Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go. A quarter of the mind, lined with shelves,
Speaker 1: cluttered with proof, A purple cowboy hat. Oh, someone's put
Speaker 1: up here on the wall poster, it says, the personal
Speaker 1: is political. I love those day glow flowers. This place,
Speaker 1: this warehouse, stores the facts that matter, and matters of fact,
Speaker 1: the evidence of the past. It's all that stands between
Speaker 1: a reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies
Speaker 1: in a time between now and then. The sign on
Speaker 1: the door reads the last Archive. Step out that door
Speaker 1: to Greenwich Village, across the passage of time to a
Speaker 1: Friday night, March twenty first, nineteen sixty nine. Walk down
Speaker 1: West fourth Street and up the steps to the Washington
Speaker 1: Square Methodist Church, a cathedral. It'll cost you two dollars
Speaker 1: to get in a donation to the Red Stockings radical feminists,
Speaker 1: best known for staging a protest at the Miss America pageant.
Speaker 1: There are three hundred people seated in the church, mostly women.
Speaker 1: It's a handful of men here too. Oh and lucky
Speaker 1: for us, there's a tape recorder up there on the altar.
Speaker 1: All of us are members of the Women's Liberation Group
Speaker 1: of New York City, and we discovered that by just
Speaker 1: talking about our own experience, about our own lives, that
Speaker 1: by talking about this altogether in our group, that we
Speaker 1: were able to find out a lot more about reality
Speaker 1: than by talking about all those objects. The thing we
Speaker 1: would talk about our own abortion, and that was like
Speaker 1: our plans for the satire. So much of how people
Speaker 1: think about truth today comes from this one meeting. Like
Speaker 1: water down a waterfall, twelve women got up to speak,
Speaker 1: one by one. They passed a microphone. They testified for
Speaker 1: more than three hours. They were mad as hell. A
Speaker 1: month earlier, a committee of the New York Legislature had
Speaker 1: considered whether or not to make abortion legal in the state.
Speaker 1: The committee brought in experts to testify. Fourteen men and
Speaker 1: one woman. Anne the Red Stockings and other activists had
Speaker 1: stormed the committee meeting. They were camouflaged in dresses and stockings,
Speaker 1: they said, and they'd shouted, let's hear from the real experts. Women.
Speaker 1: They tried to tell their stories without much success. So
Speaker 1: now they were here in this church in Greenwich Village
Speaker 1: to actually have their say. The tape it's kind of
Speaker 1: crazy to listen to the man is the one that
Speaker 1: scrowls you and then when you turn to him and say, hey, look, sweetheart,
Speaker 1: I'm pregnant. How do you know it was me? You
Speaker 1: neverics love with anyone else. One of the things I
Speaker 1: love about this tape is that it's not like women
Speaker 1: crying in front of Oprah or something. It's more like
Speaker 1: stand up comedy, but confrontational, courageous. George Carlin, Lenny Bruce
Speaker 1: Awry second all the sand. It's just what am I
Speaker 1: gonna do? What I is he going to do? What
Speaker 1: am I going to do? These are the experts, the
Speaker 1: people that are sitting here, the people that are in
Speaker 1: the audience who have had the abortion. But no one
Speaker 1: wants to listen to us. I mean, you know, we
Speaker 1: are the only expert. They spoke out that night and
Speaker 1: nighteen sixty nine because they wanted to change the law.
Speaker 1: They'd also decided to talk publicly about their abortions because
Speaker 1: some of them had been reading the writings of the
Speaker 1: communist revolutionary Mao Zedong. Maoists believed in the practice of
Speaker 1: speaking bitterness, describing your oppression, and blaming your oppressor. That's
Speaker 1: what those women were doing in that church. They were
Speaker 1: speaking bitterness. They called it consciousness raising. They also called
Speaker 1: it rapping or a speak out. I'm sure that there
Speaker 1: are many many women in this audience that have had
Speaker 1: the same experience. So I know, you know, freak or
Speaker 1: that it just happened to me, it's happened. Who can
Speaker 1: eat everybody? You know? So if I get up and
Speaker 1: I say it, you know, maybe everybody can get up
Speaker 1: and say it, and we all get up and say it,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe they'll do something about changing the situously.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the last archive, the show about how we
Speaker 1: know what we know, how we used to know things,
Speaker 1: and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't
Speaker 1: know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season we're
Speaker 1: trying to solve a Who've done it? Who killed truth?
Speaker 1: In this episode, I want to try to find a
Speaker 1: way to reckon with the consequences of a whole theory
Speaker 1: of knowledge. Speak your truth, radical feminist said in the
Speaker 1: Village in nineteen sixty nine, Speak your truth. Sure, it
Speaker 1: sounds good, it sounds great, until you start to ask,
Speaker 1: what if someone else's truth is different than yours. No
Speaker 1: legislature would recognize my right to speak as an expert,
Speaker 1: because it happened right in my body. Where a child grows,
Speaker 1: it happens in my body later on, that I don't
Speaker 1: want that child, and that I have to go through
Speaker 1: a period of time in which I have no function
Speaker 1: in this society. I've been talking all season about the
Speaker 1: end of the age of mystery and the rise and
Speaker 1: fall of the age of the fact. For a very
Speaker 1: long time, conception was a mystery, the mystery, the mystery
Speaker 1: of life. In ancient Greece, Aristotle dissected chicken eggs, which
Speaker 1: came first, the chicken or the egg was an actual experiment.
Speaker 1: Not until the middle of the seventeenth century did anyone
Speaker 1: figure out that people come from eggs too. When the
Speaker 1: United States was founded, there were no laws against abortion
Speaker 1: before quickening about when a mother can feel the baby kicking.
Speaker 1: Somewhere around four months or so later, conception was no
Speaker 1: longer a mystery and became known as the facts of life.
Speaker 1: Physicians began replacing midwives, and legislatures began making laws that
Speaker 1: made the intentional end of a pregnancy a crime. By
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, in New York, the only way a
Speaker 1: woman could end a pregnancy legally was to have something
Speaker 1: called a therapeutic abortion. Mainly she had to convince a
Speaker 1: doctor that she was crazy. If you don't give me,
Speaker 1: if you don't tell me, I'm g having abortion right now.
Speaker 1: But it's go out and jump off the Ronald Bridge.
Speaker 1: Well whatever. When I hope that therapeutic abortion, it quots
Speaker 1: me more. But the therapy answered the therapeutic abortion than before.
Speaker 1: Since this speak out took place, Americans have talked about
Speaker 1: abortion a lot for or against, but usually in the
Speaker 1: language of rights, the right to choose, or the right
Speaker 1: to life. But I've always found that this debate is
Speaker 1: also about knowledge. I still care about the questions the
Speaker 1: Red Stockings asked. Who can know things? Who's an expert
Speaker 1: whose knowledge matters? I decided to go talk to some
Speaker 1: of the women who'd been part of that meeting in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine to hear them have their say in
Speaker 1: the spirit of speaking out way, do you a lot
Speaker 1: of water? So my producer Ben and I and one
Speaker 1: of our researchers, Olivia Oldham, went to New York to
Speaker 1: the apartment of Susan Brown Miller, a feminist best known
Speaker 1: for a book about rape called Against Our Will. What
Speaker 1: was the question? Brown Miller had first spoken out about
Speaker 1: abortion at an earlier meeting. Her friend told her to go.
Speaker 1: At first, it was awkward. Then one woman got up.
Speaker 1: She said, we've been over this before, and you know,
Speaker 1: god damn well that I couldn't find an abortionist and
Speaker 1: I had to carry the baby to term and it
Speaker 1: was a beautiful boy, but I had to give it away.
Speaker 1: So when she said that, the floodgates opened and people
Speaker 1: started to go around the room and they were talking
Speaker 1: about being led blindfolded to a place in New Jersey
Speaker 1: for a mafia protected abortion. They were talking about things
Speaker 1: like that, and they were slowly inching up on me.
Speaker 1: So I said, well, I've had three abortions, all outside
Speaker 1: the continental United States, and my last one was about
Speaker 1: six months ago. And when I said that, I really
Speaker 1: started to cry because to me, this was the you know,
Speaker 1: the first time that abortion was spoken about as a real,
Speaker 1: as a real woman's issue, and the problem was not
Speaker 1: getting pregnant or not having the protection. Why did you
Speaker 1: get pregnant? You know, it was about what we had
Speaker 1: to do to secure a safe abortion. As I knew
Speaker 1: they were out there somehow, you know, I knew they
Speaker 1: were out there. They were out there, safe places to
Speaker 1: have abortions, but they were hard to find. They were underground.
Speaker 1: But what if they came out above ground? When brown
Speaker 1: Miller went to the Red Stockings wrap in the village
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine, it was as a reporter and
Speaker 1: you said you were asked to speak to testify. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I felt that Well, first of all, I didn't
Speaker 1: like it, you know, it was too confessional for me,
Speaker 1: you know. But second of all, I felt I could
Speaker 1: do us all a bigger favor by writing about it
Speaker 1: for the Village Voice, which I did. All the stocking
Speaker 1: and writing led to a landmark legal case, which is
Speaker 1: where Nancy Stearns came in. She met us Susan Brown
Speaker 1: Miller's apartment. She's a lawyer. She'd come out of the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement. I mean, challenging the law was the
Speaker 1: basis of it and was fundamental, but I didn't know
Speaker 1: whether we'd win. At that point, I thought we should win.
Speaker 1: Just months after the Red Stockings held that first abortion
Speaker 1: speak out in Greenwich Village, Nancy Stearns got involved in
Speaker 1: trying to file a lawsuit called Abrahmowitz versus Lefkowitz. The
Speaker 1: leading plaintiff was doctor Helen Abrahmowitz, and in the case,
Speaker 1: Stearns wanted to sue the state of New York, arguing
Speaker 1: that it's ban on abortion depride women of their right
Speaker 1: to possess their own persons. She was also making an
Speaker 1: argument though, about knowledge that women know. The crucial idea
Speaker 1: from the litigation perspective was not necessarily having women as experts,
Speaker 1: but having women as plaintiffs, the people who were challenging
Speaker 1: the law, not just being sort of passive or we
Speaker 1: happened to be there. Stearns wrote the briefs in the case,
Speaker 1: but she was young and a little inexperienced, and she
Speaker 1: wanted someone on her team who was older and who
Speaker 1: could kick ass, So she brought in Florence Kennedy. Flow.
Speaker 1: People magazine once called Kennedy the biggest, loudest and indisputably
Speaker 1: the rudest mouth on the battleground where feminist activists and
Speaker 1: radical politics join. Okay, everybody, while my chorus gets together.
Speaker 1: Hurry up, chorus, get over here, y'all, hurry up. Flow.
Speaker 1: Kennedy died twenty years ago, so we couldn't talk to her,
Speaker 1: but for a long time in the nineteen eighties, She
Speaker 1: had her own television show on Manhattan Community Access Picture
Speaker 1: between two ferns. I swear there are ferns more than
Speaker 1: two though the Flow Kennedy Show. Hi, y'all Flow Kennedy here,
Speaker 1: and my guest has written she wore a cowboy hat,
Speaker 1: a big ten gallon one, groovy jewelry, traumatic eyewear, eccentric, unmistakable.
Speaker 1: She was unforgettable. I remember her hats. Yeah, the hats,
Speaker 1: coy Yeah, wonderful, cowboy original, no doubt about it. Yes,
Speaker 1: I was lucky in a lot of ways. My parents
Speaker 1: thought we were absolutely perfect. I'm the opposite of Marilyn Monroe,
Speaker 1: who was this golden goddess who thought that she was
Speaker 1: a piece of ship, whereas I was a piece of shit,
Speaker 1: and I thought I was this bronze mahogany statue. Florence
Speaker 1: Kennedy born in Kansas City, graduated from Columbia Law School
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty one. She opened a law firm in
Speaker 1: New York. For a long time, she specialized in defending
Speaker 1: black artists like Billy Holliday. She also got involved in
Speaker 1: the Black Power movement. She defended black panthers, including Hrapp Brown.
Speaker 1: She loved to speak in metaphors. In terms of politics,
Speaker 1: I am what I would call a generalist, general practitioner.
Speaker 1: See when people say, oh, I can work on race stuff,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to have anything to do with
Speaker 1: the homosexuality. I don't want to deal with prostitution. I
Speaker 1: don't want to deal with abortion. My theory is the
Speaker 1: way I looked at the pathology of our society and
Speaker 1: the pathology of oppression, is that you don't regard yourself
Speaker 1: as keeping a clean house if you just make up
Speaker 1: the bad don't do anything in the sink anyway. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, Flow Kennedy, Nancy Stearns and their legal team,
Speaker 1: we're preparing that lawsuit against the state of New York
Speaker 1: over its ban on abortion. They had to look for
Speaker 1: plaintiffs before they could file, so they thought of some
Speaker 1: of the women who'd spoken up that night in the
Speaker 1: village in nineteen sixty nine, the red stockings wrapped. I
Speaker 1: know from my own experience that I had luckily sent
Speaker 1: enough to see that a seventeen year old girl who
Speaker 1: gets herself pregnant by mistakes because she has not been
Speaker 1: avail of birth control information. It's not in a responsible
Speaker 1: position to take care of the children. When I listened
Speaker 1: to that, I have to work a little bit because
Speaker 1: it can be a little hard these days to remember
Speaker 1: how new this was, how new this kind of talk was.
Speaker 1: Then it's beyond novel. People did not talk about abortion publicly.
Speaker 1: That's Nancy Stearns Again. We all knew generally whether we
Speaker 1: had illegal abortion are not. We all knew generally what
Speaker 1: it was all about. But hearing the details of it,
Speaker 1: and particularly I think listening to the women who went
Speaker 1: through pregnancy and gave their children their baby up for adoption,
Speaker 1: it all just made me angry or in truth. Starns
Speaker 1: held meetings all over the city gathering plaintiffs. Amazingly, women
Speaker 1: turned up, women stood up, They told their stories, and
Speaker 1: they agreed to be deposed on the record. Flow Kennedy
Speaker 1: took Susan Brown Miller's deposition. Kennedy and Stearns and the
Speaker 1: rest of their team wanted the women to testify in court,
Speaker 1: in open court, but the judges, a three judge panel
Speaker 1: of men, they didn't want life testimony in their courtrooms
Speaker 1: about abortions. They probably thought, well, there's going to be
Speaker 1: lots and lots of lots of testimony. You know, we
Speaker 1: don't have the time for that, We don't want to
Speaker 1: do it. You do it out there and then you
Speaker 1: give us paper. But I think they didn't want to
Speaker 1: hear from a lot of emotional women speaking out was
Speaker 1: something new. But it's important to remember too that so
Speaker 1: was the lawsuit itself. Women were not part of the picture,
Speaker 1: and nobody was interested in women other than stopping us
Speaker 1: from getting abortions. But the court would never decide on
Speaker 1: the case because in the spring of nineteen seventy the
Speaker 1: New York State Senate legalized abortion. Overnight, New York became
Speaker 1: something of an abortion capital. The CDC reported that by
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, New York City had nearly twice as
Speaker 1: many abortions as live births because the legislature made abortion legal.
Speaker 1: The courts declared Abrahmwitz versus Lefkowitz moot. The case was
Speaker 1: basically thrown out. Florence Kennedy had hoped that the case
Speaker 1: would go all the way to the Supreme Court and
Speaker 1: change US laws on abortion nationwide. That didn't happen. Instead,
Speaker 1: a case out of Texas Rovie Wade got to the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court and it would be argued on very different
Speaker 1: grounds a right to privacy. But the Red Stockings and
Speaker 1: radical feminism left a profound legacy behind consciousness raising and
Speaker 1: speaking bitterness. And in the very moment that legacy was
Speaker 1: being founded, you could already see too how all this
Speaker 1: could backfire if everyone's speaking bitterness. Does everything come down
Speaker 1: to a duel of personal stories, one grief pitted against another,
Speaker 1: suffering versus suffering. Could it be that this, this endless
Speaker 1: duel of bitterness? Could it be that this is what
Speaker 1: killed truth? In nineteen sixty nine, radical feminists had argued
Speaker 1: that women are the experts about their own bodies. They'd
Speaker 1: also written a manifesto. It said, we regard our personal
Speaker 1: experience and our feelings about that experience as the basis
Speaker 1: for an analysis of our common situation. Another group of
Speaker 1: women liked this approach to liberal feminists. Liberal feminists wanted
Speaker 1: to get elected to political office and pass new laws
Speaker 1: about women based on what women know from their personal experiences.
Speaker 1: Laws about abortion, laws about rape, laws about discrimination and
Speaker 1: employment and education. They also wanted to amend the Constitution.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment
Speaker 1: and said to the states for ratification. It's amazing when
Speaker 1: you think about it, that it wasn't already law. But
Speaker 1: all the IRI really says is that you can't discriminate
Speaker 1: on the basis of sex. It had first been introduced
Speaker 1: to Congress in nineteen twenty three, and by the middle
Speaker 1: of the nineteen seventies it still hadn't been ratified, but
Speaker 1: it looked like it was just about to become law.
Speaker 1: It had been ratified by thirty five states, only three
Speaker 1: short of the number needed. Meanwhile, liberal feminists had gotten
Speaker 1: really ambitious. They decided to hold a national meeting, a
Speaker 1: giant speak out. The point of the conference was to
Speaker 1: adopt a national plan of action. The National Women's Conference
Speaker 1: opened in November nineteen seventy seven in the Houston Coliseum.
Speaker 1: Think of it as a second Constitutional Convention, except much
Speaker 1: bigger and with women. It was a grand and glorious
Speaker 1: right accompanying the torch on its long journey. Weeks earlier,
Speaker 1: a torch had been lit in Seneca Falls, New York,
Speaker 1: the state of the first Women's Rights Convention that had
Speaker 1: been held in eighteen forty eight. Then a relay of
Speaker 1: more than two thousand female athletes from Lean and lanky
Speaker 1: marathon runners to brawny field hockey players carried that torch
Speaker 1: twenty six hundred miles to Houston. It was meant to
Speaker 1: change history. Two thousand delegates from fifty states gathered in Houston,
Speaker 1: along with twenty thousand attendees, including Susan Brownmiller and Florence Kennedy.
Speaker 1: Maya Angelou gave the convocation, we American women view our
Speaker 1: history with equanimity. We allow the positive achievement to inspire
Speaker 1: us and the negative omissions to teach us. We recognize
Speaker 1: the accomplishments of our sisters, those famous and hallowed women
Speaker 1: of history, and those unknown and unsung women whose strength
Speaker 1: have given birth to our strength. Three First Ladies were
Speaker 1: there too, Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, and the current
Speaker 1: First Lady, Rosalind Carter. Jimmy sorry that he couldn't be
Speaker 1: here today, and I wanted to come and be with here.
Speaker 1: In fact, I wouldn't have missed it for anything. And
Speaker 1: and I trust that you are not going to say
Speaker 1: he said a woman to do a man's job. Members
Speaker 1: of Congress turned up to Bella Abzug and Barbara Jordan.
Speaker 1: She was the keynote speaker and There were celebrities, Margaret Mead,
Speaker 1: the anthropologist, Billy Jean King, the tennis player, and Jean Stapleton,
Speaker 1: she'd played Edith on all in the family. Gloria Steinham,
Speaker 1: a founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, was there,
Speaker 1: and so was the president of the Girl Scouts of America,
Speaker 1: who called the meeting to order using a gavel once
Speaker 1: used by Susan B. Anthony, and I rise to advance
Speaker 1: this body in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. A
Speaker 1: lot of the women at that conference were there to celebrate,
Speaker 1: including Anne Richards, later the Governor of Texas. One of
Speaker 1: her daughters, then just a little girl, would one day
Speaker 1: serve as president of Planned Parenthood. On behalf amound matters.
Speaker 1: Who cannot find women in the history texts of this
Speaker 1: country in the elementary skills, I gotta say, you still
Speaker 1: can't find many women in those books today, and you
Speaker 1: also really can't find much about the National Women's Convention.
Speaker 1: There were huge tensions in that cavernous hall in Houston.
Speaker 1: Madam chair pro family, pro life delegates are being denied
Speaker 1: points of privilege. I asked, moment, please, justin, momma, please
Speaker 1: the parliamentary and instructed the chair. The chair had to
Speaker 1: pound that gavel a lot just for starters. Think about this.
Speaker 1: One out of every five elected delegates to the Convention
Speaker 1: opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. There were huge debates on
Speaker 1: the floor about a resolution supporting lesbian and gay rights.
Speaker 1: This was a movement founded on the idea of women's
Speaker 1: common knowledge, their common personal experiences, but it had a
Speaker 1: fatal weakness because one experience for all women. There wasn't
Speaker 1: one experience. Black feminists and Latina feminists in particular, rejected
Speaker 1: that premise. At the conference, women of color formed a
Speaker 1: minority caucus. Some of their thinking was informed by black
Speaker 1: feminists from Boston who would offered a theory of what
Speaker 1: would come to be called intersectionality. They said, we have
Speaker 1: in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations because we
Speaker 1: are dealing with the implications of race and class as
Speaker 1: well as sex. That week in Houston, a lot of
Speaker 1: that nuance got lost and there was a lot of fighting.
Speaker 1: One resolution in particular rent the hall asunder Resolution twenty one.
Speaker 1: Next item on the agenda is the Resolution on Reproductive Freedom.
Speaker 1: It included a call for sex education and insurance coverage
Speaker 1: of both contraception and abortion, and an endorsement of the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. The first speakers
Speaker 1: rose in support. Then the conservative delegates spoke out, and
Speaker 1: I rise in opposition to this resolution. If the American
Speaker 1: women do not drive out this flaw in the philosophy
Speaker 1: of what is called a feminist movement, drive out of
Speaker 1: flaws suggesting that they can kill people that are less
Speaker 1: powerful than them than they have become much worse oppressors
Speaker 1: than any of the men that they accuse of oppressing them.
Speaker 1: Please come to order, Please come to order. It took
Speaker 1: a while to quiet down the crowd long enough to
Speaker 1: call the roll, but the chairmanaged it encounter the votes.
Speaker 1: The resolution on reproductive freedom is adopted. Please come to
Speaker 1: order and be seated. A group of pro life women
Speaker 1: rush the stage carrying a giant photograph of a fe
Speaker 1: Other women fell to their knees weeping, and that singing
Speaker 1: they're singing. All we are saying is give life a chance.
Speaker 1: Fifteen hundred reporters attended the conference, but strangely, the whole
Speaker 1: thing seems to have been swallowed up by the earth itself.
Speaker 1: I ask you, have you ever heard of the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven National Women's Conference. I'm guessing not reporters covered it,
Speaker 1: but given the ambition of the thing, the coverage was scant.
Speaker 1: NBC News included a report in its News Hour, a
Speaker 1: conference's stand on the Equal Rights Amendment will be incorporated
Speaker 1: into a national plan of Acting, a set of legislative
Speaker 1: proposals to be sent to the President and Congress. The
Speaker 1: question now is how seriously will all those men take
Speaker 1: the suggestions made by all these women. It would turn
Speaker 1: out not very seriously. But Houston wasn't about men versus women?
Speaker 1: Who was about women versus women? Mainly because conservative women
Speaker 1: organized a counter conference across town in the Astrodome. The
Speaker 1: organizers described their assembly as a pro God, pro life,
Speaker 1: pro family rally. The leader of this gathering was Phylish Slaughly,
Speaker 1: a mother of six from Missouri with a perfect blonde
Speaker 1: buffant who very often dressed impeccably in a pink suit
Speaker 1: and pumps. Slaughly was a political genius, and she devoted
Speaker 1: all of her talents to defeating the Equal Rights Amendment.
Speaker 1: She founded a national organization called Stop ear. She told
Speaker 1: her followers era means abortion. She also rallied women to
Speaker 1: her movement by tying the era to rights for gay
Speaker 1: men and lesbians. In Houston, she claimed she'd been banned
Speaker 1: by the National Women's Convention, and on its third day
Speaker 1: she held a press conference to say the conservative women
Speaker 1: hadn't had the chance to speak their truth. If you
Speaker 1: were at the convention last night, I think you also
Speaker 1: must have been impressed with the fact that there really
Speaker 1: isn't any debate on the equal rights. Most of the
Speaker 1: speakers at the pro life, pro family counter conference spoke
Speaker 1: the language of radical feminism, the language they'd adopted, a
Speaker 1: language that by now had suffused the culture and altered
Speaker 1: the nature of political conflict. We are busy engaging raising
Speaker 1: the consciousness of the fabric all over America, and we
Speaker 1: are in the business of raising the consciousness of our
Speaker 1: ray makers in Roshington, and when Philish Slaughly took the stage,
Speaker 1: this crowd went wild. Many had been to the other conference,
Speaker 1: the National Women's Convention, but now they were home with family.
Speaker 1: There are many differences between this meeting and the one
Speaker 1: in that other hall today. I'm very proud that they
Speaker 1: excluded me from that convention. The whole thing was designed
Speaker 1: as a media event, a charade to go through the
Speaker 1: motions of these funny state conferences and national conferences in
Speaker 1: order to pass resolutions that were pre written and prepackaged
Speaker 1: a year and a half ago, to tell league Congress
Speaker 1: and the state legislatures that this is what American women want.
Speaker 1: By coming here today, you have shown that that is
Speaker 1: not what American women want. The women in the astrodom
Speaker 1: waved bibles, they wept, and they spoke out, and they
Speaker 1: endorsed their own resolutions, including their own version of an
Speaker 1: Equal Rights Amendment, Equal Rights for Fetuses. Therefore, be it
Speaker 1: resolved that the Congress enact and the States ratify a
Speaker 1: mandatory Human Life Amendment to the Constitution to protect all
Speaker 1: persons born and unborn. Some concession, it resolved that we
Speaker 1: oppose the modification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
Speaker 1: All in favors say I all right. Therefore, be it
Speaker 1: resolved that homosexuality, lesbianism, or prostitution shall not be taught, rarified,
Speaker 1: or otherwise promoted as acceptable through the laws of society
Speaker 1: through the adoption of children are within the institutions such
Speaker 1: as our stools. All in favor SII. By rallying conservative
Speaker 1: women against the Equal Rights Amendment, largely on the back
Speaker 1: of arguments about abortion and homosexuality, shlaughly managed to turn
Speaker 1: the tide against the ear a ding Dong the Witches
Speaker 1: Dead Erie, opponents saying when word came of its defeat
Speaker 1: five years later in nineteen eighty two, the National Women's
Speaker 1: Convention had failed and was soon forgotten. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: radical feminists argued that the personal is political, that live
Speaker 1: experience the speaking of bitterness counts as evidence. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, liberal white feminists embraced this idea too, and
Speaker 1: so did African American feminists, and so too, in the
Speaker 1: end did conservative women, who very soon would help elect
Speaker 1: a conservative to the White House. It's morning again in America. Today,
Speaker 1: more men and women will go to work than ever
Speaker 1: before in our country's history. In nineteen eighty, three, years
Speaker 1: after the dueling women's conferences in Houston, Ronald Reagan was
Speaker 1: elected president. Earlier, as governor of California, he'd signed a
Speaker 1: bill liberalizing abortion laws, but he'd since become a staunch
Speaker 1: ally of Philish Lafley's. In nineteen eighty he ran on
Speaker 1: a GOP platform that included a plank dedicating the party
Speaker 1: to the right to life for unborn children. This nation
Speaker 1: cannot continue turning a blind eye and a deaf ear
Speaker 1: to the taking of some four thousand unborn children's lives
Speaker 1: every day. That's one every one second. One person who
Speaker 1: was really affected by that speech of Reagan's was a
Speaker 1: doctor named Bernard Nathanson. Nathanson had for a long time
Speaker 1: conducted abortions, but he changed his mind about abortion, he said,
Speaker 1: after the development of ultrasound. Reagan's speech convinced him to
Speaker 1: make a film released in nineteen eighty five. It was
Speaker 1: another kind of consciousness raising. Now, for the first time,
Speaker 1: we have the technology to see abortion from the victim's
Speaker 1: vantage point. The film is called The Silent Scream, and
Speaker 1: so for the first time, we are going to watch
Speaker 1: a child being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed and destroyed
Speaker 1: by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist. Nathanson was
Speaker 1: a doctor, but he narrates the film as if he
Speaker 1: is a lawyer eliciting testimony from the fetus its personal experience.
Speaker 1: He's a ventriloquist speaking out the fetus's truth. Once again,
Speaker 1: we see the child's mouth wide open, in a silent scream.
Speaker 1: In this particular freeze frame, this is the silent scream
Speaker 1: of a child threatened him imminently with extinction. Prominent physicians,
Speaker 1: obstetricians and gynecologists criticized the film as misleading and inaccurate.
Speaker 1: Said that the cortex of a fetus of this age
Speaker 1: wasn't developed enough for the fetus to feel pain, and
Speaker 1: of course the film simply erases the body of the woman.
Speaker 1: Most of the film involves Nathanson showing plastic models or
Speaker 1: ultrasound film from inside the uterus, Lots of models of fetuses,
Speaker 1: lots of fetuses inside uteruses, but not really inside women's bodies.
Speaker 1: Barely see any women, and none of them speak. They're
Speaker 1: utterly silent. Reagan saw the film and talked about how
Speaker 1: much it had affected him. He said he wished every
Speaker 1: member of Congress would watch it. Silent Scream aired, among
Speaker 1: other places, on Jerry Falwell's TV show, and it was
Speaker 1: also widely shown at high schools across the country. But
Speaker 1: pretty often the broader public just argued over what they'd seen.
Speaker 1: They didn't really disagree. They argued absolutely abortion had become
Speaker 1: either all one thing, a brutal murder or all another thing,
Speaker 1: just another medical procedure. This had become a debate about
Speaker 1: moral absolutes, about who is good and who was evil.
Speaker 1: It had also got bound together with another movement, the
Speaker 1: victims rights movement. Well lot a victim to testify a
Speaker 1: criminal may go free. The victim's rights movement began in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five with the publication of a book called
Speaker 1: The Victims by a law and order conservative from the
Speaker 1: Heritage Foundation named Frank Carrington. He wanted laws that would
Speaker 1: be tougher on criminal defendants and harsher punishments for the convicted.
Speaker 1: He and other conservatives were waging what's known as the
Speaker 1: War on Crime. A lot of feminists joined that war.
Speaker 1: They wanted more aggressive prosecutions and stricter sentences for violent
Speaker 1: crimes against women and children. Believe the women, they said,
Speaker 1: listen to their testimony, not just about abortion, but about
Speaker 1: rape and domestic violence, and child abuse and more. And
Speaker 1: then in asking for harsher punishments for men, they made
Speaker 1: common cause with conservatives. The innocent victims of crime have
Speaker 1: frequently been overlooked by our criminal justice system, and their
Speaker 1: pleas for justice have gone unheated and their wounds, personal, emotional,
Speaker 1: and financial, have gone unattended. This is Ronald Reagan speaking
Speaker 1: in the Rose Garden, April nineteen eighty two. So I
Speaker 1: am signing today an executive order establishing the President's Task
Speaker 1: Force on Victims of Crime. Reagan's task Force recommended that
Speaker 1: victims of crime be allowed to speak during sentencing hearings
Speaker 1: to explain the nature the scale of their suffering. This
Speaker 1: kind of statement came to be called victim impact evidence.
Speaker 1: As a matter of intellectual genealogy, it comes from consciousness,
Speaker 1: raising from speaking, bitterness from speaking your truth. Let the
Speaker 1: victims speak. The Me Too movement is founded on the
Speaker 1: evidentiary principles of the victim's rights movement. Believe the women
Speaker 1: speak your truth. In twenty eighteen, Larry Nasser, an Olympic
Speaker 1: gymnastics coach, was convicted of sexual assault the abuse of children.
Speaker 1: His sentencing hearing in a Michigan courtroom was broadcast on
Speaker 1: live television. Something that doesn't happen very often, and something
Speaker 1: that really doesn't happen very often. The judge allowed one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty six women to deliver victim impact statements.
Speaker 1: Thank you, what would you like me to know? For
Speaker 1: the last year I have lived behind the shadows of
Speaker 1: the name Jane Doe. I was afraid to be identified
Speaker 1: as myself and didn't want to accept this as my story.
Speaker 1: But I can't push it off anymore. This happened to me,
Speaker 1: and I have a name. My name is Jassie Powell. Here, honor.
Speaker 1: If it's okay with you, I'll be addressing the dependent
Speaker 1: directly for a lot of this statement. You may I
Speaker 1: still remember the first time I ever saw you. Larry
Speaker 1: March twenty sixth twenty Their statements are harrowing. They're hard
Speaker 1: to listen to the courage it took to say those things,
Speaker 1: but the whole thing is also weird. More than one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty women delivered impact statements in court. Nasa
Speaker 1: had been charged with sexual assaulting only ten of them.
Speaker 1: By this point, he had also already pled guilty, and
Speaker 1: he'd already been sentenced to sixty years in prison on
Speaker 1: child pornography charges. So what were all those statements? That
Speaker 1: is sentencing hearing about in a courtroom cluttered with cameras.
Speaker 1: One hundred and fifty six women spoke of the harm
Speaker 1: Nasser had done to them, But these were crimes for
Speaker 1: which he had not been tried. On Twitter, using the
Speaker 1: hashtag me too, people expressed relief and excitement and gratitude
Speaker 1: to the judge. They thought she was a hero. But
Speaker 1: a lot of legal scholars were shocked at the way
Speaker 1: the judge handled her courtroom, and at how watching the
Speaker 1: sentencing hearing on television felt something like watching a daytime
Speaker 1: talk show. It's not that those legal scholars questioned the
Speaker 1: suffering of the women who spoke that day, or the
Speaker 1: truth of what they had to say, or even that
Speaker 1: they needed to say. It is that they questioned the
Speaker 1: place of those statements in this courtroom. Saying this out
Speaker 1: loud to you is extremely uncomfortable for me, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure for everyone who is listening it is supposed to
Speaker 1: be uncomfortable. I would be doing myself and the other
Speaker 1: brave women here a great disservice by shying away from
Speaker 1: what is now my truth. The Me Too movement is
Speaker 1: both lifted and burdened by the history that came before it,
Speaker 1: a history that carries this idea. Everything I say is true,
Speaker 1: everything you say is a lie. To question me is
Speaker 1: to do me harm if we disagree. Whichever of us
Speaker 1: has suffered more wins. Fighting child abuse and sexual assault
Speaker 1: is crucial. No question those movements have done great good,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean they haven't also contributed to an
Speaker 1: epistemological chaos seized by absolutism. Proceed, please, my name is
Speaker 1: Christine Blasi Ford. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for
Speaker 1: Brett Kavanaugh, people wore buttons that read I believe Christine
Speaker 1: blasi Ford. I tried to yell for help. When I did,
Speaker 1: Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me
Speaker 1: from yelling. It was hard for me to breathe, and
Speaker 1: I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.
Speaker 1: She spoke her truth, and then he spoke his. I
Speaker 1: was not at the party described by doctor Ford. People tweeted,
Speaker 1: I believe Brett Kavanaugh. I'm here today to tell the truth.
Speaker 1: I've never sexually assaulted anyone. What was the truth? Honestly,
Speaker 1: it was hard to say for the record. I believed her.
Speaker 1: I believed her because of my personal experiences. I believed
Speaker 1: her because my experiences of being a person in the
Speaker 1: world are a lot more like her experiences than like his.
Speaker 1: But is that enough? I don't think that's enough. People
Speaker 1: keep on speaking bitterness with absolutism of the abortion debate.
Speaker 1: This divide though it isn't about abortion. Actually it's not
Speaker 1: even a divide, because here's the thing everyone seems to
Speaker 1: agree on. Speak your truth. So who killed truth? Maybe? Everyone?
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Speaker 1: Bennette of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our
Speaker 1: exact producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez
Speaker 1: are our engineers. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music
Speaker 1: by Mattheist Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Simfinett. Many
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Speaker 1: Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Henson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis
Speaker 1: and Maurice Emmanuel Parrott. The Last Archive is brought to
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Speaker 1: Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Cane and Carl mcgliori,
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Speaker 1: are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henriet O'Reilly, Oliver Riskin Cutz
Speaker 1: and Emily Spector. I'm Jilliport