Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (2 page)

Our dissatisfaction with the impersonality of newspapers was not a new phenomenon. In 1944 a writer named Charles Fisher derided that impersonality in a book called
The Columnists: A Surgical Survey
. The introduction argues that a newspaper once carried
the personal stamp of its publisher but that that had changed. “The great portion of the American press has been congealed for years in a pattern which is admirably useful and impeccably dull,” Mr. Fisher wrote. “There isn’t much in most successful American newsapers to excite living interest, or affection, or dislike.”

The lack of what would “excite living interest,” noteworthy in 1944, had become critical forty years later because of great changes in journalism and in society. Mr. Fisher could argue that the EXTRA! that went out when great events took place had a homogenized sameness because of the caution of publishers and the rise of the wire services. But those of us in the business in the 1980s knew that that EXTRA! was often as worthy of an exclamation point as the weather report. Television beat us to so many of the biggest stories, just by being able to be there, with the few words and pictures it takes to communicate the simple existence of a space-shuttle explosion, a jury verdict, a death, a birth. The ascendancy of cable channels meant that news was on the air as it happened, twenty-four hours a day. Hampered by our deadlines, by the simple fact that a newspaper lands on most people’s doorsteps a good twelve hours after the evening news, we tried to rise to each occasion with better in-depth coverage, more analysis and background, the kind of thing that time constraints usually demand that television do incompletely, if at all.

There was no doubt, at the tail end of the twentieth century, that newspapers were going to have to change. And part of that change was driven by a larger change in society. Fifty years ago America had its papers to tell it what Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were doing, and what Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson thought they ought to be doing. The country had back fences to discuss the shortcomings of children, the problems in marriage, the scandals down the street. Perhaps in the last ten years newspapers have become back fences for people, now that so many of the old back fences are gone.

Certainly
The New York Times
that I joined in 1977 is now a very
different newspaper. During my first fifteen years we added sections called “Living” and “Home,” features on child rearing and personal fitness, columns about what it felt like to be female and what it felt like to be male. (It is testimony to how some of us felt about the contents of the paper that when the “About Men” column was inaugurated, we whispered, “Why? The whole paper is about men.”) There are still jokes that the computers automatically obliterate adjectives, but the truth is that there are more adjectives than ever before. Readers needed something different from us than we had once given them in the who-what-when-where-why days. We tried to provide it.

I felt the change most keenly when I worked out a long maternity leave after the birth of my second child by signing on to write a column called “Life in the 30s.” In his book, Charles Fisher suggests that the rise of the newspaper pundit—and it is difficult to overestimate how powerful and influential people like Miss Thompson, Mr. Lippmann and others like them were during their heyday—was an attempt to give a determinedly human voice to journalism gone bland as tapioca. The column I wrote for three years was, no doubt about it, written in a determinedly female voice, and it was considerably off the usual news. In some ways its very existence mirrored the changes in our business.

While my colleagues on the Op-Ed page were dissecting the Reagan administration, the state of the Soviet Union, and the state of the National League, I was writing about our two young sons and the world contained within the four walls of our house. Alice Roosevelt Longworth once described Dorothy Thompson as “the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay.” On a much smaller scale, I did the same with my kids. It was a wonderful opportunity to combine work and family, work I was proud of and a family that eventually grew to three young children. And it was an opportunity for the paper to make a statement, too, to show readers that amid the foreign news, the stock market tables and the television reviews there was room for one woman’s thoughts on the quieter moments. When
people would carp about taking up space in
The New York Times
with my memories of Halloween, I had a flippant reply: “They didn’t cut back the Moscow bureau for this.” What I meant was that we could be all things to all people, and that there were great things taking place in our kitchens as well as in the Kremlin. This justified my professional existence, but I also believed it, believed that if newspapers were going to survive and thrive in a television age they were going to have to use their gift of words in ways they had not considered before.

I found the relentless self-exposure of “Life in the 30s” wearing, and in some ways it was a great relief, packing it in after three years, being able to be with my children without thinking Can I use that? when one of them said something telling. I wrote the last column the week after our daughter, Maria, was born, and it ended with the words “Sometimes it is time to examine your life. And sometimes it is time to just live it. Today I embrace the unexamined life.…” And I meant it.

And then I was offered an Op-Ed page column, perhaps the best job
The New York Times
has to offer one of its writers. The unexamined life went into the storage closet with Maria’s stretchies and crib sheets.

There were many reasons to want this job, but the fact that I am a woman was not inconsequential. When I first interviewed for a job as a reporter at the
Times
, fifteen years ago, the managing editor, a kind, rather dolorous-looking man with wavy hair the color of pewter, asked me what my ambition was. I said I wanted to be a general-assignment reporter, one of that great mass of people assigned to no one thing in particular, called up to the desk whenever a plane crashes or a pol speaks or an editor simply has a brilliant idea.

Yes, he said, he understood that that was the job I was interviewing for, but what did I ultimately want to do? It occurred to me that, for some reason, being a city reporter was not considered a worthy ambition in this big building on Forty-third Street. Remembering the biographical material about him that I’d read
the night before, I said that I wanted to be Bonn bureau chief, Germany having been one of his foreign assignments. His face lit up. “How is your German?” he asked. “Not great,” I replied, since the only German I knew consisted of the names of casserole dishes. When he passed me on to the executive editor, I told
him
I wanted to cover Poland; I knew he had won his Pulitzer in Warsaw.

For some months I thought my clever duplicity and my prose accounted for my job offer, since I was in no way a
Times
man, being twenty-four, relatively inexperienced, and, of course, a woman. And then at some point I got it; I realized that that was exactly why I had gotten hired in the first place—because I was a woman.

That fact has shaped my life at the
Times
ever since. It has affected the responsibilities I feel toward my colleagues, toward the paper and its readers.

In 1974 six women at the
Times
brought a class-action suit against the paper, charging that women were not being paid, hired, or promoted in parity with men. Between that time and the time the suit was settled in 1978, the
Times
hired a number of women in all departments, including me. While the collective memory of those events faded as the years went on, except in the minds of those who were courageous enough to bring the suit in the first place, the effects remained for women in general and for me in particular. In 1981, when I became the first woman to write the “About New York” column on a regular basis, and again in 1983, when I became deputy metropolitan editor, the first woman in that position, I was keenly aware that I was the beneficiary of other people’s courage.

But when I began to write “Life in the 30s” I became aware of something else, something that marked a great shift in the women’s movement during its second decade. And that was the difference, in all businesses as well as in my own, between the choices made by men and women.

I don’t simply mean in the more obvious ways, although I knew
that my decision to ditch a promising management career because I had two children in two years was seen as distinctly—and incredibly—female. I mean in more everyday attitudes. Like some of my female colleagues, I was more interested in writing about the small moments in people’s lives than in covering a presidential press conference. Like some of my female colleagues, I found standard journalistic forms limited, even though those hard-news page-one stories were often the stuff of which advancement was made.

It was a chicken-egg argument—after all, many of us had long been relegated to covering the small moments, the color instead of the news; many of us had been placed in back-of-the-book positions where a more literary style and looser construction were tolerated. In our determination during the seventies to be treated equally, we wanted to be sent to cover the White House, the Supreme Court, the wars. But as time went by we began to feel freer to discuss differences within the context of being treated fairly and equitably. We began to admit that some of what we had once covered about home and hearth still moved us as reporters, that we believed writing about those matters was as important for readers as the world events we had been offering them on page one.

What happened to women in the newspaper business is what happened to women in so many other places, too. Once we stood shoulder to shoulder with our male colleagues we decided that some of what they did was tedious and some of it was ill conceived. The Supreme Court was an interesting beat, but not if you didn’t know much about the character, alliances, and backgrounds of the men and woman who served as Supreme Court justices. The White House required more than covering press conferences. It required a sense of texture, of personality, of the personal interplay that no press-conference coverage provides.

The irony of the role of women in my business, and in so many other places, too, was that while we began by demanding that we be allowed to mimic the ways of men, we wound up knowing we would have to change those ways. Not only because those ways
were not like ours, but because they simply did not work. The newspapers that Mr. Fisher described as dull and homogenized in 1944 were written overwhelmingly by white men, for white men, and so they did not reflect the communities or the concerns of so many of us. And they were written to a formula that said the facts were the only thing. In our hearts and our minds, too, we knew that simply wasn’t so.

If male was hard news and female was features—and in many papers, for a long time, that was exactly how matters of gender broke down—the newspapers of the twenty-first century would clearly have to be more female. Less other, more back fence. Either that, or they would perish in the twenty-four-hour glow of the television screen.

I thought a good deal about all of this when I became an Op-Ed-page columnist and had to decide how I would fit in among the six distinguished male journalists with whom I shared the page. I carried with me a legacy from “Life in the 30s,” and it was overwhelmingly a legacy of criticism. The feeling about that column on the part of some of my colleagues was that it was too personal, too particular, and too stereotypically feminine—that is, too obsessed with child rearing and relationships. I had strayed a long way from a notion of objectivity which said that the reader should know no more about me than my name. I now had readers who knew how much weight I’d gained during my pregnancies and what I wore to bed at night.

I was not going to reprise that on the Op-Ed page, a place in the paper that took itself a good deal more seriously than the style section in which my previous column had appeared. But if the notion of objectivity seemed suspect to me even in news stories, it seemed preposterous in an opinion column. In this line of work, biography is destiny. It would not serve the reader if William Safire pretended he had not once worked in the Nixon White House; instead he uses his memories and connections from those days to bring us some of the best columns that appear on the page.

An undeniable part, perhaps the largest part of my biography,
is that I am a woman. Would it serve the reader for me to write about abortion without having as my underlying premise the fact that I could be, in fact had been, pregnant? Would it serve to talk about parental leave legislation without bringing to the discussion, tacitly or overtly, the fact that I am a working mother? I did not think so.

But as time went by I realized the issues raised by a world view largely shaped by gender went deeper than that. The standard view of the columnist is of the Voice of God, intoning the last word on any subject: Capital punishment is wrong. Abortion is a woman’s right. The point is the conclusion. This seems to me essentially uninteresting, this preaching to the converted, this emphasis on product rather than on process. From the beginning it seemed to me that the point was not to make readers think like me. It was to make them think.

Some readers thought this was stereotypically female, a gender-based avoidance of strong opinions, while others thought that my use of personal vignettes to make a point about public policy was unseemly and even bad for women. In other words, the standard set by male columnists, which had for many years been one that eschewed both doubt and the introduction of the personal into the political arena, was to be the standard set for all. Never mind that that standard was in conflict with the real world, where most of our readers had conflicting and confusing opinions about cutting-edge issues and brought their personal experiences almost automatically to their considerations of public policy. That was merely human; the columnist was to be somehow superhuman, preternaturally sure of himself, unusually able to separate his view of the world and the world of his home.