When I started Victoria Principal Products, there were 22 full-time employees - they were all women.
There were the days when women were under contract, and they were thought of as a commodity, so they hired the best writers and a lot of them were women at the time. This was in the thirties and forties, to make product for the people who were under contract, who were their assets to the studios. But that doesn't exist anymore - and as a result, the people who are in the industry write products that interest them.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up all over the place, and most of those new products and new methods were developed by people who started their own companies.
When I grew up, it was a time when women were just supposed to be cute and not have many opinions. My mother and her friends were quite different. They were all the most beautiful women you've ever seen ... and they were very strong women.
There was a point where I was leaving for California when I was 22. It was a tough decision to make because, at that time, my mother and father both ran a successful chain of women's lingerie stores in metro Detroit. Two were called Bra World, and two were called Lulu's Lingerie. They were great. They did well.
I started a company called Pixel Qi and the principal of as we're going, smartphones were happening, but as we go forward, the predictions were five devices per person. Do you want to charge each one of those every night to try to get them on a full charge when you're walking around? Smartphones don't even last a day without a recharge now.
It's significant that four out of the five nominated comedies were run by women. That's not by accident. Women are storytellers, too. What's particularly exciting is that when it started to change, it changed very quickly, which I think indicates that women have been waiting in the wings for a long time and were ready to take storyteller center stage.
Oh all the time when Victoria Wood and I did our series. There were people asking 'Can women be funny?' People still ask that. It's like asking: 'Can women breathe in and out?'
Bell Labs was a fantastic research organization but having them create and market new products for the world was terrible. They were not good marketers and yet it was AT&T engineers who were deciding what the products of the future were.
The 19 hijackers that came over here to commit the attack on Sept. 11, there were those that were at the bottom of the line. There were those who were the principal conspirators. There were those who were the pilot. Everybody has a role.
It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end.
I think women dress for other women to let them know what their deal is. Because if women were only dressing for men, there would be nothing but Victoria's Secret. There would be no Dior.
I think that one of the tasks of feminist women - mainly women of culture - in our time is to seek out those women who were only forgotten because they were women.
When I started researching history in the 1960s, a lot of women about whom I've subsequently written were actually footnotes to history. There was a perception that women weren't important. And it's true. Women were seen historically as far inferior to men.
I was born born April 22. I got married May 22. System of a Down started started blowing up when I was 22.
When I first started, in 2006, it was an exciting time. Independent, cool, weird artists were being successful, and magazines were writing about them, and people were getting played on radio that were, like, really good.