can do what Hillary Clinton is capable of doing.
I don't know anybody who ever got to the end of their life and said,
you know, I wish I'd spent more time on my career.
Female columnists speak their minds on the next Oprah.
Hi, I'm David.
These are the type of women joining me today
who I think it would be so much fun to be friends with,
have a cup of coffee with,
auntie calf,
and just sit around and talk to for hours on the front porch,
and they do love to talk about everything.
These women are some of the top female newspaper columnists
in the United States of America.
Pick a topic, they have an opinion about it.
Should victims of rape have their names in the newspaper?
Why are our daughters growing up with low self-esteem?
And what about that new First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton?
Well, our guests today aren't afraid to tell their millions of readers
exactly what is on their minds.
Deborah Mathis' column is syndicated to over 80 papers nationwide.
Some of the papers you can read her in are the Houston Post and the Sacramento Bee.
The LA Times has over a dozen full-time male columnists,
but Robin Abkarian is the only full-time female columnist
at the country's largest paper.
Twice a week, over two million people read her column.
Liz Balmaceda started out at the Miami Herald back in 1980,
but by 1991, they gave her her own column,
and this year she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Betsy Hart writes a column in which she promotes the conservative point of view.
Her weekly column is distributed to over 350 newspapers,
including the St. Louis Post, Dispatch, and the San Diego Union.
Anna Quinlan is the 1992 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Her book, Thinking Out Loud, is a compilation of the best of her recent columns
from the New York Times.
And I was telling Anna that before I even knew she was on the show,
she was trying to get the book for free from somebody else,
but I'm going to pay for it, Anna, don't worry.
And she's on bestsellers' lists now all over the country,
including the New York Times bestsellers' list.
I bet that's pretty exciting when you see yourself up there on the bestsellers' list.
It's terrific.
The best feeling.
Best feeling?
Well, the Pulitzer is the best feeling.
Yeah, we were talking about, don't you want to know what,
because it's not going to happen to me, in this lifetime,
what it's like when you get the Pulitzer Prize, and both of you have.
Ninety-two, ninety-three.
What we were talking about, you get a phone call, you got a phone call.
Western Union called and read me a telegram over the phone.
By that time, you sort of start to hear the rumors just a little bit.
And actually, the Today Show had called and asked me if I'd be on in the first hour in the morning,
the only time I'd ever been asked to be on in the first hour, the heavy-hitting news hour.
So I started to get a little nervous that day.
Thinking that maybe it was it.
Yeah, yeah.
Either that or, you know, I had a great new diet plan.
And you said, the operator calls, she's reading the telegram,
and in the middle of reading this announcement to me that I've won the Pulitzer,
she stopped and said, well, this is wonderful.
And I said, yeah.
I mean, it's sort of like a 1930s movie musical.
You're sitting in your office looking out the window,
tears are running down your face, and you think, wow.
I mean, you know, it was incredible.
Everybody in the newsroom, I think, knew about it, all my friends.
But there was like this conspiracy not to tell me anything about it until the wire story came over.
And it's like all of these cameras, and I still didn't believe it until they called the name.
And I'm still in shock.
That was about three weeks.
I don't know.
It's been kind of a blur.
But I'm still in shock.
You were nominated last year, and Anna got it, and you didn't.
Your name was up.
Well, I didn't know.
I was a finalist last year until Anna's name came out,
and I was cheering because I'm like one of her biggest fans.
And then my name came out as a finalist, and I couldn't believe it.
So I kind of went out and celebrated that night because I couldn't believe I had been in.
I was totally unsurprised that you won.
Well, let's talk about why you all started writing in the first place.
When you start writing, you don't start out with the idea that I'm going to get a Pulitzer Prize.
Deborah, you started because?
Well, mine was kind of a spiritual awakening, to be honest with you.
And although some people don't quite understand this, and I think some people are confused by it.
I know that you do because I've heard you talk about this before.
My father was a Baptist minister.
He died in the pulpit about seven years ago.
And after that, I started questioning a lot of things
and kind of turning inward and turning to other sources and feeling things.
And I kept getting this sense that I was not doing enough.
And finally I got impatient.
I said, God, look, I pay my taxes.
I look both ways before I cross the street.
I feed and take care of my kids.
I go to church.
I sing in the choir.
You know, what do you mean I'm not doing enough?
And finally it came upon me that somehow I was wasting this gift to communicate.
And I recognize it purely as a gift because I really have nothing to do with it.
But you were in television before.
I was in television.
And this is quite different, isn't it?
Yes, and just something made me leave television.
And I'm not trying to be mystical about it.
I just had no idea why, but I just left television one day.
And said I'm going to write?
And I approached the local newspaper, which had always had white men over 50 writing,
and to think about a, quote, TV babe coming along asking to write a column about opinion for heaven's sake.
And they jumped on it and said yes, and the column took off.
So Robin, your reason was what?
Well, I guess I felt that I had something to say, hopefully something in an original manner.
I felt pretty passionate about things.
And as a news reporter, you're restricted, obviously, from imposing or injecting your opinions into your copy.
So writing a column has allowed me to stand for things that I believe in.
It's given me the license to have a personality in the newspaper,
which you often don't get the opportunity to have as a reporter.
And it's something, there's a satisfaction.
There's an ability to focus attention on issues, perhaps, that would go unnoticed.
It's a terrific tool.
You can do a lot of good.
You can do a lot of harm.
Right, and Bets?
Well, you know, Oprah, no one's ever accused me of being shy about sharing my opinions.
So that was one of the exciting things about being able to write a column.
But also, I felt that there was a real dearth of conservative women actually out in front writing columns,
and yet there are tens of millions of American women who consider themselves conservative or certainly not liberal or feminist.
And I wanted to speak to those women and say, hey, it's okay to share some of these conservative views
and be for strong families and low taxes and traditional values.
And I have found a real readership in that, and that's exciting for me.
And that's what's great is because women are not just of one voice, but we have many voices.
And so often in the press, we're portrayed as being of one liberal sort of patched-shoulder mindset.
Well, that's not the case at all.
And I've gotten a lot of feedback from women who are saying, thank God you're out there.
That's just not women. It's the races, too.
People think there's one black opinion.
That's right, but we're diverse, and that's great.
Liz, you started writing because?
I started writing because I come from a place where there are many, many different communities,
and I was offered the opportunity to be a voice.
And I'm a Cuban-American.
I come from a community that is strongly Cuban-American.
And I felt that those were the topics that really I had a passion for.
And I can write about those topics, and it's really, I don't know, I think that a lot of times it's dangerous
because you go in and you write about things that are very controversial in a community,
and there's a lot of psychological pressure.
Well, you're not being a good Cuban, you're being a bad Cuban, that kind of thing.
But I think there's a diversity of opinion in that community,
and I really wanted to reflect that diversity of opinion in my column.
Anna, you started because?
Well, I've been a reporter since I was 18,
and I'm not sure that anybody could ever turn down an op-ed page column at the New York Times.
But it was particularly important to me because I'm only the third woman to write a column on that page,
and I'm now the only woman appearing as a regular columnist on the page.
Sometimes they call us the great gray lady, and we wonder about the lady part,
and I guess I figure I'm the lady.
Well, one of your columns that struck me was, it was called Growing Up Half Empty, I think it was called.
It's called The Glass Half Empty.
Glass Half Empty, yes.
And so in that article you talk about, tell us what you were talking about in that article,
about your daughter's second birthday and what you realized on her second birthday.
I just realized that as a woman I'd learned over the course of my life
to live with some of the downside of being a woman in our society,
to live with the idea of sexual harassment and the ideal violence against women
and the idea of our constant under-representation.
And then I had this little girl who's incredibly feisty and strong-willed,
one of the few known cases of inherited personality.
And I looked at her and thought, it's just not good enough for her.
I've learned how to make do for myself, my friends have learned how to make do.
I don't understand how anybody who has kids embraces the status quo,
because every time I look at her I think it's not good enough.
And if 20 years from now she comes to me and says, what's this with the date rate?
What's this with the disparate pay scales?
And I have to say to her, oh, don't worry, you'll get used to it.
See, I think that's just part of the problem is current feminists and some of my friends up here
and liberals are constantly telling young girls, you can't do it.
You're a victim. Men are going to run your life and no matter what you do, baby,
you're not going to get anywhere, so you may as well hang it up right now.
And it is true. And it is just a prevalent attitude in our society.
Why not tell young girls, you can do it all? And the fact is, many of them can.
Look at the Margaret Thatcher's and the Jean Kirkpatrick's of the world.
If you really believe that you are not a victim, that you can take control over your own life,
then sure, maybe some things aren't going to go always just right.
Maybe you can get a little bit of sexual harassment.
But I know, and I've experienced that in my job, I have handled it one on one.
And that has seemed to solve the problem.
And I wish we weren't bringing up our daughters to be victims.
Well, we are going to talk about this. We got lots to say.
Here's an interesting fact. It's now been proven at the age of 12.
A girl's self-esteem drops drastically and never goes back up.
We're going to throw that out for discussion when we come back.
We'll be right back.
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These are all women I'd love to have over for an afternoon on the front porch.
Since my front porch is being fixed, we decided to do it here instead.
Anna, you were saying that the deal that we've been given as women is not good enough, and you were disagreeing with that?
Sure, life isn't perfect. It's going to be perfectly fair.
But if we constantly imbue young women with the idea that they're going to be victims their whole lives, guess what?
That's exactly what they'll be.
I disagree. I think that it's important to instill in young women the idea that anything is possible.
But in fact, in this world, bad things happen, and they often have to do with the fact that we are women.
Pay scales are a perfect example. Rape is a good example.
Did you feel you had a real deal growing up as a woman, as growing up female?
Of course not. I didn't know until I became more politicized and understood that individuals may succeed where the class may be kept down.
I think it's important to say that not everybody gets the fair shake that I got.
Not everybody had the parents that I had.
As the mother of three people, two females and all three black, all of us southern-born,
we have a whole series of supposed strikes against us.
There are prejudices against the region of the country we were born in, our ethnicity, and our gender.
Victimization, I think, need not be talked about as though it is surreal. It is an actual thing.
If my daughter says, I can be anything I want to be, if she believes that, if that's her dream, here's my take on it.
I know that she probably can't be, but I wouldn't dare tell her that.
I let her believe that all she wants, because it's important to me that if a child loses a dream,
the saddest thing in the world is a child with a tiny dream.
Every child should dream huge. I'm going to be rich. I'm going to be president. I'm going to be emperor of the world.
When you hear those diminished dreams, you're looking at a very tragic figure there in a child,
and you see it a lot now, kids who don't have many dreams anymore.
I'm not going to be the one to take it away from her, but I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to pave the way
so that she never has to be awakened by a reality.
I don't know if you feel this way, but one of the things that really moves my column is my kids and all the other kids out there.
I think I have this responsibility, but this ability, if I choose to use it,
to try to move the dialogue and events along.
If I don't take that chance for my kids and all those other kids I meet out there, boy, have I ballooned it big time.
What you said was interesting, that anybody who has kids, you don't understand,
anybody who has kids can accept the status quo.
Because you want it to be better. You look at your kids and think,
I want it to be better for you in so many different ways.
How much better will it really be, though, because our daughters, our daughters, I don't have daughters,
but our daughters, they're all our daughters.
It's important to remember.
Yes, all of our daughters will have a better opportunity in life than we had,
but how much more is the question? How much better?
I think there's a delicate balance between not poisoning the minds of our daughters,
I don't have daughters either, I have nieces,
and also not poisoning their minds with our experiences, with what's happened to us,
and with giving them the tools with which to do things.
I think that it all depends on the tools that we give our daughters.
But isn't a lot of this, though, the way we raise our sons?
Absolutely. I consider raising feminist sons one of the greatest challenges of being a mother.
Raising my boys so that they won't be little.
I always say we are not raising princes here. We are not raising princes here
to make somebody else's life miserable 25 years from now.
And the great thing is that my boys sort of don't get it at this stage.
My favorite story is, one of my best friends is their pediatrician,
and they were in the car one day with me, and Christopher says to Quinn,
you know, Quinn, I think someday I'll be a doctor.
And Quinn says, don't be ridiculous, only girls can be doctors.
And I thought, you can't underestimate how much things have changed.
Twenty years ago, if you were going to try to do this show,
you wouldn't have been able to get five of us up here.
Right.
You know, there's no question that things are changing,
and we see, for instance, that women only started entering the workforce in large numbers in the mid-1970s
and have made tremendous gains since then.
And I found that in my working life that men over the age of about 45 or 50
were much less accepting of me as an equal than were men, say, under the age of 40.
They were much more used to having women in the workplace and interacting with them as equals.
And that will continue, and I think our daughters will have wonderful opportunities professionally.
That's actually not what I'm most worried about.
I look at the young women of today, and what I'm worried about is,
what kind of relationships are they going to have with their husbands?
Will they be able to have strong marriages?
What kind of signals are they getting from society and from moms about early sexual promiscuity?
We're beginning to tell our daughters...
What kind of signals are they getting when we send the message that boys will be boys?
What kind of messages are they getting then?
And we shouldn't be sending such messages,
but I'm more concerned, and I'm more concerned about young daughters and girls of today
in relationships and life and being happy with themselves and in their families.
Because I'll tell you, I don't know anybody who ever got to the end of their life
and said, you know, I wish I'd spent more time on my career.
And that's what I'm concerned about.
When we come back.
I agree.
A woman who has definitely shown us that you should just go for it
and try to be whatever you want to when you grow up.
When we come back, we'll be discussing Hillary.
Rodham Clinton, back in a moment.
I'm going to throw out a name.
I want to hear what you all say.
Hillary Clinton.
Yay.
I have probably a lot more to say about that than a couple of words.
Yeah, I saw the whole column on Hillary you did.
Do you still believe what you wrote back in February?
That's always a problem, the columnist.
You have to wonder, do I still agree with what I said a few months ago?
And, you know, I have some real concerns about Hillary.
I don't have a problem with strong, opinionated women
who have a big impact on their husbands.
I hope you think that I'm one of them.
And I think that's a marvelous tradition that wives should continue.
But in her case, she has been given an officially powerful position.
She is head of the health care task force,
one of the most important positions in America.
Yet she wasn't elected, isn't confirmed, and can't be fired.
And I have a real concern about somebody having that kind of a powerful position.
In fact, I've known Hillary Clinton for almost 20 years.
I'm from Arkansas originally. I covered her.
She's a friend.
I am a fan of hers, yes.
But that doesn't mean that I don't see some downside to her.
Because she is, after all, human.
Although she is a rather super one, I think.
And we have to remember that Hillary Clinton is not just an excellent woman.
She's an excellent and exceptional person.
Not many men, women, or aliens can do what Hillary Clinton is capable of doing.
And it's a fact.
Now, about the electability,
there are a lot of people who are fashioning policy in Washington who are not elected.
We certainly don't elect the chief of staff.
We don't elect George Stephanopoulos.
We don't elect Mark Gergen.
We don't elect Mac McLarty.
We don't elect any number of people,
Ira Magaziner, who are fashioning policy.
And it is not as though the country is going to automatically be saddled with whatever she comes up with.
This still has to go fully through the legislative process.
I cover the White House full time in addition to this column that I do.
And I get the sense every day of what Hillary Clinton is doing there.
She has already earned respect among people who didn't want to give it, who were loathe to give it.
But she snatches it from you because she is just bottom line qualified.
You know, I think the idea that Hillary Clinton cannot be fired,
I hear that bandied about quite a bit.
I think it's a canard.
I think it's used by people who possibly have disagreements with Bill Clinton's policy.
And instead of saying, you know, these are my objections to this policy,
to the health care plan, the managed competition, whatever is being devised by the task force,
the fact that she cannot be fired is irrelevant.
I mean, no, no, it just doesn't work that way.
And plenty of wives and other spouses have pulled strings behind the scenes.
What I find admirable in this relationship is that it's up front.
We know exactly what's going on.
During the election, they went out of their way to say that she would not have a powerful position.
They told us that. They're on the record.
And then they turn around and a month after he's inaugurated, all of a sudden, yes, they were very open
and saying she would not have an official policy position.
I'm sorry, they did not say that.
They said that she would not be a member of the cabinet.
Of course, there is the nepotism law anyway that precludes that,
and that she would not be named to chief of staff, for example,
and she would not sit in on cabinet meetings.
There was never any pretense.
I don't think anybody in the country who was paying attention at all
was ever under the illusion that Hillary Clinton was not going to be a factor.
Oh, Deborah, I disagree with you.
Did anyone not know?
Do you believe the cookies thing?
No.
Hillary Clinton is not going to have an influential role in her husband's life.
Betsy, are you upset with the way you feel she was marketed in the beginning
and the whole cookies thing and the more...
I wish that... a couple things.
I wish that they had been very upfront
and said Hillary will have one of the most important, overtly powerful positions in the administration.
At least that would have been upfront with us and that would have been fine.
But what about what Anna is saying?
It wouldn't have been fine with you, Betsy, if they had said that.
You would have gone to town on that.
Yeah, but from the beginning though, what about what Anna is saying?
Nobody should be surprised by what has happened.
Well, I think we are a little bit surprised
in that it's not just as if she's a confidant and a behind-the-scenes advisor to the president.
She is a person in power who has six cabinet secretaries reporting to her
who has more senior staff than the vice president.
And what concerns me about that is not necessarily that it's Hillary Clinton.
If it were another Democrat in office and Hillary had that same position,
it would be an entirely different issue.
But the point is, to go back to something Deborah was saying earlier,
is she has a very intimate personal relationship with the president
that none of the other people, that's right, that none of the other people that you mentioned have.
And it takes away a measure of objectivity.
I mean, let's face it, one of the reasons that successful marriages are successful
is because they're not completely objective.
I mean, you have to have some give and take and some subjectivity when it comes to your spouse.
That has to be going on with Bill and Hillary.
And I'm concerned that he won't be able to look at her plan objectively,
that people won't be able to go to her and say,
I disagree with something the president's doing, that there's a loss of objectivity there.
And I have a real concern about that. And also...
Let me put you at ease, someone, as someone who knows Hillary
and knows that she invites, she actually invites, this woman has an uncanny way,
and I'm quite jealous of her, to be honest with you.
I find her really enviable. I think, I can't find a parking space,
or when I do, I walk out of a place and forget where I parked my car.
That's how organized I am. And she juggles all of this and grants.
She doesn't have to worry about a parking space either.
You're right. You're right.
Yeah.
So go ahead.
You're right. And that is a legitimate issue, I think, too,
where we have to be honest about what she really represents in terms of average womanhood.
She does not in that way. But she can make you very, very comfortable
discussing, disagreeing on whatever issue that there may be with her.
She is, I don't know what it is about her. She's quite unusual.
She wants her health care task force policy meetings to be held entirely in secret.
Even when that was found to be illegal, she went back to court and said,
I refuse to abide by this court order. These meetings will be held in secret.
Obviously, she's not open to that kind of discussion and back and forth.
That's another thing that concerns me.
When we come back, we're going to ask Anna what happened after she publicly chastised
her own newspaper for printing a rape victim's name. We're going to move on.
We're getting off of Hillary. We're moving on.
Oh, she'll be there.
Because I bet that you could go on and on.
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When you turn on your local TV news, you want today's top stories, accurate weather, the latest sports.
You don't want to be bombarded with nothing but negative news about business and the economy.
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Coaches learning rampant.
Every day, over 1,800 women are raped in this country.
It sounds just like a number, but truly, think of the person, the face,
behind 1,800. Not to mention, it's becoming just another word for,
oh, boys will be boys.
In what was formerly Yugoslavia, rape is being used now as a form of warfare.
And here in the United States, newspapers no longer protect,
some of them, the identity of rape victims.
What's going on, Anna?
Well, I think that there are some interesting arguments to be made
that says that if we continue not to print the names of rape victims,
that we continue the stigma that says somehow you're complicit in this crime.
Bottom line is I don't agree with those arguments,
and I don't agree with them for a simple reason.
I think you always have to balance the value of the information you convey
versus the harm you can do in our business.
And when I hear over and over again from sex crimes prosecutors
that they don't think women will go forward if the very next day,
where they've had a chance to tell their moms and dads, their best friends,
maybe their boyfriend, about what happened to them,
when I hear over and over again that they might not go forward if we print the names,
I say that the information conveyed doesn't balance.
Yes, and one of the interesting things you said in the article that you wrote about this
is that you knew the name of the Central Park Jogger,
and so did many other journalists, and didn't print it.
But also the most important thing to remember is Sirita didn't lose anything by not knowing her name.
At the end of the Central Park Jogger case, you knew everything about that woman.
You knew where she went to college. You knew what she did in her leisure time.
You knew what kind of job she had.
Those two words that identified her by name would not have substantially advanced that story.
Yeah, it didn't tell us who she was.
No, we'd already told you who she was in essence.
I don't think we should be in the business of outing rape victims,
but on the other hand, I think that there comes a time when rape is very personal,
and perhaps a rape victim wants to have their name.
And at that point, I think that is an individual choice.
And at that point, I think a newspaper needs to hear the voice of the victim if that victim chooses.
I don't think that we can impose our policy on...
I think as columnists, it is one of our jobs to take away the stigma of things like rape.
That's something I feel strongly about. It's something I try to do in my column.
And yet, I don't think that it serves any purpose to name a reluctant victim.
I don't think naming a victim is in and of itself going to change the social attitudes of the people in this country toward rape and rape victims.
And we've recently had the case in Los Angeles of the Lakewood High School spur posse where, in fact, there has been one conviction in the case.
But the brouhaha that followed the revelations that these young men were having sex sometimes with reluctant girls for points,
there was so much defense of that behavior, the behavior of these young men.
And one of my jobs...
The boys will be boys was the defense.
I feel it's my job to show my readers why that's wrong, why that's inappropriate, not to name the girls wrong.
But frankly, weren't you a bit surprised by the attitude of some of the parents?
Weren't you really, even after all these years of writing and reporting, weren't you surprised?
Yeah, but I think that stands partly...
And outraged, and I think that a lot of times some of the things that are wrong with some men who are abusive in any way to women is that their parents,
their mothers of all people, this is the irony of it, have protected and defended them.
I've told my son this.
You ever hit your wife, and if I'm in a nursing home, I'm going to get on a plane, me in my rocking chair, and come to where you are, you will have two fights.
That's what we were talking about earlier, the importance of raising sons.
But we make too many assumptions, Oprah.
I think we think that because we're living a certain kind of circumspect life, and because the son or the daughter never saw this in our households,
or never saw it up close in their lives, that we don't need to discuss it.
Sometimes we need to stop taking things for granted and sit down and say, by the way, what do you think about this, or what's your take on this?
And make sure that we...
How old is your son?
My son is almost 11, and his life is beginning to change in a lot of ways.
He has become no longer the cute little black kid, he's becoming the black fellow, and thereby the potential menace to society.
And I am one angry mother, I'm here to tell you.
And I feel that time is running out, and one of the things that I have to do, I have to fight this battle for, as Anna was saying, for my children,
and for other children, for my daughters, for my son, two different battles, but all the same at once.
And I feel that before long, they're going to be ready to step out into that world, and I've got to hurry up and try to get it straightened out.
Because once the innocence is gone, what you were saying in the article that you wrote about Rodney King, it's gone.
It's a tragedy.
You can't bring it back.
And I think one of the things that we're aware of now, after 20 years of a woman's movement that really has been one of the great social revolutions, really,
in the 20th century in this country, is that the lives of women changed a lot, and the heads of women changed a lot.
But sometimes when I think about raising consciousness, I think we raised the consciousness of the wrong group of people.
And that what we really need to do is bring the guys along on the journey now.
That's right.
Yes, but yeah, bring them on the journey now.
But we couldn't have brought them earlier, because you have to do it for yourself before you can do it for anyone else.
You have to do it for yourself first.
No doubt about it.
I think when you look at the big picture, it's really daunting.
But I think when you look at empowerment in terms of family, in terms of the little picture, in terms of empowerment of women in your own community,
the woman is trying to get a contract for the county and can't even get on the short list.
When you look at empowerment beginning in your house with your daughters, I think that that begins to make the big picture a better picture.
And obviously it has a lot to do with how you're raised and how sons treat their dads, how their dads treat their moms in the home,
and that's all a major part of it.
What I'm concerned about is that the violence, the encouragement of sexual promiscuity, the erosion of standards.
Who encourages that?
Remember? Oh, but come on.
But who encourages that?
Watch television, read 17 magazines.
That I will agree with you.
Yeah, the fact is it is out there everywhere.
You're right, and there is incentive.
There is incentive, and it is everywhere.
It's tough to raise them.
There's a real sense that we've kind of told these young folks, hey, we all know you're going to go out and have sex anyway, so just maybe do it safely.
There's an erosion of standards.
It seems to me that more and more of us are afraid to say this behavior is wrong and this behavior is right, and this will be tolerated and this won't.
We've become the most tolerant society in America, but to the point where we're afraid to make any value judge.
Well, okay, I would like to continue this thought.
Crime is up.
People are living in the streets.
The family unit is falling apart.
Why does everything seem to be getting worse?
We'll talk about that when we come back.
Not just seeing.
It's crumbling.
The economy's in trouble and family's in trouble and falling apart.
School's overcrowded.
Violence is everywhere.
What's gone so wrong?
Who can take on that one?
That's a big question.
I live in Los Angeles, and as you know, we've recently had tremendous difficulties in that town, and I think it was a terrible time.
The riots, the rebellion, whatever you choose to call them.
Was the whole town tensed as they were waiting on the second break?
Oh, yeah.
It was unbelievable.
There was a tension that you cannot even fathom.
But I think that one of the things that that kind of awful civil disturbance taught us is that we can't continue to ignore the things that are wrong.
Los Angeles was a town until 1991 or 1992 that was able to pretend that not much was wrong.
It was sunny.
It was beautiful.
Yes, finally the recession touched us, but people were able to live their lives without understanding what was happening in South Central.
But do you think you say we were taught that?
Do you think people really learned that lesson?
Do you think they did?
Yeah, I really, they learned it and I hope they remember it.
I don't know if people will remember because you would be amazed at the numbers of communities that have just gone about their business again.
As though it never happened.
As though nothing ever happened because nothing in their neighborhood burned down.
They don't have to drive five miles to get milk and diapers for their kids.
They can get jobs.
Industry hasn't fled where they are.
Because it was a big wake up call to everybody.
I don't know if the whole country saw it as a wake up call, but it was.
Yeah, I'm afraid that they hit the snooze alarm.
They went back to sleep and that's what I'm really afraid of.
I was out there during what was called verdict week and everyone was talking about just leave us alone media so we can get back to normal.
And I said, you shouldn't want to get back to normal.
Normal was not good here and that was what the mistake was.
Was the idea that there was some normalcy there and that within that everyone kind of knew his or her place in life went on.
And in the meantime, like what happens with so many of us in so many cities across America, probably every city in town in America, there is this little fire starting.
And so what we saw, the fires, the literal fires were just symbolic of what was there.
When everyone says it's a breakdown of family, what do you say, Betsy?
I think it has a lot to do with it.
And for any of you who saw the Barbara DeFoe Whitehead article on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly, the title was Dan Quayle Was Right.
And she is a sociologist, not of any political persuasion, but she looked at the facts.
And what she found is that there is no question that children from intact family, that means two biological parents, do better in every sense.
They do better economically, socially, they do better later in life, academically, the list goes on.
The breakup of the family is a serious problem.
And one of the things that seemed to cause it came about in about the mid-1970s where we seemed to shift the emphasis we put on children and sacrificing for children to the emphasis on what we wanted in our own lives.
Thus, divorce became not only acceptable, but very, very common and even celebrated in many instances, even though it so severely hurts children.
We see this again and again.
There's a shift away from what's good for the next generation, even if it doesn't always mean that it's comfy for us, to what do I want right now in my life.
It also hurts children to stay in a marriage, though, that is damaged and harmful and where you're being abused and violated.
Well, over there, there's no question.
And in those extreme circumstances when that's happening, obviously that's the case.
But for the vast majority of kids, they're better off in their intact family.
And unfortunately, those are beginning to fall apart.
You know, a friend of mine told me when she was going through a divorce and I just turned 30 and yet I have many friends who are getting divorced and are on their second marriages.
And she said, you know, Betsy, I couldn't have gone through this without my parents' support.
And I thought, good grief, if I came home and told my parents I was getting a divorce, they'd kill me.
There wouldn't be that sense of, gee, that's good if it's right for you.
There would be the stigma.
There would be the no, this isn't right.
And we've lost that.
And I think that we're not better off because of that.
One of the things that I think we've got to be real careful about is romanticizing how wonderful the good old days were.
And how terrific these intact families in which parents were abusive or parents were alcoholic or they were intact on the outside.
But boy, when you got in those four walls, they were about as intact as a jigsaw puzzle.
So we're better off today?
I'm not saying we're better off today.
I'm saying I want to guide my kids, but ultimately the only way you make your kids whole is not by saying to them, that's a terrible thing you're doing.
It's by leading them to a development of their individual conscience, of a sense of right or wrong on their own, not on my sense of right or wrong.
That everybody decides for themselves whatever they feel is right and wrong for themselves.
That's actually a conservative simultaneous translation of what I just said, which is totally off the point of what I just said.
Which is my kids are not always going to have me around.
They're going to have the heart that I am building today.
And I've got to say the emphasis on that heart and the emphasis on openness now that we have.
Were intact families, was this society better for black Americans 50 or 60 years ago?
Was it better for people who had been raped?
Was it better for women?
I don't think so from everything I hear.
Our columnists have had their say.
So when we come back, we're going to be getting some feedback from our audience.
Hear what they have to say in a moment.
You want healthy, shiny hair?
It comes from the inside out.
You were saying something, Deborah, about the fact that because Dan Quill was right is not...
Well, I think that it's one of those eternal absolutes.
No one ever disagreed with him to my knowledge.
So I don't understand the hoopla over the revelation that he was correct in the first place.
I agree very much with Betsy that there is deterioration of the family unit, as we like to call it.
And it is serious.
And it does have some very awful consequences.
It can have some bad consequences.
But what bothers me generally about the conservative approach to the problem is that they have no answers
as to what we do with those people who happen to not come from two-party families.
What do we do with them?
It's like, well, you should have been born into a family where they were both parents.
And after that, a lot of programs, remedial programs or programs to help them or just to leave them alone, does not occur.
We just have deemed them deprived and deemed them to be disadvantaged.
And some of the finest, strongest, best people I ever know came where there was one mama or one daddy in the house.
Even Betsy is agreeing with that.
Yes, yes.
It's true, Oprah, because you were mentioning the fact that studies by Professor Carol Gilligan at Harvard
shows that girls' self-esteem really goes south during adolescence, really plummets.
The fact is the drop is much less bad among African-American girls.
And one of the reasons that Professor Gilligan thinks that she sees that is that even while many of them may be in single-parent families,
their mothers and grandmothers are such strong, capable figures for them that they do think women can do anything.
Yes, I came from a single-family or single-mother family.
My father died when I was five.
And so if we start saying that if you don't have both parents, you can't achieve or succeed in life,
I think you're absolutely wrong because my mother instilled strong, traditional family values,
but she also told me I could be whatever I want to be.
And what I am right now is I'm a female martial arts instructor.
I run the largest martial arts school in my association in the Midwest.
And I'm also a rape prevention and sexual harassment instructor.
I teach women how to project themselves as strong, self-confident women so that they don't become victimized.
And I think that's the most important thing we can teach women is to teach them how to project themselves before they become the victim.
We're always taking care of the victims after they happen.
What happened to education and teaching women, this is how you react to these certain circumstances.
It's not in our system. We don't teach it. Why not?
Because as women, we weren't taught it as we were growing up.
There was no part in our educational system that said this is how you become a strong,
self-sufficient woman and not a victim.
We were all victims from the time we were young children.
You're weak. You're a passive person.
Men can dominate you. They are stronger than you.
They can take care of you.
Well, that was the deal that Anna was talking about, the deal we grew up with as women.
Yeah, but I never did. I have to say this in all honesty.
I never have, except when once I got popped upside the head, have I ever felt like a victim.
I didn't have that sense. In fact, I was saying backstage that I was rather surprised.
In my household, we kind of predated all these liberation movements and the black power movement, everything else.
We were just good, accomplished people, so we thought.
We were all right with the world.
And I was rather surprised to find out that some people actually thought that because I was black
or because I was female, I couldn't do something. Huh?
It came too late. I already had my headset that I could do it.
All right. All right. We'll be right back.
APPLAUSE
OK, Roger. Do it just like me.
Patty and Roger try Little Ceasar.
I'm in business in college, and I was wondering how I'm supposed to break through that old boy's network
without compromising myself and my values.
Look for the old girls, right?
No, I'm absolutely serious.
I mean, one of the reasons that I am where I am today is because women five, six, ten years older than I was
at a variety of papers reached down when I didn't know anything and said,
you come along with us and we'll help you out.
And that's why one of the most important things I do in my job right now is to always keep in touch
with my female colleagues all over the Times and say, what's going on?
What can we fix? What should I be doing?
How can we all make things better?
Instead of trying to be one of the old boys, there's a whole now girls network out there
that can do just as well, if not better, by you.
That is tremendous advice.
And when you get there...
APPLAUSE
When you get there, don't shut the door behind you.
That's the most important thing.
You've got to reach down, too.
That's exactly right. And stand up for yourself.
I had two wonderful mentors where I worked.
My boss and another vice president took me under her wing.
So it was one male, one female.
And they gave me some wonderful opportunities.
But then I also learned to really stand up for myself.
And if I felt I was getting shoved around by the guys, and that sometimes happened,
I would shove right back.
In one instance, when a fellow made a very lewd comment to me,
I literally pushed him up against a wall and said,
if you ever speak to me like that again, first I march into my boss's office,
then I'm calling my husband. And that was it.
APPLAUSE
Thank you. Liz?
Yeah.
OK, just one second.
This one is on, I guess, a dysfunctional family or whatever.
I have a 13-year-old, and I applaud you ladies with the children.
I know from day one, I work outside sales, and my daughter gets to see a lot of what I do.
She watches me, and she sees how I handle other people and stuff like that.
And with us, everything is consequences.
If you make a choice about something, then this is a consequence of you do.
If it's that bad, of course I won't let her do it.
But at the same time, this kid is an A student.
She's had a job since she was 10 years old.
Get to the question, get to it.
OK, my question is, I think that as far as families go,
that one person, one parent can raise the child to be a strong female in the business world
if you can back it up with what you do to child following you or whatever.
I don't think any of them would disagree with that.
Yeah, OK, well I just...
And that's difficult to get around very well. We'll be right back.
APPLAUSE
MUSIC
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Let's drop by the Bundy's for a peek at passion.
You can forget about having sex with me ever again.
Look, this summer, I'm going to take the time to sit on my front porch and read Anna Quinlan's new book.
It's called Thinking Out Loud.
And I really appreciate you all being here today to share your thoughts.
This was great fun for me. Thank you. Thank you.
Music
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