Adrianne: This is Underunderstood.
Regina: Hi.
John: Hey!
Adrianne: Hello.
Billy: Hey Regina.
Regina: Oh, wow. That’s very formal.
Billy: Well, it’s like.
Adrianne: Ms. Dellea.
Billy: I tried to do it so you know, so people know who’s talking.
Regina: Yeah, no, I get it. So my pitch tonight is about Geraldine Ferraro. Do you guys know who that is?
Adrianne: Sounds extremely familiar and I want to Google it.
Regina: No Googling.
Adrianne: Did she run for vice president?
Regina: Yes, she was nominated as.
Adrianne: Yes! Yes! History! US history.
Regina: Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman to be nominated as a vice presidential candidate for a major political party. So she ran with Walter Mondale in 1984, he had previously been Jimmy Carter’s vice-president but they had lost their reelection campaign, Carter and Mondale in 1980.
I find this very relevant right now, considering the timing of everything that is going on. It’s August 2020. Do you guys want to guess why this might be relevant?
Billy: Because we could potentially have our first female-
Adrianne: Woman vice president!
Regina: Exactly. So I work for a media company that covers politics and somebody shared a message in our work chat on Monday as the DNC was kicking off, and this was the message.
“I’ve been looking for a clip everywhere, and I can’t find it. At the 1984 convention, Tom Brokaw apparently introduced Geraldine Ferraro as the first woman to be nominated for vice president-size 6!”
Adrianne: No.
Billy: What?
John: What?
Adrianne: That didn’t happen. That is extremely bad, even for 1984.
Regina: Yeah. I think it’s bad basically any time. So, that’s not the whole message. The rest of the message is, “So if anyone has any ideas where I could find this audio, if it even exists, please let me know.”
The “pleaseee” had three E’s, it was LMK instead of “let me know”, just so that this is completely accurate.
Billy: Can you say the exact quote again?
Regina: Quotation, “The first woman to be nominated for vice president- size 6!”
John: That doesn’t even make sense! What?
Billy: Maybe he realized mid sentence that it wasn’t accurate because there was previously a female VP.
Regina: Oh, so she’s the first one who is a size six to be nominated? Oh no, that’s kind of a detail.
Billy: Yeah, kind of a qualifier. Size 6!
Regina: No, that adds up.
Billy: I’m just saying.
Regina: Yeah. My picture’s over. You’ve solved it.
Billy: You’re welcome.
Regina: I called the coworker who posted this. Her name is Emily Ward, and she’s actually known about this clip for a while.
Emily: I found out about this back in 2015. I was in college, I was a part of the women’s center at my college, I went to Lehigh. My focus was women in politics and so I was reading a lot of literature around that. And this just really stuck with me.
Regina: Also, after I finished my conversation with Emily, I came across something that she wrote three years ago that included this quote. So, she really has been just thinking about this for a long time.
Emily: It just kind of been like this “elusive thing” that I just was like, “Does it exist? Did it really even happen?” but it’s always stuck with me you know, that is my thing. That is the thing I think about a lot. I’m obsessed with this clip of Geraldine Ferraro and I never even saw the clip.
Adrianne: I am so wanting to Google right now.
Billy: Yeah we are not allowed to.
Regina: Don’t Google yet. I checked all the usual places and I didn’t actually find anything. So after a little bit, I sent Emily a message and I said, I think maybe he said it, but not when he was introducing her because it’s not in the video of her full acceptance speech.
Geraldine Ferraro: Ladies and gentlemen of the convention.
Regina: A lot of the easily accessible coverage is, you know, on C-SPAN or places like that and so it’s just the speeches. It’s not from the anchors because that’s all specific to those networks.
John: So what you’re getting is like a real archive of these speeches and not like the color commentary?
Regina: Exactly.
Walter Mondale: My fellow Americans, I accept your nomination.
Regina: So like I watched Geraldine Ferraro’s acceptance speech.
Jim Wright: Our next vice president of the United States, Geraldine Ferraro!
Regina: And the person who introduced her was not Tom Brokaw and didn’t mention her size.
Billy: So this is something from the NBC broadcast, probably.
Regina: Yeah, exactly. So if it was Tom Brokaw who said this, which is, you know, pretty consistently what it seems like it is based on internet searches, then it would probably be an NBC clip. It wouldn’t be in, you know, a C-SPAN clip or anything like that. And as I was looking for it, I saw that this quote is referenced in a bunch of different places. It’s pretty consistently people say it was Tom Brokaw who said it, they always say that she was a size six, which makes me think that it did happen
Adrianne: Just because it was everywhere, doesn’t mean it really happened.
Regina: That’s true. This is how conspiracy theories spread.
Adrianne: It is but also there’s a thing where you can have like it’s called zombie facts or zombie information where once you look for the original source, it’s just everybody pointing links at each other. And when you actually dig down, you realize it was a misunderstanding or it never happened, or the first person to write it, made it up and then it was misinterpreted.
Regina: I mean, I actually think that’s exactly why I really want to find the clip so badly, because if you’ve just do the quick preliminary search, every source was pointing to a different source or they weren’t citing a source and it felt it was everywhere, but there’s no actual video footage.
Adrianne: Yeah. This isn’t a New York times story from four days ago.
Regina: Yeah, there’s a ton of recent stuff about it because of Kamala Harris and her nomination, but then, if you look at the citations over time, there have been spikes kind of whenever women get close to the presidency. So, in 2008 with Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and then when Sarah Palin became the nomination for vice-president, there’s a ton of coverage because people are talking about, you know, sexism in the media and bias in the media in general.
John: Because it’s an example of sexism in presidential politics.
Regina: Right. It’s such an easy example of sexism.
John: OK.
Billy: But presumably this example hasn’t been seen by most of these people, because it doesn’t seem to be anywhere that’s accessible.
Adrianne: I got sidetracked and started Googling about when Hillary Clinton released her recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
Regina: Oh yeah.
Adrianne: Yeah. And it was her versus Barbara Bush and their recipe, their cookie recipes were being compared against each other.
Regina: That’s disgusting, really.
Adrianne: Does Hillary Clinton, can Hillary Clinton bake?
Regina: Well, and that’s the other thing is obviously you shouldn’t talk about women in that way as though that’s all they have to contribute, but there’s also a difference between what has traditionally been the role of the first lady and the vice-president, obviously. And because the first lady has always been a woman and the vice-president has always been a man, the president is to ask her the same questions that you would ask a first lady.
John: I mean, I’ll be honest, I would like to have known whether Bernie could bake.
Billy: Oh dude.
Regina: Oh, Bernie bakes.
John: Oh yeah.
Billy: Oh my God. So I Googled it and her obituary in the economist.
Regina: No! I’m gonna get to that.
Billy: Oh, okay.
Regina: See, I should have said not to Google it.
Billy: You could have just let me.
Regina: OK fine, Billy reveal it.
Billy: Okay. So I just Googled it and her obituary in the Economist comes up and literally the first line in her obituary is “The first woman to be nominated for vice-president…size six was how Tom Brokaw, a newscaster described”. It’s literally the first line in her obituary, which is just, oh, an insult to injury on the legacy.
Regina: Exactly.
So, Billy, can you just repeat again, the exact quote.
Billy: The first woman to be nominated for vice-president-size six, was how Tom Brokaw, a newscaster described Geraldine Ferraro during the democratic national convention in 1984.
Regina: And that’s how it is almost everywhere, in her obituary or just an article, even when books cite it, that’s generally how it’s structured, but then in one article, the one Adrianne mentioned earlier in the New York times, it’s by Amanda Hess, it says “Geraldine, Ferraro for the record and this is not a sexist remark, is a size six”.
John: Jesus, oh my God.
Billy: Well.
Regina: That seems strange, right?
John: For the record though, it’s still sexist.
Regina: Of course it’s still sexist, but it’s a different quote!
Adrianne: No, it’s not sexist if you say “This is not sexist”.
Billy: Oh, that’s generally how I’ve found things to be.
Regina: Yeah, it works for anything offensive.
John: I have no idea.
Billy: Can I ask an admittedly ignorant question?
Regina: Yes.
Billy: What would be the intended takeaway by saying she’s a size six?
Adrianne: It’s like the perfect size.
Regina: Like the six was the “ideal”.
Billy: Okay. So the implication here is she has a model figure.
Regina: Yes.
Adrianne: She’s got it all. So the one thing that I could say where this might be more forgivable is that I think these kinds of live events, they involve a lot of, you know, if you’re ever watching a debate and use tune in to the pre-show or it involves, just a lot of filling the air.
Regina: Yeah.
Adrianne: And maybe it’s possible he didn’t actually say it as his first out of the gate thing about her maybe he had been talking for four hours already and he’s just trying to come up to say, that I could-maybe see that scenario where it was, yes, I did a sexism, I’m a sexist man.
Billy: But how would you even know? Does he know the pants size of the male candidate?
Regina: Well, and that’s why I want to see the video so badly. I want to know was it really the first thing you said, or, you know, was there context around it? I also would love to figure out the original source.
Billy: The original source would be the broadcast, right? So it’s probably just a lot of people remembered it from the broadcast.
Regina: I would think that you would have to verify it. You would have to go back and watch it because it wasn’t something that started getting written up right away. Even if you’re like “Oh yeah, I remember that sexist thing, somebody said?”, if you’re going to quote it, you’re going to go back and verify.
Billy: Right. Certainly if it didn’t happen, I mean, the Economist is pretty high profile, if they misquoted, Tom Brokaw, either him or somebody at NBC, would make them issue a correction.
Regina: Right. Which is why I fully believe that this happened. I just want to know.
Adrianne: Me too.
Billy: So is the question, are we trying to figure out-
Adrianne: We want to find the video.
Regina: I want to find the video. I want to know once and for all, what really happened. And I think the best way to do that is to find the original source of the quote. I also want to know if it’s a case of messy archives or if it’s something that NBC is maybe just not super eager to dig up and have all over the internet because of these actual misconduct allegations against Brokaw. I just want to find the original source of the quote so that I know once and for all what really happened.
Billy: Release the tapes.
Adrianne: Coming up, Regina gets helped from an anonymous source.
Regina: Do you guys know what time it is?
John: Showtime?
Billy: Six.
Adrianne: 8:48.
Billy: Size six o’clock.
Regina: It’s time for a resolution.
Adrianne: Oh.
Billy: Wow.
John: I’m ready for a resolution.
Regina: So, the truth about this episode is that after the initial pitch, I requested some archives, I went through a bunch, more old YouTube channels. I reached out to some producers and I just didn’t have any luck and I kind of gave up a little bit, but Adrianne did not let it die. She started digging into it herself and then sending me miscellaneous things as she would find them and so the story continues.
Billy: Wow. Thanks, Adrianne.
Adrianne: Teamwork.
Regina: When I was looking for the clip, I came across the Vanderbilt television news archive, which is described on their site as the world’s most extensive and complete archive of television news.
So they have archives of news broadcasts going back all the way to 1968.
John: This is crazy. They have loan service, but it’s they load USB drives with the material requested from the collection ships to your home address. This is crazy.
Regina: Oh, I’m aware. I have requested a thumb drive. I’ll let you guys know if I ever get it.
There was at some point, I think I thought they were going to send me a DVD of it and I don’t actually have a DVD player. Luckily, I didn’t have to deal with that because Adrianne came up with a different way in.
Adrianne: I put this request up into our Discord because there are some universities with access to the Vanderbilt archive and I figured, hey, maybe one of our Discord fans has a connection and guess what? Someone did.
Billy: Wow.
John: That’s wild.
Regina: It is, but they want to remain anonymous. So we’re just going to call them anonymous librarian, LAnon?
Adrianne: LAnon is really funny.
LAnon: I got a clip and the- didn’t want to give too much of the mystery away, so Adrianne said to me, I’m not going to tell you exactly what we’re looking for, but we’re looking for something that’s on this date that Tom Brokaw said. I was like, okay.
Regina: So Adrianne and I, we thought that we had tracked down like “Oh, this is definitely where it is, we just need to be able to watch it in order to see exactly what was said” but LAnon watched it and it was not the clip.
Billy: Oh, wow.
LAnon: The original link that I was sent that sort of sent us down the Rabbit Hole, it wasn’t in there. I scrubbed through the clip and it was just really short. It was a three minute clip.
Regina: Because we weren’t able to find anything and I, I don’t know, I started to get kind of self-conscious. I was kind of nervous that maybe this was all just a wild goose chase and it was a fruitless mission and I didn’t do enough research. I started to kind of dive into this a little bit further to make sure that I was not wasting a bunch of people’s time.
We’re going to come back to L and their research but first, I am about to send you an article. It is from New York magazine and it’s by Marie Brenner. John, can you read the first paragraph on the second column on page 22, starting with on paper.
John: So it says, on paper, she is almost machine made for coalition politics, Roman Catholic, family minded “a tough Democrat” she calls herself, a female character out of Horatio Alger with ample calves to connote hard labor and a size six figure and Nancy Reagan hair to appease the Lord and Taylor crowd.
Billy: Oh my God. Wow.
John: Who wrote this?
Regina: Yeah. So, Marie Brenner. So Adrianne, what’s the date of this publication?
Adrianne: July 16, 1984.
Regina: Do you remember the date of the convention where Brokaw said this?
Adrianne: I think it was July 19th, 1984.
Regina: Yes. So three days before the DNC where he made it, the size six comment, this whole profile came out, which to be clear, not only says that she has a size six figure, but also discloses her shoe size.
John: Well, this is just pretty, pretty wild because all of the references to the size six comment, are attributed to the broadcast and not this profile, but this is where it came from.
Regina: Yeah. I mean, I’m not necessarily showing this because I think it’s the original source of her size more because I think it answers the question of how he knew her size and why it was maybe top of mind for him at this point in time.
John: Right. He read the article. It was top of mind.
Regina: Exactly. It was a big profile on her so the piece itself was a big deal and the chances he read it, I would guess, are pretty high. But as far as it mentioning her size, that actually wasn’t super notable. It had already been mentioned in previous articles. There’s one in the Washington post where they say that she had lost 25 pounds, she went from a size 10 to a size six.
Adrianne: So Geraldine Ferraro gets to be the first woman nominated to be vice president for a major party and then she goes through this campaign and all people want to talk about is how she lost weight and what she looks like. Sounds rough.
Regina: Yeah, she definitely faced a lot of sexism, but she is definitely not like a poster child for a wokeness. She definitely perpetuated a lot of racist ideas, especially in 2008.
Billy: Like what? What’d she do?
Regina: She kind of implied with Obama that, you know, he was an affirmative action candidate.
Adrianne: Cool, cool.
Regina: Yeah, she was very much a product of white feminism of the 80s and I think a lot of people at that time went on and learned and grew, and she just had no interest in that.
But you don’t have to agree with somebody to acknowledge that they faced sexism. I think Sarah Palin is a great example of that and on that note, I spoke to a woman named Caroline Heldman who spearheaded a piece in 2015, that was called Ferraro to Pailin Sexism and Coverage of Vice-Presidential Candidates in Old and New Media. I asked her specifically about the Brokaw’s comment.
Caroline Heldman: When you think about where we were in US politics with women, by that time 130 women had run for the presidency.
At that time, let me do the math, it would have been 11 women had made serious bids for the presidency, but none of them were actually considered serious by the press and would not be considered as serious candidates by the press until Elizabeth Dole’s run in 2000. But make no bones about it there were women who had run on national party tickets who had been on the ballot in 50 States who had, you know, ranked nationally in polls and they were discussed in overtly sexist terms. So it wasn’t, you know the likeability frame, it was actually straight up sexism about what they were wearing, who was going to take care of their kids, why weren’t they married? And so, the idea that Geraldine Ferraro that you would comment on the size of her body, right? And it was supposed to be by the way, a compliment, right? Cause she’s skinny and all women want to be skinny.
Regina: Caroline told me that regardless of intention, yes, maybe he thought that this was a compliment that doesn’t really matter. And anytime you comment on a woman candidate’s physical appearance, it has an effect on how they are perceived.
Caroline Heldman: One you’re less likely to care about her pain and suffering because you’ve moved her from a subject to an object and two, you’re less likely to support her candidacy because you think of her as less competent. So, great research around this, that the moment at which we think of a woman’s dress or appearance in the context and politics, it hurts her.
When you ask folks, you know, who is the ideal citizen, he’s still white and he’s still male. That has that kind of idea of prototypical citizenship presents a very high barrier for people who are not white and people who are not male getting anywhere near that office. And so I think the context was everything that it was completely unremarkable when that comment was made, because she was essentially a joke to millions of Americans.
Adrianne: If this quote was so ordinary at the time, at some point it became a shorthand for the sexism Geraldine Ferraro experience.
Regina: I mean, yes, it was the first line in her obituary.
Adrianne: Right. How did it go from being something everybody forgot about to, or didn’t notice to being this, like memes about Geraldine Ferraro?
John: Right, especially since it’s apparently impossible to find the actual original clip.
Regina: Great question. I tried to figure out where it was first quoted. The earliest one I can find is this book called Boxed-in. It’s a series of essays about kind of television media in general.
It’s by Mark Crispin Miller who I should note has some weird controversial opinions about 9/11 and vaccines, but this book is not about that, it is basically an intense commentary on the media landscape and this is the relevant part.
“As we watched Geraldine Ferraro facing the exalt in delegates, Brokaw remarked over the images, Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for vice-president-size six”.
The book doesn’t cite a source.
Adrianne: When was the book published?
Regina: In 1988.
Adrianne: So was that when it started to get more coverage about that line? After this book came out?
Regina: Not really, it’s still pretty sparse through the 80s and 90s. It shows up in a handful of books and articles, but then in March, 2001, Jennifer L. Posner wrote a comprehensive piece called Cosmetic Coverage. It looks at the way that media covers political women and Jennifer L. Posner is a source, whether it’s this piece or other pieces that she’s written, or she gets talks and panels and stuff like that, that gets cited a lot. So there are a few more references sprinkled in the early 2000s, and then we hit 2008.
Sarah Palin: Mr. Chairman, delegates and fellow citizens, I will be honored to accept your nomination for vice president of the United States.
Adrianne: This was actually a big year for women running for the White House because Hillary Clinton was running for the democratic nomination and then Sarah Pailin gets nominated to be McCain’s vice president on the Republican ticket.
Regina: Which also just means sexism everywhere. And people started writing more about the different ways in which we were talking about Clinton and Pailin. And I think the fact that it’s now 2008, and we’re talking about sexism in the media a lot more is relevant to the bigger question of how this Brokaw quote got off the rails.
Billy: So by off the rails, you mean, at this point, a lot of people are looking for historical examples to point to, to contextualize what’s going on. And so a lot of people are citing this old Brokaw quote, maybe without, without the context or without having seen it?
Regina: Right. Exactly. After the fall of 2008, I found 23 references to the quote and 10 of them framed it as an introduction. And then in 2011, the documentary misrepresentation, it’s two words, miss representation, premiered at Sundance and it’s all about the portrayal of women in the media. It has a bunch of big celebrities in it like Jane Fonda, Rachel Maddow is in it, Rosario Dawson, a bunch of people. And in that documentary, Jennifer L. Posner says this:
Jennifer L Pozner: During the democratic national convention in 84, when Geraldine Ferraro was running, she was introduced on national television as the first female vice presidential candidates-size six! So this is not new.
Billy: It’s weird that they don’t play the clip in the documentary. You would think that if it was accessible, they would’ve put it in there.
Adrianne: Yeah. We also looked at documentaries, we looked at a documentary from the time, and then we also looked at the one more recently made by her daughter, and neither of them included the clip, which you would think this juicy quote that all these print writers think is so great, would like have the same appeal or even more so in a documentary, but, nope.
Regina: Right. And you would want to hear in the documentary, you would want to hear Brokaw saying it for himself, but what none of those people had that we had is LAnon.
Billy: L.
LAnon: Obviously print archives are often much easier to search through than media archives, but even with media archives, like television shows, it’s there for reference, but it’s not necessarily there for day-to-day use in the same way. So ease of searching for instance is not necessarily top of mind.
Regina: One of the things that can make these archives, you know, more frustrating to search through is that they are oftentimes broken out into segments and so sorting through it can just take a long time.
LAnon: I went through and I listened to all of the short clips. The three and four minutes segments, which would usually be like the introductions and my understanding was that this clip was part of an introduction, like “send it down to the floor”, none of those clips had anything in it.
Adrianne: So then LAnon started to watch all of the clips available in the Vanderbilt video archive.
LAnon: I just put it on in the background while my partner was playing Breath of the Wild and I scrubbed through any time somebody from the convention was actually talking and then we heard it and just absolute jubilation, “Paused it there! Yeah! Found it!”.
Regina: L found it!
John: My God.
Adrianne: Very exciting.
Regina: L messages Adrianne tells her that they have found it and then Adrian messages me and I actually almost cried.
Billy: Okay. I really want to hear this. When did, when did he actually say it? What is the context? Where is it in the Brokaw tapes?
LAnon: This was not only after Ferraro’s speech, but after Mondale’s speech and then finally, Ferraro was walking off the stage and Tom Brokaw said the thing.
Billy: Release the tape!
Regina: Okay. I’m playing it. I’m playing the quote.
Tom Brokaw: She’ll be getting so much attention in the coming days. I would guess that they’ll probably even have a Geraldine Ferraro haircut showing up around the country and for the record, this is not a sexist remark, she’s a size 6.
Billy: It’s not really better.
Regina: So the quote, just to repeat it without the music behind it, “She’ll be getting so much attention in the coming days. I would guess that we’ll probably even have Geraldine Ferraro haircuts showing up around the country and for the record, this is not a sexist remark, she’s a size six.
John: What a bizarre sequence of sentences.
Billy: There’s also extra sexism in there that wasn’t added.
Regina: The other thing! It’s not even-if they left in the first woman to be nominated for vice president, at least that is relevant information, but that’s not there, all it is is haircuts and size six.
Adrianne: So I think this goes back to one of my first theories when we talked about this, which was that it was sort of filling the air kind of a moment.
Regina: Yes! You called this. Yeah, because this was after both of the speeches and apparently this DNC was a little bit of a mess and Brokaw was just filling time, but this is still what he chose to fill the time with.
Billy: Can you play it again?
Regina: I’m going to play it again and I’m going to play the part that comes immediately after it.
Tom Brokaw: She’ll be getting so much attention in the coming days. I would guess that they’ll probably even have a Geraldine Ferraro haircut showing up around the country and for the record, this is not a sexist remark, she’s a size 6.
Billy: Is that cover band playing Beat It?
Tom Brokaw: While the Mondale on the other hand bought a suit that was a 42 regular, so now we’re even.
Regina: Did you hear that?
Billy: Yeah. So he is quickly trying to back pedal by being like, “Oh, I also should say Mondale’s suit size”.
John: Is he that pedaling? Or?
Regina: So there’s a long music break and then he comes back and he says, Walter Mondale on the other hand bought a suit that was a 42 regular, so now we’re even.
John: What did he think he was saying?
Billy: Do you think he even really knew that? Or he just guessed?
Regina: No, he made that up.
Adrianne: Do you think that some producer was like “Brokaw! You did bad”.
Billy: Yes!
Regina: I do think that.
John: What was he trying to convey though? It’s such a weird thing to say.
Billy: Seemed like he was going to go somewhere.
Regina: With which part?
John: With the whole thought, he says the thing about there’s going to be Geraldine Ferraro haircuts, which is already a strange thing to say. She’s going to be popular enough that people are going to go get her hairdo and then to follow it up with her, what was he attempting to convey in there?
Regina: Right. Well, and that’s the thing I think now that we know that the clip is real, there’s so many questions.
John: More than before.
Regina: Exactly.
John: Was this some kind of off-camera joke that was happening that bled onto air that had no context for us?
Adrianne: I think the context was the campaign where people talked about her size and her hair a lot because she was a woman.
Regina: That’s the thing is it was like a live broadcast of an event that seemed like it was overall a mess. And this happened as the candidates were walking off the stage and Brokaw wasn’t even on screen. I could kind of see how that would get lost.
Billy: Right. You know, it’s even with the most recent presidential debates, it’s all the news organizations you can find on their YouTube channels that they posted the thing in full, but they don’t necessarily post their pre and post commentary all the time or whatever. The stuff that’s just live on the air to fill time.
Regina: Right. You know, when I first watched the clip and I saw that it wasn’t when he was introducing her and it was actually just, you know, him trying to pass the time. I felt a little bit better for a second. This isn’t the first piece of information that people heard about her, but then in a way it’s almost worse because it was such a non remark. It was such a not a big deal, it was such an afterthought, it was just, I don’t know, it was so kind of thoughtless in a way that almost, I feel like is more painful.
Billy: Certainly more honest, right? It’s just what it was like the raw thing that came out of his brain when he’s trying to fill the air.
Regina: Right. Exactly. It’s like, okay, I’m talking about a woman so let’s talk about her haircut and let’s talk about her size and that’s it.
If you remember Emily, my coworker, she said that she has been obsessed with this quote for a very long time and has never been able to find this clip. And so now that we finally actually found it, I play it for her.
Emily: It was more subtle than I thought it would be for sure. He says for the record, I’m not really sure why the record had to show that.
Regina: It’s like, you’re broadcasting, it’s recording.
Billy: Well, it wasn’t totally on the record or at least till now it was a very hidden record.
Regina: Yeah. It was a really hard to find record actually.
Emily: I think what stuck with me most too is that I think it’s just so shocking that it came from the journalist let alone the most respected journalist at the time and for so many years after. It’s just mind blowing to me that was even in his notes, that night, why was it even in his notes?
Regina: It’s a question we may never know the answer to, but at least now we can sleep at night knowing that the record reflects that it was indeed, a sexist remark.
John: Thanks for listening! Underunderstood is Regina Dellea, Billy Disney, Adrian Jeffries and me John Lagomarsino.
Regina: Extra special thank you to L for saving the day with this one. Also just a thank you to librarians and archivists, archivists?
John: Archivists.
Regina: I think both. You’re all doing important work and we appreciate you.
Adrianne: Just a shout out to our supporters in general, hanging out with you in Discord has been really fun.
Billy: If you want to join our Discord and hang out with us, it’s going to cost you.
Regina: Billy, that’s not how you make friends.
Billy: Sorry, but it’s true. And if you pay us, not only will you get access to that chat room with us and our friendship, you’ll also get access to an extra episode every week with our bonus podcasts, Overunderstood. So if you’re interested in any of that, go over to our patreon at patreon.com/underunderstood.
John: We also definitely appreciate you, even if you’re not a subscriber to our patreon, but if you want to help us in another small way, if you like the show, leave us a review on Apple podcasts. New reviews will actually do. They’ve laid up our days. They make us happy.
Regina: Thank you for listening. We will be back next week.
Adrianne: We’ll see you on Thursday. If you are an Overunderstood listener.
John: And if you listened to this in the morning, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote.
Regina: Oh right, vote, please and then leave us a review.
