Gloria Feldt

Gloria Felt was the CEO and President of Planned Parenthood from to two thousand five, the world's largest reproductive health and advocacy organization. She was named by Vanity Fair one of America's Top two hundred Women Leaders, Legends and Trailblazers, and the Glamour Women of the Year. Most people know you today as a women's leadership expert, but your history is perhaps one of the most fascinating things about you.

You went from being a teen mom to leading Planned Parenthood. Well, I think it was very symmetrical that I would go from being knowing what it's like to be a very young mother to understanding the struggles that women have to wanting to help all women be able to plan in space their childbearing, and so it really was a fairly seamless thing. But I really got my my grounding in volunteer work that I did for the civil rights movement. After I had had my three children and I was

twenty years old, and I sort of woke up. And partly it was because the birth control pill came out. Right about this, share with us, what was it like to become a teen mom? Was it intentional? Was it a surprise? How did people in your family react? It didn't take me long to realize I had not made the wisest choice. But here's the thing. I had grown up in small Texas towns. The little town where I went to high school called Stanford is very like if you've ever seen the movie or read the book The

Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry. It's one of those dying West Texas towns. And it was a great place to be a teenager because you could you know, it was like everybody knew everybody and it was one great community. It felt that way. But girls were not given aspirations for careers or even in particular going to college. The girls who were rewarded were those who were engaged and married early, like in high school or right out of high school and having children and being a support system

for everybody else. It was not unrelated that my family is the only Jewish family in town in the Bible Belt, where the first question everybody asked you is where you go to church? And it was you know, even to this day, my high school colleagues, who I still love and in touch and in touch with, they never let me forget that I am different. They never let me forget that. And I hated being different because what does

a teenager want. A teenager wants to fit in. A teenager wants to be the class favorite, which I got to be. A teenage girl in football crazy Texas wants to be a cheerleader, which I got to be. So you know, I got to be the All American girl. And that was that was the flip side of that was that I bought the whole culture. You know, there was no sex education other than a book that my father gave me when I was thirteen, Bless his Heart,

which made me very popular at summer camp. But and it got just completely worn out by all all my friends at summer camp. And you know, I hadn't really I would say the kinds of things that we talk a lot about now, Teaching our children just didn't happen. Then you were kind of allowed to just grow up. And I made not the wisest choices, and yet at

the same time life turned out pretty well. So I think that having those children at that stage of my life forced me to grow up really quickly, forced me to take on levels of responsibility that taught me the things that I needed to know later on when I became a CEO. What kind of a mom were you then in Texas? And what kind of a mom was I? You'd have to ask my children that, Um they were um, you know, as one of my children said, you did the best you could. And I think that there's a

lot of truth of that. I was a very engaged mom and my children were the center of my life, partly because I had ideas about how I wanted them to grow up. And of course, your children never do what you think you want them to do. But I did have ideas about that that I tried to inculcate and uh to, you know, to a greater or lesser extent. But there again, my children grew up in Odessa, Texas, the home of Friday night lights, and they graduated from

Permian High School. So I'm telling you that was the story of our life, right there, a documentary of our life. And so the culture had changed. The culture changes for each generation, and you may think you know how you want to raise your children, but something will be different for them that you will not understand. At that point, you were a teen mom raising kids with this husband who was also a teenager. Right. What led to the end of your marriage and what was your ambition like

at that point. Did you always just think you were going to be a wife and that was it. I wanted to be the perfect Susie homemaker wife, and then I found out it wasn't quite as much fun as I thought it was going to be. So I started to college when my youngest was four months old, and as I started learning about the world and being more a part of the world outside of my family, I started changing. But things were also changing in society. You

asked me about my husband. He was nineteen when we were married, and I would say that as parents who were that young, we did pretty well, and we were fortunate. We always had a roof over our head, and we we never had a lot of money, but we weren't destitute, and we had parents who were reasonably supportive. I always say my my father had a clothing factory, so I always had fabric and I made clothes for everybody. And my ex husband's family had a farm, so I always

had great food. So we were good. But as with most teenage marriages after eighteen years, by that time we had just become completely different people from each other. And um, we still respect each other, we're still in touch, but it was time to move on for both of us. When you went back to college when your youngest child was four months old, like, that wasn't probably expected, right, maybe even by yourself. It's like, how did your family react to that? How did your husband react to that?

Your parents? Like, what did they think of you? My family was delighted because they had always assumed I would go to college, and you know that I would at least have an education, whether I did it as a fessional thing or not. They they valued education, and I remember my father gave me fifty dollars for my first semester's tuition, and my husband's parents were not so appreciative of it. They thought it was not a good idea for me to leave the children even the two days

a week that I that I took my classes. I was very careful to take my classes all Tuesdays and Thursdays. And there was a lovely young woman who was a neighbor who would come to our house and knew the children and took care of them. So I knew they were they were well taken care of. But my husband's family was not so pleased. Although they weren't terribly vocal about it, I would say that that my husband was reasonably supportive. He wasn't he wasn't going to change his behavior.

As long as I was still doing the cooking and cleaning and taking care of the kids, he was fine with it. So it took me twelve years to finish because I was taking courses more slowly because there was only a community college in Odessa, Texas at the time. And that was good, as it turns out, because it gave me some time to get involved in community service work. You know, from my youngest years, I saw my grandmother volunteering.

My my mother and father were you know, they volunteered for things, and so following that pattern, I got involved with the civil rights movement, and that's where I learned that people can change things. People working together can change things, even if they start with very little power. At what

point did you decide to join Planned Parenthood? As I was doing the work in the civil rights movement, I noticed that women were doing the frontline work and the men were getting most of the leadership positions on credit. So you know, the lightbulbs start going off, and I started getting more interested in helping women in general, and I was I was volunteering for a head Start, and then I was offered a job at head Start, so

I was. I taught head Start for five years and during that time, one of my teaching colleagues, and believe it or not, the priest of her church, we're on the local plan parented board. It was a brand new little affiliate in the early nineteen seventies, and she asked me to do some volunteer work for Planned Parenthood. And that was actually my introduction to the organization. So it wasn't a oh, my goodness, I'm going to go get involved with Planned Parenthood. It was my colleague said, would

you serve on this committee? And I said yes, and I went to my first They invited me to attend a board meeting So I went to my first board meeting and they were arguing about whether to serve teens on their own consent. Again, as a teen mom, I'm thinking, yeah, yeah, you should. And they finally voted that after a girl had had one quote illegitimate child, then she could get

birth control on her own consent. And the county judge was on the board, this tall, lanky guy, and he leans back in his chair and puts his boots boot up on the table and he says, well, now, if that ain't shutting the barn door after the cow's done got out, And I'm like, what is this organization? Who are these people? So I really didn't have anything to do with it for a while. I mean it was I wasn't that turned off, but I you know, I

just didn't get that engaged with it. So a few years later, the University of Texas opens a branch in Odessa. I enrolled so I can finish my degree, planning to be a high school social studies teacher. And the last course that I took was an ecology course, and I decided I would do my paper on this little plan parent an affiliate. I called the executive director and ask

her if I could interview her. And I interviewed her, a nurse practitioner, a couple of board members, and two weeks later she called me and she said, I'm leaving. I think you should submit a resume. And I thought, well, I've never had a formal job interview before. I've never had a resume. I'm imminently unqualified. I am in no danger of being hired, but it'll be great experience to go and have this interview. And so I went for an interview, and then I went for a second interview,

and lo and behold they offered me the job. And I have no idea to this day why I was foolish enough to say yes when I had no idea what I was doing. But it sounded kind of interesting, so I said yes, and there we are. Thirty years later, I retired as the national President. You just never know where life will take you if you just say yes. Well, Amy and I always say that we're we're big yes people.

We love to say yes to things. And there's so much rhetoric for women on how you should say no and say no to all these opportunities, and and doors closed when you say no, and they open when you say yes. And so when you say something, you just said something that struck me. You said, I don't know why I was foolish enough to take it, But I

really don't think that speaks to who you are. You are such a positive person, and through all of the battles you face throughout your life, you maintain a smile and a positivity about people working together. Where does that come from? It's so funny. I am often asked, particularly by younger women, why I look like I'm so optimistic in spite of all of the things that they're encountering every day. So when I look back, I can say, well, it's because I have seen that you can make change.

And again, I'll go back to those early days of seeing in the Civil rights movement people without any power, without any money, yet getting together and making some of the most profound and fundamental change for our whole country, and and just knowing that you can, you can have an impact, knowing that what you do does make a difference,

really drives me. And I would say that the other piece of it for me is that at this point in my life, almost every day I get either an email or a call or something comes from someone that says you helped me in this way. You you saved my life. You you know now with the courses that I'm teaching, I I hear, Okay, I took this course, and I would have never valued myself enough to apply for that next job. But now I know the value I bring and so I did and I got it.

And those are the things that you know, even the small things that feed my passion, that feed my optimism, and to know that that we can we can make change in this world. We can do that. And now a quick later in your life, you wrote a book about power, women in power, and women's relationship to power. I think I have a good sense of where your relationship is now to power, and I think it's part of your optimism. But like, where was your relationship with

power at that point in your life? You know where, You've graduated college, You've been part of the civil rights movement, You've worked for head Start for five years. At this point, you have raised three kids. Really, so, like, what was your relationship with power? Like? Then I have to answer that question by going back to my teen years where I did not feel that I had power, I did not feel that I had the ability to determine the course of my own life. And it was obviously was

very responsive instead of proactive about things. And I I'm fortunate that my father always told me I could do anything my pretty little head desired. That was his language. And I witnessed my mother a woman who felt she couldn't in fact, do much of anything that she wanted to do. That she was always doing what someone else

wanted her to do, and it was not. Her big rebellion in life was at fifty she became a c p A and that was it was huge, but because she was extremely brilliant, So my female role model was not empowered, as it were. But I did have that little voice in the back of my head that kept coming back to me. So once I had started to college and started on you know, meeting other women who were involved in the community or or involved in careers, I slowly began to realize that I guess I do.

I guess I can determine the course of my fate as opposed to simply letting it happen to me. And it wasn't any one thing. It was a lengthy process, and I will tell you to this day, I still have my moments I will catch myself, you know, I will catch myself using language that sounds like I'm a powerless little girl, and I'm like, what's wrong with you?

But these cultural things are hard to overcome. However, the the the other piece of that is that the more you use your courage muscles, the more powerful you will feel. And so taking risks. I love seeing people encouraging young girls today to play sports and to take all kinds of risks, because that's how you get a feeling of being powerful, and that's how you grow those courage muscles and in willingness to take on things even if you may not succeed. So what was it like for you

to take over a national role at Planned Parenthood. There's a story I have to tell you about when it was all happening that I was having to decide whether to even apply for that position. So I ran the affiliate in West Texas for four years. At that point I was ready to move to a larger community, larger affiliate.

The I went to Phoenix. I I was in Phoenix and ran the Arizona affiliate for eight years, for eighteen years, and at that point I was getting kind of bored I was ready to I wanted to start writing books then. That was actually my goal at that time, and I had set up my life so that I could take a year or two off and and write a book. And at that time there was an opening for the national Planned Parenthood position, and I was being heavily, heavily

heavily recruited. About that time, my husband and I went on a hike on the Milford Track in New Zealand, and um, I discovered the first day that I would have to face some fears that I didn't know I was going to have to face. I am terrified of suspension bridges, and it turned doubt that I would have to cross twenty two really rickety. I mean these weren't like nice metal big bridges like we see here, but there's little rickety wooden planks with maybe one line of

wire on the side that you could hold onto. Well, I mean I freeze up. I just I'm terrified. And I get to the first bridge and I'm clutching my walking stick like like it will save me, and people are lining up behind me. Only one person at a time can cross this bridge. So I start across the bridge finally by by telling myself three things. Number One, you have to keep your vision, your eyes on the other side where you want to go, your intention. You have to take a deep breath and have the courage

to believe you can get there. And then finally, you have to take the action, because without the action, none of the rest of it really matters. You have to start putting one ft in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other, until you get to the other side. And while I was doing that, my life was passing in front of my my mind, and I I was realizing that I just before I had left, I had found out that I was the candidate they wanted and I was going to

have to decide if I would take that job. And it was a time when there were some problems. There was, I mean, it was not only that the political situation was extremely tense, a lot like it is today. But that didn't really bother me. People were getting murdered, people were getting I was getting personally stalked at home, getting neo Nazi calls on my home phone. I had my personal I mean, you know, I have was picketers, and you know, I knew it was a dangerous physically dangerous

thing to do. I knew that I would have to bring the entire organization through a process of dealing with it emotionally and otherwise. It was a time when the organization had had several leadership changes, like four leadership changes in five years, so they're all kinds of problems. And this was all flashing in front of me in this short period of time that I'm going across the bridge. By the time I got to the other side, I

realized a few things. One is that you know, I didn't lose my fear even after crossing all twenty two suspension bridges, but I learned that I could do it. And the other thing I learned was sometimes you have to cross that bridge sometimes at your moment, Sometimes you have to just not worry about the raging river below or the jagged rocks on the side. If you're the right person to do something, and you know that you are, and they know that you are, you have to stand

up in the moment and take that opportunity. And it was an opportunity. It was a great opportunity for all of the travails, uh, you know, it was it was a great opportunity to be able to practically reconstruct an organization. I took the whole organization through a twenty five year out visioning process, and whole sets of new programs started growth again, got contraceptive coverage by insurance plans on the political front, and that was all great, um, but it

was also exhausting and very exhausting. So I wore myself out. I really literally just wore myself out. You said, you really change the organization. You brought what I think is really an entrepreneurial spirit to a very established nonprofit. Like do those two things can they work together? I wouldn't have thoughts so, but they do. I wouldn't have thought so. And you probably heard the saying that Ginger did everything Fred did but backwards and in high heels, and leading

a nonprofit is a lot like that. You have to have all the business sense, but you do it where you don't have as much money or access to resources. And we we did have to be very entrepreneurial because there were so many changes in the health care system, so ways that we were able to provide women's healthcare at low fees or no fees for the women who

couldn't afford it. We had to be very scrappy. You know, we we literally created you know what you see now as the on every corner little uh dock in the box. I call them the urgent care centers. I'm telling you planned parent to it, invented that little neighborhood clinic that is very responsive to the needs of people. Doesn't do every service, but you do what you do well, and you do it at a price people that can afford, and with good customer service. And you know, we we

sort of invented that. And also the use of nurse practitioners as clinicians and providers and found that the patients literally like that better because nurses are trained more in an educational mode, you know, to really talk to people. So that part of it was really fun. That part of it was fun, And I guess I know my father was an entrepreneur, and I guess I had just ingested some of that in my daily life with my family, and to this day I enjoy that that aspect of

what I do in a nonprofit. You were also a pioneer of getting contraception covered by insurance. How did you make that happen? It wasn't just me, for sure, there were people who had started seeing the injustice of it. And for example, there was a young woman in Seattle, a young pharmacist who discovered that her pharmacy didn't cover her birth control pills, and so she sued them. And that was how I got got, you know, aware of what was going on. You know, sometimes there's an injustice

you don't even see because it's invisible. Women were just accustomed to paying for their pills and we didn't even question it. Right well, there were a couple of states where they had started being some grassroots movements to get insurance covered, and so I quickly saw that this was one of those things that almost everyone could coalesce around. That we could get some Republicans then I don't know

that we could. Now we could get Republicans and Democrats to come together on something that would prevent the need for abortion. For one thing, and that was it made such economic sense because being able to have children when you're ready to have children results in better prenatal care outcomes that results, and it enables women to enter the workforce.

All of those things are are great intellectual arguments, and so I really I saw that as being something that could bring a very fractured country together around an issue because Americans use birth control at some point lives for goodness sake, so almost everybody thinks contraception is a good thing.

So that was one part of it. It was that big macro concept of how could we how could really have a national dialogue about something that could bring people together on issues that had been very fractured and contentious. So that was one. But the other thing was it was that that's just the injustice of women not getting this basic healthcare paid for, and we didn't even hadn't

even been being noisy about it. So I started trying to get legislation, and we ended up the first piece of federal legislation we got was in the Federal Employees Insurance Program and that is the largest insurance plan in the country. So once that insurance plan covered it, most other plans started to follow suit. And then these this legislation started bubbling up from the states as well individual states. But here's the thing to know, couldn't get any media

coverage of it at all. Couldn't get any public, you know, big public discussion of it until Viagra viaggregates approved by the f d A, and suddenly every insurance plan is covering viagra. Well, the next day I'm on Good Morning America because suddenly it's become a big issue. It's like, what insurance plans will cover viagra, which is hardly necessary. I mean, it's fine, it's good, but necessary. No birth

control for women is a necessary health care provision. And so that's when it became a big public issue and it got a lot more attention, and then we were able to make it more of a normalized thing. And now a quick break. Over the course of the years, I imagine your relationship with money has changed enormously. How did it evolve from those teen years to today? You're so right, so right saying my relationship with money has

changed a great deal. When I was very young, I discounted the importance of financial stability or just you know, financial capability. I really discounted it. And probably that's because although we were never wealthy, I never had to worry about the next dime. And I think when you grow up in abject poverty, you learn very quickly how important money is, and so I I didn't really pay that

much attention to it. I hate to say this, but I never negotiated my salary until I became the national President of Planned Parenthood, and even then I didn't negotiate it because it was more than I had been making, sounded like a lot. Then I came to New York and I had to figure out how to pay for

a New York apartment. So at that point I went back and I renegotiated because it was clear that I had greatly undervalued myself and slowly as time has gone on, and partly this is because of my study of women's relationship with power. In our culture, power and money are very much synonymous, and so if our relationship with power is ambivalent, our relationship with money will be ambivalent as well.

And I now can see that it was pretty foolish of me that, to me, the best thing that ever happened was direct deposit into my bank account of my of my pay. I was doing the work I wanted to do. I didn't want to think about it otherwise, Well, that was not very smart. That was not very smart.

And I think that financial literacy for young women is just incredibly important and understanding the importance of not just what's in your paycheck, but how you build your wealth, how you build your how you build your your wealth, for your for your future and the future of your family, and that was just not even something that I It was not even a concept for me until recent years and now in in in the work that I do with Take the Lead, we definitely talk about the relationship

between money and power and that it's that money and power are both like hammers. You can build something with it or you can break something apart. They have no characteristics of their own, so it's what you do with it. If what you do with it is something good, well, then why shouldn't you have the financial capability? So that's that's my personal rethinking about money and power and how you deal with them and how you help women have

a better relationship with money. Another thing that changes every time is our relationship with friends. And oftentimes when we're you know, younger, raising kids, it's hard to make time for for friends who are your friends now and what do you what do you do with them? Well, one of the things that somebody told me when I left Planned Parenthood was that your rolodex is going to change quickly, and the people who will answer your phone calls will

change quickly, and that is definitely true. You find out who your friends are who your real friends are. But but that so, so my friends now tend to be fairly diverse, fairly much more diverse than they were earlier in my life. And that's a deliberate thing. And whenever I start noticing that all of my friends are my age, I start trying to make sure that I have friends who are in younger generations A so I know what's going on in the world and be so I will

always have some friends. It's a real thing, you know. It probably has something to think about. I'm very blessed to have a few women friends who started zooming at the beginning of the pandemic and it was just one of those oh why don't we do this on Sunday and and it became a regular weekly thing. And I've come to so appreciate that community of women who care about each other. So you just touched upon aging. It's

hard to believe you are seventy nine years old. What is your relationship like with aging and beauty and how has that changed. I can't believe I'm going to be eighty years old either. I'm fortunate to have good health. But I'm fortunate to have good health, I think because I do take care of my health. And being in very stressful jobs, I learned the importance of exercise. And and also I will tell you when I left planned parenthood, people started asking me if I had a facelift. No,

I didn't have a facelift. But I'm getting Actually, I'm getting sleep every night, which is I didn't for nine years, especially as the national President. I ran on four or five hours of sleep every night. And you cannot do that and stay healthy. So exercise is is really my secret sauce. It makes me feel, it releases those happy hormones, and I get really cranky when I don't get to exercise. So I would say exercises my secret sauce. A little green tea is my secret sauce. And not letting things

get you down. You know, as you get older, you learn you can do these things and survive. You just learn that. And the more you learn that, you let other things roll off your back. It's not as important anymore. So you have fifteen grandchildren and six children? Is that number correct? Right now? That number is correct, But I do need to I do need to say that three of them are my bio logical children, and three of

them are my current husbands of biological children. And then between the two of us we have those fifteen grandchildren, of whom a few are great grandchildren. For those that are girls and even the boys, how are they being raised differently even than you raised your children. The youngest

of the great grandchildren is six years old. And when I see her now, I will tell you that from her birth she has been given all kinds of girly girly things, clothes really clothes, and they let her do makeup and stuff that I'm going, why do you do that? But on the other hand, she is an athlete. She is you know, she is in her physical body, which I think this is a new generation of girls who know how to take up space. You know, they know the strength of their bodies. That is not something that

I knew. And I am so glad to see that. And I'm so glad to see that her family gives her that they give her lots of opportunities to to to be in in different kinds of sports and gymnastics and things that she enjoys and that give her that feeling of physical strength. I think that's fantastic, Gloria. What do the next ten years of your career look like the next ten years of my career look like this. First of all, I am planning this year to raise a lot of money to make Take the Lead a

self I mean, a sustainable organization. You see. The problem for me is I know how to do almost everything in an organization since I started with a small one and grew it to a big one in La la la la la, And I now you know, I just I can just do too many things, and I'm doing too many things, so I need to So my my plan here is to to raise enough money to to build a sustainable infrastructure be able to have a succession plan.

I want someone else to run the organization, believe it or not, even despite the fact I've been a CEO for pretty much all of my career life. I love the mission, I love the I don't mind fundraising, I love doing the public facing work. I I love the relationship building and all that. But daily operational stuff, no way.

And then, as I am able to ease myself out a little bit, because you know, I'll keep I'll keep doing what I do because I take the lead is really based all on my own intellectual property, and I'm donating the use of all of that to take the lead, and I will continue to do that, but I want to be able to oversee that use of that, you know, my books and my courses and that kind of thing.

But beyond that, I also have realized that I have had the opportunity to be both a maker and an observer of really important elements of history, and so I haven't saved everything, but I want to organize my papers and put them into uh some kind of place where they will not just be on a shelf, but will be available as working tools and documents for women's leadership

for perpetuity. So I don't know what that's gonna look like exactly, and I'm open to ideas from people for exactly how to do that, but I see that as being something that I definitely want to do in the next five to ten years. So I feel a responsibility actually to do that, because when you don't know your history, it's hard to create the future of your choice. You know, we have these little what we call our jewelry power

tools that take the lead. And I'm wearing the know your History lantern that gives you insights into yourself because we are all formed by the history that that made us, and so it's important, and I want the next generation to know the history and to be able to apply it to their own advancement and their own leadership. So that's what I see the next ten years as being, well, Gloria, we are going to go to our speed round. Now. We're just going to ask you a few quick questions

and you can give us quick answers. Amy, do you want to kick us off? Yes? What book are you reading now? I'm reading one called My Grandmother's Hands and it is about racial trauma. It's an incredible book. It's just an incredible book. I'm usually not reading things that are that deeply into psychology, but but the author's voice is so gorgeous. Also, it's like it's just fabulous. It's

it's wonderful, wonderful insights. I just finished reading a book about that was set in Odessa, Texas, the first novel I've read in a long time, called Valentine. It's a hard book to read, but it's a hard scrabble life in West Texas and it's very true and I got a lot the laughs out of remembering some of the places. As I was listening to it. You're an expert on leadership. Who if you had to name three leadership experts you admire,

who would they be one of them? I just did a I just did one of my LinkedIn lives with this morning. Her name is Felicia Davis, and she's one of the leadership ambassadors for Take the Lead. She has an organization called the Women's Collective, and she does branding, self branding for women. And she can take my very straightforward ideas and turn them into really cool ways of teaching them. And I think teaching is something you are

doing all the time when you're a leader. Have to be able to put things into story form and communicate in a way that people can hear you. So that's one. Now, this is somebody who is not alive anymore. But Warren Benness was one of the people from whom I learned the most. And what I learned from him was the principle that the first duty of a leader is the creation of meaning. And I'll tell you that that really that Relea stood me in good stead and one of

my former mentors also also male. You know, I have to understand there weren't that many female mentors for me when I was when I was getting into leadership roles. I almost find myself channeling him now. But the things I learned from him were and then I go back and I reread his books all the time. His name is Watts Whacker, and he was a futurist, and it was like anything is possible. Those are the things that have helped me do what I've done. What is your

nighttime routine? My nighttime routine is I I'm sorry to admit this. I usually do an extra couple of hours of work first of all, but then I lift weights with my husband and that is kind of like our little routine before we go to bed. As he's not great on exercise, so I'm always trying to encourage him. And so we've started lifting weights together at night. And uh, that's it. How do you keep your romance alive? Look? Look,

I think laughing a lot, laughing a lot. We talk about that a lot that we do laugh a lot together. We don't do any of the things that you're always people always talk about. You know, there you don't see any candles and you know, like soft music and stuff like that around here. But you know what, he's ninety one and I'm eighty and we just are still all

over each other all the time. Lou Burns has been listening to our interview and he will be asking you the final question from the male perspective, what was your role in the Civil Rights Act of in that time period? Who did you work with? And also did you get any flak from your neighbors and people that was around you, because obviously you grew up in a time where segregation

was still happening. Indeed, all those things right now. I was home with three small children during the height of the of the of the movement of the sixties, and so while my heart would have gone to Selma, you know, physically I felt I couldn't do that. So I looked for things that were local, and mostly the things that I did were getting involved with with groups like there was an organization at the time, I don't know if

it still exists called the Panel of American Women. That was the name of it, Panel of American Women, And you could call upon them to bring a panel to your group where there would be four or five people, each one representing a different race or religion. And that was the kind of thing that I was able to get myself involved with I had no idea, Sam, I should have known just by doing math that Gloria was

about to turn eight. And it got me thinking that, you know, we've done a number of these interviews now, and we have interviewed many iconic women who are still doing so much work in their seventies and eighties, and it just it just makes me rethink everything I've ever thought about my own career, like in this really inspiring, amazing, profound way, like I aspire to be like Gloria Felt and Gloria's sinum. Glorious Chinam also is in her eighties and she is still not just like kicking, but she's

making change in the world and she's out there. And I really when when we meet these people, I don't think there's any difference between us and them. I mean in terms of like the whole adage, like ages just a number. They embody it, they really do, and they don't get discouraged even though they're fighting some of the same bullshit fight they've been fighting for fifty years. They just keep going. And I love hearing about their friendships.

It's so important. We always talk about this, Sam, like how important friendship is for women, and these are women who can still tell stories about going out and having fun with their girlfriends, like life is long and there's so much to do, and I think it's and it's beyond friendship book. I just think they both have fun.

Like you know, it's the whole thing that you and I always talk about how we're some of the few people who know will just like hop on a plane in a moment's notice and say, yeah, I'll show up at that and just make it work, and we are our tendency is to say yes over no. I think that if you look at the people we've interviewed, and there's such a wide variety right of everything from ethnicity to background, culture to careers, and one of the things

that kind of ties them all together is that optimism and that zest for just digging into life. One thing in Glorious Story that I loved is that she built this in amazing career in a very nonlinear way. And I also think that's something that we see among these really amazing legendary women that we talked to who are in their seventies and eighties, is they have lived a

thousand lives. They have reinvented themselves seventy two times, and I hold on to that right after what I've been through in the past couple of years, that you can reinvent yourself and you can live a new life and live to breathe another day, and it's just incredibly inspiring. Gloria is still plotting her next course. Like when we asked her, what does your career look like in five or ten years? Like she had an answer. It was there. She knew she's not done. Thanks for listening to What's

Her Story with Sam and Amy. We would appreciate it if you leave her review wherever you get your podcasts, and of course, connect with us on social media at What's Her Story podcast. What's Her Story with Sam and Amy is powered by my company, The Riveter at the Riveter dot Co and Sam's company, park Place Payments at park place Payments dot com. Thanks to our producer Stacy Parra and our male perspective Blue Burns m HM.