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

by Anna Quindlen

  That was part of a memo that was used when Mrs. Hopkins brought suit. She hired her lawyers with one condition: she said she would never settle out of court. She had spent years thinking that there was no link between her painful and debilitating connective-tissue disease and the implants that she received after a mastectomy.

  And then she began to hear that there were documents that indicated otherwise but that had been sealed as part of out-of-court settlements. And she got mad. And even. According to Mrs. Hopkins, Dow Corning’s lawyers offered her almost $2 million just before closing arguments in her case. She refused. The jury awarded her $73 million.

  Most of that was in punitive damages, although it will be a long, long time before she sees any money because the company is appealing. But she’s satisfied. Her case is part of the public debate, and six ordinary people sent a message to Dow Corning: You did a very, very bad thing.

  There are many women who have silicone implants and think they’re terrific. They constitute the majority, although no one knows if they will have problems in years to come. Dow Corning likes to argue that women have a right to make their own decisions about implants, a freedom-of-choice argument that is a good sell.

  But I’m not buying from Dow Corning right now. Women have a right to implants—a right to safe ones, rigorously tested with the best interests of people placed before the bottom line.

  “As long as we don’t make a fuss we don’t get anything better,” said Mrs. Hopkins. We must make a fuss, and the Food and Drug Administration, which has acted laudably in this case, must stay with us every step of the way, so that dangers are recognized before the damage is done. We are not machinery, to be tinkered with and then patched together when it turns out the parts don’t work. But that is how we have been treated for too long a time.

  CONTRADICTIONS

  January 8, 1992

  Videotape confers a peculiar kind of immortality. The parents of Major Marie Rossi can watch their daughter, alive as anything, tell the world how she feels about what she does. In a jaunty camouflage hat, she stands in the desert and tells the cameras what some of us were saying in print: that national defense is sex-blind. “What I am doing is no greater or less than the man who is flying next to me,” she said, as pundits were opining the same on the home front.

  But we were only operating word processors while Major Rossi was flying a Chinook chopper for the Army, and the day after the cease-fire the chopper crashed. She was buried in Arlington Cemetery, where a memorial to women in America’s wars is planned. Rewind. Play. “We thought it was pretty neat that three women were going to be across the border before the rest of the battalion,” Major Rossi, forever upbeat, tells CNN.

  Fast forward.

  It’s been a year since we went to war in the Persian Gulf. Most of the veterans came home to their bases or to their civilian jobs. The people who help the homeless say they’re seeing some of them in shelters or on the streets. And some came home to verdant places like Arlington.

  Major Rossi was perhaps the best known of the casualties, a kind of poster figure in that war which redefined the role of military women. At banquets and memorial ceremonies, her parents have become accustomed to having her come alive on tape, her open face and matter-of-fact manner summing up all that we think of as particularly American.

  “She was a very compassionate person,” says Gertrude Rossi, remembering her daughter’s last letter, dated the day before she died, describing with empathy the prisoners she was transporting, barefoot and ragged, boys and old men.

  It has been a year of gender wars in America; at no other time have the motives, mind-set, roles, and relationships of men and women been as thoroughly dissected and debated. The problem in these debates has been a classic one—a yen for simplicity, for no contradictions, no complications. A philosophical framework that long ago outlived its usefulness. Either you are a good girl or a bad one: no middle ground. Either you are a victim or a strong woman, not both. Either you are a soldier or a mother. Choose.

  So many of us have chosen lives of seeming contradictions, at odds with the old ways. I remember mentioning the baby-sitter in a column once and receiving outraged letters from readers who could not understand how anyone who could write feelingly of her children would hire help with their care. When did those people think I was writing? In the checkout line at the supermarket?

  It came as a surprise to me, looking back, to see that I began the year 1990 by considering women in combat in Panama. (Remember Panama?) And I began 1991 by considering women in combat in Saudi Arabia. The good news is that at the beginning of 1992 the question of women in combat has gone back to being a philosophical issue.

  The philosophy will inevitably be shaped by Major Rossi and others like her. Like them, so many of us said matter-of-factly that women should do the jobs that they could do. But there was no doubt that it was a stretch, for those simultaneously feminist and pacifist, to fight for the right of women to freely choose what we abhorred.

  There is accomplishment contained in this description of Major Rossi: First Female Combat Commander to Fly into Battle. There is infinite sadness that the description is on her headstone. Equal access to body bags: that is a tough one to argue from the heart.

  Some of us were afraid to argue what we really felt, that the world would be better served if we all internalized those traits that have been seen, for whatever reason, as female. If we stopped thinking physical aggression was the obvious way to settle things. If we stopped seeing talk as weak and wimpy. If world politics became less a test of manhood and more a matter of coexistence.

  I remember reading what Major Rossi’s husband said at her funeral, as powerful a contrast as I have ever heard. “I prayed that guidance be given to her so that she could command the company, so she could lead her troops in battle,” he said. “And I prayed to the Lord to take care of my sweet little wife.”

  THE GLASS HALF EMPTY

  November 22, 1990

  My daughter is two years old today. She is something like me, only better. Or at least that is what I like to think. If personalities had colors, hers would be red.

  Little by little, in the twenty years between my eighteenth birthday and her second one, I had learned how to live in the world. The fact that women were now making 67 cents for every dollar a man makes—well, it was better than 1970, wasn’t it, when we were making only 59 cents? The constant stories about the underrepresentation of women, on the tenure track in the film industry, in government, everywhere, had become common place. The rape cases. The sexual harassment stories. The demeaning comments. Life goes on. Where’s your sense of humor?

  Learning to live in the world meant seeing the glass half full. Ann Richards was elected governor of Texas instead of a good ol’ boy who said that if rape was inevitable, you should relax and enjoy it. The police chief of Houston is a pregnant woman who has a level this-is-my-job look and a maternity uniform with stars on the shoulder. There are so many opportunities unheard of when I was growing up.

  And then I had a daughter and suddenly I saw the glass half empty. And all the rage I thought had cooled, all those how-dare-you-treat-us-like-that days, all of it comes back when I look at her, and especially when I hear her say to her brothers, “Me too.”

  When I look at my sons, it is within reason to imagine all the world’s doors open to them. Little by little some will close, as their individual capabilities and limitations emerge. But no one is likely to look at them and mutter: “I’m not sure a man is right for a job at this level. Doesn’t he have a lot of family responsibilities?”

  Every time a woman looks at her daughter and thinks, She can be anything, she knows in her heart, from experience, that it’s a lie. Looking at this little girl, I see it all, the old familiar ways of a world that still loves Barbie. Girls aren’t good at math, dear. He needs the money more than you, sweetheart; he’s got a family to support. Honey—this diaper’s dirty.

  It is like looking through a tel
escope. Over the years I learned to look through the end that showed things small and manageable. This is called a sense of proportion. And then I turned the telescope around, and all the little tableaux rushed at me, vivid as ever. That’s called reality.

  We soothe ourselves with the gains that have been made. There are many role models. Role models are women who exist—and are photographed often—to make other women feel better about the fact that there aren’t really enough of us anywhere, except in the lowest-paying jobs. A newspaper editor said to me not long ago, with no hint of self-consciousness, “I’d love to run your column, but we already run Ellen Goodman.” Not only was there a quota; there was a quota of one.

  My daughter is ready to leap into the world, as though life were chicken soup and she a delighted noodle. The work of Professor Carol Gilligan of Harvard suggests that sometime after the age of eleven this will change, that even this lively little girl will pull back, shrink, that her constant refrain will become “I don’t know.” Professor Gilligan says the culture sends a message: “Keep quiet and notice the absence of women and say nothing.” A smart thirteen-year-old said to me last week, “Boys don’t like it if you answer too much in class.”

  Maybe someday, years from now, my daughter will come home and say, “Mother, at college my professor acted as if my studies were an amusing hobby and at work the man who runs my department puts his hand on my leg and to compete with the man who’s in the running for my promotion who makes more than I do I can’t take time to have a relationship but he has a wife and two children and I’m smarter and it doesn’t make any difference and some guy tried to jump me after our date last night.” And what am I supposed to say to her?

  I know?

  You’ll get used to it?

  No. Today is her second birthday and she has made me see fresh this two-tiered world, a world that, despite all our nonsense about post-feminism, continues to offer less respect and less opportunity for women than it does for men. My friends and I have learned to live with it, but my little girl deserves better. She has given me my anger back, and I intend to use it well.

  That is her gift to me today. Some birthday I will return it to her, because she is going to need it.

  For Quindlen, Christopher, and Maria Krovatin

  Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

  Enwrought with golden and silver light,

  The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

  Of night and light and the half-light,

  I would spread the cloths under your feet;

  But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

  I have spread my dreams under your feet;

  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  Acknowledgments

  In 1988, when he was deputy publisher and I was preparing to leave The New York Times for the last time, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., approached me about the possibility of becoming an Op-Ed-page columnist. He will always have my gratitude for that blessed leap of faith. So will Arthur O. Sulzberger, who made the formal offer, and Jack Rosenthal, who told me in no uncertain terms to take it.

  Twice a week the best copy editors in the business vet my work. You don’t see the names of Steve Pickering and Linda Cohn on my column, but their care and attention are in everything good I do.

  My colleagues at The New York Times are the most generous people—and the finest reporters and editors—I could ever know. Those in the Washington and City Hall bureaus, on the national staff covering social policy and on the metro staff covering social welfare, know how often I have called upon them to share reporting and insight. They have been invaluable sources of information and inspiration.

  All my friends have been involved with this column, but three deserve special notice. I owe a good deal to the wit and wisdom of the team of Michael Specter and Alessandra Stanley. And if Janet Maslin didn’t exist, I would have had to invent her, so that I could have someone smart, thoughtful, and funny to talk to every morning on the phone.

  Two books in particular have been of great help to me over these last three years, giving me a historical grounding in the work of opinion-column writing. The first, Charles Fisher’s The Columnists: A Surgical Survey, was published in 1944. The second, Peter Kurth’s superb biography of Dorothy Thompson, American Cassandra, put me in touch with the woman whose work first informed my own. Both were primary sources for the introduction to this book.

  For three years Elizabeth Cohen has been much more than my assistant. She has been my surrogate, my protector, and my office voice. This is her book, too. And it also belongs to Amanda Urban, who is a great agent and a better friend, and Kate Medina, who is the best editor in the book business.

  Quindlen, Christopher, and Maria Krovatin, my children, have been extraordinarily understanding of how distracted I can be, particularly on what are known around here as column days. And they have consistently provided me with good material—and a sane and balanced view of the world that I would not have had otherwise.

  There’s little precedent for a man married to an opinion columnist, since there have been and continue to be too few of us who are female. Sinclair Lewis, when he was married to pundit doyenne Dorothy Thompson used to beg not to have It discussed in his home, It being the world situation or anything else that smacked of the Op-Ed page. My husband, Gerry Krovatin, has instead been unstinting of his opinions on every aspect of It, and uncomplaining if I did not adopt them. And he is responsible for what remains the best line in anything that has appeared with my byline: “Could you get up and get me a beer without writing about it?” I suppose this is the answer.

  ALSO BY ANNA QUINDLEN

  Loud and Clear

  Blessings

  A Short Guide to a Happy Life

  How Reading Changed My Life

  Black and Blue

  One True Thing

  Object Lessons

  Living Out Loud

  Thinking Out Loud

  BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

  The Tree That Came to Stay

  Happily Ever After

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNA QUINDLEN is the bestselling author of four novels (Blessings, Black and Blue, One True Thing, and Object Lessons) and four nonfiction books (A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Living Out Loud, Thinking Out Loud, and How Reading Changed My Life). She has also written two children’s books (The Tree That Came to Stay and Happily Ever After). Her New York Times column, “Public and Private,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Her column now appears every other week in Newsweek.

  Read on for a preview of Anna Quindlen’s new collection of essays

  Loud and Clear

  Available in hardcover in 2004 from The Random House Publishing Group

  A NEW ROOF ON AN OLD HOUSE June 2000

  A slate roof is a humbling thing. The one we’re putting on the old farmhouse is Pennsylvania blue black, and it’s meant to last at least a hundred years. Jeff the roof guy showed us the copper nails he’s using to hang it; they’re supposed to last just as long. So will the massive beams upon which the slates rest. “Solid as a cannon-ball,” Jeff says. Looking up at the roof taking shape slate by enduring slate, it is difficult not to think about the fact that by the time it needs to be replaced, we will be long gone.

  In this fast food, facelift, no-fault divorce world of ours, the slate roof feels like the closest we will come to eternity. It, and the three children for whom it is really being laid down.

  Another Mother’s Day has come and gone as the roofers work away in the pale May sun and the gray May rain. It is a silly holiday, and not for all the reasons people mention most, not because it was socially engineered to benefit card shops, florists, and those who slake the guilt of neglect with once-a-year homage. It is silly because something as fleeting and finite as 24 hours is the antithesis of what it means to mother a child. That is the work of the ages. This is not only because the routine is relentless, the day-in/day-outness of hastily eaten meals, homework
help, and heart-to-hearts, things that must be done and done and then done again. It is that if we stop to think about what we do, really do, we are building for the centuries. We are building character, and tradition, and values, which meander like a river into the distance and out of our sight, but on and on and on.

  If any of us engaged in the work of mothering thought much about it as the task of fashioning the fine points of civilization, we would be frozen into immobility by the enormity of the task. It is like writing a novel; if you consider it the creation of a 400-page manuscript, the weight of the rock and the pitch of the hill sometimes seem beyond ken and beyond effort. But if you think of your work as writing sentences — well, a sentence is a manageable thing.

  And so is one hour of miniature golf, one tětè-a-tětè under the covers, one car ride with bickering in the backseat, one kiss, one lecture, one Sunday morning in church. One slate laid upon another, and another, and in the end, if you have done the job with care and diligence, you have built a person, reasonably resistant to the rain. More than that, you have helped build the future of her spouse, his children, even their children’s children, for good or for ill. Joie de vivre, bitterness, consideration, carelessness: They are as communicable as chicken pox; exposure can lead to infection. People who hit their children often have children who hit their children. Simple and precise as arithmetic, that. “Careful the things you say, children will listen,” sings the mother witch in Stephen Sondheim’s Intro the Woods. And listen and listen and listen, until they’ve heard, and learned.

  There is a great variety of opinion about mothering because there is great variety in the thing itself. In Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence renders Mother an emotional cannibal, trying to consume her children. Mrs. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice is a foolish auctioneer, seeking the highest bidder for her girls. Mrs. Portnoy hectors, hilariously. It is no coincidence that these are all, in some way, richly unsatisfactory, even terrifying mothers (and that their creators were not mothers themselves). The power of the role creates a powerful will to dismiss, ridicule, demonize, and so break free.