And what was your response . What did we do wrong . We did something wrong exactly. That was interesting. So do you think they did something wrong . [laughter] just to clarify, is the idea that is the fear that you did something wrong in that she doesnt want to do what you did . Bad role model. Youre really a good role model and you think, well, gosh, we were pretty ive been married, as a married parent. Yes. And why do they want to push it off so far, i guess. You know, what was wrong with well, i would answer that in a couple of different ways. The first my parents have been married for 50 years and have an extraordinarily happy marriage. It has very different power terms than i would choose for my own marriage, but theyre very happy and very they are in love, and they spend all their time together, and, i mean, they have a model marriage in many ways. Though it began in an era where domestic responsibility was divided much more traditionally than it is now. And i, actually, i now remember conversations that i had with a girlfriend of mine when we were in our 20s in new york and unmarried, and she also had very happilymarried parents. And at this, you know, we were wondering, like, what this is weird. Were on a map that we dont recognize, we dont whats going on with us . This is not what happened with our parents. And we actually said, oh, maybe our parents were too happy, maybe they raised the bar too high on what we should expect. So i do, you know, my but i think thats, you know, for those of us who have come out of happy marriage, part of the shift thats happened is understanding marriage as a different kind of institution. It used to be something on which women were dependent. Economically, if they wanted to have a sociallysanctioned sex life, if they wanted children, you had to do that with marriage. And, therefore, it sort of had to be an event of course, there were people for whom this budget true but women couldnt have economic stability very easily on their own, a sexuallyliberated life on their own. So marriage, you had to find somebody to marry. And so sometimes you found somebody with whom you made a wonderful life, and metimes you found somebody that was a truly bad marriage and there were plenty that were kind of in between. But the marriage itself meant something different. In an era in which you dont have to get married in order to have economic independent, in order to have a sex life, in order to have children, in which there are so many other things that you can do with your adulthood, marriage becomes much more discernible as an institution of variable quality, and you want to find one that makes the life you can have on your bone better, that enhances on your own better, that enhances the life youre able to have on your own. And as many of of us know, it ts a long time and maybe you never do find somebody who you feel like you want to headache that legal attachment to, but it also takes a long time to find a person who you feel that confidence about. In some cases not. There are people who still meet the right person for them at 18 or 16 or, you know . But so i think, i dont think its about doing anything wrong. It may be about doing something right and showing your kids that happy connections and reciprocal relationships are a possibility and that she shouldnt settle for anything less than that. [applause] yeah. Kate and rebecca and beyonce, i love the work yall have done with reclaiming words like spinster and sort of shaking up single. And im wondering about the wordy very say divorcee which still has a kind of 60s, i dont know, gross fruit cocktail vibe to it. [laughter] and, yeah, its based on your research or your writing or your friends experience if you feel like married women are having less trepidation about leaving troubled marriages, about becoming a divorcee with sort of the new freedom around singleness which used to be so sort of shadowy and yeah, just really stigmatized. I think from what ive seen and said, you know, historically, statistically the divorce boom happened, and then its kind of plateaued. So divorce rates have not gone up over time and have, in fact, gone down a little bit in certain areas. So i see it as the divorce boom helped singledom in the sense that it created a lot of single people for the first time. And to we had to start rethinking how we thought about single people. And then it also inspired people to not get married as quickly because, you know, children of divorce are, have colder feet sometimes and so forth. So i havent seen i love that though. I mean, youre right. Divorcee does have that kind of cheesy vibe. But i havent seen it and, oddly, i hear women say sometimes not tons, but ive heard women say to someone who was or divorced, oh, well, at least youre divorced, at least you get to say someone chose you once. [laughter] yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that yeah. Thats what i have to say. Yeah. Ive been single for 54 years. I tell my girlfriends who have been divorced for, like, 10, 20 years why do you have to live with that word . Why arent you youre single now, so you mark single. Yeah. Why do we have to carry the divorced word around for the rest of our lives . Its like the government always wanted to know what color we are, what race we are, now they want to know your marital im single. I tell my girlfriends are you single or are you married . Well, i was divorced 20 years ago. Youre single now. Yeah. Youre single. [laughter] i just want to tell you well, not the reason why im single, but i reteared military retired military. I joined when i was 20. I had a baby when i was 30 out of wedlock, of course, to this i mean, this really good looking guy. [laughter] that, you know, he didnt have much of a personality, but [laughter] late 20s. My sex life was great. I was considered a slut, but [laughter] i didnt care because i was doing the same thing these young 20yearold guys were doing. Yeah. Which kind of angered me. So i had a little girl, and i realized that shes my number one priority. So here i am 30, single, in the military with a brown baby and loving my life. And i can afford things, and i buy a house, and people want to know why im single, why dont you get married . You know, the rumors about, you know, shes got some kind of sexual dysfunction, you know [laughter] shes gay, shes no. I really like my life. And i like my kid. I like my daughter. And im going to make sure that i raise her the best way possible, and its not going to be how my mom did it. Yeah. So im, i have this path that i have to forge for myself because i cant relate to anybody. Theres really nobody who can relate to me. You should write a book. I know. [laughter] yes, i should. And my daughter says that all the time. I was the mother that everybody came to in the neighborhood. But what i want to say is i, i love my life. Most of the time im reading. If im not reading, im out with the girls. But ill tell you what, i dont go out with the girls who are married because im never invited by them. So my friends, a lot of them were married, and i was the single one. So i had to seek out single women at my age, and i still do at this time. And shes over someplace else because she doesnt want people to know how long shes single. Im very proud of it. Thank you. Youre great. Thank you. Congratulations. Yeah. [applause] actually, your story reminds me of a story a friend of mine wrote. My friend is named emily, and she was covering a she was writing about assisted living facilities, and she was interviewing these 80 women saying dont you want to get married again . It was emily so she was saying do you really want to get married again, and they were saying, no. You know, theyre only looking for a nurse or a purse. [laughter] so i think, you know but you had a question. [inaudible] just kind of wondering oh. I was just wondering if there is a similar process going on with young men and, if not, what are the implications for young men who are maybe back there and, you know, women have moved on . I can take that if you yeah. Do you have something no, go ahead. So, yeah, it is happening for young men. When the married well, the shift in marriage pattern ors is certainly happening because the majority of marriages are still hetero. It has a profound impact on men as well. They are staying single longer. They always had a higher age of median first marriage, and their age is still now the median age of first marriage for women which was preen 20 and 22 for all of history until 1990 at which it jumped to 23 and its now over 27 and higher than that in many cities, for men it is over 30. So, yes, men are living singly longer than ever before in massive numbers as well. [inaudible] well, i think its because everybodys changing together. [laughter] i think there are lots of different shifting expectations, and you have something to say about this too . [laughter] wait, i want to hear what you have to say, but the my book is mostly about the womens experience. I think there should be many, many books written about men. One thing that is different is there historically has been space in the world for independent men. Because men have been better able, more able to be economically independent, to have sex lives that were not, that sort of didnt cut them off from the world if they were found out. Men have been able to there may have been raised eyebrows and all that, but there has been space for independent men in the world in history. There has not been equivalent space for women until very recently. So thats one of the reasons that i happened to focus on that aspect of what i see as a revolutionary shift in marriage patterns. The other thing that is fascinating is that if you have men and women living independently for more years or all of their adulthoods, what you get is not just women moving into professional economic spheres and enjoying new kinds of sexual liberty, you also have men developing skills in realms that they hadnt historically been asked to or needed to. So my, one of the theories that i write about in the book is that this is good for hetero partnerships when theyre formed because if you, if youve lived in the world with men and women working together as peers, as colleagues, as friends who go out for beers together, who treat each other as equals and not just halves of the unit in which theyre going to have a breakdown of domestic responsibility that works along certain power lines, and also if you have women who are out there learning paychecks and member who are learn men who are learning to cook breakfast for themselves and doing their own laundry, when and if they do partner and live together or build a family together, theres more of a likelihood that the tasks and the responsibilities are going to fall to the people who are just better equipped to do them and not the people who are assigned them based on gender. I read a nonfiction, statistical book where the author and im so sorry, i cant think of the name of who it was or the name of the book where she did interviews with women on every social level and actually went and lived with them, saw what their daily life was like. And with the multitreed women with degreed women with equal men, the very privileged women, they had the happiest marriages. Even though it wasnt quite fair if the woman got a better job offer, it was more like, you know, most of the time they would go with the mans offer. What was really surprising was the lower class, minimum wage women, who were finally having the confidence to go get that nursing degree or whatever. But they were still supporting their unemployed husbands whose mechanical and other manual labor skills had been replaced by robots. And, you know, the guys had really kind of given up and become alcoholics or just wasteos and were spending the womens money. This was a very long period that she was doing this, like over five years, and it took most of those women about five years to kick the guys out. Now, in some cases the excuse was the guys were taking care of the children, and they were the worst babysitter ors imaginable. The houses were filthy, they didnt change the diapers, they played video games all day. It was very sad because it was like you saw, as the women were going forward, the men were dropping out. Now, since i have the microphone, im going to change the subject and say that i have been a very happy spinster for 69 years [laughter] and ive had two decadeslong relationship with a male and a female x. The best part of my life is the 40 years i have been alone. [laughter] she who travels alone gets to do 50 Different Things every day at the time i want to do it and exactly the way i want to do it. And there is a disadvantage. I live in a small town p and theres a famous bill getter and Sullivan Gilbert and sullivan musical about how the maiden in town is such a distraction that the whole town just cant leave her alone. And ive had so many vandal problems and such. And my female friends who are married did not believe it until they became widows. And then their windows were shot out, and they had wow. Invasions and such. And it is still a problem even at my age. And it is very aggravating that the town and men cannot tolerate a single, independent woman without harassment. I wow. Yeah. I wow. Someone in the back. Way back. I have a question, actually, about weddings. So im in my early 30s and have had a lot of friends who cohabitat, have children together, and they essentially live married lives, but they really feel like they cant be married until they can really commit to having the whole wedding. And im wondering how the rise of the wedding Industrial Complex has really kind of [laughter] you know, coincided with maybe a decline in legal, formal marriage but people really living married lives. It did shul. Its completely absolutely. Its completely related, the rise of the marriage Industrial Complex, yeah. Do you have yeah. Its coterminus. And one of the things that, you know, we talk about the increasing normalization of unmarried life for women, but it is very discomfiting. It throws everything up in the air, and as women gain new kinds of power, it yeah, people who used to have all of that power, its very uncomfortable for them to share it. And so there are also these punishing messages, right . Just because single life is increasingly normal and increasingly anormal for women doesnt mean people arent upset about it. The reclamation of the word spinster, you know, is the positive word at it. The fetishization of weddings as the peak life event which has not slowed down in correspondence to the fact that its not the peak life event for many, many women or men anymore. Not for women. In fact, its just sped up. And so the sort of say yes to the dress social media, the way that the, like, Engagement Ring shops go, you know, wedding announcements, all that ampup of weddings is all part of a set of cultural messages that are still sent to women that this is the thing they should come on, guys, this is your day. This is the day that celebrates you. This is the day. And it comes in part from ideas that are long embedded in this, that this is the measure of female worth, that it remains the normative state of female adulthood. That was true for centuries, were not going to shake it off in a matter of a couple of decades. This remains the state that women are supposed to aspire to. And because the shift in marriage patterns has happened over between classes, economic insecurity makes marriage far less tenable, right . Poverty makes marriage harder. And so i spoke about the way in the mid 20th century that lots of economically challenged communities of color the marriage rates began to drop. The place where the marriage rates remain the highest is in the highest income brackets. And so thats the wedding Industrial Complex is also very tuned to that and the fact that weddings are still happening, though far later than ever before amongst the wealthiest americans who have money to spend on it. And we have increasing messages that are telling them they should splash out completely on it. And so all these things, were in a stew. There is a trajectory, but its one that comes with all kinds of circles and setbacks and sets of kinds of backlash and that the fetishiization of marriage as the capstone event is a big part of that. Hi there. Let me see if i can say this right. Eight years ago or a little under eight years ago we elected barack obama. And we didnt think we were racist. We were, there was, you know, cheer, yea, we, you know, weve overcome that. It turned out we were really racist. It turned out that, you know, we had some issues. I mean, theres been this enormous volatile, terrible period. We had a congress that wouldnt, you know, that decided that they wouldnt work with him. And i think a lot of white men have a lot of issues. Whats going to happen with a woman . Oh, its going to be really bad. [laughter] yeah. [inaudible] the australian woman that became prime minister. Let me because were running out of time, im going to let them talk. She got so much legislation through, but they just persecuted her. So we are, this is a country that has been built, you know, on the marginalization of certain kinds of populations and the, like, mic accrue wall of power by one population, you know . White men who from the beginning had Voting Rights, and their enfranchisement has been protected ever since, and there are a million other structural ways in which we have racism and sexism really embedded into this country. We have seen enormous progress in the course of centuries, really since our founding, you know . Weve been moving, im an optimist about these things. Ta that has city coats would disagree with me. I think we are moving in directions toward greater possibility for greater opportunity for more americans. But our systems, our attitudes are all shaped around an idea of what america is supposed to be that is not supposed to involve the equal opportunity of these people who have been historically marginalized. And we are still in the midst of moving through the stew, and were not out the other side. Its going to be centuries before we are. And so what you see and i think its very evident in the president ial cycle right now you see these leaps forward. But they dont mean that weve all leapt forward. And, in fact, the fact of a leap forward just inspires anger and hatred and fear and instability. And there are people let me Say Something sympathetic to the angry and the fearful. Its true you have if the norm has been you have these kinds of power and then that shifts, it is a loss of something. Its a real loss. And it is destabilizing, and it is scary. But, yes, if we have a woman president , there will be all kinds there will be, there is already, theres look at the, these things are not unrelated, the move to make abortion illegal even though it remains legal. The move to disenfranchise the Voting Rights, you know, voting regulations that, make no mistake, systematically disenfranchise people of color and women. They dont want its a sneaky way to revoke the Voting Rights that took centuries to to win. I mean, these things are not happening in a vacuum. They are happening because we have candidates not just like barack obama and hillary clinton, but also like marco rubio, like sarah palin, like carly fiorina, ben carson, herman cain. We things are changing in the United States. And it makes people who live in the United States very uncomfortable. And, yeah, its going to be bad. The racism isnt going away anytime soon either. Progress. We have to go forward [inaudible] well, you can make it come back if you restrict peoples ability to vote and to control their own reproduction. [laughter] but, and thats what the fight is right now. Were at the heart of it. Were at the heart of, you know . [inaudible conversations] i think weve got time for one more. Wheres my timer . I have a san antonio question. The Economic Innovation Group came out with a study recently talking about income inequality, and san antonio is one of those places where theyre side by side, some of the worst poverty and well off. And i was thinking about your point about women having children out of wedlock more and more. And i think historically weve always been taught to think, oh, thats a bad thing. Thats something that we need to help those women not do. Just like we need to improve the educational system and everything. Are we thinking about those wrongly . I believe that we are. I am, however, a lefty feminist. [laughter] it is conservative dogma, and you can hear from many republicans who really believe, for persuasive reasons, that one of the cures for poverty is, in fact, a reestablishment of marriage as an early norm. This is any republican politician will tell you this. And they will tell you in terms that make sense. Like, its one income, how are you going to raise a kid on one income, you know, if you brought two incomes together i believe the reverse is true. I believe that stabilizing people economically promotes, and im to not particularly