Julia Child - On Cooking

"After one taste of French food, after our very first meal in France, at Rouen, on the way from Le Havre to Paris in our old blue Buick that we had brought over with us on the boat — after that first unforgettable lunch, I was hooked. I’d never eaten like that before, I didn’t know such food existed. The wonderful attention paid to each detail of the meal was incredible to me. I’d never really drunk good wine before, and knew nothing at all about it. It was simply a whole new life experience. But you don’t spring into good cooking naked. You have to have some training. You have to learn how to eat. It’s like looking at a painting: If you don’t have any kind of background, you don’t really know what you’re looking at. The French have training from their families, they grow up with an appreciation of food, that it is an art, that it is worth considering carefully and looking at. I had to learn, and both cooking and taste developed simultaneously for me."

— Julia Child, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Julia Child, whose love of French culture and cuisine brought a renewed appreciation for the culinary arts in America.

Available at Apple and Amazon.

Betty Friedan -- HERSTORY

“It changed my life.” That’s what women say about the women’s movement, “It changed my life, it changed my whole life.” When they said it in the beginning, they meant the book The Feminine Mystique. Now they mean the whole women’s movement. It did change everybody’s lives, including my own. But I don’t want there to be any danger this time of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What I’m saying now is really unfinished. Where it seemed in the first stage that self-fulfillment for women was opposed to the family, in the second stage I think because the evolution of the family is based on the strengthened self and autonomy of women, they are not opposed. I do not think you can see a full celebration of the personhood of woman if you divorce the woman from the family. But the strengthening of the family is made possible by the new autonomy of women."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Betty Friedan's oral interview from the late 1970s, available for $0.99, at Amazon and Apple.

Betty Friedan - On Motherhood

"My three kids are great. Who knows? They may think I would have been a better mother if it hadn’t been for the women’s movement, but I don’t think so. The way that you can have children now, when you’ve already started on your work and know what you can do, you are not subject to the guilts that women in my generation were. That was the worst, the guilts, the conflicts, the leaning over backwards against them. That put negative valences on one’s own enjoyment of motherhood. It’s such a short period. I wish that in the period when they were little, I wish I’d felt free to concentrate on them more. But when you’re under the aegis of the feminine mystique, there was the rebellion; and then to do anything at all, you’re going against the stream of society and you have your own guilts about what you’re doing."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

Available on Amazon and Apple.

Billie Jean King - On Winning

"Working to change things gives me the most long-term happiness. Performing is very temporary. To me, winning is doing what I want, what makes me happy, doing the best I can at this given moment in my life. That’s all I can ask of myself. If each person does the best with what he has, that’s winning. He’s fulfilling his own potential."

— Billie Jean King, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped our Times.

The oral biography of Billie Jean King, who created opportunities for women on the tennis court and in the workplace, and who continues today to champion social change and equality around the world.

Available at Amazon and Apple.

Julia Child - On Cooking

"To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hard work, and a love of creating. Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent—science, mathematics, energy, history, experience—and the more experience you have the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create. There’s no end to imagination in the kitchen."

— Julia Child, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times. 

Enjoy the brief oral interview of Julia Child from the late 1970s, available on Apple and Amazon for 99 cents.

Gloria Steinem - On Women in the Workforce

"You’ve got the hope that parenting can be equal and certainly you’ve got lots of women who are not having children until that’s true. They’re on kind of an unconscious baby strike. If we have to have two jobs while men have one, well, forget it. But we don’t have the structural change to make it happen. We don’t have parental leave instead of maternity leave. We don’t have shorter work days or work weeks for parents of young children, men and women. So I think we’re in a very uncomfortable period now because we’ve got lots of hopes and aspirations and changed ideas of what our lives could be, but not the structural change that would make it possible for most people."

— Gloria Steinem, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Read the oral interview of Gloria Steinem from the late 1970s, available at at Amazon and Apple.

Betty Friedan - Herstory in a chapter

"There was the great first movement for women’s rights beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft, and the early suffragettes in England and America who fought for the vote, and the early rights; but that movement came to a standstill with the winning of the vote in the United States in 1920, before I was born. It didn’t change the lives of women because the rights, while necessary, didn’t lead to the kind of changes that are happening now. The movement was aborted, or it was asleep. There was a backlash, which I then gave a name to: the 'feminine mystique.' We had to break through the whole image of woman and we had to define ourselves as people; and then we had to begin a process that’s still not finished, of restructuring institutions so that women could be people. The essence of the modern woman’s movement is equality and the personhood of woman. That’s what it is and that’s all it is. All the rest of it—all the images of women’s lib, the bra-burning, the man-hating, down with marriage, down with motherhood—was  an expression of anger based on an ideological mistake. It is not essential. It is not a part of the whole change. The anger was real enough, but sexual politics was not what it was really all about."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Read the oral interview of Betty Friedan from the late 1970s - available at Apple and Amazon for 99 cents.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg - On Equality and the Law

"We believe in racial equality, we believe in free speech. We have recorded those beliefs in the Constitution, our fundamental instrument of government. We are advancing toward the belief that men and women should be seen as equal before the law. We should record that basic principle in the Constitution. We should do that in preference to reading the principle into Constitutional provisions drafted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know the founding fathers in the eighteenth century did not think men and women were or should be equal before the law. During the nineteenth century, after the Civil War, there were still tremendous differences in the law’s treatment of men and women. It was accepted that men should vote and women shouldn’t vote. It’s hard to read into provisions written over a century ago our modern concept that men and women should have equal opportunities, so far as government action is concerned. Yet the Supreme Court Justices have been doing just that. They have done so because our Constitution is meant to survive through the ages; there must be some adaptation to changing times and conditions."

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Enjoy the oral interview of Ruth Bader Ginsburg from the later 1970s; one of 42 oral interviews captured in Particular Passions: Talks With Women Who Shaped Our Times

The oral biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who continues to contribute to civil and women’s rights as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Available at Apple and Amazon.

Women's History Month: Radcliffe Connections

In recognition of Women's History Month, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study presents Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, Amelia Earhart, Dorothy West, Betty Friedan, June Jordan, Julia Child, Anna Deveare Smith, and Elizabeth Warren. These nine remarkable women have all made history-and they have something else in common: a connection to Radcliffe.

I am proud that my portrait of Betty Friedan was selected for this video.

Betty Friedan - Herstory.

"Well, they say the women's movement is the largest movement of social change of the last decades and in some ways it’s probably the largest revolution of all time, though it isn’t what anyone else has ever meant by revolution. You have to see it in its own terms. I think we’re only beginning to see the far-flung implications of the change. Also I think the women’s movement is only a step in a larger process of evolution, that it’s a stage. It’s been happening for a long time." Betty Friedan - Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times."

— Betty Friedan, in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.

The oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues to work toward equal rights for women around the globe.

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Friedan's Feminine Mystique - enjoy her oral interview from the late 1970s; one of 42 interviews captured in Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Shaped Our Times.