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.
But even when I had strong opinions and left my children out of them, there were those who thought they were inevitably connected with my sex, and perhaps they were right. There was the reader who hated my pacifist columns in opposition to the Gulf war. “If you were a real man,” he wrote, “you’d understand why we need to be there.” On the other hand, being a real woman was invaluable in certain situations. During the Anita Hill hearings, charges of sexual harassment in high places and the gender blindness of the United States Senate cried out not for a purely intellectual response but for righteous indignation as well, and for a feminist perspective. It seems to me that a dry intellectual discussion of a rape case on my part not only would be boring but would be, in some clear sense, a lie. There are issues about which I not only think but also feel. And yet standard operating procedure has been to bring the mind but not the heart to the table of public discourse. I had to wonder why. Is thought always more telling than emotion? Is the territory of the heart always secondary to that of the mind?
Or is it possible that we devalue certain ways of looking at the world because we have come to believe, for whatever reason, that those ways are the purview of women?
And what would it mean if six women brought a lawsuit against their newspaper for equality, and one of the visible results of that lawsuit was a woman doing a bad imitation of a man twice a week on the Op-Ed page?
When I was a girl my admiration for Dorothy Thompson had something to do with the fact that she wrote her column in bed, drinking black coffee, and dictating to a secretary. But when I reread her columns as a grown woman far less enamored of working in a supine position, what struck me was her willingness to write about the Third Reich one day and her nasturtiums the next. There is no contradiction between her power, her influence, her hreadth of knowledge and interest, and her contention that she was “altogether female.” Clearly she had settled the issue of emotion vs. intellect within her own mind. Of a collection of her columns entitled Let the Record Speak, one reviewer wrote, “Dorothy Thompson writes fierily. Sometimes she seems to write almost hysterically.… She gets mad. She pleads; she denounces. And the resu
lt is that where the intellectualized columns of her colleagues fade when pressed between the leaves of a book, these columns still ring.”
In a speech in 1939 she said:
“One cannot exist today as a person—one cannot exist in full consciousness—without having to have a showdown with one’s self, without having to define what it is that one lives by, without being clear in one’s own mind what matters and what does not matter.” They were words of clear guidance for me from a more experienced woman when I began to write the Op-Ed column we named “Public & Private.”
Now, three years later, the words that speak loudest to me are much simpler, less lofty, perhaps, in their bread-and-butter tone, more stereotypically “altogether female.” In a letter Dorthy Thompson’s son received after her death in 1961, the last sentence was “As I write this little note, I feel very grateful.” Me, too: for all the women who laid the groundwork. These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.
UNSOLICITED OPINIONS
At a dinner mourning his retirment, Tom Wicker, who had been a columnist at the Times for a quarter century, read a letter he’d received that day from a reader: “1992 is shaping up to be a good year. First we got rid of Gorbachev and now we’re getting rid of you.”
We laugh at the mail from readers that suggests that we are mistaken, ill informed, or are just plain idiots. And yet I find it inescapable, and telling, too, that the letters I receive from readers that are strongest in every way—powerfully moving as well as horribly insulting—are the ones that come as the result of columns about those issues I’ve embraced most passionately.
It has always seemed to me that this bully pulpit should devote itself, in large part, to those who have no pulpit at all, to the publicly disfranchised. While I care about the affairs of the White House, Congress, and the world community, there are many more people to speak for and about them than there are to speak for the powerless, whether it be the homeless, the poor, the gay men and lesbians, African-Americans, the terminally ill, or people with AIDS. I have chosen often to write about those people and their problems. And the response has often been discouraging.
I don’t mean that all the mail is brickbats. I remember the day my assistant called to say, “You got a fan letter from Paul Simon!” It was only later that I realized I didn’t know whether it was the singer or the senator. (It was the senator.) When I won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, I was often asked what the best thing about it was. The honest answer is that everything about winning the Pulitzer is great. But the thing I found most cheering was the mail from perfect strangers (emphasis on the adjective) who took time out to say: Congratulations. We are pleased and proud. I kept all those letters, and when I’m getting clobbered pretty badly I’ll read one or two.
Because part of this job is getting clobbered with some regularity. In my case, the columns that generate the most mail tend to be the ones about those social-welfare issues that move me most powerfully. The response to those issues never ceases to amaze me: the meanness, the vitriol, the Old Testament verses, the Ku Klux Klan literature. With the exception of abortion, I receive no mail on any issue that is as horrid and ignorant as the mail I get on gay rights. (While I have received a fair number of passionate, intelligent, deeply thoughtful letters about why abortion is wrong, I have yet to receive such a letter about homosexuality.) I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words. Nor do I understand people like the man who thought the way to show us what he thought of the idea of gay people serving in the military was to send a box of dead roaches. And by first-class mail, too.
But the flip side of all this comes when you give voice to people who feel rendered mute by the great world. They are grateful out of all proportion to the simple act.
I was prepared to be reviled for suggesting that gay Irish should be given a place in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and I was. (“It’s a good thing her grandfather’s already dead,” one caller said the day the column appeared, “or she would have killed him for sure this morning.”) But I was not prepared for the letters of gratitude from so many gay people. I was prepared for negative mail about an affirmative action column. But I was not prepared for all the mail from African-Americans who said, “Thank you for speaking our truth.”
I was unprepared for the reaction we got when I wrote about the press itself, about how and why we do what we do. Clearly the readers believed we never considered such things, when in fact it sometimes seems that considering them is most of what we do. This was particularly true of what became, for a while, my best-known column, a piece criticizing The New York Times for its coverage of the woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her in Palm Beach. (Mr. Smith, of course, was later acquitted of those charges and the woman, Patricia Bowman, went public to insist that what she had said was true. But before and during the trial the question of using her name was of great moment.) I made the mistake of going on vacation soon after that column, and several readers called to ask whether I had been fired. One right-wing zealot thought that after months of championing welfare cheats, boozy vagrants, and perverts I had finally gotten my just deserts. “Quindlen,” he wrote with glee, like Tom Wicker’s New Year’s correspondent, “you are out of there!”
We laugh about the mail. But some of it still stings me—until I recall the balm. When you write about the parents of gay people and a young man writes to say that he used the column as a way of coming out to his mother and father—well, you can get by on something like that for a long, long time.
THE OLD BLOCK
May 17, 1992
The block on which my father grew up half a century ago is a truncated little street that leads nowhere. If it were a foot or two narrower, the map makers might have called it an alley. The houses are identical two-story attached brick buildings with bay windows on the top floor, an overobvious attempt at grandeur.
In this quiet backwater in the southwestern part of the city the children of Irish-Catholic families played in the late afternoons after they had changed from their parochial school uniforms. A police officer walked by twice a day, talking to the people he knew so well.
My father remembers that in one fifteen-minute span when he was eight years old he was hit by four people to whom he was not related: the cop; the neighbor whose window he drew upon with spit; the priest who saw him messing with a statue, and the nun who saw the priest whack him and wanted to second the emotion. So he grew.
Today the kids on the block are black. The house where the seven Quindlen children were raised, the boys packed two to a bed, has long been empty. The small setback porch is still covered with debris from the fire that gutted the building several years ago. There is plywood nailed over the glassless windows and the doorless doorway.
This was a prosperous neighborhood, a way station to something better. Today it is a poor one, a dead end. Charred interiors are common. So are crime, drugs, and a sense of going nowhere.
Since L.A. burst into flames we have cast a net of blame in our search for those who abandoned America’s cities.
The answer is simple. We did. Over my lifetime prosperity in America has been measured in moving vans, backyards and the self-congratulatory remark “I can’t remember the last time I went to the city.” America became a circle of suburbs surrounding an increasingly grim urban core.
In the beginning there was a synergy between the two; we took the train to the city to work and shop, then fled as the sun went down. But by the 1970s we no longer needed to shop there because of the malls. And by the 1980s we no longer had to work there because of the now-you-see-it rise of industrial parks and office complexes. Pseudo-cities grew up, built of chrome, glass, and homogeneity. Half of America now lives in the ’burbs.
We abandoned America’s cities.
Ronald Reagan and George Bus
h did, too, and so did many Democrats, truth be told. And they’re going to have to ante up now. But it’s not enough anymore to let those boys take all the responsibility. They don’t carry it well enough.
I understand how Eugene Lang felt when he gave a speech at his old grade school and, overwhelmed by the emptiness of words, offered all the students in the class a chance to go to college. I’ve heard the argument that Mr. Lang’s largesse takes government off the hook. But I bet it’s not compelling for kids who might have gone down the drain if one man hadn’t remembered where he came from, before he moved on to someplace greener, richer, better.
Over the years I’ve heard about sister-city programs between places here and places abroad, places like Minsk or Vienna. Pen pals. Cultural exchange. Volunteer philanthropy. And all the while, twenty minutes away from the suburbs are cultures and lives and problems about which we are shamefully ignorant. I like the sister-city concept. Short Hills and Newark. South-central L.A. and Simi Valley. Both sides benefit.
The pols will lose interest in the cities again soon enough, because so many city residents are poor and powerless and not white. It would be nice to think of Congress as the home of idealists, but thinking like that makes you feel awfully foolish. America’s cities will prosper when America’s prosperous citizens demand it. When they remember their roots.
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