I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

In the 1960s and 70s, women took for granted a certain degree of patriarchy and sexism and

needed their consciousness to be raised about the fact that this is not fair.

Lady Cotton Poghubin helped lead the powerful wave of feminism that swept across America in the 1970s.

Lady and I worked side by side, often during those years. Both of us contributed to the groundbreaking album,

Free to Be You and Me, and she was my editor for a couple of articles I wrote for Ms. Magazine.

Lady and I have been friends for over 40 years, during which time we've had many conversations that have been delightful,

and that have helped me see things in a new way. This is one of them.

A founding editor and writer for Ms. Magazine, Lady also is the author of 11 books, both fiction and nonfiction.

All of them exploring what makes humans tick, what brings them together, what pulls them apart.

And she's a very active activist in efforts to actually bring people together.

For decades now, Lady has been experimenting with something that is important as it was seemed unlikely to work, if not impossible.

But it does seem to work, and it seemed like an interesting place to start our conversation.

One of the things that you do that really amazes me is you're able to bring together people who you wouldn't think would ordinarily be in the same room together to work on their problems.

But I think you have an unusual way of doing it.

Yes, you could call me like a group groupie.

I love forming groups. I'm an organizer.

When I'm in the middle of an experience, it occurs to me, she was, look, we're all sort of going through this.

Why don't we create a space where we can talk about it further instead of just the March, for example, on January 21st, 2017.

So many women were going down on buses together and trains together and putting together carpools.

And there was an urge to continue after that day, because we were so energized by it.

And that's what I have tended to do for the last 40 years.

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