All About Change - Gloria Feldt - Feminist Icon

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Gloria Feldt, the CEO of Planned Parenthood from 1996-2005, is a bestselling author and life-long feminist activist. Raised by Jewish immigrants in rural Texas, Gloria became a teen mom at 16 and had ...three children by the time she was 20. After the birth of her third child, she decided to pursue her dream of getting a college degree. The pursuit of education ended up completely altering her life path.   Join us for the latest episode of All About Change as Gloria discusses her career - empowering women of all ages and how we can continue to rally forces even as the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade threatens to unravel years of progress. Please find a transcription of this episode: https://allaboutchangepodcast.com/podcast-episode/gloria-feldt-feminist-icon/.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Yes, you can make a difference. That's exactly what we saw in Kansas. Hi, I'm Jay Ruderman, and welcome to All About Change, a podcast showcasing individuals who leverage the hardships that have been thrown at them to better other people's lives. This is all wrong. I say put mental health first because if you don't... This generation of Americans has already had enough. I stand before you not as an expert, but as a concerned citizen. Today on our show, Gloria Felt.
Starting point is 00:00:34 Our institutions were designed by men for men who had women at home taking care of the kids and the family. Gloria is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and an acclaimed expert on women, power, and leadership. Abortion has never been about abortion. Birth control arguments have never been about birth control. They are about whether women will have an equal place in the world. Raised by Jewish immigrants in rural Texas, Gloria became a teen mom at 16 and had three children by the time she was 20. Four months after the birth of her third child, she started a new path. She enrolled in community college and one of her final collegiate projects involved researching the Planned Parenthood
Starting point is 00:01:16 organization. And 30 years later, I retired as the national president. Gloria grew Planned Parenthood into the powerful nonprofit you see today. Among her many accomplishments, she was the architect behind getting insurance companies to cover contraception. Don't wait and just try to fight back bad legislation. Write your own legislation that sets up a world as you want it to be. Today, at 80 years old, Gloria is still as passionate and active as ever. She's the co-founder and president of Take the Lead, promoting female leadership across all sectors. The recent Dobbs decision, threatening to unravel years of progress,
Starting point is 00:02:00 makes our conversation today all the more urgent and timely. My choice! My choice! Hey, that could be me. That could be my daughter. That could be my wife. That could be, you know, a niece or somebody that I really care about. It is unfortunate that we had to wait this long for people to wake up, but I do believe they are waking up. We won't go back.
Starting point is 00:02:21 We won't go back. We won't go back. Gloria, thank you so much for being our guest today on All About Change. I think today's interview is especially poignant considering the recent Dobbs decision. And I thought I'd start out by asking about your personal background. You grew up as a young Jewish girl in the Bible Belt in Texas. Did your experience lead you to have an affinity towards civil rights? No question about it. Absolutely. I believe that to this day. I think it is one of the greatest gifts that I could have possibly had. And also for giving me a certain kind of courage.
Starting point is 00:02:56 Right. It takes courage to stand up for what you believe when you're not the majority. And I had to hone those muscles. And that also stood me in good stead in fighting for reproductive justice and rights. Often when I'm making speeches to Jewish audiences, the title of my speech is, There Was No Temple in Temple. Temple was the name of the town where I was born. There were a few Jewish families there, but not many. And I went to high school in a town where we were the only Jewish family. And I hated it at the time. I hated being different. You know, what does a teenager want, right?
Starting point is 00:03:28 Right. It turned out as I got to be an adult, I realized what a gift it was to know what it felt like to be the other, to be different. It was a gift because it gave me empathy for other people who had been disregarded, disrespected, or in some way or another discriminated against. As I began studying Judaism as an adult and really got in touch with the social justice values of Judaism, I became much more committed to it and, you know, to raising my children in the Jewish faith. Their father was not Jewish, but was very involved in the synagogue in West Texas, 60 families in a hundred mile radius, but we were there. You were a very, very young mother. You had your first child when you were 15 years old.
Starting point is 00:04:20 I was barely 16, but yes. Can you talk about the decisions you made at that point in your life and how you became such a young mother? How does anybody become a mother, right? My father, bless his heart, gave me a book about it, but my mother never said one word. And I didn't really, I didn't really understand, as I think many young people grow up, not understanding their bodies and understanding the sexuality and sexual desire and how you need to make wise choices about what you do. And it was the 1950s. And there was no really reliable birth control. Right. I was a normal kid. And, you know, I had a boyfriend who was a normal boy. And how does it happen? That's how it happens. And I think that it's really wonderful that today,
Starting point is 00:05:16 while there still is more pregnancy among younger people than should be, the rate has gone very far down, thanks to more information that's available to them on the web, even if they don't have parents who talk to them about sex. But also, girls have much more vision about what they can be and do with their lives. I didn't have that. Although my father always told me you can do anything your pretty little head desires, the women I saw didn't really seem to think they had agency over their lives and their decisions. Role models of women didn't really teach me that I could or should have a vision for myself beyond being a wife and mother. So was it a choice? I thought so. But you know,
Starting point is 00:06:11 maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was that I was following the cultural cues. You went on to become CEO of Planned Parenthood. You've written many books, you're a sought after keynote speaker. But most importantly, you're an activist with an incredible track record. Can you connect the docs for us from being a young mother to becoming an advocate? Well, it's actually very symmetrical. It's a set of values that really is authentic and consistent and comes from a place of understanding the real world situations of real world women and wanting to help them. After I had my third child, it was like a light bulb went off in my head. And I realized that, first of all, I had always been a pretty smart kid,
Starting point is 00:06:55 and I liked to study and I liked to learn, so I decided I wanted to start college. So I started to college when my youngest was four months old, and it took me 12 years to finish. And during that time period, I both was able to start some professional work and also to get involved in community service work. The first thing that I did was I got involved in some civil rights organizations and a number of interfaith organizations as well. I was living in Odessa, Texas by this time. I learned a couple of things from the civil rights movement. And one was that people working together can change anything. And you don't have to have formal power to do that. You don't have to have a lot of money to do that. But you have to be willing
Starting point is 00:07:40 to take risks and have the courage to talk about it. And you have to work together. The other thing that I noticed was that the women were doing all of the frontline work and the men were getting all the leadership positions and all the credit. And I thought to myself at the time, hey, wait a minute, if there are civil rights, then women must have them too. And that was when I began to get this realization that there were a lot of things in this world that were not necessarily fair to women. And honestly, I had grown up drinking the Kool-Aid, believing that a woman's role was to be the support system for everybody else. And you wanted to live behind the picket fence and have a bunch of children and take care of your husband and, you know, be Susie
Starting point is 00:08:29 Homemaker, which I, all of which I learned how to do. But it turned out it wasn't quite as gratifying as I thought it might be. As I finished my degree, I was serendipitously offered a position as executive director of a small fledgling Planned Parenthood affiliate in West Texas. 17 big rural counties and one or two cities that could have been called cities. And I had planned on being a high school social studies teacher, frankly, because as I was growing up, women could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries, and that was about it. I couldn't type and I didn't like the sight of blood, so I decided teaching would be the thing for me. So I was serendipitously offered this position at just about the time that I was planning to start looking for a teaching job.
Starting point is 00:09:16 And I thought, well, it sounded kind of interesting. I'd do it for a few years. And 30 years later, I retired as the national president. That's such an incredible story. Little did I know, nor would I have known, that it was actually a perfect fit for me. I had never imagined myself being the CEO of anything, but it turned out that I just had the right kind of brain for that work. And I really loved movement building. And then after I left Planned Parenthood, I started another nonprofit organization to get women to parity in leadership within my lifetime,
Starting point is 00:09:52 because I believe if we don't have equal pay, equal power and equal positions, we'll keep fighting those same battles over and over and over again. As you can see, we are fighting them today. Back up the street. Let's go. Let's go, Mr. Cameraman. This ain't no time for funny. When you took over Planned Parenthood, there was real danger involved. I mean, clinics were being bombed. People were killed. I want to emphasize again, as I had to do just a few days ago, that acts of violence against people who are trying to exercise their constitutional rights are acts of terror. What was it like to build an organization while at the same time receiving personal threats?
Starting point is 00:10:31 I don't even know how to describe this. At this point, you know, I look back on it and I think, my goodness, how in the world? I was very fortunate to have a spouse who had the kind of courage that you have to have in situations like that. And he literally helped me know how to muster that courage and how to stand up for what you believe, no matter what else was going on in the world. The moral of that is you can't go it alone. You have to have a support system, number one. The second thing that I realized when I became the national president of Planned Parenthood, in order for people to refrain from being just demoralized by what's going on in the present world, it's important to help them think about, okay, well, why are we here? When we look back 25 years from now, what do we want to have
Starting point is 00:11:25 accomplished? And so that we can think on that level of, all right, how are we going to solve this problem? Not how are we going to, you know, how are we going to hunker down and just survive it? You have to get out of survival mode. And those were the kinds of things that I learned from that time. And I was always just so inspired by the courage of the clinic staff. I mean, there would be days that I would take bagels and donuts and things, you know, to try to thinking I was going to, you know, buck them up. And they'd just look at me like, hey, we got work to do. I was going to, you know, buck them up. And they'd just look at me like, hey, we got work to do. The idea that our rights can be taken away, it's like I'm shaking.
Starting point is 00:12:13 It makes me, it makes me sick. Did you ever think when you were running Planned Parenthood that the day would come when Roe would be overturned? I actually wrote a book about it. And it wasn't intentionally predictive of it, but it did lay out exactly where we were in 2004 and how it could be possible for the groups that were aligned in opposition to reproductive rights and how they could make that happen. And I also laid out a roadmap for not letting it happen. The human mind is much better wired to much more closely wired to respond to crisis than it is to be proactive. And I feel
Starting point is 00:12:52 that that is where the movement fell down terribly. I had kind of turned the ship around and we were at the point where we actually were doing a lot of proactive legislation. We got contraceptive coverage by insurance plans. We had Plan B emergency contraception approved and available in every state. We made a lot of advances. But as soon as you don't have that kind of a forward-looking agenda, you'll get pushed back. And that's what happened over and over again. And honestly, I think that one of the things that happens in a movement also is that there is a tendency to get into survival mode and also because they can raise a lot more money on being the victims than they can on having this forward-looking agenda. And that's unfortunate, as it's for the long term a
Starting point is 00:13:46 very, very harmful strategy ultimately for the women and families of the country. And it was at that point that I concluded if I really wanted to solve the problem of that backsliding, that it would be important for me to put what energy and time I had left into getting full equality and parity for women in positions of leadership so that we could stop fighting these same battles over and over again, and so that it would become more of a given that that women should have equal rights. And what's very different today is that because of the availability of contraceptives, because we've had two generations of women now who have been able to plan and space their children in their own responsible way, they have been able to get an education. They have been able to build careers. There are many women now in powerful executive positions, and those women need to stand up.
Starting point is 00:14:51 Those women need to put their companies on the forefront of taking positions as, for the most part, companies have never done. This is a moment that's going to test them. So the book that I mentioned to you is called The War on Choice. And the name of the book I would like to give you the name of is Intentioning. It's my most recent book, Intentioning Sex, Power, Pandemics, and How Women Will Take the Lead for Everyone's Good. These books are all available any place you get books. I was a teen mom. By the time I was 20, I had married my high school sweetheart. We had three children. And then I sort of woke up. But I tell you that because I
Starting point is 00:15:36 think it's important to understand that what we're talking about with Take the Lead is not just for women who are privileged or have opportunities to go to elite universities. It's really for everyone. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the organization that you co-founded called Take the Lead, which elevates women in positions of power. Can you talk a little bit about why that's so vital for our future? From a purely economic perspective, one of the things that most interested me when I started studying, why had we opened doors and changed laws and yet women were so far from parity in the top
Starting point is 00:16:14 leadership positions across every single sector? And when I started studying it, we were half of the workforce, but 18% of the top leadership. And that was true wherever you looked, whether it was politics, big companies, little companies, entrepreneurship, it didn't matter. I had to come to terms with the fact, number one, that we all grow up in the same culture. So women ingest a lot of the same values, a lot of the same biases that men grow up with. And it does things to our heads. And women were ambivalent about acknowledging that they had power or seeing that they had power.
Starting point is 00:16:55 There was just an ambivalence around owning and claiming power. And I had to help them know that power is like a hammer. You can build something with or you can break something apart. Right. So it's what you do with it or you can break something apart. Right. So it's what you do with it that counts. Women have borne the brunt of many negative aspects of power over the years. So no wonder so many women would say, well, I don't like that idea. But as soon as I would get them to realize that it really had no attributes and that, in fact, if they would shift thinking about power from power over you
Starting point is 00:17:22 to having the power to make life better for yourself, your family, your community, the world, I was like masks would fall off of their faces. And they'd say, well, I want that kind of power. So then as I was developing the curriculum that I developed for Take the Lead that forms the basis of the training and coaching that we do, I realized that we had to start by helping women shift their thinking about the paradigm of power and what power actually means and to be able to analyze the points of power that they have that they really don't realize sometimes that they have. Whether it's knowledge power, whether it's positional power, whether it's money power, whatever it might be,
Starting point is 00:18:12 you have to first realize what you have and acknowledge it and the value that you can bring to any endeavor. And then you need very specific tools and skills in order to operationalize that in a world that wasn't designed by you for you. You know, our institutions were designed by men for men who had women at home taking care of the kids in the family. So it's functional. It was functional at one time, but it's not so functional anymore in families where for the most part there are two earners. And it's a moment of opportunity for change. And just shifting that thinking, it's more of a mindset that we do with Take the Lead. We help women know the power they have, know how to use it in ways that are positive,
Starting point is 00:19:00 that they feel good about, authentic about, confident about, and be able to identify what their own highest intentions are. And they create strategic leadership action plans for themselves. Once I saw that it made such a difference for women to have this, being your basic movement builder, I realized that I could only reach so many people as an individual that we needed to have an organization. And so that's when I joined with a co-founder and we started Take the Lead. We are celebrating our eight years right now. Gloria, I saw that yesterday, Eli Lilly, which is the largest employer in Indiana and an internationally known drug company, essentially said that because of the change in the law, we're going to have to move our business elsewhere. What role do you think corporate leaders and women corporate
Starting point is 00:19:50 leaders especially should take in speaking out against or in favor of issues that our society is facing in real time? I'm so glad you mentioned the Eli Lilly example because they have had a very robust gender equality program within the company for maybe a decade or so. They first recognized that they had to be able to speak authentically to their clients, their customers. And in order to do that, they had to really take on the issue of gender equality and gender parity. Right. And then that also played out in terms of their leadership, their, you know, their hiring practices, their promotion practices. So they're a company that has over a number of years really implemented many of the kinds of systemic changes that need to be made in companies in general.
Starting point is 00:20:47 And the economic power is there. And incidentally, not so coincidentally, the bottom line says a lot in America, in a capitalistic society, companies that have more women in their leadership simply are more profitable. They are, you know, the cultures are more appreciated by their employees. And it's not that women are better than men. It is that we have been socialized differently. And now, today, that different socialization is actually positive for women. And so women bring these qualities that have been acculturated into us, not hardwired, acculturated into us. And we bring those qualities and it makes for a better, more profitable company.
Starting point is 00:21:33 So it all makes sense. We are seeing that people are gravitating toward the states where they're saying, at least, that they're going to gravitate toward the states where there are reproductive rights and freedoms. I really thought that their statement was very respectful of the various points of view. You know, it starts out by saying and acknowledging that it's a contentious issue and that there are people with many different points of view. But the bottom line is that as a health care company,
Starting point is 00:22:07 they have to keep the best interests of their patients and clients at heart. Don't underestimate the potential power of companies to make a change for the better. They are not going to be able to get away without taking a position now. Roe was passed by the Supreme Court in 1973. In 1974, you become the head of Planned Parenthood. And I saw an interview that you gave where you said, at that time, people in the movement were sort of like, hey, we won, it's over. But I think what you're saying is that advocates can never become complacent because things can change really quickly and you have to be ready to respond.
Starting point is 00:22:48 I call that the wages of winning. And it happens with every social movement. As soon as they've won or at least won a certain amount, the wind goes out of their sails and it's harder to get people activated. Our minds are hardwired to respond to anger as opposed to vision for a positive future. So what I'm encouraging people to do
Starting point is 00:23:11 is to start with the vision for the positive future and then build toward that because you can have aspiration energy as well as anger energy. It just takes a lot more work to get that aspiration energy going. Right. You can never, never, never think you have won.
Starting point is 00:23:28 You always need to be the insurgent. And by that, I mean you always need to be having a vibrant, forward-looking agenda. Call it fighting forward instead of fighting back. You talked about that there was a period of time when the government was putting a lot of money into supplying contraception. And do you think at this point that might be threatened? One of the most disturbing things about what's happening today is that it's not only the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, that gave women the right to decide whether or when to have
Starting point is 00:24:00 children with regard to abortion. That case was decided based on the same principles of the right to privacy that gave us the right to birth control in 1965 in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut. It's the same logic that also has been used to support gay rights and same-sex marriage. So people need to understand what's at stake here, and what's at stake is whether we will be able to make our own childbearing decisions at all without government interference. And that is huge. That is
Starting point is 00:24:33 really huge. And I think that the recent vote in Kansas, in which the ballot initiative that would have codified outlawing abortion in the state's constitution failed. And I think it's because people are suddenly waking up and realizing, hey, that could be me. That could be my daughter. That could be my wife. That could be, you know, a niece or somebody that I really care about who finds herself in a very difficult situation, whatever the circumstances might be. It's basically nobody's business. It is unfortunate that we had to wait this long for people to wake up, but I do believe they are waking up. It seems like at this time, there's a fear of a domino effect. Do you think that there's a threat to all these other rights that we've come to accept
Starting point is 00:25:20 as Americans? Clarence Thomas, Justice Thomas, literally wrote that into his opinion, that now that we've overturned Roe, now we're going to go after contraception and same-sex marriage. So yes, these are all threatened. The consequences are so immense for the whole social fabric of the country. For example, what's the impact on the other privacy rights, like privacy of your medical information, the HIPAA laws? What are the implications for apps that women may use to track their periods? Now, that having been said, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was right, as she so often was, that it would have been better if reproductive rights had been decided based on the 14th Amendment and equal protection under the law. So, Gloria, you're saying that the legal basis
Starting point is 00:26:21 for these rights that we're talking about was built on an inferred right to privacy. But ideally, they should have been decided differently and based on equality. That is my opinion, yes. And as I said, that was one of the things that Ruth Bader Ginsburg often commented on, that the concept of privacy is not as strong, I guess you could say, is not as strong, I guess you could say, as a basic civil right. But at the time that Griswold and Roe were decided, there had been no gender equality cases for them to use as stare decisis. Right. And you know, the court likes to build on past precedent. So the precedent that they had and the precedent that they primarily used, although they did allude to the 14th Amendment, but the precedent that they used primarily was this idea of the Constitution having giving us the right to privacy.
Starting point is 00:27:20 I think it was Justice Brandeis who first who first talked about it. And he said that the the first liberty that we all should have is the right to be left alone. And then that got built on over the next century. So, Gloria, what happens in a case like this? We have a Supreme Court that's voting to restrict rights of Americans, and most Americans don't agree with these restrictions. What would you recommend an activist do at this point? There's just no substitute for being deeply engaged in civic life. People don't always know exactly how they can have an impact, and they have been taught by politicians who want them
Starting point is 00:27:58 not to be involved. They have been taught to be cynical about politics and to feel like they can't make a difference. But yes, you can feel like they can't make a difference. But yes, you can. Yes, you can make a difference. That's exactly what we saw in Kansas. If everyone will simply take that as an object lesson in what you have to do. These are the principles of movement building. You identify the other people who believe as you do, who share your values, who have a vision of a world of justice that you hold in your mind, in your heart, and you have the courage to actually talk about these issues publicly, define the issues, define the message, and then you take action, you organize, you get together with people, you have a strategy. Personally, I believe that the most important strategy right now is twofold. Number one is to have a very, very proactive policy agenda. In other words, don't wait and just try to fight back bad
Starting point is 00:29:02 legislation. Write your own legislation. Start with that. Be proactive. Be define the terms, define the issues. Don't let the other people define them for you. Right. Then the second piece of it is that there is no substitute for people actually getting out and voting and voting in an educated way. Educate yourself about where the candidates stand
Starting point is 00:29:26 and vote. Make sure that you are registered to vote. Make sure that you know where to vote and how to vote because there have been so many new laws passed in the last four years that are aimed at depressing the vote. So it's up to us as citizens to know how to make sure we're registered and we know how to vote. There are websites that will show you exactly. You can find this so easily now from so many different places. And then you can align with organizations that share the goals that you have and they will help you. They will help you know how to be an active citizen and how to actually make a difference. It's very hard to do as an individual. You really need to gather. And I think, you know, there again, there are some Jewish values there
Starting point is 00:30:18 about individuals can do a lot, but you have to be part of a community also. Exactly. You have to be doing both all the time. You talked about the attack on abortion as not always being about abortion. It's an attack on women in general, denying women equality in society. Can you expand on that? Abortion has never been about abortion. Birth control arguments have never been about birth control. They are about whether women will have an equal place in the world. Because if you cannot have autonomy over your own body, you cannot be an equal citizen in any other respect. You know the term barefoot and pregnant? It all started at a Rotary Club meeting in Arkansas when a member of the state legislature said, well,
Starting point is 00:31:05 we don't have any, this was in the 1950s, he said, well, we don't have any of those uppity women around here. If one of our women gets too uppity, we just give her another cow to milk, and we keep her barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. And it got a big, uproarious laugh in the 1950s, just as the feminist movement was starting to resurge. I think that is the best example. We have a society that has historically been defined by men for men, and people don't relinquish power easily. But the men who are really smart these days understand that actually it's better for their family if women have equal pay. It's better for their family if everybody has access to the health care, including reproductive health care that they need, so that they can have children when they are prepared to take care of them.
Starting point is 00:32:07 And so I think we're at a turning point. And because we're at a turning point, the reaction is more vicious than ever. The Bible says women should be subservient to their husbands. Right. You're going to hear that in some places. in some places. And so that I mean, that's the underlying thread of a patriarchal society that is, is kind of may not be on its last legs, but it's on some legs that are a little shaky right now. And so there's a there's a reaction. In America, are we behind the rest of the world? Oh, my goodness, yes. And why is that? One is the structural reason and one is the cultural reason. The diversity of this country is, in my mind, a great benefit.
Starting point is 00:32:51 It makes this country much richer. All four of my grandparents came here from Eastern different faiths and different all kinds of ethnicities is really what has made America the vibrant powerhouse that it is. But when you have been the group in power and you're feeling that power slipping away from you, it doesn't feel so good. Right. And people just don't relinquish it very easily. And the people who've had it, let's face it, have been white Christian men.
Starting point is 00:33:31 And so that gets me to the other piece of this, which is that there is a strain, and I don't want to paint everybody with this brush, but there is certainly a strain of the fundamentalist right that clings to that so-called traditional idea of subservient women and dominant men in the culture. As they say, culture eats strategy for lunch. I mean, it's really hard to change a culture while you're living in it. There is also the process of having a pluralistic democracy with a constitutional democracy has resulted in a political system where a loud minority can have influence beyond its numbers. Right. You know, the squeaky wheel gets greased.
Starting point is 00:34:19 And so that's on us. That's on the rest of us. I've said it before when the story was shared. We cannot legislate regret. We can't. What she may regret, another person may not. But she had the choice. And we cannot take the choice away.
Starting point is 00:34:37 I think that we have to start demanding civility in these conversations. Those of us who do believe in the idea of a healthy, robust, diverse society, those of us who believe in that, we have to be willing to stand up for it and not let those other loud voices drown us out. I feel like I'm sounding like a one-note person, but it really comes down to being willing to identify what you believe and stand up for it and join with other people whom you share those beliefs and values. I'm super proud to be from Kansas tonight, and I feel like my state just showed up and boldly told me that they are going to take care of me and my female friends and everyone that can get
Starting point is 00:35:21 pregnant in the state of Kansas. We are protected tonight. I don't know any other way. I could despair, but I don't believe that despair gets you very far. We've never lived through this kind of world-changing pandemic, those of us who are alive today. These things have happened in the world, but we haven't lived through them before. These things have happened in the world, but we haven't lived through them before. And so those moments of extreme disruption are the best moments, maybe the only moments we'll have for quite a while to make big systemic changes. about the mission that I have of gender equality. Because I think if we really take this moment, we can make some big systemic changes that we've been wanting to make for decades. Because it's going to be to the benefit of our economy
Starting point is 00:36:20 and it's going to be to the benefit of men and women and families. But you have to recognize that, and you have to be willing to seize that moment and not step back from it. And it can be very painful. And some people will just say, well, I am moving to another country, or I'm just going to move to the blue states, and I don't want my daughters to go to college in states where they don't have access to equal rights. But I don't think that's the way to go. I mean, I think the way to go is you have to go through it. You have
Starting point is 00:36:58 to engage, stand up, and you won't win everything. But I'm a great believer in, you know, the old fashioned breaking bread with people. Sit down, have coffee, have lunch, have dinner, have a potluck. People who do things like that tend to be able to get along across party lines and across other kinds of divides. I think we need to encourage that. Gloria, you've given us such wise words. I want to thank you for being my guest on All About Change. You've really made a difference in our world, and I really appreciate your contributions to our country and our society. So thank you so much. Thank you, Jay, for having me. And I love your topic. It's so timely. Everybody needs to be thinking about these issues. So thank you for
Starting point is 00:37:44 giving me the opportunity. Thank you and be well. All right, you too. All About Change is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. This show is produced by Yochai Meital, Jackie Schwartz, and Mijon Zulu. As always, be sure to come back in two weeks for another inspiring story. In the meantime, you can check out all of our other previous content live on our feed
Starting point is 00:38:12 and linked on our new website, allaboutchangepodcast.com. Lastly, if you enjoy our show, please help us spread the word. Tell a friend or family member or consider writing a review on your favorite podcasting app. I'm Jay Rudiman, and I'll catch you the next time on All About Change.

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