I do think it's really important for all of us to be brave.
I think it's particularly important for girls and women to be brave.
Do you feel from your own mother, is there any lesson that
she has taught you about what it means to be a woman in America?
Well, she certainly has, I think, shown me and so many of us what resilience and grace look like.
She also has an incredible sense of humor.
And I think that that enables her to get up and be graceful and be resilient,
that there’s a direct connection there.
Like self confidence is like you believe that you can do the things that you set out to do in the world.
But I don't think you're actually able to do those without bravery or resilience.
I don't know quite how to explain that to my children, but one of the things that I do talk about with Charlotte,
partly cause she’s older, admittedly also partly cause she's a girl,
you know, she'll often say to me, “Mommy I look so pretty today.”
I’m like, “You do look very pretty today, Charlotte, and what's more important than being pretty?”
And she says, “Being brave.”
Like, "That's right. Being brave is more important than being pretty."
I was wondering if you could speak at all to the importance of being vulnerable with people that are hateful to you...
but how to cultivate that sort of compassion, the importance of having it.
You know, certainly for our children it's very important to us, and this is important to me in the world,
to draw a distinction between opinions and things that devalue someone's common humanity.
I don't think racism is an opinion.
I don't think anti-Semitism is an opinion.
I don't think misogyny is an opinion.
I don't think homophobia is an opinion.
I don't think Islamophobia is an opinion.
I don't think when you're devaluing someone's sense of shared humanity,
that's not really, you can't really have a debate about that.
Do you talk to Charlotte about sexism?
Oh, completely. We talk about that in a way three and a half year old can talk about that,
but at least we're having these conversations now, because I want her to grow up being aware of how privileged she is
and also to feel a responsibility to use that privilege to help empower others here and around the world,
something that my grandmother always called "needing to expand the circle of blessings."
So, with your most recent book,
I was wondering if there is one line from that book or one quote that really stands out when you think about
the most important message that you learned in documenting these women
who often don't get the spotlight.
Someone whose story I'm so proud to tell was Sally Ride.
And she said, “It's hard to imagine what you can't see.”
And so one of the reasons I wrote She Persisted and She Persisted Around the World
was to help close what I think of as the imagination gap,
so that young readers who are girls can see themselves as anything and everything,
in the stories of these women who were scientists or advocates, journalists or artists.
But also that young boys see their girl classmates, their sisters,
as having equally valid and valuable dreams as their own.
This is a photograph I look at everyday.
This is a photograph I look at everyday. It's of my grandmother.
It's of my grandmother.
She passed away more than six and a half years ago.
This photograph is actually in the hallway right outside my children's rooms.
It gives me the perfect opportunity to talk to my kids about her. So they know about my grandmother.
And that’s really important to me, because she was hugely influential in my life
and she very much remains my North Star today.
She had a saying that life's not about what happens to you, it's about what you do with what happens to you.
And for my grandmother, who grew up with kind of no sense of power,
I mean her parents abandoned her, she had to start working to support herself before she even turned 14.
But she was determined to give a sense of empowerment and possibility to her children.
And I just think it's a remarkable arc that she was born before women could vote in our country
and she lived long enough to vote for her daughter for president.