Jennifer Weiss-Wolf: Breaking Barriers from Menstruation to Menopause

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. This is a time to speak our truth.

0:43They speak their truths and what they believe them to be. Interestingly, I wrote a piece for the LA Times just yesterday. And the reason I knew it went live was because I already had hate email in my inbox referring to the op-ed, which was my trigger to say, oh, I guess it's up. They don't keep it to themselves and nor do I keep my views of the world and what is just and what is right and what is fair. And I don't just write about problems. I don't just point fingers, but I write about solutions, too. So thank you very much, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, for being on my podcast. Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is the executive director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at NYU Law School, which basically means that she is at the forefront of advancing women in the legal profession.

1:32And in the past, she has been a driving force with another movement. This is menstruation equity. And her book, Periods Gone Public, was instrumental in this quest. Did I get all that right? That sounds good. Thank you. That sounds like me. So first of all, most relevant and timely question, How is your newfound singing career going? Oh, did I mention my singing along the way? I had my concert last night. Yeah, it was very exciting. I sang on an off-Broadway stage with a group of about 50 other people, none of whom are professional singers. And we sang some good old school rock and roll songs and it was really fun.

2:38I heard that Instagram went down because there was so much traffic for people. That could be true. I think we might have broken the internet. So if this whole legal and activist thing doesn't work out. Yeah, if it doesn't work out. I've got a career in breaking the internet. You've got to back up careers. I have a serious question. Why were you all wearing red in that video? Oh, I posted that. And you can see I am actually the only one not wearing red. I was wearing black. Because we were assigned to wear black and red in whatever combination we wanted. But in that little video clip, which my daughter took, it was just like a little slice of people.

3:17And they all just happened to be wearing red. But if you saw the whole stage, people were wearing a mix of red and black. And I guess the director thought that those were colors that pop on the stage and look festive. So I don't think there's any symbolism behind it. I didn't think so. Knowing where you are politically, I'm like, why was she being red? Yeah, no, there was no statement being made there. It was just fashion. And I was dressed in black because I am a true New Yorker. So I really didn't actually even own anything red in my closet. At least you didn't have the red hat on. I think there were some red hatted people there, but no logos or slogans on them.

3:57So red hats don't go over well in New York City. All right. We have been obviously researching you and you have some pretty much kick butt editorials lately. I love to write. Writing really is my tool, my sword, my weapon of choice. It's how I sort of combination of think about problems and solutions and by having to communicate them in the arc of 800 words, which is what in op-ed or editorial, the standard length is. It's a really extraordinary way to accomplish that. So I love to do it because I actually find it serves me and how I'm thinking about the work, but it also serves the world. It's a great way to explain something that they might not have thought about and that they can digest and get on board with whatever solution you're arguing for.

4:48One of the editorials is a reference to the Judy Blume book, Are You Their God? It's Me, Margaret. Love Judy Blume. I want to ask you a non-theoretical question. Do you think that God is there now for women? Wow. Okay. I wasn't expecting that question. And I mean, my own sort of religiosity and spirituality aside, yes, women, we're strong. This is not the worst we've seen. And we're smarter than this administration. And ultimately, we're more powerful than what's happening right now. We're the majority of the population. We have clear fights ahead of us. So whether that's God or whether that is our own spirit and passion, I don't feel depressed or without mission or focus at all.

5:39And in fact, part of why I sang last night and decided I wanted to sing this year is because I spent so much time writing and thinking and toiling in the world of all of the things that are wrong with society right now. I think it's really important to simultaneously lean into things that make us happy and push our limits and give us adrenaline. So all of those things are true at the same time. You don't have to just have one or the other. Okay. Now, your other editorial that we found, which was just as interesting, is about whether, let's just say that, do politicians have a sense of decency anymore?

6:19And there were a bunch of pictures with have you this and have you that and have you that. And what's the answer to that question? Do politicians have this decency at all anymore? This is like McCarthyism too? It is McCarthyism too. So that particular piece I wrote because a graphic designer had made these really amazing visuals for the moment. And her name's Bonnie Siegler. And she was leaning into the very line to Senator McCarthy, have you no decency? And she looked at the cast of characters in the current administration. And not only did the question, have you no decency, come to mind, but so too did have you no integrity, have you no character.

7:03and then some more crass things too, if I'm allowed to say them here. And then some of them were just downright funny. There was a picture of one Supreme Court justice who we got the information about his love of beer during his confirmation hearings. No names mentioned Brett Kavanaugh. And the sign was a picture of an angry faced Kavanaugh with have you no beer. And there was a picture of a down parkered Vice President J.D. Vance in Greenland with have you no suit. So she had some fun with them too. So I wrote about them and what the intersection is between art and protest and all of these ideas about policy, ideas about equity, ideas about politics.

7:42But what I will say is the sidebar was super fun was the website where I wrote about that is a substack. It's called The Contrarian. And together with the graphic designer, we made the poster art free to download for viewers so they could grab the PDF and take it to their local print shop and turn it into a poster themselves. So we showed up in a march in New York City, just for fun. I wanted to meet up with a designer. She's a friend. And we thought we'd have a good afternoon together. And we saw people marching down the street with the signs. So of course, we ran up to them to ask them how they got them.

8:15And yes, indeed, they got them from the article. So that was pretty cool. Oh, cross my fingers. Please tell me that was on Canva. I don't make them so I don't know. But I'm going to say yes to you. Wait, did you, do you have one that says, have you no black suit? No, we can make one. I think that's pretty timely now, right? Yeah, we'll talk about that. I am not the designer here and I wasn't even the slogan maker. I was the person who wrote about them. Okay. So now I have to ask you, you and I, let's just say we share perspectives on politics, but I hesitate sometimes to come out so strongly. And you obviously have no fear because you're writing for Ms.

8:58And you're writing for the LA Times. Are you not scared of being targeted by MAGA or the government or at an extreme? No, this is a truth-telling moment. No, I'm not. This is a time to speak our truth. They speak their truths and what they believe them to be. So, no, I don't think so. And interestingly, I wrote a piece for the LA Times just yesterday. And the reason I knew it went live was because I already had hate email. in my inbox, referring to the op-ed, which was my trigger to say, oh, I guess it's up. So yeah, they don't make their dissatisfaction. They don't keep it to themselves. And nor do I keep my views of the world and what is just and what is right and what is fair.

9:40And I don't just write about problems. I don't just point fingers, but I write about solutions too. And in fact, the piece that I wrote yesterday was acknowledging that a proposal that is now in front of the Trump administration is putting forward actually looks a lot like some things I've argued for, too, for very different reasons. And I tried to unpack how we could have such different reasons for actually agreeing on the same thing and what that looks like from my perspective to make sure if this is something they end up doing, that they do it in a way that doesn't harm people. Wait, are you specifically referring to having more babies and getting menstruation education out there so people can get more babies?

10:25Okay, so I'm referring to a piece of that. But yeah, so as part of something that the Trump administration has indicated it has an interest in is what is called this pronatalist agenda, which is that responding to declining birth rates requires the intervention of the government. Now, there's a lot of people involved in this debate, and they come at it from almost as many angles. And there are a lot of right-wing arguments that are made, especially in terms of increasing certain kinds of families, families that are very traditional, that are white, that have a mother and a father, that are wealthy.

11:04And they've put forward a bunch of proposals, or they've received a bunch of suggestions of what they should be proposing or advancing. They run a pretty wide gamut from medals of honor to mothers who have multiple, many children, something that was done in Nazi Germany. And one of the suggestions was that people need better literacy in reproduction all around to understand how conception happens. I would agree with them wholeheartedly that people don't have that education and that lack of education is a problem for reproductive autonomy. and that if we provided that education, especially where I focused around menstrual literacy, but it goes broader than that, that would be healthier for all people.

11:50So I guess, yeah, I agree with them that this education is needed. I certainly don't agree with the reason why they want to do it. I can't imagine I'll agree much with what their educational agenda will look like. But I think it's important in this day and age to engage and to really interrogate what's happening and to pull the threads that you think actually have some potential and figure out how to improve them. He always says people suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. And I think if I came out saying menstrual literacy is a terrible thing, that is what I would look like, given that I've probably written about 50 op-eds prior arguing for menstrual literacy education.

12:34The reason why we did this and they did this in the L.A. Times is because two years ago, almost to the date, I wrote an op-ed there about Judy Blume and Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret, which had just hit the movie theaters at the time. And that in itself was 50 years in the making. The book came out in 1970 and was a preteen classic for Gen X kids like me who read it in the 1970s. When the movie came out in 2023, that was super exciting. Definitely for me. I held a watch party. But I also wrote about a law that was being debated and eventually passed in Florida at the time in which menstrual education is still deprived.

13:12Their students are deprived of it was cut out in their sex ed program. Any discussion about menstruation for kids, sixth grade and younger. And that is actually the law of the land in Florida right now. So I wrote about that because it was overlapping with the release of the Judy Blume movie. And I thought that made for an interesting discussion point or entry point for people to think about that law in Florida. And Judy Blume herself was advocating against the bill when it was introduced. So two years ago to the date, I wrote that. And now here we are. And the very same idea is in the news for exact opposite reasons.

13:46So I felt that that was something interesting to reflect upon. I could make the case that the people whose DNA you do not want spread out are the ones who are most interested in spreading it out. But that's a different discussion here. So perhaps you could explain to us, because when I was reading about all your work, I never put this two and two together about the relationship between reproductive rights and democracy. So how are those two things related? Yeah, so menstruation, menopause, that sort of is like the beat that I have, but it more broadly falls under this umbrella of reproductive rights and equity and democracy.

14:26And among the professional roles that I've had, I've worked at a democracy organization for many years, also affiliated with the law school at NYU called the Brennan Center for Justice. And as I thought about all the ways we were arguing and advocating for full and fair participation in civic life and in the body politic, it's really hard not to think about how attacks on our bodies are intrinsic to what it means to live in that free and fair society. And it goes both ways. So the ability to have freedom over your body is certainly part of what it means to live and exist and thrive in a democracy.

15:06But there's like a flip side to it, too. The way our democracy functions, it just so happens that when it comes to issues like reproductive rights and justice, those are the first places that people who would otherwise degrade or deny our democracy choose to do so to keep the people from having their will. And I'll give you an example. In the state of Ohio a couple of years ago, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade in the 2022 Dobbs decision, there was a measure on the ballot in Ohio because the legislature in Ohio is so gerrymandered that even the people who are elected to serve or the people who are elected to serve don't reflect the will of the people.

15:51So that's the first broken rung in the democracy ladder at Ohio, that the people could want something, but those who are in charge of making and passing the laws are not going to do what the people want. That is not a democracy. So they put it on the ballot so the people could have a say directly. That's scary to people who don't support democracy. So you know what they tried to do? They tried to raise the threshold of the number of votes it would take to pass the measure. So whereas normally it would be a 50-50 kind of thing, they said, no, we're going to raise the bar and more people, 60 percent of the people are going to have to vote for this because they knew what the people wanted.

16:28And they knew that if the people had their way, their broken system of government wouldn't be serving their needs. So they tried and they failed. There was a special election in the summertime to try to raise the bar. It didn't succeed. And the measure passed with far more than majority support. That to me is such a clear example of how people will use the levers of our democracy and try to degrade and distort them if they don't want the will of the people to succeed. And that happens time and time and time again on gender issues and reproductive issues. So to me, I hope that was clear. Those are the ways I see reproductive rights and gender equity as intersecting with democracy.

17:08Two-way street. Control over ourselves is part of democratic participation, but so too are the rules of democracy, making sure they're honored so that the will of the people is heard. Do you really think they are actually thinking and plotting that we have to control women's bodies in order to control power? It's that simple. Yes. Yes, it is. Maybe you can't explain it because you don't understand it, but that's certainly my case. Like, how does that thinking work? I'm not here to justify it, but we've seen it over and over again. It's not an accident that it keeps happening. Fool me once, that kind of thing.

17:54They do it over and over. It's a playbook that's played out from state to state to state. So the fight for democracy is intrinsic to the fight for our reproductive lives, because those are, in fact, the tools of how we're going to get there.

18:18Do you believe that at this point we are an oligarchy? And for those who are listening, let's just define oligarchy as where a tiny amount of people have accumulated most of the power and use it to enrich themselves. So are we at that point already? It sure feels that way. People who are wiser than me, who study fascist states and oligarchs around the world are saying yes. People are now acknowledging this sort of tipping into a constitutional crisis, veering towards authoritarianism, oligarchal tendencies, all of those fears that have been part of our, I think, American story for not just the Trump years.

18:58We've been set up for this for probably the better part of the 21st century. We're already a quarter of the way in, but we've arrived. Next question. So I hope the answer is yes. Can the laws and the separation of power and the judiciary, etc., is it going to work? Are we going to preserve democracy or are we going to turn into Hungary 2.0? I hope it's going to work. We've seen the courts really holding strong thus far. Today we're talking, I think this is the 100th day of the Trump administration. I think we have something like 1 ,500 to go. But so far, I would say that many of the systems and checks have held up.

19:42I think we're seeing, obviously, unprecedented, a very overused word, ways that they're being tested. And I don't think that this administration is going to be deterred by the things that have blocked them so far. So the fights will continue. you. I am hopeful. I have no choice but to be hopeful. And one of the things that I think about a lot is the strategy, this flood the zone, everything, everywhere, all at once strategy and how overwhelming it is. And sometimes it makes me feel overwhelmed because I'm not an expert in most things. I'm an expert in a few things. And oddly, some of the things I'm an expert in, like menstruation policy, have relevance.

20:27So go figure. But I try hard to remember that I don't have to solve everything. And I don't even have to listen to or invest in everything. I have to put my skills and my talents where they can be most useful. And that gives me a lot of reassurance that if there are a lot of us out there doing that, that is the resistance we need. There's a line of thinking that the judiciary is where the rubber meets the road, but the judiciary doesn't have really enforcement power. What's it going to do? Call up the U.S. Marshals and tell them to arrest Donald Trump. We've seen that already and we've absolutely seen him flouting and defying rulings and judges personally going after them, calling them out, the judge in Wisconsin who was arrested.

21:15But I do think that the court of public opinion is a really powerful mode of our democracy. And it's a very challenging one right now, too, given the state of media in this country. And I'm happy to talk about that, too, as somebody who writes and contributes and is part of a nonprofit media organization, Ms. Magazine. But I think that where the judiciary meets public opinion is a really interesting one, because even with all of the crises we've seen at the Supreme Court and questioning ethics and all the ways that we've seen such dramatic shifts with its conservative supermajority over the past couple of years, generally speaking, courts are the place where Americans hold the highest value and regard.

22:05I think they'll have the biggest to fall, like where people think politicians are automatically crooked and slippery. There's a little bit more sensibility that judges and their robes are going to be wiser and more impartial. So that gives extra heft to what the courts are doing, even if the administration and the president himself is creating chaos and crises by rejecting or arguing against or making truth social or ex posts about judges in the judiciary. Jerry, it's giving the public more to think about and more to chew on and more to be uncomfortable with, perhaps, than they might be if they just saw him duking it out with a member of Congress who they didn't trust anyway.

22:52Are you familiar with the work of Erica Chenoweth? Yes, yes, I am. So I think it's an oversimplification to say that when you get three and a half percent, you can have change, but that's her observation, which is not necessarily as simple as that. But like, at least her work shows that you don't need 51 % of the people in the streets, you just need a small percentage of the people in the streets. Well, I'm going to take that back to your earlier question about God and women's rights and looking out for women. Erica also argues that women's focused movements have been the most successful in the world at countering authoritarianism and joining the intersecting issues that comprise what it means to consider and think about and fight for gender equity.

23:42So if it's that you need that critical mass and that critical mass especially is organized and led by women and people who lead in a women's focused way that has more intersecting interests and collaborative leadership at heart, you do have a recipe for success. And Erica has shown it time and again in the different autocracies and movements that I've seen written about. We are going to have her as a guest in a few weeks. Good, good, good. I don't know. We published another piece by Erica in Ms. Magazine, and it was called The Revenge of the Patriarchs. And I hang on, Eric is every word. I'm so glad.

24:23Look, I'm really looking forward to interviewing her. So, yeah, I'm glad that you guys are familiar with each other's work. It makes perfect sense, right? So let me ask you something. I must confess ignorance here. Until about three days ago, I had never heard the concept of menstrual equity. I thought everybody knew it and talked about it. What can I say? At least I'm being transparent. First of all, could you just please define that for the other ignorant men out there who are listening to this podcast? It's not ignorance. It's the society we've been brought up in. And to be very fair, it's a phrase I made up about 10 years ago.

25:01I tend to doubt it's in the common vernacular. But the idea of menstrual equity, I'm going to explain it as a concept and then I'm going to explain it as a policy framework, if that's OK. When I started doing work around menstruation and public policy, I learned about this because some kids in my community were collecting menstrual products, tampons and pads for our local food pantry when they discovered that it was a need of the people who used the food pantry and the food pantry didn't have a budget for it. So as simple as that, I learned about that like through a social media post through a mutual friend.

25:32And I contacted the family because I really wanted to be involved in their product drive. But I really started thinking about it. And I will say this goes back to my Brennan Center roots and my consideration of these issues as a matter of what it means to live in a full and fair democracy where we all have equal civic engagement and participation opportunities. You're probably not so ignorant, your word, to know that if somebody doesn't have access to these products, it's really hard to participate in public life. It's impossible for most, I would say, just about everybody. And so I started thinking about it in those frameworks, and I became consumed with why an agency that presumably had public and philanthropic funds and was able to meet every need of their base, why this was being left to a couple of teenagers to go out and stand on the corner like they were selling Girl Scout cookies for.

26:24Why was this considered not important enough to be part of any of those budgets? Was it not allowed? Had they forgotten about it? Was food more important? These were all real questions. So I started digging into that and discovered that there was really no policy agenda that had ever been attempted to normalize menstruation, talk about it in halls of power, and say, hey, you know what? There are some problems here that we haven't thought about. Have we ever thought about the fact that for low-income people, they just can't afford to put this in their budget? Why do we provide toilet paper in public restrooms for free?

26:56We don't ask people to pay for that. But we charge for this or we don't make it available at all. Who decided that? Who was making that decision? Was there a discussion? So I became consumed with these questions. So that was when I started public writing. I really hadn't done much public writing before that either. And the very first piece that I wrote happened to be published in the New York Times, little old paper that nobody reads. So the issue got a lot of attention and ended up this whole array of activity. People who wanted to get engaged like philanthropically. Oh, I want to do a product party too.

27:26That sounds fun. It's a little subversive, right? If it's something you don't talk about, it seemed kind of edgy to have a party where you asked everybody to bring a box of tampons. I became really interested in what the laws could be. There was a lot of pop culture interest at the time, too. This is all 2015. I became really interested in what the policies could be. And I wrote this memo and I came up with a whole bunch of ideas. And what happened was I kept writing because the issue ignited me so much. And lawmakers started contacting me, whether it was in municipal governments like here in New York City and the city council, state legislators, members of Congress, and saying, hey, what can I do?