Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private Read online

  More praise for

  Thinking Out Loud

  “Quindlen deserves her place on the masthead, has earned her Prize, and even sounds like somebody who would be fun to have to dinner.… Much of the pleasure is in the writing—[her] ability to turn a deft phrase, to notice the telling detail, to put a wry spin on a subject.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  “Ms. Quindlen has mastered—mistressed?—a thoughtful, argumentative style that neatly sidesteps the criticisms usually leveled at feminist writers. She is neither strident nor shrill. But she also knows that ‘please’ is not always necessary.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Taken individually, these pieces are short commentaries on news events or issues of the day; seen as a whole, they constitute a history of the conflicts and ironies that have characterized the turbulence of the past few years.… Always there is Quindlen’s incisive use of language, her quick wit, and her ability to see the private effect of the most public of deeds.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Quindlen writes with rare insight, intelligence, and wit. Most of all she writes from the heart.… Whatever the issue, whatever the emotion, Quindlen’s ‘thinking out loud’ is worth a careful listen. Long may she type.”

  —The Buffalo News

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming edition of Loud and Clear by Anna Quindlen. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1993 by Anna Quindlen

  Excerpt from Loud and Clear by Anna Quindlen copyright © 2004 by Anna Quindlen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  All of the essays that appear in this work were originally published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, from 1990 through 1992. Copyright © 1990, 1991, 1992 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-90547

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76355-6

  v3.1_r1

  My advice to the women of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.

  —WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  “Altogether Female”—An Introduction

  UNSOLICITED OPINIONS

  The Old Block

  A Changing World

  The Great White Myth

  Tyson Is Not Magic

  To Defray Expenses

  Across the Divide

  Erin Go Brawl

  No Closet Space

  With Extreme Prejudice

  Evan’s Two Moms

  Moving the Furniture Around

  Room at the Inn

  No Place Like Home

  Somalia’s Plagues

  Seeking a Sense of Control

  A Time to Die

  Justice and Mercy

  Parental Rites

  Believe in Magic

  Foul Play

  Journalism 2001

  Suffer the Little Children

  A Mistake

  KIDS AND ANIMALS

  The Days of Gilded Rigatoni

  Suicide Solution

  Cradle to Grave

  With Babies on Board

  Rabbit Punch

  Another Kid in the Kitchen

  Men at Work

  The Waiting List

  Mom Alone

  Babes in Toyland

  Mommy Dimmest

  Naughty and Nice

  Enough Bookshelves

  Mr. Smith Goes to Heaven

  ON THE NEWS

  Justice for the Next Century

  The Blank Slate

  Listen to Us

  An American Tragedy

  The Perfect Victim

  The Trouble with Teddy

  The Invasion Vacation

  Summer’s Soldiers

  New World At War

  The Questions Continue

  In the Shadow of War

  Personally

  The Back Fence

  The Domestic Front

  Regrets Only

  Reservations Not Accepted

  The Microwave War

  No There There

  Just Say Yes

  Advantage, Mr. Clinton

  Gender Contender

  All of These You Are

  The Two Faces of Eve

  The Fourth Wall

  One View Fits All

  Rumor Has It

  A Place Called Hope

  WOMEN’S RITES

  The Abortion Account

  Mom, Dad, and Abortion

  The Nuns’ Story

  Offensive Play

  Rust, Roe, and Reality

  Hidden Agendas

  The Abortion Orphans

  At the Clinics

  Hearts and Minds

  One Vote

  The Truth Telling

  No More Waiting

  Bears with Furniture

  Dirt and Dignity

  The Cement Floor

  A Team Dream

  Heroine Addiction

  Rebels Without a Clue

  Getting a Second Wind

  Ms. President

  Not about Breasts

  Contradictions

  The Glass Half Empty

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  “ALTOGETHER FEMALE”

  —An Introduction

  One afternoon in Denver a young reporter came to interview me about a novel I had written. But the talk soon turned to my opinion column in The New York Times, since, like half the young reporters in the business, this one wanted to be a columnist someday. (The other half want to be executive editor.) “But is it really necessary,” he asked after some preliminaries, “for you to wear your gender on your sleeve?”

  For a moment I thought about telling him where my gender really resided, but he seemed pleasant and earnest and I didn’t want to embarrass him. Besides, although he’d worded it in a peculiar fashion, his question was one I’d been asked often, by colleagues, friends, critics, and readers. Truth to tell, it was a question I’d asked myself for a long, long time.

  Half a century ago Dorothy Thompson, perhaps the best-known woman to fill a column of type on any paper’s Op-Ed page, complained about being habitually told she had “the brains of a man.” Her strength, she insisted, was “altogether female.”

  (Miss Thompson, who at the time was writing three columns a week, touring the lecture circuit, and being touted as the second most powerful woman in the country after Eleanor Roosevelt, laid it on a bit thick when she added, “I wish somebody would say that I am a hell of a good housewife, that the food by me is swell, that I am almost a perfect wife.…”)

  But her complaints underscore a question that has been with me since 1990, when I became the third woman to write a column on the Times Op-Ed page. Is it part of the modern mission of a woman columnist to be somehow overtly female in print?

  The answer might not have been yes a half century ago, when Mis
s Thompson was assigned to produce a “cozy woman-to-woman chat,” a “chat” that became one of the most influential columns in the country on the state of the world and the nation. And the answer may not be yes a half century from now, when the idea of gender specificity may seem quaint. My predecessors at The New York Times, Anne O’Hare McCormick and Flora Lewis, were both women with extraordinary expertise in geopolitics; they could have written under their first initials without any clue to their sex being contained witiin their copy. My successors might well be women who air their opinions in an atmosphere so egalitarian that making much of being a woman is superfluous.

  But right here, right now, I believe it is not only possible but critical, not only useful but illuminating, for a woman writing an opinion column to bring to her work the special lens of her gender.

  I am one of those people who have loved newspapers all their lives, loved the smell of them, the feel of them, especially loved the idea of all those reporters, out on the streets and at their desks and phones, discovering first what’s what and whipping it, every day, into some coherent version of instant history. I love the chaos and the cacophony of newsrooms, with their barracks sprawl and utter lack of privacy. When I first started working at home, I was amused by the sympathy the arrangement evoked in people who said it must be so hard to write with kids around. Trust me: a preschool is less noisy than a fair-sized city room any day of the week.

  I grew up in the newspaper business, went from eighteen and covering demonstrations against the Vietnam War to thirty-one and visiting abortion clinics under siege. I was a city columnist when New York was in a period of extraordinary flux and an editor when the Times was in a period of flux too, trying to re-create itself in a changing market.

  Those changes were good ones because, although I had long loved newspapers, even I had sometimes felt that the events contained in them were somehow other, the sort of things that happened to other people, the kinds of things about which the people we accost at the scenes of tragedies say, “I never thought something like this could happen to me.” When I first began working in the newspaper business, I was hard-pressed to find myself between the pages of the papers for which I worked.

  I don’t mean my literal self: I believed then fervently in the idea that I was meant to be hidden from the reader, a byline without a face, a voyeur without a point of view. But I could not find approximations of my life, either. There were murders and Senate bills and press conferences and White House briefings and Vietnam casualties and Russian evasions. But those of us looking for reflections of our own lives, our problems and relationships and constant concerns, found them more often in fiction than in the daily newspaper. We women had a section of our own, supposedly, called the woman’s section, but in small papers it seemed to consist largely of recipes, sewing patterns, and Dear Abby or Ann Landers, and in larger and more sophisticated newspapers there was a good deal about couture and the Beautiful People, the kind of people I had no opportunity or desire to meet.

  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 Timesman, 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.