The party game was not meant to make me feel stupid or show my ignorance, but so it happened. Dave and I were attending a large gathering in the late ‘90’s for a friend who was moving. The goal of the game - in which guests had a card with a celebrity’s name pinned to their backs – was to spark conversation. While sipping drinks and dipping into passed hors d’oeuvres, we’d ask questions about “our” person in trying to guess his or her identity.
I’d ascertained that my person was a woman, a famous woman, someone connected with the news. Someone older than me. Someone who lived in the U.S. Someone who lived in D.C. Someone connected with The Post.
“The Post?” I said. “Um… The Connecticut Post?” Brilliant guess given the previous D.C. hint. I hope I didn’t look as vacant as I felt.
“No. The Washington Post…?” Whomever was trying to guide me was kind but clearly incredulous that even with that hand-it-to-me hint, I had no idea who was pinned to my back. With a questioning tone as to my extraordinary obliviousness and “Duh” left unsaid but implied, the clue-giver told me the name.
“Katherine Graham…?”
Sigh. The name was no help. I had no idea who she was.
That was long ago, and having just finished Katherine Graham’s autobiography, Personal History, I know her better, and I grieve in imagining what she’d think about today’s threats to the free press and Jeff Bezos’s take-over of her cherished family newspaper.
Hers is quite a story. A woman from an affluent, activist, highly-connected family who inherited what was a local, but successful, newspaper when her husband – the president and CEO – shot himself in the room next to where she was napping. Beyond the unimaginable cruelty of that event, that scene, was the reality of the “welcome” she received in 1963, when she stepped into a leadership role previously held only by men.
But for secretaries, she was the lone woman at every board meeting, at every business lunch, at every conference. I don’t think the term “imposter syndrome” had been coined yet, but that’s how she felt. She was shy by nature, cowed by her powerful mother, and accepting of the subordinate role society had decreed for women. No matter how much she learned or accomplished as CEO, when things went wrong, she felt it was her fault, her inadequacy. But for her father and husband, she would never have had this role; she didn’t earn it herself, after all; such was her thinking. And the men around her, but for a few, reinforced that.
Nonetheless, she was publisher and president of The Post from 1963-1991, through the assassinations of JFK, his brother, Bobby, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. Through the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements. Through the escalation of the Viet Nam war, release of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and Nixon’s downfall. Since my newly-forged bond with Ms. Graham, Dave and I have re-watched “The Post,” “All the President’s Men,” and “Watergate,” diving deep into those tumultuous times, and suffusing our spirits with stories of people who had the courage to do the right thing.
Beyond my membership in Katherine Graham’s fan club, I have also been captivated by Suffs, a show Dave, Casey, and I saw at the Bushnell in Hartford, now streaming on PBS. Ms. Graham was not the only void in my knowledge of women warriors. I was vaguely aware of suffragists Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Carrie Nation, Ida B. Wells, and Susan B. Anthony, but Inez Milholland Boissevain and Doris Stevens? No. I know and exalt them now, for Shaina Taub, playwright and actor, wrote her musical, Suffs, after reading Jailed for Freedom by suffragist Doris Stevens. I have re-watched the show and endlessly re-played the songs since I learned of it.
Where in our textbooks were the suffragists struggles and triumph enumerated? I went to all-girls schools from K-12thgrade; surely women’s history would have been emphasized there?
Maybe it was. Maybe I just didn’t have the sense to be interested. Until recently, I took my rights for granted, and the limitations women had faced seemed a battle long over and settled. Not so long over, however, for had I married Dave a year earlier, I would have needed his permission and presence to get my own credit card. I churn to imagine it. How did my strong-willed mother tolerate that? Like Katherine Graham, for a time, she accepted the way things were.
Today’s women can thank Emily Card, Bella Abzug, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephanie Lipscomb, Jeanne Hubbard, Gloria Steinem, and Ellen Sudow – many whose names are largely forgotten – for their work in the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974.
I was complacent for so long. Fortunate in my parents and the life I was born to. Fortunate in my times, and beholden to the women who fought for the rights I enjoy. The suffragists, civil rights activists, and feminists of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s faced the same arguments broadcast today by those who feel threatened: that granting rights to others diminishes one’s own.
For me, worry has been a constant since 2015. Clearly, push-back follows progress. As my poster collection expands – No Kings! Melt ICE! Support the Vets! Black Lives Matter! My Body, My Choice! – I wonder what Katherine Graham would make of Donald Trump. She’d find him familiar – the rants, threats to the press, surveillance, and enemies list – but she’d be stunned that we let it happen again.
4 comments:
It's unbelievable that -- if we get the chance -- we will have to repair all the things that were repaired over the last hundred years.
So good, Lea. I'm also horrified by that picture where its just Katharine and all those men. Of course, recently in China, we saw the American representatives and Chinese, with not ONE woman present in an important role. It was disgusting. These times are very depressing, but as many have said...the future is female. I have to believe it.
56 years ago I was in DC. My father called me to let me know that "Uncle George" was coming to pick me up the next morning at my hotel. In Texas we would never refer to someone by their first name, way to familiar, we would refer to them as aunt or uncle as a sign of respect, Who was Uncle George? I had no clue. Uncle George showed up the next morning at the assigned time, in a limo with security. He took me on a tour of the capital and it was incredible. He took me onto the Congressional floor, had me sit in the seats. The we went to the Senate floor and again, I sat in one of the seats. Who WAS Uncle George? I'll get there. He took me to lunch in the Congressional dining room. He taught me to pout tons of pepper on the ketchup for my fries. We were chatting and it was not all that different from the political table talk that we had at home. Look around he said...what is missing from this room? Afraid I would embarrass my dad by saying something stupid, I looked at each and every person in the room. still afraid to make a mistake, my voice became very small. Women? Yes, he said. Only when and if women make up at least 50% of this room and the Senate will this country be run correctly. It is up to YOU and your generation to fix this mess in which we currently live. That was 1970. You know Uncle George as President George HW Bush. The PS is funny....years later I asked my father why Bush converted to Republican. He told me he had always been one. What? Oh I didn't tell you his party. You had never met an R and I was concerned you would be afraid to be with him. Not sure what he thought I would think would happen but it was true. So, yes, we came a long way, baby but the giant baby running the country now has sent us back decades. It will still be up to us to fix his mess.
Wow. Two amazing stories - Laurie in China, and anonymous above with Uncle George. We have come a long way, but there are powerful efforts to reverse that. Would that all parties (and countries!) would realize the strength that comes from giving everyone a chance to reach and share their potential and not just the reigning 50%.
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