Drew Gilpin Faust, NECESSARY TROUBLE: Growing Up at Midcentury
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[1:03]Drew Gilpin Fast is the author of Necessary Trouble Growing Up at Mid-Century.
[1:07]Drew is Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard University, where
[1:12]she served as president from 2007 to 2018.
[1:16]She came to Harvard in 2001 as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
[1:20]after 25 years in the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.
[1:24]Fast is the author of several books, including Necessary Trouble.
[1:28]This Republic of Suffering, Death in the American Civil War, Winner of the Bankcraft Prize
[1:32]and Finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
[1:36]And Mothers of Invention, Women of the Slave Holding South and the American Civil War,
[1:40]which won the Francis Parkman Prize.
[1:42]She and her has been living Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[1:44]Welcome, Drew.
[1:45]Thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[1:46]Don't have time to read books to discuss your memoir Necessary Trouble Growing Up at Mid-Century.
[1:52]Thank you for inviting me.
[1:54]It's my pleasure.
[1:56]I was so excited when I saw that you had a book coming out, and I know it's not coming
[1:59]out, even though this will air closer to the time of your book, that this is a summer
[2:03]book.
[2:04]And as soon as I saw it in a catalog, I was like, oh my gosh, I have to touch it.
[2:08]I can't wait to hear, how did you end up becoming like the head or whatever you were like,
[2:13]how did this all happen?
[2:15]And when I, and I like poured over your book and all of it.
[2:20]And then I was curious as to why it started and stopped, where you had it, and is there
[2:25]a continuation?
[2:26]Is it like a part two coming out next?
[2:29]Just maybe talk about the idea of even starting your book and how you, in which times
[2:34]you focused on the most and why.
[2:36]I was moved to write this book by my increasing sense that people today, especially young
[2:40]people, have misapprehensions or no understanding of what went on in the 1950s and 60s.
[2:46]And that it's being misrepresented or sometimes caricatured, and there's all this objection
[2:52]to the baby boomers and how baby boomers have failed.
[2:55]And I thought, I want to tell this story as I saw it and I remembered it.
[3:00]And that was in part because I've been a historian my whole life and I've relied on testimony
[3:05]from people in the past and I spent a lot of time listening to people in the past.
[3:10]And so I thought, while I'm still on this earth, I want to now tell and have the possibility
[3:15]of others listen to me and listen to my sense of the experience of those years.
[3:20]And to outline in some degree my own life, but also how it fit within a broader set of choices
[3:26]and structures of society and that era.
[3:29]No single person can be representative and of course I'm not representative in so many dimensions.
[3:36]I came from a very privileged family and moved through life struggling with the upsides and
[3:42]the downsides of that.
[3:43]But nevertheless, a lot of the things around me that I did have to confront were larger
[3:48]structures that I think could be generalized to many more people as they made their choices.
[3:53]And as the character of the 1950s and the 60s unfolded, you asked also to know about why
[3:59]it stops when it did.
[4:00]Yeah, why did it stop when I did to keep going?
[4:02]So I stopped when I turned 21 and I cast my first vote.
[4:06]It was not legal to vote until you were 21 in 1968.
[4:10]But I cast my vote in a very fraught election that I've occurred after two assassinations
[4:15]in the spring, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.
[4:18]And then the upheavals of the Democratic Convention.
[4:21]I just been launched into the world with a college degree.
[4:25]And what a world it was.
[4:26]And here were two choices in this election, neither of which reflected the anti-war sentiments
[4:31]that had mobilized so many of us during the preceding years.
[4:35]And so the kind of challenge of that election and the turning point it meant for me.
[4:40]And I think for the nation was a really important marker in my life.
[4:45]I wanted to stop there because I really was writing about coming to the age, growing up.
[4:50]And that's what this book represents.
[4:53]How do you find your way in the world?
[4:55]And I use a kind of theme of freedom and freedom in a variety of dimensions, including
[5:01]the civil rights movement, including communism and the unfreedoms of the Soviet bloc.
[5:07]And then my own struggle for freedom from the conventions about young women that I found
[5:12]so constraining.
[5:13]And so I felt that, OK, I turned 21 and then I have an education.
[5:18]I have a job that supports me.
[5:20]I've liberated myself in many ways and intellectually from the chains that had been imposed
[5:26]on me.
[5:27]And this was the time to stop the memoir because I felt, OK, now I have to enact that
[5:33]freedom.
[5:34]What am I going to use it for?
[5:36]That's a whole other set of questions.
[5:38]And so it seemed a good stopping place.
[5:41]So interesting.
[5:42]Well, I really enjoyed hearing all about your whole family history and particularly
[5:48]the threads of the military that were woven throughout so many branches of your family.
[5:54]And how that affected not just the men, but the women and the families, and particularly
[5:59]like all the different generations you had who had experience in this and how that ultimately
[6:04]ended up shaping you because today, you know, here I am, I'm 46, but it has not felt
[6:10]the same as the generations that you write about and the systemic changes, obviously.
[6:15]I mean, you all know this, but it's one thing to read about it in a history book.
[6:18]And it's another for you to take us through your family and, you know, the golden sun
[6:24]who sadly passed away and how even that has so many ripples all the way through and the
[6:30]different generations.
[6:31]So I don't know.
[6:32]Maybe speak to that for a minute and tell all of that because of course the military and
[6:38]the government, it's not just a theoretical thing, right?
[6:40]It affects who is even alive in your home and just in that job.
[6:45]So it's both very personal and very much more than personal and it's in its impact.
[6:50]There's a chapter in the book which is a little odd for memoir because it's not something
[6:54]I remember.
[6:55]It's about World War One and about my family's experience in World War One.
[7:00]And it's based on a set of letters that have been preserved back and forth between different
[7:05]members of the family during the war.
[7:07]And it really focuses on my great uncle who I never met.
[7:11]He was killed just before, weeks before the war ended in 1918.
[7:16]He was a flier which was a very dangerous role in that primitive era of flying.
[7:22]And his plane fell into the North Sea and he was killed.
[7:26]At that time his father, my great-grandfather who had been in the military had been to West
[7:32]Point, graduated in the early 1880s from West Point.
[7:35]He was serving in his late 50s as a general on the Western Front.
[7:41]And so this news comes to him but he can't leave his post because it's very heavy fighting
[7:46]just as the war's ending.
[7:48]The news comes to my grandmother, a dead person's sister and her mother in Knoxville, Tennessee,
[7:54]in the midst of the influenza.
[7:56]And they all have to grapple with this terrible loss of the golden boy, the son on whom
[8:02]so many expectations had been placed.
[8:05]And for my grandmother, this is devastating in so many ways, losing this wonderful
[8:09]brother whom she idealized.
[8:12]But she writes to her father a consolation letter where she says she knows that the family
[8:17]will never be the same because he was the family line that was going to carry the family
[8:22]forward.
[8:23]And she writes a line, a girl is never the same.
[8:27]And she is the kind of second-class citizen in this family and she says the wrong one died.
[8:32]And she spends her whole life in a sense feeling a girl is never the same, lives into
[8:37]her 80s.
[8:39]So well into the next part of the century and well into my own life.
[8:43]But I think she's deeply affected by this loss and it shapes her marriage, it shapes
[8:49]her attitudes towards the world, it shapes her sense of her own possibilities.
[8:55]And so then as she grows up, she has a child right after the war when her husband comes
[9:01]home, safely he was also a flyer, but he made it through.
[9:05]So he comes home and they have a child right away.
[9:06]And she names this child for the dead brother, my father, this is my father born in 1919.
[9:14]And of course, as he comes into his adulthood, he goes off to war.
[9:19]And so if you just think about these generations of sending sons to war, my grandmother
[9:24]is terrified that she will lose him or his brother, both of whom are in the military
[9:29]in the Second World War.
[9:31]And I have letters back and forth from my father to his family about his experience in
[9:36]World War II.
[9:37]And I think that experience, he lived, he survived, he found the military very moving and
[9:43]gratifying and he found a huge contribution to the world and helping patent liberate
[9:47]France.
[9:49]But it distorts our family once again because he just married and left my mother with
[9:53]my older brother and went off to war and did the most important thing in his life and
[9:58]in his view.
[9:59]And so.
[10:00]When he came back to all of us, it was an afterthought.
[10:03]And I think their marriage was affected by that separation,
[10:06]by what he'd experienced and how he valued it
[10:09]and understood it, but was also horrified by parts of it
[10:13]that then affected his life.
[10:15]So fast forward to when my older brother is coming of age
[10:19]in the 1960s and we have the Vietnam War.
[10:22]And so it's as if a generation is defined by the wars
[10:27]that each one seems to fight in this part
[10:29]of the 20th century.
[10:31]And for me, that third war, the Vietnam War,
[10:35]was defining because I was such an activist opposing it.
[10:37]And so that was a very important part of my young adulthood
[10:41]and my understanding of my commitment as a citizen,
[10:46]my obligations as a human being.
[10:49]And as I watched so many young men in my college cohort
[10:54]being drafted or worried about the draft,
[10:56]my brother went into the Navy because he
[10:58]didn't want to be in the ground troops,
[11:00]so he served four years in the Navy.
[11:01]But once again, lives shaped, often distorted
[11:05]by these military obligations and demands
[11:09]that these three wars represented.
[11:11]So in a sense, the three wars are an arc
[11:14]that rests over the structure of this book
[11:16]from my first origins when I'm born as a baby boomer.
[11:21]That means after the war, that's the very definition
[11:24]of my generation, up through my own experience
[11:27]in relationship to the way that Vietnam War tore,
[11:30]not just families apart and not just more than 50,000 deaths,
[11:34]but the nation torn apart by the experience of Vietnam.
[11:39]And then you have yourself where we totally understand you
[11:43]as a daughter, which I think, of course,
[11:45]informs how you end up growing up.
[11:48]I mean, here you are, this young precocious,
[11:51]obviously brilliant woman and your mother
[11:53]does not even value your intelligence.
[11:56]And in fact, finds it almost offensive
[11:59]to her ideas of her sensibilities related
[12:02]to what a lady should be.
[12:03]And that, of course, was forced upon her,
[12:06]not that she was so excited about it herself.
[12:09]And her own relationship, and we understand
[12:11]like even her mother-in-law relationship
[12:13]because you tell us so much about your grandmother,
[12:15]just really fascinating.
[12:16]So anyway, it comes to you who's now writing letters
[12:19]to Eisenhower and speaking your mind
[12:22]and doing all of this at a young age,
[12:24]and I'm like, what did I do?
[12:25]I wrote a letter to my headmaster
[12:26]and trying to get the Jewish holidays out from school.
[12:29]Like literally, that's what my parents say to them.
[12:32]It's my childhood letter.
[12:33]But anyway, and how it really put you in a position
[12:36]to listen to yourself and just continue
[12:40]to advocate for what you believe in.
[12:43]And I feel like there's part of your dad's sort of mission-driven
[12:47]like leftover from the military,
[12:50]like what you said about him feeling so important
[12:53]how hard it is to take something that ideologically
[12:56]is so massively important and then, you know,
[13:00]change a diaper or do whatever mundane,
[13:02]like put the dryer sheet in or whatever.
[13:05]It's hard to transition to that.
[13:07]So anyway, I feel like you've picked up the mantle in a way
[13:10]and just did it a slightly different way
[13:13]and very interesting that.
[13:14]Well, I think you're right that in the post-war period
[13:18]that there was this sense of ethical challenge,
[13:22]in a post-war-war two period
[13:24]that these issues had been so kind of black and white
[13:27]fighting the Nazis and the heroes of World War two
[13:31]who'd done that.
[13:32]There's a kind of moral seriousness
[13:33]that conveyed to many in the post-war years.
[13:38]Of course, the 50s were in many ways just not that
[13:41]and they were avoiding that.
[13:43]But at the same time, I think I picked up on
[13:46]my father had done these really brave things.
[13:48]What was gonna happen next?
[13:50]What was my duty?
[13:52]And as I grew up as a girl and a family with three brothers,
[13:55]I was constantly feeling things weren't fair.
[13:58]I was asked to be a lady and wear horrible,
[14:01]organ-ditchy dresses and do certain things
[14:05]or not do certain things that my brothers were allowed to do.
[14:08]It always made me mad.
[14:09]And so I believe that also attuned me to or sensitize me
[14:13]to the very segregated unfair world in which I lived
[14:18]and that out of my own gender inequities,
[14:21]I came to see much larger inequities in southern civilization.
[14:26]So you refer to this Eisenhower letter.
[14:28]It was a letter I wrote when I was nine years old
[14:31]to President Eisenhower and it was prompted
[14:34]by the disputes in Virginia about school integration
[14:37]in the aftermath of Brown v. Board.
[14:39]My outrage when I suddenly realized that it was not an accident
[14:42]that my school was all white
[14:44]and that someone had prohibited black students
[14:46]from coming to my school.
[14:48]And that was not fair.
[14:49]So I wrote to Eisenhower in support of integration
[14:53]and begged him to please integrate schools.
[14:56]And I evoked all this kind of religious imagery
[15:00]from my own Sunday school knowledge
[15:03]in a Protestant Episcopal church,
[15:05]kind of shaking my finger at Eisenhower telling him what to do.
[15:09]I was a very opinionated nine-year-old.
[15:14]So my parents had no idea I'd done it.
[15:18]And when I got this little formal acknowledgement
[15:20]back from the White House, I said,
[15:21]what's this about?
[15:23]And they were horrified because they accepted
[15:26]the basic views of Virginia and their era
[15:28]and they knew they had trouble on their hands.
[15:31]That's what the title comes from.
[15:32]That I was always making trouble.
[15:34]Oh my gosh.
[15:36]Well, that's another piece of the book
[15:38]which carries through even free.
[15:40]You're going to Selma and all of the advocacy
[15:44]and activism, I should say, that you have been doing.
[15:47]And I loved how you depicted your father's relationship
[15:49]with, because name was Rafael Rafael.
[15:52]That's Rafael.
[15:53]Yeah.
[15:54]Rayfield, as if it were our YFI ELBA
[15:57]that was spelled like a painter, Rafael.
[16:00]All right.
[16:00]Rayfield was called in Rayfield.
[16:02]Well, they had to say that, you know,
[16:04]and how he came in and after your mother passed away,
[16:06]and I'm so sorry about that,
[16:07]and how he was the one who was really his caretaker
[16:10]after that, and sounded like the two of them
[16:13]were like, honestly, like BFFs back in the day,
[16:16]like they were like buddies.
[16:18]And I feel like you did such a nice job
[16:20]of highlighting that friendship and relationship
[16:23]as much as it could be given the constraints
[16:25]of that era at a time and place and all of that,
[16:28]and how that even shaped some of your future activism.
[16:33]Well, it's interesting, you focus on the relationship
[16:36]between my father and Rayfield,
[16:37]because it's such a complicated one
[16:39]and this speaks the complexities of race relations
[16:43]in Virginia and the South generally in that era.
[16:46]And I think in areas before, before as well,
[16:50]because Rayfield did take care of my father.
[16:52]I think they were on one level very,
[16:56]I mean, Rayfield knew everything about him.
[16:59]My father was on one level devoted to Rayfield
[17:02]and was weeping at his funeral when he was asked to speak
[17:05]and was very moved in his remarks.
[17:09]But they're nevertheless was a hierarchy and a distance.
[17:13]They never sat down at a table and ate together.
[17:16]Rayfield would eat in the kitchen,
[17:18]daddy would eat in the dining room,
[17:19]that's what was expected.
[17:21]So there were lines that could not be broken.
[17:24]And there's a lot, I believe, about how Rayfield saw this,
[17:28]that I do not know.
[17:29]There was speculation in the community
[17:31]that maybe he had founded a branch of the NAACP
[17:34]and was actually kind of secretly an activist
[17:37]on racial issues, even as he was so deferential to my father.
[17:42]So what was going on in Rayfield's mind
[17:45]and how much were there perceptions
[17:48]of this relationship different
[17:50]and even as they interacted in these very,
[17:54]kind of intense and intimate ways.
[17:57]Wow, that is really interesting.
[17:59]Are you in touch with his children or grandchildren?
[18:04]So, is that not?
[18:06]What do you go on to talk about your time at Concord Academy
[18:09]and then Brynmar?
[18:10]And by the way, my dad was responsible
[18:13]for getting rid of parietal hours at Yale.
[18:15]Uh-huh.
[18:16]That is literally, he talks about that a lot.
[18:19]So you know what the word means.
[18:22]Yeah, I knew what the word meant.
[18:24]I love that your daughter did not or whoever it was.
[18:26]It wasn't your daughter.
[18:27]Somebody didn't ask my daughter.
[18:28]I was telling her proudly about what we'd done
[18:30]and she said, what are parietals?
[18:33]What are you talking about?
[18:33]I thought, well, that's a sign of success
[18:35]and she doesn't even know what it is.
[18:37]We really did eliminate it.
[18:39]Yeah.
[18:39]So what year was that, that your father was at Yale?
[18:41]He graduated in 69.
[18:44]So just the same year, I exactly.
[18:46]Yeah, baby, but yeah, he was very proud of that.
[18:52]And also for bringing, for establishing something
[18:55]called the Yale Ballet Society
[18:56]because he was trying to find a way
[18:58]to get girls on campus and to get ballet appreciation
[19:03]for the societies and they would go to the ballet
[19:05]and New York and bring, I don't know, he's a character.
[19:09]That's great.
[19:10]Yeah, anyway.
[19:11]Well, then of course, through all of your advocacy
[19:15]and you end up becoming, you end up becoming a leader,
[19:21]right?
[19:21]Like I would love to fast forward a little bit
[19:23]and just even get like the bullet points
[19:25]of post memoir here mid century times
[19:30]to becoming a leader.
[19:32]And if you thought about a career in politics at all
[19:35]and where you, how you feel about things now?
[19:39]Career and politics.
[19:40]I never thought about a career in politics.
[19:42]I worked for two years after I graduated from college
[19:45]for the Department of Housing and Urban Development
[19:47]which was then a very new cabinet department
[19:50]and it had just launched a new program called Model Cities
[19:54]which was a program that was going to take an integrated
[19:57]meaning not racially integrated,
[19:59]but all kinds of things.
[20:00]different programs and and problems seen holistically and try to see how the federal government
[20:06]could help improve the situation in cities. And during my college years there had been
[20:13]really kind of riots and insurrections in cities every summer. And so the issue of urban
[20:19]problems in urban justice was very central and in my mind in the mind of the country. So I went
[20:25]to work for the federal government. And within two years I was back in the academy and felt that
[20:32]universities were really the places in which I felt most comfortable but also felt I could be most
[20:37]effective as a contributor to to American life. And so I went to graduate school and got a PhD
[20:46]and then was hired by the University of Pennsylvania where I got my degree and worked on the
[20:52]faculty there for 25 years. And in my role as with students as teacher and in my role writing about
[21:00]the origins of racial history in the United States. I wrote about the Old South 19th century South
[21:07]slavery and then began to create a write about war which I think reflected my Vietnam interests
[21:14]and the ways that what we talked about earlier had affected me. And so I felt my influence was
[21:20]through my writings and also through an effort to make universities be the institutions that they
[21:26]could be in contributing to society. I didn't take on administrative roles except those that were
[21:33]kind of forced upon me. You had to be a department chair every once in a while. You had to do
[21:36]things. But I felt the classroom was really where I wanted to be. And I had a child in 1982 and so
[21:44]the classroom and the teaching obligations rather than administrative ones fit better with
[21:50]that life of being a parent. But then I was invited by the then president of Harvard to
[21:57]come and be the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute at at Harvard and he invited me in 2000. But
[22:03]2001 is when I arrived. And I did that partly because my daughter was out of the house. She'd gone off
[22:09]to college. And I felt that this was an institute that was meant to help solve the problem
[22:18]of women at Harvard and to make relationships between Radcliffe and Harvard regularized by their
[22:25]merger and also put a focus on the issues of gender within scholarship within the university. And
[22:30]I thought, boy, to do that at Harvard is such an important thing to if they can get it right,
[22:35]maybe everybody else can get it right. And so that was the first really major administrative job
[22:40]I took on. And I found that I loved it. I found working with people on goals and advancing
[22:46]issues that actually had solutions rather than issues that lasted for 250 years or whatever I was
[22:53]looking at in my historical work was very gratifying. So I continued with that and then was asked to
[23:01]be president in 2007 and served as Harvard's president from 2007 to 2018. And that was a great
[23:08]a great privilege and as well as an education in its own right. Oh my gosh. Do you feel like
[23:14]they finally gotten it right with women? They've gotten it a lot better. It's not entirely right.
[23:22]There's so many issues that still remain in terms of representation on the faculty in terms of
[23:28]student lives in terms of issues like sexual harassment. There's still lots to be done. But
[23:33]it's a much better situation than when I first arrived just to give you a story not long after
[23:40]I arrived at the Radcliffe Institute my very first days at Harvard University. A major administrator
[23:46]came to me and said be sure you don't talk about women when you talk about issues because I'll only
[23:51]discredit you. And it was as if anybody who saw women as a category had a special pleading or was
[24:01]trying to make up for their insufficiency or it wasn't something that should be central
[24:06]within Harvard's considerations women and so far as they were there should just fold in
[24:12]and be like everybody else who is who is there and that has certainly changed. We have voices
[24:18]talking about women thank goodness all the time and Harvard has just selected a wonderful new president
[24:25]who will take office in July who is an African-American woman political scientist. This would have
[24:32]been completely unimaginable when I arrived at Harvard and now there she is so change happens
[24:40]in Jeffens. I feel like my own family is like a little microcosm of the changing times. My
[24:46]grandfather went to Harvard Business School in graduate 1939 during the war. He couldn't get a job
[24:53]on Wall Street because they thought that you know unless you were from a very well-to-do
[24:59]German Jewish family which he was not that they would be too discriminated against so he ended
[25:04]up going into me. Then my father graduated in 1972 and then went into finance and then I graduated
[25:11]in 2003 as like the woman and my dad actually. So 2003 from Harvard Business School. Yeah. Oh great.
[25:19]My mother worked in Harvard Business School because her dad had gone there and so she was sort of
[25:25]trying to take up a husband or I don't know what but anyway. She said she went she got a job there
[25:30]and that's how she met my dad and then I went like as the student so I felt really good about that
[25:35]and then I wonder like I wonder if one of my kids is going to end up there. My class was only
[25:42]30% women something like that so I don't know what the percentage is today. It's closer to 50 now
[25:47]at the Harvard Business School and there's been a lot of focus on women's issues and
[25:52]you know bringing women more folks. For example the whole grading system. Great based on whose loudest
[25:57]and yes steals the floor from everyone else. That's a kind of gendered way of rewarding students
[26:03]for class participation of that sort. So lots of scrutiny and I wonder have you been back to any of
[26:09]the events I know they're often events for women alums? No but my I guess my 23 union is coming up
[26:17]or by the time this airs I will have gone. So we'll see how it is there but no I haven't.
[26:24]Because you can get a take on whether things have changed. I think it is a report card.
[26:32]Report card yes. So what now what do you have this book coming out what would you like to tackle
[26:39]after this? Well I'm sort of mulling about a new book project and reading stuff and thinking about
[26:45]what I might do. I felt for a long time that I'd like to write a biography. I wrote a biography
[26:52]early in my career of a despicable man who was a southern slaveholder and planner, governor and
[26:58]senator from South Carolina wrote down all his despicable thoughts so that he was just a rich target
[27:04]for exploration and I wanted to see the world through his eyes. How do you be a person like this?
[27:10]I've that's fascinated me from my very earliest days of my historical career in part
[27:16]because of my own experience which is how do people do evil things and take it as a routine.
[27:23]How do you get up in the morning if you're a slaveholder in the south and I think that came from
[27:27]how do you get up in the morning if you're a segregationist in Virginia in the 1950s and 60s. I just
[27:33]wanted to know how people live with experiences, practices that we find unthinkable. So as I'm
[27:41]considering a biography now I have my eyes on writing about somebody in the 19th century who was
[27:48]just opposite, who always seemed to do the right thing and oppose slavery and risk this life and
[27:54]fought against slavery and there is a biography of this man coming out soon so that I have to
[28:02]take a look at what that's covered but I think I might take a piece of this life and ask the
[28:08]other question how do people come to make admirable choices in the world as opposed to the people
[28:14]I've focused on mostly which are the people who've made choices that it's very hard for us to
[28:20]comprehend or forgive. So interesting. Well if there's one thing that you want people to take away
[28:26]from necessary trouble, what would it be? It would be that things have definitely changed since
[28:33]the 50s and 60s. That we can't say everything's the same, everything's been terrible forever.
[28:40]We should look back and be grateful for what isn't the way it was when I was growing up.
[28:46]And that should inspire us to recognize that we can change things again, that where we are is not
[28:52]inevitable and we're not back in 1950 or 1960 and we don't have to be where we are now 50 years
[29:02]from now. So I would hope it might encourage people to be optimistic even in trying and difficult
[29:10]times about what can happen and what they can do to make it happen. Amazing. And the
[29:18]nine-year-old girls should continue writing the present. Yes. Yes. I have a nine-year-old girl,
[29:24]so maybe we'll do that. Okay. All right, well thank you so much. Thank you very much. It was
[29:31]great to meet you. I hope I see you around at one of your reunions. Yes, yes. Thanks for listening to
[29:40]this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at
[29:45]zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibiowens.com
[29:50]and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so
[29:55]much to Steve and Ryan. Heck, texture sound for the sound editing. And thank you to
[30:00]Good morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.