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

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 womanwas 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 result 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

    A t 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