Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy.

I'm Amy McPhee All the Best.

In March of 2022, I had the great privilege of traveling to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee with Stanford Professor Claiborne Carson, who is the world's top expert on Dr. Martin Luther King.

I was finishing my thesis on women in the civil

rights movement and I was expecting to learn things on site in the Deep South that I hadn't been

able to learn from books. And that expectation was exceeded in every way and I highly recommend

to listeners to take your family and friends

and make a trip to the South to tour the civil rights sites. And especially, I was deeply,

really profoundly moved by the Legacy Museum, which is a new museum in Montgomery, Alabama. It was

really an essential life-changing experience, and I believe every

American should go there and have that experience at the Legacy Museum. That's just an aside, though.

What I wasn't expecting from my trip and what will be the subject of today's episode is that I

would meet new friends in my travel group when I went on that trip. I did meet

amazing friends and two of those friends turned out to be not just friends, but heroes for me.

I first talked with Nanette Gartrell and D. Mosbacher toward the end of our trip when we realized

that we had a mutual interest in women's

studies and women's issues, and we kind of shared a common frustration that women weren't being

featured and foregrounded more in the curriculum of the study trip. So after that first conversation,

I went back to my hotel room, and I looked up Nanette Gartrell and D. Mossbacher and I found that they

are luminaries in their respective fields in their careers. They have been pioneers in gay rights

activism for decades. And if they hadn't been so warm and approachable when I met them in person,

I definitely would have been too starstruck to talk to them.

...