I was having breakfast with one of my friends the other day, and I mentioned in the course of the meal that I forget everything now. I think the issue came up because I blanked on the name of her son whom I have known since he was two. And I didn’t even feel bad about that because that morning I had forgotten my own home telephone number.

And it was almost like I had admitted this to her because she is one of us. You know what I mean by

that. A lot of us here today are “one of us.” I mean, we share the same great educational backgrounds, the same terrifi c jobs, the same privileged existences, the same wonderful fami-lies. We shop at the same stores. We all buy black pants.

We run into one another on the street or at bookstores. I wind up talking a lot to big groups of women like us, and I have to say, one of my small securities is knowing that if I had gotten here today, and I had forgotten my reading glasses, there would probably be at least a few people in the audience who would have the same drugstore magnifi ca-tion that I do. In fact, I can test it: Can I have the 2.0’s raise your hands? See, us.

One of the things that all of us have in common is that we have lived through the greatest social and political revolution in the last cen-tury in this country, and that is the

w w w . m a d e i r a . o r g

Nota BeneA newsletter of The Madeira School

Thank you for that generous introduction. I feel that I have the life that you heard described to you for two reasons: because I was educated at a women’s college, a place where I developed

strength, confi dence, and courage, and because of the teachers who shaped my intellectual and spiritual life during the course of my education. If not them, not me; it’s as simple as that. I am who I am because of teachers and because of schools for girls and women, and I’m not sure if I can ever pay either group back enough for the life that they have given me.

Anna Quindlen speaks with Madeira alumae and students at our recent Centennial Celebration about the changes she’s seen in her lifetime and the changes to come for theirs.

Talking ’bout a Revolution

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rebirth of feminism, and the subse-quent, enormous changes in the lives of women like us, and our daughters, and our granddaughters. When lots of us were growing up, there weren’t any girls in Little League. There were no altar girls in Catholic churches. Most law fi rms had never had female partners. Most hospi-tals had never had female residents. There were no women in the Senate or on the Supreme Court. There had never been a woman on the Supreme Court or in the Senate.

I could never have imagined how different the world would be by the time I was past 50. I could never have imagined that we would come to completely take for granted female police and fi refi ghters, female rabbis and ministers, female sena-tors and judges, female partners and surgeons, female editors, and female columnists.

Just to illustrate how much our world has changed, I’m going to give you character sketches of three girls. The fi rst had parents who came to the United States from Italy. They were strict and they were sure about certain things, so the girl was sure about them too. She knew that there was money for college—which there wasn’t, but, if there was, it was her brother who would get in, even though her art teacher said that she was very talented and she should go to art school.

But her parents expected her to get married, which is what she did right after high school; and to have children, which she did, fi ve in all; and to never work outside of her home, and she did that too. But she kept in her bedroom jewelry drawer the supplies for watercoloring. And when she sent them to school with bagged lunches on Friday, sometimes she drew pictures on the shells of their hard-boiled eggs. She had other dreams, bigger dreams; she never spoke of them, and neither did many of the other women in her generation.

The second girl was her daughter. She was raised as her father’s oldest son. When she got B’s, they told her they should be A’s, and when she had A’s, they asked why they weren’t A+’s. She always knew that

she would go to college. She also knew that there were large colleges that she couldn’t attend because they were boys-only: Princeton, Yale, and West Point. She looked around her at the people who ran the country, and they were male, all of them. But she decided that that was just too bad, and to show them, she would be so much better than the guys that no one would be able to take her place.

The third girl is her daughter. She is 17 years old and she lives in an utterly different world than the one in which her mother grew up. She takes for granted that women work and that they help run the world. It would never occur to her for a moment that her brothers are more entitled than she to do anything, from college to a career in science, law, medicine, or anything else.

Well, what I just sketched out for you is a family experience. The frus-trated artist was my mother. The girl who was pushed by her father is me. And the youngest is my daughter. I remember once coming to pick her up for take-our-daughters-to-work day when she was 11 when she spent the day with my friend, the federal judge. And in the cab I said, Maria, do you ever think you might want to be a boy? And without even think-

They see Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. They see Eileen Collins in space, and Shirley Tilghman at Princeton. They see the head, and so many other people in this room, and they have no doubt that you are as important as your male counterpart.

That is progress. That is real progress.

One of the things that all of us have in common is that we have lived through the greatest social and political revolution in the last century in this country . . .

3

ing for a moment, she replied, oh, no, mom, it would be too boring.

I am so glad my daughter has come of age in a time when being male seems tedious to her. In a way, I have to confess that when I was younger, being female sometimes did to me. I’m glad she was able to choose that day among my female friends to decide whether to go to work with the judge, the prosecutor, the agent, fi lm critics, or the televi-sion anchor. I have a daughter who has grown up with precious little evidence that women cannot, and do not, hold any jobs equivalent to their male counterparts. She has personally met two female astronauts, a female general, and a fi rst lady, who became a junior senator.

She has never had a male doctor. In fact, one day, years ago, before she was born, I was driving her two older brothers home from a visit to their pediatrician, who is one of my long-time friends. And Christopher turned to Quinn, I remember, and said, I might want to be a doctor when I grow up. And Quinn said, don’t be silly, Christopher; only girls can be doctors.

Now, why do I return to the personal in this way? It is because we know the world the way we see it. That is what school teaches us. As a child, I really saw no women in posi-tions of outside power and authority. The money the women I knew had, was given to them by men. The position they held was given to them by men. And believe me, for a girl who was outspoken, intelligent, and implicitly insurrectionary, that was a powerful reason to think that the world needs changing.

But that is not the world the girls I know, the girls I love, the girls you teach and raise and see around you every day, see around them. They see Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. They see Eileen Collins in

space, and Shirley Tilghman at Princ-eton. They see the headmistress, and so many other people in this room, and they have no doubt that you are as important as your male counter-part. That is progress. That is real progress.

It’s also a problem. I mean, where does the social movement go when it has been enormously successful but not yet completely transforma-tive? It’s an interesting question, and we’re going to be living the answer on all kinds of fronts. It’s easier, for example, to sell, in a sense, a labor union movement when young wom-en sewing in the Triangle Shirt Waist factory die because the windows are barred, than when people on auto-mobile assembly lines are making an hourly wage three or four times higher than minimum wage.

It’s easier to argue against racial prejudice when a young black man who whistles at a white woman can be murdered with immunity, than when the question is how many black kids are going to get into Auburn and whether the black son of

the doctor is given a leg up over the white daughter of the cop. And it’s far easier to argue for the systematic devaluing of women and society if women are denied the right to own property, take the bar exam, or say no to their husbands than it is when women appear, at least from the outside, for all intents and purposes, to be participants in virtually every walk of life.

When prejudice, bigotry, and injustice are entrenched, egregious, and sanctioned both overtly and covertly, I think that big muscle remedies are required. That is, the lawsuit, amendment, the marches, the legislation.

But the women’s movement now is more often in the small-muscle-group area, and it’s also a place where the intimacy of the revolution becomes the nexus of real change, which means that in some ways, it is in the most diffi cult part of the actual transformation. It seems to me that the stage of the women’s movement that comes next takes place not out in the world but at home, in chang-

But the women’s movement now is more often in the small-muscle group area, and it’s also a place where the intimacy of the revolution becomes the nexus of real change, which means that in some ways,

it is in the most diffi cult part of the actual transformation.

4

ing the hearts and minds of men on deeply personal, rather than political, levels because as long as the revolu-tion has transformed the world for only half the population, it can’t really call itself a revolution at all.

Most representative of this for me is the fact that when I speak in public like this, I am almost always asked by some nice young woman how it is possible to combine work and family. But in all of this time, I have never been asked that question by a young man, not once. And that speaks to the fact that the battle that hasn’t been won isn’t the recognition or the need for equity by corporations or judges; it is the fairness principle that is stored in the DNA of daily life for both men and women.

I mean, girls wonder today how they will juggle work and family. Boys, by and large, still fi gure they’ll juggle work and family by getting married. We still start from differ-ent places. In some ways, the vast changes that we have all embraced

have made the differences even more apparent. We’re always telling girls that they can be both leaders and nurturers, both achiever and friend, both worker and mother. Girls are being told all of the time that they can do everything. But why aren’t we talking to our sons more about becoming more like us, about the joys of parenting, about being good friends to other men, and about hon-oring their emotions, as well as their ability to win money and power?

We’re still in a position where we usually ask men to do half of every-thing, just like the bad old days. Boys don’t need to spend a day in offi ces to learn that they are taken seriously in the world of work; they always have been. Women are just learning to be. Maybe our boys need to learn that to sustain life is at once the most rewarding and the most arduous work we ever do, so that they will either want to embrace it in its fullness or at least adequately honor those who make it their lifestyle.

The young women today aren’t going to hit a glass ceiling the way their predecessors have. They are not going to know what it’s like to watch while their fathers and husbands go out to vote for president and they have to stay at home. They are not going to know what it is like to be denied entry to West Point or even to basic training.

Virtually, all of the fi rsts are gone now except for the fi rst female presi-dent and the fi rst female pope. And we might get the fi rst one during our lifetime. Young women today are going to hit the glass ceiling at home when almost overnight, the world implodes when they fi nd themselves transformed from a junior executive with the world in their palm pilot to a home-bound mother with two kids under the age of three and oatmeal in their hair.

Your average young woman will do that when she realizes that she has wound up with two full-time jobs and her male counterpart has not, because of unfi nished business about the division of those tasks formally denoted as women’s work. Changing that is a far harder sell for march-ing in the streets. It’s a harder sell because it takes place on an indi-vidual level. It’s not hard to call your co-workers on assumptions made because of gender, but to come home from work night after night and wave the fl ag over a colicky baby or a stack of dirty dishes. As a nurse said to me in the hospital when I had to fi ght to have my legal name on my kid’s birth certifi cate because it was different than my husband’s, “This is where most of you girls fold.”

And it is. Arlie Russell wrote a book some years ago called The Sec-ond Shift, in which she interviewed couples and found out that women did 92 percent of the household chores along with their paid jobs. That is a lopsided fi gure.

Girls wonder today how they will juggle work with family. Boys, by and large, still fi gure they’ll juggle work and family by getting married.

5

Now, I know I complain all of the time about young women in Amer-ica, young women like the women you’re educating here. They don’t get it; they don’t understand how hard we worked to get here. They don’t understand how bad things were. They don’t understand that you used to have to keep your mouth shut if your boss made a grab at you or that no matter how smart you were or where you had gone to col-lege, the fi rst question you were asked in a job interview was, can you type.

But, how in the world do we ex-pect them to feel the utterly changed tenor of the times any more than I can truly feel what it was like for my grandparents to raise nine children during the Depression. Of course I know the history, and at home I heard the stories, but personal experi-ence is often the truth part.

These young women will learn from personal experience that a dou-ble standard in who we are and what we do still exists. But they’ll learn something else in many cases, and it’s probably the most important part of the next stage of feminism. They may learn, as I did, that child rearing too can be utterly transformative. And that the division of labor in which men hand it off to their female counterparts is a bad deal for men. Young women will learn that power and infl uence with no countervailing forces, no intimacy, no connection to others, is for many women, no time for life at all.

In other words, these young women will slip into the world of “difference feminism,” which is quite different from that of “equity femi-nism.” Difference feminism is still tough for even some of us feminists to swallow. I mean, we started out with the notion of equality. We can do anything they can. And because people are not terribly sophisticated about semantics, that word “equality”

turned into “the same.”And yet, there is a fair amount of

research that suggests, at least for the time being, women bring something different to the table than men do. For example, some years ago the Center for the American Women in Politics at Rutgers University found that even when you held constant area of the country or level or con-servative or liberal or Republican or Democrat, women offi ce holders behave differently than their male counterparts.

They are more likely to bring

ordinary people into the process, to have the process take place in the public eye, to open it up to let the sunshine in, and to embrace the issues – it used to be known as women’s issues, but they are now the cutting-edge issues of the new millennium – education, welfare, childcare. That sounded to me not like what women bring to the table but what we all wish our elected offi cials would bring to the table. It was just different.

Now, I want to be careful about how broad a brush I use here. I re-member one night I was at an event in which one woman suggested that if a female president had been the leader of our country three years ago, she would have taken a deep breath,

called together our allies, and worked out a diplomatic solution instead of engaging Iraq. And when I heard that, I started to nag her about how that might not be possible, that to refute the notion of gender weak-ness, she might have felt even more compelled to use force—that is, it is sometimes different for pioneers to work outside of the box, when some-one—when suddenly one of the guys at the table said pointedly, do you really think that is what Margaret Thatcher would have done?

And keeping in mind that we are

all different, sometimes we are also afraid to acknowledge differences because stereotype is still attached when we talk about differences in who we are and what we are able to do. Along those lines, I was particu-larly thinking for obvious reasons lately about a conversation I had with Ann Richards the month before the gubernatorial election in Texas in 1994.

At the time, she was the most popular elected offi cial in America. She had statistically the highest pop-ularity ratings possible for an elected offi cial outside of a forced totalitarian state. And I was just checking in to ask how things were going, and she said, well, darling, I think we might lose this thing. And I said, what? I

women … ask new questions and fashion new paradigms out of what they bring to the table and [do] not just go along with the old ones.

6

mean, that is impossible; how could that be? And she crooned, well, darling, I’m soft on crime.

Yeah, the major difference of opinion I had with her was that she signed more death warrants than any governor before her in Texas history. And Texas was executing more people than any other state. And I reminded her of that fact. But she reminded me of the one that trumped all others when it came to issue like crime. She sighed, but darling, I’m a girl. And a month later, popularity still soaring, she lost to George W. Bush.

So I hate the all-women approach that ghettoizes us, just as surely as if we were wrapped in pink. I can’t get caught in that trap in which I enumerate our differences to suggest our superiority: nurturing, fl exible, collaborative. Those are some of the words that have been used to de-scribe us, and have been used by us to describe one another. But of course, as you can see by looking around, we are not all the same, and we don’t know which of our attributes are societally determined by a way of rearing young women on its way out, and which are somehow riding the backs of an X chromosome.

What we do know is that so far the difference in principle doesn’t necessarily need to go the other way. We know that there are some leadership situations in which bring-ing people together is necessary, yet

somehow, male leaders who are not so skilled in those areas have man-aged to prevail. I remember once speaking to a group of surgeons about the need to treat the patient and not the fi le, to make the human con-nection, and afterwards having one trio of guys who practiced together rush up to inform me that they heard me, they got what I was saying, and when they got back home, they were going to hire a woman for their offi ce specifi cally to deal with patients.

I mean, it’s so true that, as we so often have to do, we often have to be all things to all people to be consid-ered real leaders, to be as tough as nails, and as warm as toast all at the same time. For the woman leader who is seen as man-ish, or conversely the one who is seen as a softy, there is still a double standard, and it’s always suggested to me when I look over my desk at the New Yorker cartoon that hangs there. A king and a queen are sitting side by side on their thrones, and the queen is complaining, yes, but when a woman beheads some-one, they call her a bitch.

If we are different, we frequently tried to minimize those differences over the decade in which we began to live lives out in the world. We even went through a regrettable period early on when there were a lot of us who wore those fl oppy little ties with our suits. You can tell what we were supposed to do indeed by the language: one of the boys; team

player. The message was clear: As long as they could forget that, dar-ling, we were girls, we were okay.

But there comes a critical moment in institutions when the percentage of the disenfranchised reaches a mass great enough so that they no longer feel the need to—for lack of a better term—to pass. And that percentage, research says, is around 20 percent, and it is where we are in many cor-porations and fi rms, and even in the military, and not quite anymore on the Supreme Court.

And what that means is that women ask new questions and fashion new paradigms out of what they bring to the table and do not just go along with the old ones. Well, once, we simply wanted parity; now we are strong and powerful enough to want change and ways of doing things that we know from what we bring would be better not just for ourselves, but for our organizations, our country, and our children. After all, the old traditional rules men play by have not always worked very well, have they?

That is why a new ethic is in order, not because we want it, but because the old ethic has not been very successful. I mean, most of us would agree that our governments have signifi cant shortcomings in all areas, ranging from the economy to defense to social welfare. The ways in which our corporations are run often seem to create massive com-pensation for executive positions and minimum connection to consumers, so that today’s booming business is tomorrow’s bankruptcy.

Yet the values of big business too often remain old-fashioned values of hierarchical management and rigid arrangements. If female managers are more collaborative—and sev-eral studies show they are—then all workers benefi t when women help set the agenda. But in many companies, that model is not rewarded. In many

we often have to be all things to all people to be considered real leaders, to be as tough as males, and as warm as toast all at the same time.

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And if those times of changes are unremarked by the younger women among us, the women who are students here today, well, that is inevitable.

They have to learn—I am so thrilled to say—to live with ordinary everyday equality.

tenure decisions, teaching is not well rewarded. In many hospitals, patient contact is not rewarded.

A recent study on women in sci-ence showed that despite what any university president might suggest, it is not that women can’t do science; it’s outmoded institutional structures in academia that most often stand in their way. A female standard may be better in countless areas, but it’s still too long been devalued by custom.

Instead of choice, we have got a new set of set-in-stone rules and roles. The woman who somehow simultaneously works two full time jobs – one in the offi ce, one at home. Instead of transformation, material-ism; instead of justice for all, privilege for the privileged class. The greatest failure of feminism is probably that it has not brought poor women with it.

And I think there is sometimes a sense of frustration and impatience because the revolution of the mind, and home, and heart has often not matched the revolution of the courts, the workplace, and the outside world. In my mind the expectations, assumptions, and reality of what the world can offer in the way of exis-tence and opportunity are radically different for the girl who paved the way a hundred years ago than they are for the girls who come here today.

A hundred years’ difference, only a few generations, and you are talking about deeply transformative systemic change in virtually every level of society, even where we feel that more change is necessary. In one genera-tion alone, we have moved from a population of women who are far less educated and representative in the workforce than men, to a workforce that is half female and a college population that by the year 2010 will probably be 60 percent women in this country.

Last year I spoke to a conference of senior women executives at the

Xerox Corporation. That confer-ence began just twenty years ago with seventeen women. The gathering I spoke to had 400 senior managers. They were addressed by the CEO of their company, who happens to be a female. I mean, just looking at Anne Mulcahy and thinking what life would have held for her if she had been born fi fty years earlier, I had to think that the women’s movement is really about women’s waste, the waste of talent, the waste to society, the waste of women who had certain gifts and goals and had to suppress them.

The point was not to take over male terrain, but to change it because it badly needed changing. Things simply did not work. The depth and breadth of that transformation is what refl ects the success of the movement, and by that measure, women are doing very well, and so is everyone else. Fathers take a far larger role in the daily raising of their kids. Companies feel more neces-sity to be sensitive to medical and family emergencies. Sex crimes are prosecuted. So is domestic violence.

Patients demand more personal care from their doctors. Readers demand more human interest stories from newspapers and magazines.

A research organization that tracks women at work has reported that “Fortune 500 corporations with the most women in top positions yielded on average a 35 percent high-er return on equity than those with the fewest female corporate offi cers.” Even if you want to make money, you have got to bring us in.

And if those times are unre-marked by the younger women among us, the women who are stu-dents here today, well, that is inevi-table. They have to learn—I am so thrilled to say—to live with ordinary everyday equality. Female astronauts and secretaries of states, and mothers in their news broadcast, the muse-ums, and magazines. As a mother of someone who would have been in a madhouse in the ’50s, I feel blessed to live in this time for women. I only wish we had gotten started earlier so my mother could have gone to art school. Thank you very much.

Anna Quindlenspeaks at Madeira

THE MADEIRA SCHOOL

8328 Georgetown PikeMcLean, VA 22102-1200www.madeira.org

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