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

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