American Experience; 1964; Interview with Claire Bond Potter, Historian, part 2 of 2

I guess there's others in New York who spoke with Louis Manin, who wrote about the 50th anniversary that was going to be interesting. If you had to boil down what Ferdinand's most original insight was, what would you, in a nutshell, what would it be? Ferdinand's most original insight was that society, and in part by society she met men, but not only men, didn't take women seriously, and that because of that women didn't take themselves seriously. And was there some, there was a belief in the essential nature of women? Yes, there was a belief in the essential nature of women, and Ferdinand is not immune from that. Particularly if you look at her later writings, she trends more and more toward a notion of happiness as being embedded in relationship, in the role of a wife, in the role of a mother.

And even though Ferdinand sort of moved past her very famous homophobia in the 1960s, into a period in which she was able to admit that there were other ways of life that could make women happy, she really did hang on to an essentialist notion that her dreams, which were to have an intimate romantic long lasting relationship with another man, and good relations with children, that her dreams really should be everybody's dreams. What was her homophobia? Well, Ferdinand's homophobia was very much lodged in the popular Freudianism of her time. She takes on Freud in a big way.

She takes on Freud, but she also then makes certain kinds of assumptions that are deeply embedded in Freudian theory. So I think if we look at Betty Friedan's training as a psychologist, we can see that on the one hand, her feminist energy is in parts sparked by the way she sees women being portrayed in Freudian theory, and in psychoanalysis more generally, but she doesn't question, in the same ways, the ways in which Freudianism is used to promote what we might call official or state sanctioned homophobia in the 1950s and 60s. So she assumes, for example, that to be homosexual is to be in a state of arrested development. One of her criticisms of women being forced into a housewife role is that they take too much of their creative and intellectual energy and pour it into their children, which is likely she argues to produce male homosexuals. Here she's really working off a horrible reactionary book that's published in 1942 by Philip Wiley called Generation of Vipers, in which Wiley makes exactly the same charge that there is something called momism of women who are much too focused on home and family who are turning their son's gay.

No way. It is a fun read. It is a fun read, but it is of course for all of the ways in which Betty Friedan challenges the assumptions of popular culture. In relation to homophobia, she accepts the notion that homosexuality is not a natural state of being, and I think that's very much related to her very high focus on healthy marriage as the backbone of society. So just so because we've gone all over the place and had so many different fascinating threads of this, how did she define the feminine mystique? Well Betty Friedan's feminine mystique is often wrongly understood as something she invented or something that women sort of took on themselves.

In fact, in the book Betty Friedan defines the feminine mystique as something that's invented in popular culture and specifically by advertisers. And Friedan actually is a very early, very keen critic of consumerism. And she's sort of raised because she's a magazine writer. She is raised as a journalist in an atmosphere in which advertising is driving magazine production. So the expansion of opportunities for women in journalism is directly related to the expansion of advertising as an industry and to the expansion of products for the home. So Friedan is positioned particularly well to see this thing that she calls the feminine mystique. And I think she would define it as the way women are told to be. And she saw it as a trap, not as something that was good, which the advertisers see it as, that helping women be the way they should be was in fact a kind of public service. And advertisers talked about it this way. And Friedan takes that on and says, no, it's exactly the opposite. The feminine mystique is something that doesn't exist.

That women can never be and women can never have. And thus it becomes a trap for them. And it's a sort of pseudo scientific justification. Well, of course, as Friedan knew very well, having been trained as a social scientist, advertising was a faux science. There were anthropologists and sociologists and psychologists who were very heavily involved in the advertising industry at that time. So advertising like everything else, like the military, like sex education, like the broader view of education itself is very embedded in scientific ways of viewing things. Oh, there's something we have to toss in here. Betty Friedan in researching the feminine mystique herself creates a scientific basis of research for the book by doing a survey in 1957 of her class at Smith in time for their 15th anniversary.

So she sends out a survey to the entire Smith class from which she derives her data for the feminine mystique. The idea that women's primary goal was marriage really heavily embedded in the culture in 1964. The idea that marriage should be women's ultimate goal was indeed very heavily embedded in the culture in 1964. Women and older women as well, college presidents used to talk casually about women going to college to get their MRS degree, not a BA or a BFA.

And there were very few women's colleges in which the goal of marriage was not part of a woman's education. One exception to this, of course, is Bryn Mark College, whose president, M. Kerry Thomas, once famously said, only our failures marry. But I would also say that the goal of marriage accompanies by 1964 the real fear that women's colleges will be seen as hotbeds of lesbianism. So to the extent that marriage is being promoted as part of the way a woman is educated to be her true adult self, these colleges are also defending themselves. At a moment in which homophobia and redbaiting are beginning to decline, but it's not over yet. During the Civil Rights Bill, which we talked about before, there's a ploy by the Southern senators to try and instruct passage.

And they introduce the word sex. Well, the Southern senators who were trying to derail the Civil Rights Bill get what they think is a terrific idea, which is you insert sex into the bill. And that will make the bill the idea that women should be equal will make the bill so noxious to conservatives in the Republican party who are mostly northerners at this time, that it will defeat the bill. What happens is just the opposite. The insertion of sex into the bill begins to attract senators to the bill who otherwise would not have voted for it and so the bill passes. And suddenly we have this notion in law that is completely revolutionary that not only African-American people are entitled to full citizenship, but women are entitled to full citizenship. However, in the absence of a true feminist movement in 1964, nobody really knows what that means yet.

So the word sex stayed in the bill? It did, and it becomes the basis for other kinds of legislation that then begin to refine what it means for women to be equal. Of course, the most famous piece of legislation is Title IX, which is promoted by a Republican senator from Indiana, Birch By, in the 1970s, because what By comes to understand is that if women don't have equal opportunity to education, they don't have equal opportunity to citizenship. So that's really why By gets behind the bill. It's not inconsequential either that Birch By comes from a state, Indiana, where sports are a big deal. So Title IX's association with sports becomes part of his campaign because he sees athletic scholarships as a way that people without money can actually get education. And a good way to sell the concept. When we say that they inserted sex into the amendment, maybe just clarify that. What do they actually do?

And why do these conservative Republicans decide that that's a reason for supporting in that? Well, why do they? I mean, some of the women stand up and say, it's about time. Right, right. Right. I can't remember in my own mind because this is, I'm a little money- Yeah, no. That the poison pill that they think is going to become this, make the bill ready. Why it turns, turns it the other way. I think that's a really good question. It's a very good question.

Why the poison pill turns things in another direction. And I think, to some extent, we have to credit Betty Friedan and the feminine mystique for creating a conversation in 1964 about women's equality that actually put the question of women on the table. Part of what Betty Friedan is talking about in the feminine mystique is the invisibility of women. In the article she writes for TV Guide, she's talking about all of the ways in which women are the focus of advertisers, but nobody's willing to talk about them and nobody's willing to let them speak for themselves. So in 1964, the feminine mystique creates an atmosphere in which not only are women speaking for themselves, but that certain kinds of women like Patsy Mink, like Shirley Chism, like Pauling Murray, become visible in new ways. And if we look at this so-called poison pill as something that is attached to the civil rights bill, I think we see two things.

I think we see the ways in which women are still pretty invisible to Southern Democrats as a rights-bearing constituency and how women are still seen as acquiring their rights through men. I think we're also beginning to see a change among Republicans in the Upper Midwest and in California and in the Northeast in which women who are liberal and women who are conservative are beginning to have a much bigger voice in politics more generally. Interesting. Good. I think we've, I mean, I want to ask you about some other stuff and we want to some politics stuff, but I just want to make sure because that's really good circle around. We just have a time check. I told Andy I need to be out of here 10th or 78% college faculty, 90% of doctors, 97% of lawyers for men, you know, just that idea.

What's the, what's the hard-cult truth about about American culture in 1964? What are the statistics that really come to this? The hard-cult truth about American culture in 1964 is that a lot of women are working, but they're working in low-wage jobs and there are very few jobs available for professional women, people with good degrees. What you see in 1964 is women graduating from places like Smith and Radcliffe and moving to New York to get a job in publishing. What do they get? They get a job as a typist. A man graduates from Harvard or from Columbia and he goes into publishing and he's instantly an editor. So that the level at which educated women are coming into the workforce is considerably lower than the level of educated men coming into the workforce.

What you're also seeing in 1964 is the expectation and assumption that women will get married. So what's the point of giving them responsible jobs? What's the point of training them? What's the point of admitting them to medical school or for law school when they are taking the seat of a man who will actually need that job to support a family? Isn't there some moment in the TV guy thing where some guy has committed some crime that's going to ruin his career? I can't remember that. No, I'm blanking on it. But just the scenarios revealing. And the possibility of a man destroying his career by misstep is a big theme in popular culture in the 1960s. There's a wonderful television show for example called The Fugitive that is built around a man being mistaken for his wife's murderer and having to spend three or four television seasons clearing his name while he runs away from the police. So you can argue that people didn't take women's work seriously enough to imagine how a career could be derailed except by woman's choice to have a child.

And I think the assumption that women chose to have children really becomes something that Friedan and other feminists begin to organize around to undo. And it's one of the reasons that contraception and then abortion rights becomes essential to the feminist movement because it's not some kind of terrible misstep. It's a natural event that can't be prevented that's derailing women's careers. Let's take five. That's just really good. There's some of the other cultural things that are going on in 64 that are just against. There's something about that year where decisions have to be forced in the road to keep popping up. It's like the moment when decisions have to be made. Do you have sort of a broader sense of whether there's a kind of a cracks you're appearing in the consensus?

Historians talk about the 60s in a number of ways, but one of the things that frames the ways we discuss the 1960s is this idea of the good 60s in the bad 60s. And the good 60s is Woodstock and hippies in the summer of love and the bad 60s is Altamont and the war and the anti-war movement becoming violent and the collapse of SDS. In 1964, none of that has happened yet. In 1964, SDS is still a movement of college students trying to decide what they can do to create a more just world and what being in university has to do with that. In 1964, instead of the Rolling Stones doing album covers that feature battered women or album covers that feature Satan, the Rolling Stones are having a really difficult tour in the United States in which they're not really catching on.

And if you look at videos of them, they're standing in line wearing suits and ties and strumming on their guitars. They're not really the Rolling Stones yet. They haven't become this thing that challenges the status quo. If you look at the Beatles in 1964 who are having a fabulous tour and they're on Ed Sullivan and everybody loves them and they're called the mop tops. And they exemplify a kind of soft masculinity that is not only a little girlish but still very heterosexual, but actually the Beatles are actually wearing their girlfriends clothes. And so they're changing the way men dress. But what is considered long hair in 1964 is hair my length for men. In three or four years, the Beatles are going to be dropping acid, walking barefoot across Abbey Road, singing about how maybe Paul is dead.

But none of that has happened in 1964 yet. So there's a kind of romance with pop music and pop culture that suggests there can be a social revolution that unsettles things, but it doesn't really change or challenge American culture as dramatically as what will happen in a couple years. But are there, are there, you know, tremors? Oh, yeah. What are those sort of fault lines that are beginning to occur? There's certainly tremors in 1964. I think if we can look at the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a tremendous triumph and a triumph that we need to celebrate. In fact, it also becomes a moment in which Southern massive resistance to desegregation takes a turn to avoiding desegregation by other means. So that for example, in 1964, we see that what becomes the privatization of schools has already begun by the creation of what are called segregation academies and Christian academies where white people can send their children without worrying that their children are going to be sitting next to the children of black Americans.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson is trying to decide whether to commit to Vietnam or pull out of Vietnam. And of course, as we know, in 1965, tragically, he commits the United States to a war in Vietnam that will affect everything. But underneath it all, the Tunkin Gulf is there in 1964. Absolutely. Matt Marrow writes these memos about escalation. So it's almost like, as you say, the actual fallout is maybe a year or two down the road. The fallout about Vietnam is definitely a year or two down the road. But it's in 1965 in which the people that David Halberstam called the best and the brightest are now congregated in Washington creating a policy in Vietnam that is going to not only expand the United States commitment to that war is going to expand the draft.

It is going to exacerbate racial tension in the United States by pulling more and more men of color into the Army while white men get deferments to go to college and to graduate school and are able to devise ever more elaborate ways of staying out of the Army. 1964 is. I meant 64. Yeah. So just just give me the beginning of that. Okay. Okay. 1964 is a moment at which the people who David Halberstam called the best and the brightest are gathered in Washington in the Johnson administration and are devising a Vietnam policy that will become fully apparent the following year. And it's not just sort of turmoil in SDS and in the Johnson administration. There's there's revolution in the air on the right. Yeah.

Tell me about that. Yeah. 1964 is a moment in which two very different movements are becoming more militant. One, of course, is the black civil rights movement. And we see the emergence of black power specifically around the riots that are happening in northeastern cities in the early 1960s. Black power is is seizing on those and pointing to the ways in which racism is not confined to the South and in which northern cities and police forces and governments are themselves racist. Right. So we so we see a militants in the black civil rights movement in 1964 that will cause the movement to split and cause the creation of militant groups like the black panthers. I rock. That happens. You can feel it. I mean, you can feel it because community organizing in northern cities is changing because of the violence in those cities and the violence of police against black youth in those cities.

That's creating and capacity to organize in a more militant way. Martin Luther King isn't greeted as a savior everywhere. Martin Luther King is not being greeted as a savior everywhere. And there are questions given the amount of violence that is being wreaked on black youth in cities. Whether a nonviolent response is truly a way to a quality or if equality is the issue, if in fact a kind of black national separatism is really the road to take. And Bob Moses is in Oxford out in the Midwest. He's deciding that the choice has to be made about organizing in Mississippi. Yes. Bob Moses is definitely. Oh, really? That's great. Well, and actually can I shift back to women for a second. One of the things you see in 1964 is not just criticism from a militant left of Martin Luther King, but you see criticism from Pauli Murray who wants to know why women were not included in the March on Washington in the major speeches.

And that becomes a theme for feminism, which is that an American left is coalescing around male stars. And there's an increasing desire to push women out of the way so that when women want to take their place at something like the March on Washington or the anti war marches later on in the 1960s, they're pushed aside, they're mocked, they're told to get back to the kitchen. A whole series of things that Betty Friedan treats a lot more gently in the feminine mystique, becoming acted on the left in some very vicious ways that are intended to marginalize women as political actors. What does Stokely Carmichael say? Stokely Carmichael when asked what should be the position of women in the movement says position of women should be prone.

This creates a tremendous reaction among women and some men at the sexism of the black power movement. Now paradoxically, at the same time, conservatives are organizing. Well, of course, we talk about Betty Friedan's feminine mystique as the big book of 1963, 64, but there's another big book too. And it's kind of a little book, which is Phyllis Schlafly's a choice, not an echo. Phyllis Schlafly emerges as a second kind of female media star in 1964 when she gets behind the Goldwater campaign. Publishes a choice, not an echo, which is about 90 pages long, but it's a pamphlet about how politics are run in the United States, why conservatives are constantly being shouted down in the Republican Party,

what a proper conservative foreign policy would look like, what a proper conservative domestic policy would look like, and Phyllis Schlafly and her husband Fred print up a couple thousand of these books under a new press that they create, the Paramarket Press, which is named after a priest who is martyred in Eastern Europe. And they create this press, and they publish this book, and they mail it out of their garage. I mean, it's really, it's the first direct mail effort among conservatives to try and create a coalition on the right wing that can be powerful in national politics, and Phyllis Schlafly gets behind Goldwater. The book, a choice not an echo, is possibly one of the first examples, well actually the second example, after Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery, of a book that was privately printed and privately marketed and became a bestseller.

And it becomes a bestseller both because Phyllis Schlafly and her husband Fred are political entrepreneurs, but it also becomes a bestseller because conservatives are organizing particularly in California, and they're organizing around the rising political star of Ronald Reagan, and they're organizing at the level of the neighborhood. And this is very interesting in relation to women, because what conservatives do is they don't assume that women who are housewives and mothers are dumb. And so conservative organizers go around neighborhoods, many of which are filled with people who have been in the military, have settled in California to work for what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex. They've settled down in these new suburbs, in cul-de-sacs, and so on, that Betty Friedan derives.

And this becomes the organizing terrain for not just conservatives, but for women who will be the foot soldiers of the conservative movement. And for Dan, I mean, Schlafly, you know, she embraces Goldwater as this insurgent animals. Schlafly embraces Goldwater as an insurgent, in part because of the theory she develops about why conservatives can't succeed in the Republican Party. And she organizes it around another catchphrase, right? If the feminine mystique is a catchphrase for a liberal feminism, the catchphrase for a conservative feminism or a conservative women's movement is this idea of the king-makers. That there are people who you can't see, wealthy people, and of course she targets the Rockefellers as prime movers and shakers, who, despite all the best efforts of a conservative base, consistently shove conservative candidates out of the way in favor of moderate or liberal Republicans. And of course, one of the things that gives Schlafly traction with a choice not an echo is the disastrous candidacy of Richard Nixon, in which Richard Nixon actually almost gets to be president and fails.

And he's the vice president of a phenomenally successful Republican president, Eisenhower. And so Schlafly can point to that and say, you know, he failed because Republican conservatives wouldn't vote for him. And we need to candidate the Republican conservatives can organize around, but most importantly, we need a chance as conservatives to be heard within our own party. And we can't be heard because of these Northeastern king-makers. Can you imagine that by an echo? Yeah. I mean, what she was arguing is that in a choice not an echo, Schlafly argues that conservatives within the Republican party are constantly being told to echo what the king-makers want. And what she wants is for conservatives in the Republican party to be given a choice and to be the choice. Great. And how does Barry Goldwater fill that to the bill?

Barry Goldwater is an important candidate in part because no one expects him to become the presidential candidate. And he becomes the presidential candidate because of a concerted grassroots effort by people like Phyllis Schlafly. He becomes the candidate because Ronald Reagan, who has national political aspirations himself, gets behind the candidacy in California. Ronald Reagan agrees to run the Goldwater for President campaign in California. And in fact, many people have argued that it's Ronald Reagan, who is really responsible for Goldwater success because he makes a speech. The speech that he had been making for some time about the importance of getting government out of the way of business and the importance of a tradition of American individualism and freedom in making America great.

Ronald Reagan's handlers call this the speech. And he not only goes around giving it to businessmen and larger audiences of academics and so on, but he actually records it. And it becomes a paid television show that the Republican party begins to run on television stations around the country. It's one of the first, as you might say, political action committee productions in which a spontaneous speech is actually an ad. It does magnificently. It does very well for Barry Goldwater. Ronald Reagan, saying, and obviously Reagan had been a television star. He'd been a movie star before that. He was governor of California. He has a tremendous, not yet. So let's roll that back. Ronald Reagan has a tremendous television presence. He's been a television star. He's been a movie star.

He is on track to become governor of California. He commands the camera in a way that very few political candidates know how to do. Jack Kennedy knew how to do it. Richard Nixon didn't know how to do it. So television is becoming increasingly important. Goldwater also has that kind of television presence. He's got this craggy look. He's aggressive. He doesn't pull his punches. His speech at the Republican convention in which he says extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. He just belts those words out and the crowd starts to roar. So in many ways, Goldwater paves the way for Reagan. I would say, as a Western candidate who can sort of play that cowboy role in politics, but also speak as politicians are having to learn to speak because of the expansion of a television environment. And there's a famous ad that runs after Goldwater wins the nomination. One of the most famous commercials ever run in America.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson takes a huge risk. And we have to understand that, of course, advertising agencies had really come into politics increasingly in the television age. How to position, how to use what they know about television and culture to persuade a voter. So Lyndon Johnson takes a huge risk and authorizes what becomes known as the daisy ad. Which is a little girl, and it's not inconsequential. It's a little girl who's blonde and white, who is endangered by nuclear war. And a little girl is in a field and she's plucking petals off a daisy and saying, one, two, three, four. And then what is superimposed over her voice is the kind of mission control voice that everybody's gotten to know because of the space program going, nine, eight, seven, six. And then we see a huge mushroom cloud engulfing the picture. And then at the end of the ad, the voiceover says, can you afford to take this chance?

And the ad is so powerful. It's only shown once. Yes, it's so controversial. The Goldwater campaign comes roaring out and says, this is unfair. This is an absurdity. This is an outrage. But the power of this ad is such that it only has to be shown once because then it gets talked about and talked about and talked about. And Stanley Kubrick has set the terrain for this whole thing as well, right? With Dr. Strange Love. Yes. Stanley Kubrick's movie, Dr. Strange Love, or how I learned to love the bomb, makes the possibility of an accidental nuclear war real for many people. That possibility is only made more tangible during the Cuban Missile Crisis in which the United States and the Soviet Union are facing off appear to be on the brink of nuclear war in Cuba.

And in fact, the idea that something like this could happen by accident, that you need a really skilled president to control nuclear warfare is only enhanced by the stories that are told about the Cuban Missile Crisis afterwards. To the extent that Jack Kennedy's reputation is being burnished in 1964, his tragic death in 1963 means that by 1964, people are already writing his legacy, Arthur Schlesinger, publishes a book about Kennedy in 1964, William Mansfield publishes a book about Kennedy in 1964. So the histories of Kennedy are already being written then. Lyndon Johnson ceases on this to claim a kind of authority as Kennedy's heir that the Daisy ad really expresses. And the idea is, can you trust an amateur? Can you trust somebody who's never actually been by that red phone to control a nuclear arsenal?

And that's another reason why the loose talk and periodic extremism label sticks to Goldwater, because the culture is really sensitive about it. Well, the extremism label sticks to Goldwater in part for reasons that are because of his own unwillingness to compromise. For example, early on, the John Birch Society is associated with the Goldwater campaign, and he sort of goes back and forth about whether he's going to disown them or not. And finally, Ronald Reagan does that for him in California. But Goldwater doesn't see any reason why he has to disassociate himself from extremist members of his party. Similarly, Goldwater seems to be running against the grain of history when he votes against the Civil Rights Act. And he does so for reasons that are about his libertarianism.

And he keeps explaining that to people, and they just don't see what he's done as anything but racist. And finally, I think we have to look at 1964 as that moment that's a turning point in the war in Vietnam. How is the United States going to address the problem that the war in Vietnam is being lost? And Goldwater becomes his own enemy in that regard by not pulling his punches because he's asked, would you use nuclear weapons in China? And he says, I would use every weapon at my command. And they say, no, no, no. Senator Goldwater, would you use nuclear weapons? And instead of saying, no, he says, all I can tell you is when I'm done with Vietnam, it could look like a parking lot. And so the daisy ad plays into legitimate fears of who Goldwater might be as a military leader.

Excellent. Suddenly there are these black women in evening gowns singing about burning, burning fever. What are the screams signify? And how do they represent a kind of moment of change? The supreme's represent black artists taking control of their own music. Prior to superstar groups that were groomed by Barry Gordy, of which the supreme's were really the first, black music comes to white Americans through white artists, artists like Karl Perkins, like Elvis Presley. In fact, the British bands that begin to come to the United States with the Beatles in 1964 and the Stones in 1965, they see themselves as doing black R&B.

And in fact Keith Richards famously said in his autobiography that he believed by the time they came to the United States that he had actually become black, that everybody saw him as white, but because he knew the music so well, he was really a black person by then. So the supreme's taking the stage and taking control of their own music is a moment in which black artists not only begin to own it, but begin to integrate the media, integrate radio stations, integrate television. You see television shows like American bands stand, not only begin to have black artists on them, but to have interracial dancing in the audience, and so on. So these bands are really breaking through. And they're also doing something really interesting with sexual elements. They're doing something extremely.

Well, of course, black female sexuality in American culture has always been very fraught. Black women were too often seen as overly sexual, as sexualizing the public sphere, as corrupt in some way. So that when Barry Gordy puts women on stage, black women on stage, doing music that is about love and romance and sex, Martha and the Vendela's do a song called Heat Wave. Well, the song's about a Heat Wave in the weather, but it's also about other kinds of heat, too. So when Gordy is doing this, he very cleverly chooses a mode in which all of the movements are very controlled, in which the dancing is as important as the singing, in which it's mildly sexual, but so choreographed as to exude control and beauty, and putting women in evening gowns to really make them look like queens. And so it's a kind of elevation of music that is highly sexual in its content, highly sexual in its content, but also elevating it to a new level of cultural elegance.

Yes, and acceptance. Three more minutes. Okay. Big picture questions. Yeah. 1964, it's the year seen, it seems to be the year of choice. Choice non-acto, gold letters film that never gets shown is called Choice. All these forks in the world. Is that what's going on? Is that how we can look at 1964? I think 1964 is a year of choice for women, for blacks, for gays and lesbians, in which the question is not, can we keep the world we have, but what are we going to do with the world we're getting? Americans are looking toward desegregation. They're looking toward addressing poverty in very serious ways. They are looking at a world in which gays and lesbians are increasingly coming out of the closet and being publicly visible and being written about in the media.

So the question is not, can we go back to the world of the 50s where everybody is locked down in their houses and everything is pretty? The question is, we now know a lot more about what our world is, what are we going to do about it? And it seems like this is the moment when things that have been percolating for a long time housewives who are trapped civil rights issues, which won't get resolved because they're filibustered away. Right, this is the year when finally the decisions start to be made, be it not? Yeah. I think 1964 is the year that decisions start to be made for a couple of reasons. The most important of which is Lyndon Johnson suddenly becoming president and having the ability to define certain kinds of political futures that he never expected to have to define. I think if you look at the Civil Rights Act, for example, Lyndon sends Lady Bird Johnson to the South on a tour of Southern States, the white woman touring Southern States that are in the throes of conflict or desegregation trying to get that civil rights movement passed, trying to get a white middle class to join with her in progress.

Lady Bird Johnson visits 45 speeches in five days at one point. Can you imagine Jackie Kennedy doing that? So I think this accident, this horrible accident of Jack Kennedy being assassinated means that a political future is being delivered to a far more aggressive politician who's willing to make certain kinds of choices that Kennedy appears was not willing to make. Do you want to call Kennedy as an accident? No, I really don't actually. It's the issue of his assassination that triggers this. Kennedy's assassination really triggers a whole series of things in 1964 that might not have been triggered had he not been tragically assassinated in Dallas.

Why should we remember 1964? Why is it important to be looking back at his role? It's important to remember 1964 in part because 50 years later, we're faced with similar choices. What are we going to do about poverty? What are we going to do about education? What are we going to do about racial inequality? What are we going to do about the fact that women who have achieved to so much still seem so unable to move forward because of a lack of child care, because of a lack of access to birth control, because of a lack of access to equal pay. We are now 50 years later at another moment of choice, much as people were in 1964, and we need to ask ourselves the question, what are we going to do about it? Is the partisan divide that began with Goldwater's ascendancy, the world that we now live in?

Goldwater candidacy certainly created a moment of realignment in both parties. It created a moment in which gradually all conservatives would move into the Republican Party, and all liberals would move into the Democratic Party. So to the extent that in 1964, around the Civil Rights Act, you could create a coalition of liberals in both parties to pass that act. You can't do that anymore. Right, we need to get 30 seconds of silence. We'll room tone for Claire Potter for a second. And room tone, that was fantastic.

Mary King and Casey Hayden were longtime activists in SNCC, and as part of that Civil Rights activism, they began to acquire consciousness that in many ways women were treated like men as blacks were treated by whites. Okay, perfect. So we need...