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Transcription: [00:33:26]
{SPEAKER name="LILLIAN HELLMAN"}
Would you mind reading it once more if it doesn't bore the audience too much?

[00:33:29]
{SPEAKER name="MERYLE SECREST"}
Okay. You --

[00:33:32]
{SPEAKER name="LILLIAN HELLMAN"}
I'm sorry about this --

[00:33:34]
{SPEAKER name="MERYLE SECREST"}
No, let me paraphrase it.

[00:33:37]
{SPEAKER name="LILLIAN HELLMAN"}
Oh, if that's what you're saying - yes. [[laughs]]

[00:33:43]
{SPEAKER name="MERYLE SECREST"}
You were saying that you weren't involved, that you thought the whole --

[00:33:49]
-- that your generation thought the whole business of the emancipation of women had been either won or it was a boring subject or it wasn't anything that necessarily concerned you anymore.

[00:34:01]
And I wanted to ask you about that because, if this is so, of course the answer is obvious, but let's go through it.

[00:34:09]
If it's true that women were emancipated by the time you came to young womanhood, why is it then that my generation of the 1950s had such a hard time?

[00:34:22]
{SPEAKER name="LILLIAN HELLMAN"}
You weren't as bright.
[[extended laughter with audience]]

[00:34:35]
No, I - I --

[00:34:36]
{SPEAKER name="MERYLE SECREST"}
I guess that answers that! [[laugh]]

[00:34:40]
{SPEAKER name="LILLIAN HELLMAN"}
I do, I do really think that you were taken - not you were taken, not women were taken -

[00:34:46]
there'd been a very large step back in America, as there's been a very large step back today.

[00:34:52]
My generation, I don't really ever think my generation thought of the emancipation of women.

[00:35:00]
We were, probably the first, we weren't the first, we were the second or third generation that went to college, my mother went to college.

[00:35:10]
It didn't do her very much good, she didn't learn anything, but my generation did begin to want to learn,

[00:35:18]
and did begin to doubt certain things that I think should be doubted. Half the time we were --

[00:35:26]
{SPEAKER name="MERYLE SECREST"}
What things?

[00:35:28]
{SPEAKER name="LILLIAN HELLMAN"}
Well, it began -- I began to sit and listen in a class, and often to think to myself, "I don't think he knows what the fuck he's talking about." [[laughter and applause]]

[00:35:41]
And I'll go out and read a book for myself or look it up in the encyclopedia. I don't think my mother did that.

[00:35:48]
Probably because it wasn't her nice nature to do it. and it was my un-nice nature to do it.

[00:35:56]
But I wasn't alone in it. My roommates all did it. My friends all did it.

[00:36:02]
We were beginning to feel as if, possibly--

Transcription Notes:
Speakers Panel Moderator: {SPEAKER name="MERYLE SECREST"} Guests: {SPEAKER name="LILLIAN HELLMAN"}