﻿1
- We were trying to say we do not wanna be nuns
cloistered in a seminary.
We want to be out in the bigger world,
but almost in a subconscious way.
We just knew we wanted to be free.
(sniffling)
Boy, that really touched a nerve.
You know, somehow when I said that word, "free,"
it made a connection through the decades.
♪ Do you know
♪ Do you know what it means
♪ To be free
♪ Say the cost of living's high
♪ Check the price tag on a dream
We had just lived through the most
tumultuous year in the history of America.
♪ Fight in every kind of war
♪ Our freedom's at a premium
♪ Hope is all I can afford
- For our graduation, we were the class of 1969.
We decided we wanted to try something
that had never been done before.
Not a yearbook, but a Yearbox
full of large, loose pages.
Pages you could display like a portfolio,
and you could arrange them however you wanted.
We decided we would stage our own photoshoots.
These photos are the inspiration for this movie.
♪ Do you know what it means to be fulfilled
- [Voiceover] I wanted it all, and I wanted
to see if I could do it all.
- [Voiceover] We discovered freedom wasn't free.
I was chasing a dream.
♪ My mother and my father
♪ Are telling me what I should be
♪ I just wanna be happy and
♪ Make some good before I leave ♪
- Well, I think as women, we have a unique opportunity
to tell the story of women who went to a women's college.
Very few exist anymore.
And give our perspective on how
our lives have changed, or how we changed the world.
- Even to get to the point where you could
express a feeling of outrage, that was an achievement.
And there were all these midsts about women and their role,
and you kind of had to keep breaking through that.
- What I also could not appreciate at the time
was how unboxed my life would be.
♪ If that mockingbird don't sing
♪ Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring ♪
- [Voiceover] I felt like I was at the beginning
of something really exciting.
- [Voiceover] You know, I really wanted to
spread my wings and have a big life.
- [Voiceover] I was excited, I was scared.
First person in my immediate family to go to college.
- [Voiceover] Father worked at a factory.
He made tires.
- [Voiceover] Before I went to Skidmore,
I checked two books out at the Manchester Public Library.
Amy Vanderbilt and Emily Post,
because I didn't want to make a mistake.
- [Voiceover] Meanwhile, outside of the shelter
of our college, there were cataclysmic events
taking place all over the world that were gonna
affect all of us and change our lives.
- [Voiceover] The thing that stands out to me
when I look back is how young I was.
This suit is a pretty red, and I wanted the red
as saying, "I'm here."
When you see Afro-Americans and the numbers aren't there,
you show up two, three, or four in a group
or whatever and people start watching you.
It's like they've never seen black people
before or something.
- My parents put me on a plane in Beirut, Lebanon.
I didn't see them for another year
'cause we couldn't afford to fly me back.
- So we pull up to the dorm,
and these girls are on the porch
and they're waiting and they start clapping, and--
- My roommate was a wonderful young woman
from Long Island, her father was a physician.
The thing that I remember about her
was her coming in with a clothes rack,
rolling clothes rack, full of clothes
with still their price tags on.
And I knew then that I was in a brave, new world. (laughs)
- And they charge out and my big sister
comes running out as I get out of the car.
Obviously she knows me, but I'm still trying
to figure out which one is she.
And she runs up and she hugs me,
and the others swoop down and the luggage
is swooped out, and they're talking and they're hugging
and my parents are looking at each--
I saw the eye contact instantaneously
between them of, "Thank God.
"She's being treated like everybody else."
I think my mother was close to tears. Of relief.
- I came from a very proper family,
and you did things the right way.
I curtsied when I was introduced to people growing up.
- Social life in high school was very...
I really enjoyed it.
It was just like, you know,
American Bandstand. (laughs) It was...
- At that time, everybody was trying to fit in.
Trying to look as preppy as possible.
I was very surprised to find out there was a gal
on my floor who already had gentlemen callers.
She had about five guys that came to see her.
And I said, "How do they all know
"she was already here?" She was really beautiful.
Really beautiful, striking blonde.
We were all wearing sweaters and skirts
and she was wearing a slinky cocktail dress,
and these guys from Dartmouth were already waiting for her,
and I felt totally unsophisticated.
I realized I had a lot to learn.
- And I said to my wife, "1,400 young women?
"Really? What kind of problems could they have?"
And she said, "Oh, you will learn."
And I did.
- And the class of '69 was actually
in the dawning of that era.
They began to have the thought
that they could control more of their destiny
than they ever had before, than their mothers had,
and certainly their grandmothers had.
- We were the transition from the old to the new
in every sense, doing away with all the rules,
basically, in that four-year span.
- Pretty much from the get-go
of arriving on Skidmore campus,
there was a feel, a nascent feeling of liberation.
We were on our own, we were on our own two feet,
and we had to learn to speak up for what we believed.
But gee, it was a long time before I felt really
comfortable speaking out in class, even.
I was a shy person.
And eventually, you find your voice.
- The possibliity that a girl could come up
with her own version of her own voice,
I think I was talking to myself.
I was about me.
I was looking for a way, I didn't want to just be
like a cookie cutter person.
- All of it allowed me to learn
that you could not, nothing would intimidate me.
- Which I think a lot of the '60s was about,
it's like you're doing things and there's
a little danger in them, taking risks.
- Well, all hell broke loose
between 1965 and 1969.
It was an entirely new world.
Dormitories were now open to men,
house mothers were sent packing,
students now ran the dorms.
Women now had men and their dates staying for the weekend.
Everything had changed.
- And I was called up before the Honor Board
for having alcohol on campus.
And they told me that I would be grounded
and that I had to resign as President of the Senior Class.
And I said, "Well, you didn't elect me.
"You can't un-elect me."
They said, "Then we're gonna have a vote."
I said, "Fine. Here's the vote.
"The vote is you keep me in,
"We get booze on campus.
"You kick me out,
"You win. I'm out."
The faculty is one-third,
the administration is a third,
and the students are a third.
All three parts voted for
allowing you to drink on campus.
It was a great victory.
Dean Olds had called me in before the vote,
and she said, "Why did you do this?"
I said, "Look, it was just celebrating my birthday."
And she said, "What did you drink?"
And I said, "Well, Old Crow and whiskey sour mix."
And she goes, "Oh my dear, don't you know?
"Next time, I'll give you more money.
"Old Crow can make you very sick."
- This is how we envisioned our life was going to be.
We were gonna be glamorous,
and still throw back to something vintage
and cool, but now we were out there.
And we could do whatever we wanted,
and we were toasting ourselves.
At our first mixer, you wore a sheath and heels.
That was the dress code, a sheath and heels.
Very Mad Men, very sheath and heels.
By the second mixer, you were taping your shoes together.
Remember that, loafers were the thing
and you could beat them up as much as you want,
then you put this like, adhesive, this like bandage adhesive
around them to hold them together, because it was cool
to have the ones that were falling apart.
And it was like one year, everything changed.
While that was liberating, it was also extremely scary.
Before, you were edited and you were funneled into,
you could be a teacher, you could be a nurse,
you could be a buyer, but now, those rules were off.
Now the rule was, you could be anything you want.
I was like, "Okay, I don't know what I want." (laughs)
All right, it's like, "Here's all the flavors of ice cream,
and you go, "I don't know if I like butter pecan."
(rock music)
- The Yearbox, what a wonderful metaphor it was.
These students had come in 1965,
and they were, in some ways, in a box,
in a cage, even, at that time.
A cage of parental discipline.
A cage of very strict college laws.
- Ah, here it is.
Yearbook in a box,
and how that came about.
You're students. What year are you?
- Seniors.
Well, when I was a junior, I was tapped by the,
one of the art professors, who was very aware
and sensitive to the yearbook.
Couldn't we do something more
than what had always been done?
He never met a project that couldn't be reinvented.
(laughs)
And so he just let me conceptualize.
- Oh, I love how she was trying
to really hold on back there. (laughter)
And everybody else is kind of doing it pretty easily.
- Bob suggested to me to go home
and come up with some new concepts
for what a yearbook could be.
It comes with a responsibility,
perhaps, to reinvent it,
and make a better world.
And we like to think this was a better world.
- That it was a lot about
opening up possibilities,
and thinking outside the box, if you will,
to make a reference to our Yearbox.
And sort of reinventing your life.
(rock music)
- He said, "Skidmore is looking for a
"photographer who would photograph the senior class.
- I mean, all of those photographs
were part of a kind of liberation.
- And you had me write Sedan a letter,
and I remember coming to you in the snack bar
with my response, 'cause we used U.S. mail in those days.
- (laughing) Yeah, right.
- Oh, I got a letter from Sedan.
Oh, he would be very interested in our project.
He'd like me to come to Yale as his guest.
And Bob says, "And stay in the guest room,
"I assume." (laughter)
And that should have tipped me off right away.
This guy was gonna be trouble.
- I was still a bashful young man.
I was the only rooster in the garden, so to speak.
I was in Wonderland.
I thought this would be a nice shoot
because I thought they were gonna take their clothes off
in an area where I can see them.
But they all disappeared and came back with the barrels.
A lot of them would show me their little
diamond ring, like don't touch me, or don't...
So I knew immediately they were off limits.
One time when we were in a position
of being very intimate, and she said to me,
"I wanna stay a virgin until I get married."
I never got over that.
Occupy Wall Street, occupy this and that.
Very much rooted in the efforts of the '60s generation.
That freedom that came with it.
The freedom of expression, and the freedom
of action among the students was the most important to me.
(gentle flute music)
- This architecture speaks to me because it's
fanciful and exuberant, and it's not just a box.
It's architecture unboxed.
The photographic shoot with Sedat,
as I recall, involved him involving me
in a conversation, so not just as he posed
and suggested different places to stand.
He would ask questions, and the question
I remembered when he snapped it was,
"So what are you gonna do next year?" (laughs)
And I said, "I'm going to go live in Italy."
And click. (shutter clicks)
- All the doors were not open.
You can be anything you want, and then,
what makes you think you can do that?
I wasn't aware of barriers for a long time.
It took me a while to realize that I was,
I was beginning to break some barriers.
- Women didn't run for president
of the school, you could be secretary.
Certainly not treasurer, 'cause you don't trust
women with money, at least not in high school in the '60s.
I never really...
thought that I would spend my life
being a mom, a wife, and a worker.
That didn't seem an opportunity for me.
I mean, when I was growing up there was one mother
who worked, and you should've heard
the other mothers talk about her.
- I grew up with up with parents
and a little white picket fence.
You would think that would be how my life worked out.
Not so.
(gentle music)
- I always thought everybody else
knew more than I did, and they kind of,
they had the formulas to the secrets to us, and I didn't.
- I always felt like everybody was
better looking than I was.
- I really did feel like I was...
out of my own.
When I say that, I don't think that I
had ever been in my element anywhere.
- But it just really took me a long time
before I felt centered.
- I was afraid to be beautiful.
Yeah.
I was afraid to be funny.
I wanna say I don't know why.
The closest that I can get to the truth...
is that...
I think I was afraid that
what I would...
what people would see
would not be acceptable.
I was lost.
♪ God's gonna trouble the water
- And we began to chant,
"Let the women speak, let the women speak!"
Life then just seemed like every day you got up
and there'd be another kind of "Wham, here's another
"majorly big thing that's happening."
And it really did feel like the ground
was just shifting all the time.
- There began to be a critical mass within our hearts
of what we needed to be doing.
- I think women have been told to be quiet,
to calm down, to calm down.
When somebody says to me, "Calm down,"
sometimes my husband will say that to me now,
I think, "Don't tell me to calm down."
- People were being assassinated, there was
riots in the streets, cities were burning.
The Civil Rights Movement,
the war, women's lib.
Students now think that if they "Like" something
on Facebook that they've done thier bid,
but you're not gonna affect change in the society
unless you get out there and try to do something about it.
- I've lived through two
truly cataclysmic events in terms
of the impact on my world.
One was the assassination of President Kennedy
and everything that flowed from that,
and the other event was 9/11.
- I worked for, on and off of the newspaper
when I was in college, and I did get the opportunity
to interview Bobby Kennedy,
who, my god, was one of my major heroes.
I was devastated when he was assassinated.
- [Voiceover] The day Bobby Kennedy came to the campus...
- I have a picture of me sitting right behind him.
What struck me, his hands were shaking.
I'll never forget that. His hands were trembling.
Nobody could see it behind the podium
in front of him, but I could, I'm right behind him.
The page was shaking, hands were
trembling so that the paper rattled.
- I began to see that women were treated
in similar ways to in the ways that blacks
were being treated, so it wasn't a difficult leap
to make between what was happening
in the Civil Rights Movement and wanting to get
more with the Women's Movement.
- There was a woman in that dorm whose,
I don't know whether it was her fiance,
was in Vietnam, and he called her
and I remember that conversation.
That sort of heart breaking conversation.
He's over there, who knows
when or if she'd ever talk to him again,
and she's on this payphone in the hall.
- All the boys that I grew up with, 'cause I didn't
grow up in a fancy neighborhood,
were being drafted to go into a war that,
and many of them got killed, that,
most of the people that I knew, including myself,
didn't believe was a moral war, a justifiable war.
It seemed that the U.S. had no business
being in Vietnam, it was a civil war,
and that it sort of smelled of imperialism.
That's what drove everybody to feel
that they really had to speak out.
- You know, when he came home and I met him
at the airport, I thought he'd made it.
He got out without getting killed.
And then he was in his early 40s,
one night he says to me, "I have cancer."
I said, "If you've got a slow growing cancer,
"you could probably trace it right back to Vietnam."
You know what I mean?
Yeah, to (mumbles)
You know, I really loved him.
But he's gone.
♪ If that mockingbird don't sing
♪ Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring
♪ If that diamond ring turns brass
♪ Mama's gonna buy you a looking glass ♪
- [Voiceover] Everybody came home from Christmas
senior year with their rings.
- Sex was never a conversation at home.
And she says to me, "Do you know what a diaphragm is?"
And I said, "Yeah, it's this muscle
(laughing) "underneath the..."
- Finally an enlightened gynecologist came to town,
and he let it be known that he would do,
he would give birth control to women who were engaged.
One of my students sent away for her older sister's
engagement ring, she put it on, went to see the doctor,
and the doctor years later said to me,
"Tom, if I saw that ring once, I saw it 27 times."
That's what women had to do in that era
to get a hold of birth control.
- The ring by spring thing was nonsense.
I'd never heard that before, that was not on my agenda.
My mom had told me early on, if you wanna get married,
stay home and save everybody a lot of money.
- I think I was interested in romance
from the time I was about four.
This little boy named Georgie Kiefer gave me a ring.
That was the beginning of the end for me.
I think everybody wanted to appear to be a virgin,
and I think everybody said they were a virgin.
I actually restored my virginity
after high school. (laughter)
I then became a... (laughs)
I was a recovering virgin.
- I had an affair with two professors.
The airplane belonged to the professor, the first professor.
He was sort of, considered to me,
the best looking professor on campus.
I was his girlfriend, therefore people would
turn their heads to look at me.
I became friends with his family and I remember
being over at their house when we landed on the moon.
Another milestone was finding out through analysis
and through becoming friends
with a terrific group of people, that I was gay.
The most difficult part about that was
telling my family, which did not go so well.
- Out of that grows a great solidarity with the people that
are coming out of the closet, have come out of the closet...
I mean, we just had a fellow at work,
an engineer at work, who took a week off
and came back as a woman.
- I wrote to her every day in the summer,
and she never wrote me back.
I remember that as being excruciatingly painful.
I'd go to my little mailbox in Oak Bluffs,
I'd open it up and there'd be nothing inside.
Finally, she must've called me or something happened,
and I went to visit her and her family in Vermont.
I was in her bedroom,
and I opened the top drawer, and there was
my stack of letters all in one piece.
When I left, I took them.
And she never said anything to me about it,
she clearly had them sitting there,
and I read them, and I was sort of appalled,
and then I buried them outside. (laughs)
I tried to dig them up a couple years later
and they were not there anymore.
- Your big sister set you up in your freshman year
with a frat boy from Union College,
and he drinks a lot of beer and is really into football,
and that just wasn't my thing.
So I just found my little home in Caffè Lena.
(folk music)
That was a university for us.
I wound up waitressing there pretty much all four years.
Yeah, you're a woman, but you can do this.
You can play music, you don't have to just listen to it.
♪ Wade in the water
♪ Wade in the water children
♪ Wade in the water
♪ God's gonna trobule the water
Well, the first love of my life, he was a master
guitar player, he had a beautiful Martin D-28,
I think, and just lovely picking style,
and very, very sweet songs.
I lost my virginity at Lena's apartment.
As a matter of fact, she gave us her grand bedroom. (laughs)
- I have always had terrible taste in men.
- Sometimes you have to kiss a lot
of frogs to meet the prince.
- I think I went underground...
Especially because I was so, sort of in awe of my husband.
- I'm really not wife material. I'm really not.
- There was something very theoretical about my life.
I wanted something real, but to become kind of,
really realizing my sexual self,
that happened with Mike.
It was, you know, it was very...
It was very powerful.
- I'm talking about coming out of the box, and I think
women realized that sexual satisfaction was their right.
- Mike put on this album, this new album
that had just come out, and Both Sides Now starts to play.
Whenever I hear it I immediately turn back to that night,
and it rained and we ran across the bridge,
and that was one of those moments when
your life is sort of going down the road
this way, and then all of a sudden (blows air).
- The major cop-out thing, I got married.
And I was embarrassed to be getting married.
That's how I felt about it. (laughs)
I remember I went home and told my father
"I'm so embarrassed to be saying that."
- I actually dated someone from Union College,
but it stopped when my parents would not let me
go down for a weekend.
- That's where my life started going off the cliff.
You know the whole cliche of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
That became a real part of my life,
the chaos and the instability of relationships.
- [Voiceover] So it took a long time for me to actually get,
from my mother, probably 'til I was like 55,
that she was actually proud of what I'd done.
All she'd call and say, "So when are you having children?
"So when are you having children?"
- My mother had the longest running subscription
to Brides Magazine that I think they ever had,
ever, ever, ever.
- Yes, I was pregnant when I graduated,
and there were a few of us.
- I got pregnant and got married.
Had I not gotten pregnant, I wouldn't have gotten married.
- I had my son probably just before I turned 43.
- She was the second bottle of champagne
on my 40th birthday. (laughs)
So you know, everybody says life begins at 40?
I didn't think it was gonna be that way. (laughs)
Yeah, it was a surprise, I was not necessarily
wanting children, really.
A lot of people say it's a difficult moment when
your daughter goes off to college.
I was so ready to get rid of her. (laughs)
Living with a teenage girl who's very smart
and is also stronger than you are...
But I got mad at her, she used to pick me up.
Literally pick me up off my feet.
How, and you know it's like,
"Put me down, put me down!" (laughs)
- One of the big regrets of my life is not having children.
I never set out to not have children,
I always assumed I would have children, but...
When I came here to MIT, it was,
I couldn't even imagine having children.
- James Baldwin said, "Go the way your blood beats.
"All true love is holy."
It was very important to me for many, many years,
to have a lover and to be in a
loving relationship with someone.
I never had a strong pull toward being a mother.
I certainly never had any regret
at the decision to have an abortion.
And that's what I find so upsetting in these...
pathetic old men in Congress and without that
set themselves up as arbiters
of what should happen with my womb.
- Not having children makes me weep.
And there are times when...
simply having nobody
to help me but me makes me weak.
You're about to get the flu
and you can feel it coming on,
and there's nothing in the house,
and you have to make the trip to the grocery store
to buy what you're gonna need for the next three days
because there is no division of labor.
That makes me weep sometimes.
The stinkin' quart of milk. (chuckles)
("The Water is Wide" sung by MaryLeigh Roohan)
♪ The water is wide
- Yeah, honestly relationships have been
my biggest challenge.
- The type of men that
I found appealing changed
as I became more political.
- I have a wonderful husband,
and he calls himself Mr. Thatcher.
He claims he likes to carry my purse.
- We've been married for 42 years.
- I very much had one foot strongly planted
in that 1950s mentality,
of your husband will take care of you.
- I can remember my mother saying (inhales)
"The man is the head of the relationship
"and the woman is the heart."
Therefore, don't think.
- I wasn't good at expressing my feelings at all.
Because you didn't wanna rock the boat.
- I mean, look what happened with divorce.
I know my friends' parents who would stay together
with impossible marriages, and the stigma
attached to divorce, well, for politicians...
Ronald Reagan became president and he was divorced.
That never would have happened in the '50s.
- I could make much better business decisions than I ever
did with most of what was going on in my home life.
- You know, every divorce has a straw.
- He landed in jail many, many times.
His face was beaten up.
- My ex-husband bought a ship.
I'm not talking about a boat or a yacht,
I'm talking about a ship.
- He did try to break into the White House.
He was fairly political-minded.
- And so he bought a ship without telling me
or discussing it with me, or...
And that was at a time that we could barely
pay our day-to-day bills.
- You know what?
I love you dearly, but I'm better off
striking off on my own.
- It's not always a regret, it's a wonder,
what would I be like if I had married?
(laughs) I don't know.
I think I learned early on
with other girlfriends,
I learned not to define myself
based on the dependence or the need for a man.
- Who am I without a man?
That's been, that's been a very interesting
thing to discover.
- That bond, and that's probably why he's come up a lot,
is the one that sort of remains in my dreams.
That's what my soul returns to.
Married, couple of kids.
I ran into him at a funeral. (laughs)
I was still hoping that I would find someone
that would be more of a life partner.
But they were mostly musicians, you know?
The nature of the beast, you know.
I think that I was close to a guitarist
for a while, and very close to a jazz pianist
for a while, and then close to a jazz bassist
for a while. (laughs)
Never set up housekeeping again, though.
♪ Say the cost of living's high
♪ Check the pricetag on a dream
- Brian, my middle child,
used to wonder, "Mommy, why do you work
"so hard?" And he was like, 12 or 13 maybe at the time.
This is when I was still single,
I hadn't married Randy yet.
I said, "Because I don't wanna get fired."
He said, "No one would ever fire you."
He says, "You are the queen of work!"
- I mean, I loved being a mother,
but there was a real big hole in my life.
- And if you think about their mothers,
who many of them who graduated from
very good liberal arts colleges like Skidmore.
Those mothers thought that they would get a ring
by spring of their senior year and then
move into marriage and produce children
like themselves and then go on
producing more children, but not taking a job.
Now we had women going out into the workplace
who actually expected to work.
- But I'll never forget walking down the hall
and hearing this music, and saying, "Oh my god,
"that is so beautiful." And it was like,
it's just kind of (humming march music).
It was so beautiful, and that's,
that's how I responded, and...
that has never left me.
It's really the profound through line of my life.
I kind of went from the sublime
to the ridiculous, but the way I phrased it
was I sang as a singing telegram
delivery person, and I sang in the chorus at the Met.
So, which was sublime and which was ridiculous?
(laughs)
- I only have one sibling,
and she's developmentally disabled.
She was living at home with my parents.
I asked my parents, "What are your...
"What about Kathy?" because by that time
my father was almost 70.
This when I was still in college, and I said,
"What is the plan?"
My father said, "You're the plan."
I said, "I'm not the plan."
I realized, to make sure I wasn't the plan
I really had to put a lot of distance
between myself and Manchester.
I just did not wanna be, this is (mumbles),
gonna be sound very heartless, but I did not
want to be my sister's keeper, I really wanted a life.
I'd worked hard to get one.
I didn't want to go back,
and so I didn't.
- In the summer I had worked on 7th Avenue
as a Fitters model, and I remember where,
which basically, they stuck pins in you all day
and paid you for it, but mended you
if you bled onto the dress.
It was really one of those really interesting
7th Avenue experiences.
I got paid by the hour and all that kind of thing.
I really realized at that point that I wanted
to be the one sitting behind the desk
going, (nasally) "I don't like this.
"She doesn't look good in that.
"That's not cute, I want that one.
"Could you make it in blue?"
(normal) I wanted to be the one on the other side,
the business person.
- I would always come at it from the financial side
'cause I really wanted to be in charge.
- Victoria's Secret has a whole other, when I was there,
you had a whole manual that defined
what sexy was in six different buckets of sexy.
Believe it or not.
Once you tell people that you do bras,
let me tell you, you're at every cocktail party,
people are hiking up their shirts.
(laughing) I mean, just even at my Sunday School
teacher man was like, "Not here, please,"
and I was like, "Please."
- I began my career with the Three Mile Island event,
and I was flying that day into Harrisburg
to meet with the governor the day after
Three Mile Island, I'm the only one on the plane.
(laughing) Everybody else is going the other way.
- I ran for mayor. Very active in my union.
Teachers Union, and...
during my working years I'm still active as a retiree.
- I became Mondale's Press Secretary when he
geared up the campaign to run in '84.
I was the first woman Press Secretary
to a major Presidential Campaign,
so there was a barrier broken.
- I mean, I was the first woman in a men's locker room.
I was doing a really feminist thing,
and it was really, really, really hard.
I was part of probably, the largest group
Pulitzer ever won at the Times,
which was for portraits and grief
about almost everyone who died on 9/11.
- Oh, there were times when I was working 60 or 70 hours.
It's become my family.
- I'm a workaholic and one of the problems
is that it's so darn interesting. (laughs)
This organism, Prochlorococcus,
it's like opening a present every week.
My relationship with it is wanting to understand
how it dominates the ocean.
There's 10,000 of them per teaspoon of ocean water.
Nobody knows they're there,
and yet they're running the world.
This is actually a poster for a party that
my department had to celebrate my receiving
the National Medal of Science.
- Three weeks before the election, we got a poll
which showed very conclusively that it was gonna be
very difficult for Mondale to come back
from where he was at a low point, and try to
and win the election, so we knew he was gonna lose.
- I have never cried on the job no matter how bad
things got, I have never cried on the job.
I might've cried at home afterwards.
- I would go back to my hotel room
every day and cry at 5 o'clock,
everybody thought that was funny at the time.
- And one day we were watching something
on television and Robin Morgan appeared.
Robin Morgan, of course, was a very ardent feminist
and we watched this, and Mike,
my brand new husband, said, "Oh, everything she says
"makes so much sense to me."
And I was thinking, "Oh, god.
"We just got married, we're gonna have a baby."
It was a funny thing that he was
liking the feminist point of view whereas I was
kind of saying, "I don't know if I'm gonna be able to really
"do this feminist thing."
- Nobody ever said to me that all of that
so-called success was going to
also have a toll, and it did.
It had a toll on my spirit,
it had a toll on my sort of sense of self.
I loved my work.
The first show that I did was Charles in Charge,
I developed and produced The Magic School Bus series,
I've won 12 Emmys, do a lot of my work in Hollywood,
which is a real pressure cooker.
I started doing that at a very early age
and I also became a mother at a relatively early age.
- I just don't think I was the best mother
in the whole world.
I was too tired to be the best mother
in the whole world.
- I was fortunate because my husband worked freelance,
and he was at home, fortunate, unfortunate
because at a certain point,
I felt somewhat resentful that here I was
being the person to go to work every day
and basically bring home the bacon.
Wasn't it great?
I was a successful woman of the '70s,
but I worry that my children's major attachment
was to my husband, who was really taking
the role of the traditional stay-at-home parent,
and I was bravely marching into the workforce
to come home exhausted all the time,
and have the feeling that
I was somehow failing at my work
because I wasn't there as much as I should be,
and I was failing at home because I wasn't with my children.
- The schools didn't have an all-day kindergarten,
so it really became an option for me
where I could just drop the kids off in the morning
and pick them up at night.
I can remember both of them
standing behind this fence,
crying as I'm leaving, it was just,
it was devastating. Absolutely awful.
Awful, awful.
- Women had to work twice as hard,
and this has been documented by double blind studies
of resumes and publications, and you know,
fellowship grants, that women's have to be,
half again as good to get an equal outcome.
- Assertiveness in women is aggression.
It's okay for guys, but it's not okay for women.
- And he asked me the question and it was on
the evening news, I'd love to try to find this footage.
And he asked me the question,
"Why you?" Right?
I was pretty young, "You're so many years old,
and "why would he have chosen you for this job?"
And I said, "Would you ask that question of a man?"
And I think I caught them off guard.
- They were all men except for me.
And we had a 7 o'clock breakfast meeting
once a week and I remember,
it was like a stopwatch getting everybody ready,
dropping off at childcare, et cetera, et cetera.
So I went in to get Danny and he had made
just a great, huge mess in his crib.
I had to give him a bath.
I'm looking at my watch, it's 6:45,
saying to myself at the time,
"There's not a single member of the Executive Committee
"doing this this morning, that's for sure!"
I remember being kind of annoyed
that there was no opportunity for me to even
catch a breath because they're running it like a men's club.
- I mean, I became part of the movement,
and I don't think it's coincidental that that was
about the time I got tenure at MIT.
Then I became very involved in
advancing the cause of women in science.
- See, I, in the business world also,
see the generation of women who think they have to be
like the boys to succeed, and I've never felt that.
And I think Skidmore is why. (laughs)
I think I was comfortable in being me,
as a woman!
I've not tried to be a man. (laughs)
I wanna be with the boys,
but I don't wanna be one of the boys.
- There's always this sense that you walk into a room
if you're a woman, and have no degrees from MIT,
that you're assumed dumb until you prove otherwise.
Not dumb, but less than.
And I think that that
kind of constantly fueled
a sense of, "I'll show them."
I call it the "uprising," when all
the senior women got together.
I have a button that says,
"Well-Behaved Women Don't Make History."
- Yeah, the glass ceiling was there,
it wasn't blatantly talked about.
Women could be vice presidents,
but you weren't gonna be CEO.
- You have to be not well-behaved
if you're gonna make history.
♪ The water is wide
- [Voiceover] After I'm dead, I hope people
Google me. (laughs)
- Gee, as I'm sitting here I'm becoming
much more proud of myself (laughs)
because it is, in fact, a legacy.
It is an easier, the world is an easier
place for my daughter.
- Many times over my career, I've been the first woman
to get this or the first woman to get that,
and I always tell the joke
that I wanna be the second woman
to get whatever it is. (laughter)
Or the fifth.
- They want to celebrate your being the first black
to do something, or the first minority of any kind.
To me the stories are that you get these
privileges, you're talked about being special,
that you're not like everybody else.
And my reaction is, "Oh, but I am
"like everybody else." (laughs)
There are a lot of people who worked hard
who should've been in front of me,
but they sort of laid down and sacrificed
so I could get there, and I will not forget that.
When I went to college and became a lawyer,
my parents said to me, "Good, go--"
Well, they didn't say "Good" initially,
it was like, "You wanna be a lyin' lawyer?" (laughs)
Those were my mother's words exactly.
But after that, they said, "Well good,
"go speak for those who can't speak for themselves."
- When she was talking about, she and her husband's
wedding and they had been meeting with the rabbi,
and she talked about how, she thought it might be nice
if she walked around him seven times.
I said, "And then he's gonna walk around you seven times,"
and she goes, "No, I'm just gonna walk around him."
Something inside me snapped and I lost it,
and I was very inappropriate with her,
and said that it would be over my dead body.
If I choose to be submissive,
if I choose to play a role
in my household it's my choice,
but no one should tell me what my role is.
I didn't want anyone to tell her,
or at least make a demonstration
of what her future role might be in her marriage.
She didn't walk around her husband
seven times at the wedding.
- The Women's Movement affected me in terms of
raising my son to appreciate women,
and to value their roles and to try and understand them.
We encouraged a lot stronger generation of women
coming up behind us than existed before,
and also, perhaps a generation of men
who were a little bit more attuned
to women's issues and women's rights.
- The idea of being unboxed, I wish that for everybody.
I wish that for my own daughters,
who I would say, are in the hipster box.
You know, get out of that box, and...
just see what's out there.
- In fact, I always tell my students, "Follow your heart.
"It won't let you down."
- Feminism was the best gift of your generation
to modern students, and they take it for granted,
but they may have to re-fight some of these same battles.
- I mean, look at Hillary Clinton,
another graduate of the class of 1969
from a women's college.
I'm really proud to be
in that class and of her generation.
- I think my child is my legacy.
My fearless child.
I would never have been called fearless
when I was her age, when I was 23.
That was not something somebody would ever say
to us when we were that age, fearless.
'Cause I don't think that was something we knew how to be.
At least I didn't.
- Yeah, I think that this on both sides now
kind of says it all, and maybe that's how
I've lived my life, more with the questions.
I know I have more questions always
than I have answers, and I find
that the older I get, the less I feel I know.
- You can't have it all.
You sort of have choices to make, trade-offs,
and everybody finds their own balance.
- I Googled it and I found her,
so I decided to call her.
This man answered,
I gave him my name, he said "Oh!
"Your portrait is hanging in our living room
"over the mantel."
She comes to the phone
and she's in the process of getting divorced.
I made a terrible gaffe, I said,
"Are you still as beautiful as you used to be at Skidmore?"
That's something that you should have never,
ever said, but I said it.
In retrospect I think about it and I said,
"What an ass I was to make a comment like that."
But she was very mature about that,
and she put it in a very...
spiritual level.
She said, "I'm very beautiful inside."
- Hopefully someone would want to say,
"Good daughter, good friend,
"good wife, good mother."
I guess I didn't say good lawyer. (laughs)
I don't think I want that on my tombstone.
- My epitaph on my gravestone,
"No longer looking for a better position."
♪ I'll go out with a bang
- [Voiceover] Aging is about, it's about
a lot of letting go.
- Just turned 65 the day before yesterday.
- The road ahead, there's a vanishing point,
(laughing) and we'll be vanishing at some point.
I think about death a lot, I have to say.
It is not something that I...
But it's not, it doesn't, I don't--
When my mother died, I was with her.
I was holding her as she died,
and it was actually very peaceful,
and it was very sweet.
- The question no longer is "what do I want"
but what is my role in reflecting God?
- I touch God every day.
God is in my daughter.
- I think that I still have a lot of unfulfilled potential.
And...
Unfinished. (laughs)
- I wanna feel useful.
I wanna feel like I'm, I still have a voice.
- We have renewed ourselves and maybe reinvented
ourselves so many times along the way.
- I would like to learn, probably,
would you believe, Latin and Hebrew.
- I would love to do a cartwheel.
I tried it recently. The results were...
(laughing) shall we say, a little disappointing.
- A friend of mine said the only thing about getting older
is that you look different to other people.
I feel the same inside that I always did,
maybe even better.
- The moments of a real joy and
contentment in my life.
I've got my piano and I've got my cat,
and I've got a good job.
- I mean, sometimes I'm amazed that we're all 65
and, where did those years go?
It's quite a journey.
- I feel much more that I understand
what the word "freedom" means now, than then.
In some ways, I guess maybe I'm really living the '60s.
Not only am I in my 60s, but I'm living
the spirit of the '60s of not feeling...
bound by convention as much as
by my own heart, and freedom
was what the '60s were about.
I think I'm finally getting it.
("Fading")
♪ Fading
♪ They say I'm fading
- It's become my family.
♪ Better look at my life and forgive
♪ Graying
♪ Just 'cause I'm graying
♪ Don't mean this fire is dying
♪ Shine 'til the last moment
- Well-behaved women don't make history.
♪ 'Cause I started dancing
♪ When I learned to walk
♪ Became a fighter and never stopped
♪ I refused
- And all these midsts about women and their role,
and you kind of had to keep breaking through that.
- Don't tell me to calm down.
- (laughing) I was a recovering virgin.
- It's this muscle (laughing) underneath...
- She didn't walk around her husband
seven times at the wedding.
- I wanna be with the boys,
but I don't wanna be one of the boys.
- Still their pricetags on, and I knew then
that I was in a (laughing) brave new world.
- [Voiceover] I ran for mayor.
- You are the queen of work.
- I would love to do a cartwheel.
- Another kind of, wham!
♪ 'Cause I started dancing when I learned to walk
♪ Became a fighter
- Get out of that box.
- I'm unboxing myself, I guess, in some ways.
- You look different to other people.
♪ I'll go out with a bang ♪
- What kind of problems could they have?
- I think maybe it's just not gonna happen for me.
I would, however, not...
If I met somebody while I'm walking back
to my car this afternoon, the Upper West Side
has always been a very (laughs)
successful place for me to meet men.
I, you know, I would explore a relationship.
For sure.
♪ Oh blackbird I hear you sing
♪ You've mended up your broken wings
♪ But I heard people say
♪ That you can't fly the same
♪ Say your wings are old now, they're gray
♪ Oh blackbird, I hear them say
♪ It's time you put those wings away
♪ You're not graceful now
♪ You're just flapping around
♪ Better off retiring to the ground
♪ Oh blackbird I know it isn't true
♪ The fire still burns bright inside of you
♪ Oh blackbird, you tell me
♪ You have so much left to do
♪ You'll fly high until it's through ♪