She's Got Guts
10/4/19 - Friend of the podcast Hillary Rodham Clinton returns with Chelsea Clinton to discuss their recent joint project, The Book of Gutsy Women.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton
More on some of the gutsy women Chelsea and Hillary profile in their book:
Daisy Bates was a civil rights activist in Arkansas who selected the nine students who first integrated schools after the Brown v. Board of Education decision
Fraidy Reiss is working to end child marriage in the United States
Kimberly Bryant is the founder of Black Girls Code
Dolores Huerta is the co-founder of the United Farm Workers
Female firefighters at Pearl Harbor (episode image)
Margaret Chase Smith, Republican Senator from Maine who called out Joseph McCarthy on the Senate floor
TRANSCRIPT: SHE’S GOT GUTS
[Ads]
(0:30)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman. On this week's agenda friend-of-the-podcast -- I can't believe I get to say that -- Hillary Rodham Clinton is back and she's here with Chelsea Clinton to talk about their new book.
[Theme Song]
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hello, hello.
Aminatou: How's it going?
Ann: Well Aminatou Sow I have been better. I've got a cold. My uterus is shutting itself in a very angry fashion. I am hot and then I'm not hot. I'm cold. I'm like ugh. How are you?
Aminatou: You know, I would say doing better than that but that's so . . .
Ann: Different problems.
Aminatou: Yes, different problems. I don't have like baby wolverine in my uterus problems but many other problems. So it's also that part of tour I feel like where we just both get tired and the being away far from your bed really starts to show.
(2:00)
Ann: It's real. So, you know, emotional and geographical tour check-in is we are in Austin, Texas tonight and then we have a little break and then we added one final date at the end of October, Saturday, October 26th in Washington, D.C., the city where it all began for you and me.
Aminatou: [Laughs] That sounds so romantic.
Ann: I mean it was! We're doing a live episode recording at the comedy/friendship/podcast festival The Benson Ball and there are tickets at callyourgirlfriend.com/tour. I'm excited to have a little break before we do that one and also so excited for this Austin audience tonight. All of the above. On this week's agenda friend-of-the-podcast -- can't believe I get to say that -- Hillary Rodham Clinton is back and she's here with Chelsea Clinton.
Aminatou: I was really excited to call them up and talk about their new book The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience. You know, the first thing that I thought is is there a household that has written more books just in general in America? I don't think so.
Ann: An extremely prolific household, let's be real.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Ann: I mean they don't live together but metaphorical -- family tree. A prolific tree. [Laughs]
Aminatou: A prolific family tree of authors. So this book is a children's book but like all children's books it is not just for children. As you've gathered from the title the book is essentially a collection highlighting gutsy women throughout history. And a thing that I'm always struck by when I read this genre of books is yes, of course I know everyone and I know every story and that's never what happens. Always be learning.
Ann: Wait, you don't know everything?
Aminatou: Not about gutsy women. [Laughs] Apparently not. And it's also just very heartening because you're like oh, like again like children's history or literature as a gateway for actually exposing the fact that no one knows anything about anything in history and that women are always written out or their contributions minimized. And so I really liked this fresh take on Chelsea and Hillary to women who have had a lifelong conversation about who the women are that inspire them, sharing that with the rest of us.
(4:12)
Ann: I have a question for you. Is there a children's book from your own upbringing that you feel was a real eye-opener or something that you were like whoa?
Aminatou: Oh, that's such a good question. Wow, you are really knocking me on my butt because I really feel . . . there were definitely books like that. Like I remember reading all the Ramona Quimby books and being like oh, you can be a small person with emotions.
Ann: Aww.
Aminatou: I remember that being like a very -- that was something that I was like oh, this is very antithetical to the way that I'm being raised and I genuinely appreciate this character and she is a character. I remember that was like a big oh, you can be a young person this way.
Ann: Ramona and Beezus had a lot of -- all of the feels as they say on the Internet.
Aminatou: Right, you know? And I was raised with no feels so I think I really lost myself in like feels. But it's also true for me that in most of the books -- well not just me but in general but most of the books I read when I was younger were about boys. So it wasn't until I think I was learning English and I started reading English books where I was like oh, there's just like a wider net here. Everything that Jacky Woodson has ever written just really knocked me on my butt.
Ann: There's so much butt knocking happening today. [Laughs]
Aminatou: Listen, I love it. But it wasn't truly until my friends started having kids and I perused books to buy for them that I was like oh, this body of work can teach me something.
Ann: The book that I remember reading as a very young child that I was obsessed and fascinated with is this book called People which is a very pretty kind of colored pencil watercolor book written and illustrated by Peter Spier. And the theme of the book is there's lots of different people in the world. That's literally what it's about. There's a whole page about people have different noses. A whole page of noses. People like to wear different clothes. A whole page of different clothes.
Aminatou: This is the most Ann Friedman thing in the world.
(6:05)
Ann: I honestly loved it so much, you know? It was a little bit like Where's Waldo if Where's Waldo had cared about being representative. To be fair I also loved Where's Waldo but it was really just a book that I felt I could look at for hours and always notice something different of like oh, this woman is wearing a dress this way. I've never seen that in person. Or it is something that has very much shaped my interest in talking to strangers as an adult. I think about it a lot. I buy it for the young people in my life even though I'm like it definitely does not feel radical in any way, or definitely not the way it felt to me as a kid, because many of these young people are growing up with a lot of people who don't look exactly like them or have cultural traditions exactly like them. Anyway, People, life-changing for me. Not explicitly about women but I do remember there being some good representation of women in this book.
Aminatou: That makes me happy. Well, you know, the thing about the gutsy women book is it has exclusively representation of awesome women. [Laughs]
Ann: Correcting the narrative.
Aminatou: Yeah, correcting the narrative and also I think making people think about what it means to have guts or grit, you know? Which is not a thing that historically we teach girls at least anyway. It's not a -- you know, it's just like here, here's how you be a girl in the world and nobody's ever like be courageous. Be adventurous. Stand up for the truth. Have a backbone. And so I don't know, thinking about that as a value that you can actually inculcate very young to people is -- that's exciting to me. Because then I'm like you don't have to be like me in your 30s being like oh, where do I muster up courage from?
Ann: Right.
Aminatou: So that's exciting about it. We also talked about which gutsy women today we want to highlight when future people read the history of our times because I forget which dead American poet it was that was like history's never dead. A thing that the history people love to tell you.
Ann: Sure. We're making history right now on this sofa as we record the podcast. Is that what you're saying? [Laughs]
(8:03)
Aminatou: Right, we're making history right now. Maybe somebody will illustrate us in a book one day about women who were tired but tried to be gutsy.
Ann: Two women who picked up the microphone week after week to fearlessly share their opinions. Oh my god, I'm taking these headphones off and running away.
Aminatou: Right, you know? And I was also just very excited because obviously Chelsea Clinton is someone who has been in our consciousness for a long time but I don't hear a lot from her right? Like I hear a lot about her and the work that she's doing and I'm just like mother/daughter pairs that get along and work together will always be fascinating and inspirational to me.
Ann: It's such an interesting topic coming from these women in particular because I think that in general it's pretty common for girls to be raised to maybe like oh yeah, go after what you want or it's okay to have an opinion now. But I think what is less repeated to them is that's going to mean not everyone likes you and it's totally fine to not be liked by everyone if you are taking a stand on something that matters or creating something that feels really important and meaningful to you. And when I think about the match of a topic like this for kids written by Hillary and Chelsea in particular I think about women who have really been comfortable sacrificing likability frankly in a way that I don't even mean that as . . . I don't even mean that as an insult or anything. It's the facts.
And so I think that the more we can talk about not just being gutsy as a virtue but it being okay that maybe not everyone likes you or maybe it being a fact that you're going to feel a little lonely sometimes while you do it feels really important because I think sometimes that's where that messaging breaks down for young women.
Aminatou: Right. And also I think that just teaching that you can be a hero by being an ordinary person.
Ann: Yes.
(9:55)
Aminatou: Because a thing I think that for me it's always hard to relate to is when the only people we talk about are very famous or they're superheroes or whatever. And then it's like no, actually there are things you can do in your everyday life to make life better for everyone and to be a person who is trying to live a life where you're making everything better around you. You don't have to wait to be the person in the world that you're supposed to be. And so that to me was very exciting. And also mostly I'm just, you know, I think that for people our age and people older just this realization as you get older about how much women's contributions are minimized or just completely erased from history and realizing the real life consequences that that has, you know? It has consequences on say the 2016 election maybe. It has consequences on how you feel about yourself as a woman in the world. And obviously I feel sad for us but it makes me excited that a new generation, they're going to be raised differently and they'll just know differently so that's a good thing.
Ann: Yes. Raise your daughters to not care if they're liked. [Laughs] I'm excited to listen to this interview.
Aminatou: Well here you go Ann.
[Interview Starts]
Hillary: I'm Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Chelsea: This is Chelsea Clinton.
Hillary: And we wrote The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience.
Aminatou: Thank you so much for talking to us about this book. I'm really curious if you can talk about how you decided to write a book together.
Hillary: Well this book is about some of the women that we admire who inspired us because they were gutsy in their own lives but they were gutsy also on behalf of other people, knocking down barriers, overcoming obstacles. And it really arose out of a conversation that Chelsea and I started having when she was a little girl about inspiring women and why I wanted her to learn about such women and their lives. Because we know that history has written out a lot of very gutsy women. And it's also marginalized others.
(12:02)
So part of the goal of this book is to spark a conversation so that many people are talking about gutsy women. The gutsy women in their own lives; the gutsy women that they know about. Because I just think we're living at a time when we need to be uplifted, when we need to be persuaded that no matter how dark it seems or difficult the road we can walk it and others have done it before us. And so we wanted to share these favorite stories -- we could've written a much longer book with many, many more women included -- to be a conversation starter and also a reminder that we have to do a lot more to make sure that women past and present and maybe even future are included in our histories.
Chelsea: You know I was just going to add one of the joys of working with my mom on this effort, and I can't believe it's kind of finally out in the world, was revisiting those conversations that were so formative to me as a little girl and as a young woman. And that's meant so much to me particularly now as a parent and kind of now thinking about the stories I want to share with my daughter but also my sons of really gutsy women who have inspired me kind of since I was their age and continue to inspire me today.
Aminatou: I find the use of the word gutsy to be such a good choice in the title because there are so many synonyms in that family that make people balk, specifically the word ambitious for example even though it's a word that I love and apply to myself. But when I saw the cover of the book it made me really happy because I felt that so many more people could connect to that sentiment so easily. And so I would love it if you could talk a little bit about how you define gutsy.
(14:00)
Hillary: That's a great question. And for me it's that combination of grit and perseverance and courage that sees you through the hard times and gives you the optimism and the hope to keep going. Because despite all of the obstacles and the really difficult times a lot of these women faced they never gave up. And that takes a certain level of optimistic belief that you can finally make it. So I mean the very first person that we profile in the book is Harriet Tubman. I mean really could you think of a more difficult life and one that she kept powering through because she was in our view a gutsy woman?
Chelsea: Amina since you mentioned the cover kind of one of the conversations my mom and I have had throughout the whole process of writing the book is a unifying theme of the gutsy women we profile's lives is that kind of they were gutsy for themselves and others. And sometimes the others were people in their family or their community and sometimes it really is our world. And when we think about the women on the cover of the book who were volunteer firefighters at Pearl Harbor, they're preparing in case they're needed. It's from 1941 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor. And just the look on their face as they're kind of working together, just that sheer grit and gutsiness, and then kind of their -- their preparedness that we don't know but probably helped save lives just a few months later is incredibly inspiring to us and such a . . . a mark of gutsiness and kind of shared then with the stories in the book.
(16:00)
Aminatou: I really love hearing you say that because I think that we are living in this moment where everyone is just interrogating all the stories that we have been told about women throughout history and the women who have been written about, the women who have been written out, the women who have been forgotten. And I find that this book is doing a lot of that work resurfacing the stories of both historical women and modern women and telling them in a way that will leave a different mark in history. I'm wondering what the process was like for both of you when you were choosing whose stories you wanted to tell.
Hillary: It was a really difficult process [Laughs] I will confess because there were so many women. I mean this book could be ten times the length that it is which our publisher was not enthusiastic about.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Hillary: So we wrote over 200 essays. I mean we had lists of hundreds and hundreds of women who we think of as gutsy whose stories we would've loved to have told and we wrote over 200 essays about them. And then we had to keep cutting and cutting so we ended up with 103.
It was really difficult because there were so many women, just as you were saying, whose accomplishments, whose stories had been either written out of history, marginalized, or totally forgotten. And that was particularly true because there were women that I was impressed by and inspired by when I was a young girl and didn't know any women who worked outside the home other than my teachers and the public librarians. And by the time Chelsea came along there were so many more women who were doing things that thankfully were becoming more expected.
And so we wanted to tell the stories of a lot of women who might not have a big audience right now but whose lives are so inspirational to us. And hopefully readers will find their own inspiration to live their own gutsy life.
(17:52)
Aminatou: You have both written a lot of books. [Laughs] I think that as a household probably there's no family in America that's written as many books as you all. Chelsea I really enjoyed the children's book that you put out recently also. But I think that a collaborative writing process is very different and so I would love to hear you talk about how you work together.
(7:45)
Chelsea: Well it was a lot of fun. I mean it also did take a lot of work. You know, as my mom was speaking about the narrowing down of the women that we were able to include and thankfully my mom and I really respected each other's advocacy but we really had to go to the mat for the women that we wanted to include and make the case to the other for why we thought, you know, this particular story just had to be -- had to be told and had to be included in the book.
And then kind of in the mechanics of the writing itself I did know that my mom still wrote longhand. I mean I'd seen her yellow and white legal pads with her script on them around my parents' home. But I hadn't understood what it would be like to work with someone who doesn't use Google Docs or like doesn't use a shared drive or doesn't use track changes or comment boxes as a way to collaborate.
And so I would send her six attachments and she could -- she could open them and she could print them and then she would make suggested edits or write questions and then she would take pictures of her handwritten notes on my typed-out pages and then send the photographs to me as a way to share her thoughts.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
(19:45)
Chelsea: And I kept saying like track changes are your friend. I can just teach you how to do this. And she kept saying that's not how I think or operate. And finally I just had to realize my pleas and entreaties were just insufficiently persuasive.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Chelsea: And I had to adapt because she just wasn't going to. So that did take a while but we got into a good groove once I gave up.
Hillary: In my -- in my defense girlfriend, okay, in my defense it is the way I have always written long-form things. And you know who else writes longhand? Barack Obama. So I think I'm in really good company. But it was frustrating for Chelsea and I understand that.
Chelsea: But I got over it.
Hillary: She got over it. You know, the best part of it was frankly the discussions we had and sometimes, you know, the disagreements we had about why one of us wanted to write about somebody. And we could've filled this book with athletes we admire, artists we admire, political leaders, advocates. And to try to have a cross-section of women historical and present, real and fictional because we agree with people like Sonia Sotomayor and Gayle King that Nancy Drew is inspirational, we really had to think hard about how to come up with the essays that are in the book.
And what we want the book to do is inspire conversations. We want people to say "You know, my mother was the gutsiest woman I know." We include at Chelsea's very strong request both of her grandmothers because this is not just about famous women or women who should be famous. It's about everyday women, women you know, women who have withstood terrible ordeals.
You know, one of the women we profile is Nadia Murad who was kidnapped by ISIS when her village was invaded in northern Iraq and she went through the worst experiences you could and she never lost her courage to escape. But when she escaped, you know, her very traditional society was reluctant to take back all the young women who'd been kidnapped and raped by their captors and she became the voice of these women, speaking out for them, standing up for them.
So there are women who have faced the most horrific kinds of experiences and then women who were privileged like Betty Ford who made the book in my strong opinion because when she got breast cancer it was at a time when she was the first lady. Nobody even said the words. And we're now in breast cancer awareness month and she was the first person publicly who not only had a mastectomy but then invited the press into her hospital room with her husband President Ford to have her picture taken so she could try to end the stigma about this disease. So the women face different challenges and we really admire how they responded to them.
(22:50)
Aminatou: Yeah. I'm so glad that you brought up the Betty Ford example because it's one that I was really touched by and also realize that I just didn't know that. I had no idea that a first lady had done this kind of advocacy and I was really excited by the thing that you said about the fact that it was also not just all famous women and that there is such a good cross-section of women throughout history. And so I -- you know, I would love to hear more from both of you about what your hope is for people who pick up this book because I know that it's a . . . it's technically a children's book but I was enthralled reading it because again I just keep realizing there is so much that I don't know.
Chelsea: Well my hope, kind of in addition to what my mom was saying earlier in terms of, you know, hoping that it will resonate with readers and readers thinking about the gutsy women in their own lives and, you know, hopefully reflecting that maybe they're the gutsy woman in their life and -- and owning that and kind of being proud of that, is that I hope that it also helps people connect to the issues and work that still very much needs to be done and is crying out for gutsy women.
(24:18)
I mean one of the women we profile is someone that I've just been honored to get to know and to support is Fraidy Reiss who's really leading the effort to end child marriage here in the United States. It's still legal for children to be married in 48 states. I mean including where you're sitting in California and where we are sitting in New York. And that is just unconscionable to me that it's 2019 and it's still legal for children to be married.
And Fraidy was in a forced marriage, an abusive marriage. She was incredibly gutsy in liberating herself and her children and then incredibly gutsy again in using her story to fight to end child marriage. And now two states have banned child marriage without exception. Before Fraidy started working it was no state. So we still have 48 more to go but I'm so thankful to Fraidy.
And so I hope that people who read this book think wow, that's work that I want to be involved in and that's where I want to direct my gutsiness. Or it could be in any arena that we talk about or don't. But I hope it's not just inspirational for people to think about gutsy women but to really think of how they can be gutsy and kind of direct that energy towards something that calls to them.
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(29:33)
Aminatou: I'm sure you both know this. In New York City there are only five statues out of the 150 statues in the city's outdoor public spaces that honor women. This year the city announced that they were going to add probably four more. That's still going to be only nine women out of 150 statues just in our public spaces. You know, I think about the book really as a record of women who are doing things that deserve to be celebrated and I think about how little we see that both in literature, we see it very little depicted in media, but also we don't see women in our public spaces. And just how much of that has been taken away? I would really love to hear you both talk about the corrective that really has to be done to ensure that we hear these stories over and over and over again and that we really correct the course of telling this history.
Hillary: Amen. I am so in line with the point you just made. We still are ignoring women's achievements even today and we certainly are not teaching the history of women the way it needs to be taught. We have women in this book who were major inventors that had no support. They just out of their own intelligence invented something that became well-known. Oftentimes their patent would be stolen or they would not get the recognition that they deserved.
We have women -- young women right now, Kimberly Bryant and Reshma Saujani who saw a need to help teach young girls how to code. And they have created organizations to do just that. And so we're trying to fill the gaps that exist in our history because if you don't know the history it can be hard to understand where you are in the course of it. And we want young women of all backgrounds to recognize somebody came before you and you should learn their story because even though we live in vastly different times Sojourner Truth saying "Ain't I a woman?" can give you some courage to say the same in your head when you face discrimination in any setting whatsoever. Or Dolores Huerta who had such a challenging time when she was one of the two founders of the Farm Worker's Union. Her co-founder Cesar Chavez got all of the attention. She did a lot of the work and people who get into organizations and feel that hey, you know, their work needs to be recognized and supported too can look at her long life of service and accomplishment. I literally could go on and on.
(32:25)
Because in the book there are so many stories of women who certainly never met one another. They weren't in the same line of work. They didn't live at the same time. So in the current environment we're still having to tell our young girls and boys that you can be what you dream of but you have to be prepared. You have to work hard. But it's not just for a certain race or a certain gender or a certain kind of person; it should be for everybody. And I know that's still aspirational but these women give us the stories to hang onto as we encourage, you know, young people -- particularly young women -- to make their own mark on life and to choose the path that they think is best for them and to persevere in it.
Chelsea: And Amina I would just add that I think we have to continue to put pressure on the people who kind of have the power and authority to do things like ensure there's more representation in our statues here in New York City. And I'm so thrilled that Shirley Chisholm will be one of those new statues.
Aminatou: Yes.
(33:40)
Chelsea: But I couldn't agree more that still being not even 10% of statues in public places in New York City is nothing to be proud of. And one of the great moments for me when we were working on this book was that in April the kind of very conservative Republican governor of Arkansas where I was born, with whom I don't think I agree on anything really, except that in April he signed legislation to replace the two statues that represent Arkansas in the National Hall of Statues in -- at the US Capitol -- so that very soon it won't be the two white nationalist segregationist who are there now representing Arkansas but rather Johnny Cash, but also really importantly Daisy Bates who we write about in the book and who my mom knew who really was the driving force behind the Little Rock Nine and physically helped escort the Little Rock Nine, the courageous nine students who integrated into Little Rock High School in 1957.
And so while it shouldn't have taken until 2019 for Daisy Bates to be so honored we are making progress but only because we continue to demand that women's stories be told and that we respect and I would argue even revere the women who have helped make our country healthier and more equitable, more just, more sustainable. While also recognizing that part of their legacy has to be continuing doing that work because we're still so far from where we need to be.
Aminatou: Yeah, Chelsea, I love that your mom said you advocated for your grandmothers to be in the book. And obviously your mom is not in the book except that the entire subtext is about her. And, you know, and just -- and her own gutsiness and her own courage and her own resilience. I'm just wondering how does that make you feel?
(35:45)
Chelsea: Well I'm incredibly biased towards my mom. I mean I own that outright. Also towards my grandmothers. And, you know, yet for me Amina as proud -- and I'm fiercely proud to be my mother's daughter -- my most important identity now is as my children's mom. And so when I think about the stories that I want Charlotte and Aidan and Jasper to internalize at the cellular level and to feel a responsibility for, it absolutely are these gutsy women and also their gutsy grandma. Hashtag #GutsyGrandma I guess.
Aminatou: [Laughs] We're making t-shirts.
Chelsea: And to understand -- yeah, make it. I'm definitely going to put that on a t-shirt. And a onesie because Jasper, I mean he's two months old. He's not in a t-shirt yet. Because I do think it's important to feel hopefully not intimidated by their grandmother's example but a responsibility to that resilience and to the work that she's kind of been part of her whole life, and yet the work that still has to be done. Although hopefully if we do our part there'll be less work for them to do.
Aminatou: I love that. Can you tell me what like a -- when you . . . I mean you're an iconic mother/daughter pair. What does an iconic mother/daughter pair do when you get together? Like what are the snacks? What's your perfect activity? What does it look like?
Chelsea: Well now we took -- we took Charlotte to Frozen this weekend. It was for her fifth birthday. It was her grandma's present to her. And it was just amazing to watch her awe and wonderment and she was just so excited to see Elsa and Anna come to life onstage. But she thinks like the movie is real so please don't tell her it's not.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Chelsea: Probably our favorite thing is just to listen to the incredible, absurd, delightful questions my kids ask because I definitely have fallen down the leaderboard. I mean my mom makes no bones about the fact that she's far more interested in my children than me and that's absolutely how it should be.
(38:00)
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Chelsea: So, you know, the honest answer is we spend a lot of time with the youngest members of our family listening to them, laughing with them, doing Magna Tiles and Play-Doh with them. But my mom and I also try really hard to go on walks together and still spend time together because I know I'm still her little girl and I'm so thankful for the relationship that we have. But as someone who was so close to my grandmothers I also am thankful to be able to nurture that relationship now between my kids and my mom.
Hillary: Yeah. I have to add that it's really a cultural awakening to have little kids around because I never would've probably seen half the movies that I've seen in recent years, Moana and Frozen obviously, or the cartoons that they watch. Bubble Guppies and Lord knows what else.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Hillary: Aqua?
Chelsea: Octonauts.
Hillary: Octonauts and all of that. And they don't get a lot of screen time because their mother understands that that's not good for little kids but they get it as special treats and I'm thrilled that, you know, my husband and I are among the special treats. But we spend a lot of time just hanging out. We go on vacation together. We love to have them at our house where we live about 50 minutes north of the -- north of the city. And as Chelsea said it's just fascinating to watch their personalities develop. I mean I know that's the biggest cliché ever but they are so different.
I mean Charlotte, our granddaughter, just loves all of the fantasy and the princesses and all the stories with her little friends. You know, she'll dress up in their costumes and if she has a friend over they're playing. And our grandson loves numbers and music and is just so intrigued by all of that. And Jasper, the two-month-old, is an eating machine. So, you know, we watch all of this develop and it is such a joy. And of course I wish that both my mother and Bill's mother were still alive to see this next generation but it is a joy for us.
(40:20)
And I have to say when my friends became grandparents and became goofy, googly grandparents like they did, I thought well that's really nice but, you know, I mean come on. And then it happens to you and it is truly the only experience in life that is not overrated in any way. And so any chance we get -- and so far when we knock on the door they let us in so I hope that continues for the rest of their lives and ours.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Do you . . . what does watching the news right now make you feel like? Because on the show we -- we're almost avoiding it because it still . . . there's such a pain there and there's also just everything is absurd. And there's still so much anger I think for so many people. And I'm wondering what is that like for you watching the news unfold?
Hillary: That's a great set of descriptors and, you know, angry, painful absurdity. Seeing what's happening to our country under this presidency of what I called the other day a corrupt human tornado is deeply distressing. You know, the long-term damage that he's causing to our institutions, to the rule of law, to the separation of powers, the whole way that our system is supposed to operate is going to take some real repair work. The next president, hopefully not him, will not only have to defeat him and all that he stands for and the people who still remain enthralled to him and to his behaviors, insults, and general nastiness, but it's also going to require a rebooting of our government. A sense that hey, come on, we are all in this together and we all have to make a difference. We have to get healthcare for everybody. We've got to deal with climate change. We have to fix this crazy gun culture with stronger laws to protect people. All the things that Democrats are talking about and should be.
(42:30)
Because this -- you know, this period in our history hopefully ends soon. But it will be looked back on with just total disbelief. How did we let this happen? How did this, you know, narcissistic character through all of the machinations including Russian help end up in the Oval Office?
So when I watch it obviously I take it very personally because I still feel, you know, like he's an illegitimate president. And I think part of his behavior is because he knows he's illegitimate. He understands that at some level of consciousness which is why he spends so much time still going after me because he knows what really happened in the election. And sadly he has the power now to cause real damage. And what I worry about as we move forward with the impeachment inquiry is that he will get more and more irrational and lash out even more.
And at some point -- we write in the book about a Republican woman senator from Maine called Margaret Chase Smith who in the early 1950s was the only Republican to stand up on the floor of the Senate and call out Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin who was coming up with every conspiracy theory you could think of, ruining people's lives, making accusations. And Margaret Chase Smith had the gutsiness to go to the floor of the Senate and call it out for what it was and to call out her Republican party. She was joined by very few other voices. It was a really lonely stand that she took.
(44:18)
Well where are the people who do that now who put country ahead of party the way she did and why she's in our book. So, you know, I'm not celebrating the opening of an impeachment inquiry. It's a sober undertaking. But I don't see that Speaker Pelosi or the house had any choice but to investigate the abuses of power that we can plainly see coming from this White House.
Aminatou: Whew.
Chelsea: I agree with all the adjectives both you and my mom used to describe the news on any given day. You know we have the largest chunk of an iceberg falling off Antarctica in many, many decades and millions of birds disappearing and the data points around the accelerating existential crisis of climate change are so sobering and I wish galvanizing to more people.
And yet even in this inundation of bad news, troubling news, distressing news, I would argue there are also real points of optimism because there are so many -- particularly women -- who get up every day and try to change the future. So whether we are thinking about all of the gun violence prevention activists who are working not only for stricter laws but to help try to turn the tide against our death by suicide crisis in our country, or we're thinking about the young women including many young indigenous and Native American women who are standing on the front lines against climate change and environmental degradation.
(45:55)
Or I've been thinking a lot about since my mom shared that Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mother is running to be a commissioner in Miami-Dade County. And just to think like if she can get up and to try to change the future for other young black men and women so that no family has to suffer the tragedy that her family did and the grave injustice, like how could any of the rest of us ever feel like we shouldn't be doing every single thing that we can do every single day? I think about the women who get up every day and are profoundly courageous. And I think we owe it to those women to kind of share that sense of optimism that their -- that their lives hold.
Aminatou: I love that. And last question before we go, what's the next gutsy thing that you're on to?
Hillary: [Laughs] That's a good question. We haven't had time to think about it.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Hillary: You know, let's see. If I had to think about the next gutsy things I'm just going to keep speaking out and doing everything I can to support the resistance and elect a Democrat in 2020 and try to flip the Senate and keep the House so that we can get back to some semblance of normalcy and balance in our country. And I feel absolutely mission-driven about that.
Chelsea: I would just say, you know, we have elections this year around the country right? A lot of states are electing governors or state legislatures or county commissioners. And so I just think we need to all do everything we can kind of in 2019, for 2019 as well as for 2020 so that we have a radically different country than we have right now.
Aminatou: Thank you so, so, so much for making the time today. It means a lot to all of us and I'm really excited that The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience is out now wherever you buy books.
Hillary: Thank you so much my friend. Good to talk to you.
Chelsea: Thank you.
[Interview Ends]
(48:10)
Ann: Oh that was so good.
Aminatou: Thank you Ann. [Laughs]
Ann: You're welcome. I'm happy to compliment you on your interviewing skills which are substantial.
Aminatou: I am really excited for people to pick up this book and to read it and more importantly to just gift it to the young people in their life but also, you know, you should probably pour through the pages for yourself and fill in those knowledge gaps.
Ann: Right. Gutsiness, a thing we can all read up on. You know that Maya Angelou quote about courage? You know what I'm talking about?
Aminatou: No, tell me.
Ann: I'm going to paraphrase and I hope not butcher it but essentially it's that courage is the most important virtue because without it you cannot practice any other virtue.
Aminatou: Oh, wow. Dr. Maya Angelou, always with a word.
Ann: I mean Oprah is also always requoting it so this is just like a fourth-hand paraphrase. I apologize if I got it wrong. But yeah, it's something that I was thinking about when I was thinking about gutsiness as like a primary lesson to teach the next generation of women and ourselves. Love it.
Aminatou: Love it.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: See you on Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton's Internet. You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf where Sophie Carter-Kahn does all of our social. Our associate producer is Jordan Baley and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.