To donate, please visit press. Org institute. On behalf of members worldwide, i would like to welcome our speaker today and those of you in our audience. Our head table includes guests of our speaker as well as working journalists who are club members. And if you hear applause in our audience, i would note that members of the general public are also attending so its not necessarily evidence of a lack of journalistic objectivity. I would also like to welcome our cspan and public radio audiences. You can follow the hash tag on twitter today using the hash tag npclunch. Ill ask as many questions as time permits. Now its time to introduce our head table guest. I would ask each to stand briefly as your name is announced. From your right, richard strauss, former white house radio director. Barbara cochran, head of the National PressClub Journalism institutes. Yolanda is ceo and former deputy chair of the Democratic National committee. Kathy spiller executive editor of ms magazine. Elle president of feminist Majority Foundation and publisher of ms magazine. Allison fitzgerald, finance and Investigative Reporter at the center for Public Integrity and chairwoman of the National Press club Speakers Committee. Skipping our speaker for just a moment, Senior Vice President of msl group and Speakers Committee member who organized todays lunch. Thank you for that. Beverly, ph. D. From Spelman College and founding director of womens research and Resource Center and professor of womens studies. Nicky schaub, associate editor of washington whispers at u. S. News and world report. Jennifer sergeant, a freelance magazine writer and deborah, executive Vice President of hager sharp incorporated. [ applause ] its not often that one person can define an era. Our guest today had already made it as a high powered woman in a mans world when she discovered that world was far too narrow to accommodate her. Gloria steinem is the face of the feminist movement and was doubled the leading icon of american feminism in time magazine. She cofounded ms magazine in 1972. More than 40 years later, shes still a consulting editor to the magazine published by the it feminist foundation. Ms. Steinem celebrated the 40th anniversary of the magazine last year at the press club. She said it was the right place to do it since she was the first woman to appear as a National Press club speaker after women were admitted to the clubs membership in 1971. [ applause ] she received a mens tie as a thank you. Shes in town this week to receive the president ial medal of freedom from president obama. [ applause ] ms. Steinem worked as a journalist in the 1960s after living here in washington during high school and heading to Smith College from after college she spent two years in india where she wrote for indian publications and was influenced by gandhi and activism. In 1968, she was a columnist and wrote feature articles. As a Young Journalist she wrote for esquire and once hired on as a stunt for a playboy bunny and helped fund the National Womens caucus and most recently the Womens Media Center. [ applause ] along the way, ms. Steinem has been criticized as a threat to male privilege and knocked by fellow feminists when she wrote a selfhelp book and by some when she got married. Today shes a documentary producer and author as well as a regular on the speaking circuit and says the fight for equal rights for women is hardly won not only here in the u. S. But especially in developing countries. Today shell talk to us about big things left undone in a speech titled still to come the unfinished and unimagined. Help me give a welcome to glory steinem. [ applause ] first i have to say what an amazing collection of talents and great minds and great har hearts. It drives on organizers crazy that may not know each other. As you have already heard, i get a big sense of history when i come back here including my own history, and i can just say as the first woman speaker i remember so clearly my knees knocking and my voice quaking and losing all of my saliva. Does that happen to you . Each tooth gets a little angora sweater. I was so aware of the responsibility. However, when they gave me a tie i felt completely free to say outrageous things. And since then, i mean, its so great that weve had 11 female president s of this institution and so many great women have joined great men in speaking here and we did gather last year to celebrate the 40th anniversary of ms. Magazine. Thank you for carrying this forward and weve got here the great you heard weve got the great beverly who is a great troublemaker. [ applause ] and Jeanetta Cole who is educator and now whats your proper title at the museum of african art . Director. Okay. And Allison Bernstein who insists on calling herself bernstein who is a Great International activist and there are so many of you here. I just want to tantalize you to make sure you look around and see three or four people you dont know and you introduce yourself. And it is a celebration of my inclusion among 15 people i greatly admire who are being presented with the medal of freedom by president obama. Theres no president in history from whose hand i would be more honored to receive this medal. And it gives me a chance to say here im especially grateful for this lunch because when we get the medal, we cant talk it turns out. Im grateful to have the opportunity to say here that i would be crazy if i didnt understand that this was a medal for the entire Womens Movement. [ applause ] it belongs to Shirley Chism and patsy and in the future it would be great for robin morgan im lobbying a little bit here. Barbara smith. And so many more. And it has already honored rosa parks and Rachel Carson and dorothy and my dear friend chief of the Cherokee Nation who i accompanied when she received her medal. Now, of course with all of that company i get uppity, i can remember dick cheney received as did henry hyde whose selfnamed amendment has hurt lowincome women for the last 37 years and were counting. The power of this honor may be even more evident in the withholding than in the giving. I was reminded by ellen that president Lyndon Johnson even as he signs the First Federal and International Family planning acts into law refused to bestow the medal of freedom on sanger and feared reprisal from the catholic church. Ellen told me when she looked at sangers private history papers at Smith College, im proud to say the biggest archive of womens history, she found a poignant handwritten note from sanger asking that her body be buried here next to her husband but that her heart be removed to japan, the only country in the world that had ever bestowed a public honor on her. So i hope this is retroactive in honoring the work of margaret sanger. I hope she would celebrate this recognition that reproductive freedom is a human right at least as crucial as freedom of speech. And that no government should dictate whether or when we have children. [ applause ] whether we are male or female, the power of the state must stop at our skins. She might also say the backlash against reproductive freedom by a right wing extremist minority especially in state legislators they unfairly control by redistricting is proof of panic of their racist and immigrant fearing efforts to keep this country from becoming as it is about to be no longer a majority European American nation. It is becoming one that looks more like the world and better understands the world. So sanger might say as i do that there is no president of the United States who is more responsible for understanding that reproductive freedom is a basic human right than president obama. However, there may be a movement problem with me as a recipient because of my age. Im trying to absorb the fact that ill be 80 next year. [ applause ] i plan to reach at least 100, but i am really worried about mortality but im also worried that my age contributes to the current form of obstructionism. All of the people who say that movements are over and use ridiculous terms like postracist and postfeminist. Excuse me . Right. I can testify personally that the very same people who were saying 40 years ago that feminism was unnatural and unnecessary are now saying it used to be necessary but its not anymore. Just to name one parallel to show how ridiculous this is, if it took more than a century to gain legal and social identity as human beings for all women and men of color, now that we need legal and social equality and no power based on race or sex or ethnicity or class or sexuality, thats likely to take at least a century, too, dont you think . And were only 40 years into it. Also as original cultures say, it takes four generationses to heal one act of violence. So truly we are just beginning. So i would like to contribute a few examples of the adventures before us and unlike david letterman, im not going to try to put them in any kind of order because each one is crucial. And any way, theyre all just reminders for people in this room. One, womens issues arent separate from Economic Issues or vice versa. Paying women equally for comparable work done by men would be the biggest economic stimulus this country would possibly have. The institute for womens policy Research Tells Us that paying women of all races equally to white men would put 200 billion more into the economy every year and would be way more effective than propping up banks and wall street because this money would get spent not put into swiss bank accounts. It would create jobs and help the poorest kids who are those that depend on a mothers income. Do we hear economic stimulus and equal pay in the same sentence . No. I dont think so. And after we do that, we also need to value care giving work which is a third of the Productive Work in this nation at replacement value and make that tax deductible if we pay taxes and tax refundable if we dont. We could do that. Two, a womans ability to decide when or whether to have a child is not a social issue. It is a human right. It is the biggest indicator of whether she is educated or not, can work outside the home or not, is healthy or not and how long she lives. This country has the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies, teenage pregnancies and medically complicated births in the developed world and the least Sex Education which allows web pornography pretend to be Sex Education though the truth is present in the word. We have shown as a movement that rape is not sex, its violence. We havent yet been successful in showing that pornography is very far from nurotica. Women with children are less likely to get hire order paid well while men with children are more likely to get hired and paid well. This is the tip of the iceberg. Nothing else is going to work in a deep sense until men raise children as much as women do. Deep. Children will keep on liabling men by thinking they cant be loving and nurturing and they can just as well as women and liabling women by thinking they have to be loving and nurturing. This is huge. Read a book long before its time and were finally ready for her. Four, the u. S. Is the only modern democracy without some National System of child care and now the average cost of child care has surpassed the average cost of a college education. Five, were also the only advanced country that endentures College Students by saddling them with debt at the time they should be able to explore and women pay the same tuition as men and get paid a Million Dollars less over lifetime to repay those loans. That reminds me much of the fact has been made that women outnumber men on College Campuses but many are trying to get out of pink collar ghetto and into the white collar ghetto. Meanwhile, women in Blue Collar Union jobs earn more than the average College Educated woman so no wonder men are choosing not to run up all that college debt. Six, the Digital Divide is pretty good proxy for power. For instance, more than 80 of Internet Users are in industrialized countries and the fewest on any continent are in africa. It tells us something here at home. Though men and women are only about 2 apart in computer use, 67 of white nonhispanic households use the internet while only 45 of black households have access. It is about power and it is serious and it is polarizing. So lets hear it for the librarians who are only ones i know of fighting to democratize computer use. While were celebrating Marriage Equality victories, great, lets not forget that 51 of us in the United States say homosexuality should be accepted by society. That was the question in the Public Opinion poll. 69 of people in canada do. Are we not comparable at least to canada . And 83 , 83 of people in germany do. On campuses, students still ask me why the same groups oppose lesbians and birth control. I think many of us dont yet understand that the same groups oppose all forms of sexual expression that cannot end in conception. Sometimes i fear that our opposition understands our shared interest better than we do. Nine, do enough people understand that racism and sexism are intertwined and can only be uprooted together. To maintain racial differences in the long run, you have to control reproduction which means controlling the bodies of women. Those of the socalled superior group are often restricted and those of the socalled inferior group are also exploited . But both suffer. This is true for sex in india just as it is true for sex and race here. It is a universal, global truth that these two things can only be uprooted together. And still i think our common adversaries sometimes know our common interests better than we do. 10, heres a final shocker just for anybody who says its post anything. Violence against females in the world has reached such a peak due to preference which produces son surplus and daughter deficit to such practices as sex trafficking, to sexualize violence in war zone, to Child Marriage and pregnancy which is the biggest cause of teenage female deaths in the world. That for what may be the first time in Human History, females are no longer half the human race. On this space ship earth, there are 101. 3 men per 100 women so before we think of causes as distant, that cause as distant, let me also remind you that even by fbi statistics, if you add up all of the women in the United States who have been murdered by their husbands or boyfriends since 9 11, and then you add up all of the americans killed in 9 11 and in iraq and in afghanistan, and you combine all of those numbers, more women have been killed by their husbands and boyfriends since 9 11 than all of those americans who were murdered in 9 11, in afghanistan and in iraq. We pay a lot of attention to foreign terrorism but what about domestic terrorism . What about crimes in our houses, schools and movie theaters that are 99 committed by white, nonpoor men with nothing to gain from their crimes. Nothing to gain from their crimes. But who are addicted to what they got born into. They did not invent it but they became addicted to the idea of masculinity and control. Those crimes, i think, we might refer to as supremacy crimes which is their motive and really think about the why of it and the cost of the falsely created ideas of gender. But heres the good news. Thanks to a Landmark Book ive been talking to some of you about for a year at least called sex and world peace by Valerie Hudson, we can prove with 100 countries that the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent within itself or will use military violence against another country. The biggest cause is not poverty or lack of religion, its violence against females. It is that that is experienced first and that that normalizes all other subject object dominated, dominator, concurring superior, inferior relationships and in my list i havent included everything you know. Equal rights amendment would be nice if we had the constitution, dont you think . [ applause ] the fact that threequarters of all immigrants fighting a great battle in this town are women and children. You know all of those things. But those are ten. I just picked arbitrarily so i dare anyone to say this revolution is over because now we are onto the ways of denormalizing violence and dominance. Were understanding that well never have democratic countries unless we have democratic families. Were understanding that the idea of concurring nature and women is the problem and not the solution. Were returning to the original and natural paradigm of 95 of Human History which was the circle, not the pyramid, not the hierarchy. Our movement came from a period of dependence. We were dependent. So we naturally had to get up there and become independent and selfidentified and now were ready for a declaration of interdependance among our movements and within each other. We are discovering that we in this room and everyw