She Said What?

Interviews with Women Newspaper Columnists

Maria Braden

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813187310
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

No longer relegated to reporting on society happenings or household hints, women columnists have over the past twenty years surged across the boundary separating the "women's" or "lifestyle" sections and into the formerly male bastions of the editorial, financial, medical, and "op-ed" pages. Where men previously controlled the nation's new organizations, were the chief opinion givers, and defined what is newsworthy, many women newspaper columnists are now nationally syndicated and tackle the same subjects as their male counterparts, bringing with them distinctive styles and viewpoints.

Through these frank and lively interviews, Maria Braden explores the lives and work of columnists Erma Bombeck, Jane Brody, Mona Charen, Merlene Davis, Georgie Anne Geyer, Dorothy Gilliam, Ellen Goodman, Molly Ivins, Mary McGrory, Judith ("Miss Manners") Martin, Joyce Maynard, Anna Quindlen, and Jane Bryant Quinn. Pofiles describe how these writers got started, where they get the nerve to tell the world what they think, how they generate ideas for columns, and what it's like to create under the pressure of deadlines. Representative columns illustrate their distinctive voices, and an introductory essay provides a historical overview of women in journalism, including pioneering women columnists Fanny Fern, Dorothy Thompson, and Sylvia Porter.

Braden finds that today's women columnists frequently raise issues or use examples unique to their gender. Because they are likely to have a direct personal connection to current social issues such as abortion, child care, or sexual harassment, they are able to provide fresh perspectives on these provocative topics. In doing so, they are helping to define what is worthy of attention in the '90s and to shape public response.

A unique addition to the literature on women in journalism, this book will interest general readers as well as students of journalism, literature, American studies, and women's studies. Aspiring writers will find here role models and practical guidance.

JANE BRODY

When she was four, Jane Brody told her father she wanted to be a veterinarian. Fine, he said, Cornell has a college of veterinary medicine. That was 1945, and Brody grew up believing she could do anything she put her mind to. “If you wanted to do something, you did it,” says the author of the nationally distributed New York Times column, “Personal Health.” “I never had the feeling that things were not appropriate for me to do. There were never those kinds of barriers, either emotionally or intellectually.”

Brody describes her father as a “women’s libber” who helped shop, cook, and wash the dishes; her stepmother always worked. Brody says she didn’t understand the women’s movement at first because she had never experienced discrimination. When there were barriers, she broke through them. In 1965, for example, with just two years of reporting experience at the Minneapolis Tribune, she applied for a job as a science writer at the New York Times. Asked if she would be willing to write women’s news, she said no.

The executive editor told her she had “a lot of nerve” applying, since other applicants had twenty years’ experience and stacks of clippings. “I said, ‘Mr. Rosenthal, if I didn’t think I could do this job, I wouldn’t be here’—and as I said it I thought what am I saying?—but that was exactly what he wanted to hear. He liked my writing and he also liked what can only be called chutzpah.” At twenty-four, she became a science writer for the Times.

A.M. Rosenthal doesn’t recall that first meeting with the young Jane Brody, but he was impressed with her from the beginning: “I do remember thinking she was first rate. She was very good, had a great deal of knowledge and wrote succinctly.” Her writing reflects the way she is, “very direct, very feisty, determined, and brave,” Rosenthal says.

Brody had majored in biochemistry at the New York State College for Agriculture at Cornell, but after working part time as a biochemist, she realized “you could spend years researching something before you would find out what question to ask.” It was isolating and “took too long to get to the point where it was interesting to everyone else,” she says. Still intrigued by the way living things work, Brody looked for an avenue that would enable other people to share her fascination. In her junior year, “just to keep myself from going crazy with school work,” she edited a student publication. “I woke up one day and said ‘I love this. Why don’t I do this?”’ So she earned a master’s degree in science writing at the University of Wisconsin and worked for the university news service covering the medical school. When a science writing position she had been promised at the Minneapolis Tribune failed to materialize, she left the Tribune and joined the Times.

After reporting on science and health for the Times for eleven years, Brody was asked to write a personal health column. Although she had dreamed of having a column some years earlier, the offer came at the wrong time. Her two sons were old enough that she could begin to travel and do “adventure stories,” and she was afraid a column would tie her down. “I didn’t want to be burdened with something that had to appear every week, regardless, come hell or high water,” she says. But she decided to try it, and at the end of three months “It was obvious that I was enjoying it and it was very well received. The Times loved it, readers loved it, and I was having a great time.”

Former Times managing editor Arthur Gelb remembers asking Brody to write the column. “She exploded,” he recalls with amusement. “She said it would take her away from the mainstream of science reporting.” Gelb told Brody he wanted the column to be in the mainstream, and that she could choose her subjects and set the tone of the column. “It was immediately a success. In fact, it was such a success that doctors became furious every time she wrote the column,” Gelb said, “because phones would ring all over the country with patients asking questions. Doctors for the first time were being questioned thoroughly by their patients.”

Initially, Brody had thought of writing the column jointly with a physician but is glad she didn’t because it would have constrained her. Physicians must be cautious. Columnists are paid for expressing their opinions and must meet deadlines. “You can’t give advice if ‘it depends,’ ” Brody says. “We can sit on the fence forever, waiting until every i is dotted and every t is crossed, trying to get the absolute, definitive truth—but we’ll all be dead waiting. One has to come to grips with the best available evidence and say this is what you should do. And that’s why I write the column and [the physician] doesn’t.” When the material doesn’t allow her to come to a decision, she lays all sides out as clearly as she can and lets her readers decide.

As she sits and talks in the red-papered living room of her brown-stone in Brooklyn, Brody’s energy makes her small frame seem spring-loaded. Without stopping the conversation, she jumps up to get a magazine, answer the phone or bring a visitor a glass of water. She practices what she preaches about the benefits of regular exercise, sandwiching the interview in between swimming and writing her column.

Brody is known around the world for her science and health reporting, but she says her reputation for being on the cutting edge of science has been both a benefit and a curse. One of the hazards of being ahead of everyone else is that others have attacked her views. But in almost thirty years of science writing, Brody says she’s made only one mistake. It happened because she broke her own rules—what she calls “Brody’s Postulates”—when she wrote that there was a link between hair dyes and cancer. Carcinogens have been found in hair dye in laboratory experiments, but clinical studies have not shown the cancer risk. That was the problem.

Her rules stipulate that a relationship such as the one between hair dye and cancer must make biological sense, and that laboratory evidence, population evidence, and clinical evidence all must support the observation. In affirming the link between cancer and hair dye, she broke her own rules. But her insistence on those standards has served her well in other cases, enabling her to point out flaws in studies by researchers at institutions such as Harvard University and the Sloane-Kettering cancer institute.

One such study linked the use of oral contraceptives to cervical cancer, finding a three times greater incidence of cancer in pill users than in women who used diaphragms. “Ipso facto, the pill causes cancer. Like hell it does,” Brody says. “The diaphragm protects against cervical cancer; the pill doesn’t cause it.” To detect the flaw in the study, Brody had to know about patterns of cervical cancer, which acts something like a venereal disease.

And when Harvard researchers published findings in the New England Journal of Medicine relating coffee consumption to pancreatic cancer, Brody said, “Hogwash.” There was no lab evidence, no societal evidence, she says, and the epidemiology contradicted the observation because coffee drinking had been declining while pancreatic cancer was increasing.

Where does she get this certainty about science? “I have no idea,” she says. “A lot of it is gut feeling.” But she also has a tremendous reserve of facts and the ability to make connections across disciplines. During her first ten years as a science writer, she studied medicine, attended medical conferences, and read medical journals and related publications.

She no longer has time for conferences, but still reads widely. Now, however, the sheer volume of information makes it almost impossible to keep up. “One of my concerns is that I’m losing touch with all the details you need to have stacked up there,” she says, pointing to her head, “to make sense out of every new piece of information.” In order to stay on top of the subjects she deals with in her column, she leaves certain big and demanding subjects to her Times colleagues to cover, such as cancer research or the science of AIDS.

Her thoroughness often surprised her sources when she was a young woman trying to get information from scientists who were mainly older men. “I knew my stuff. I didn’t pick up the telephone to talk to anyone until I had read the whole background stuff, and so I spoke their language,” Brody says. “I used their words, I knew their science and they knew it from the first question I asked. They quickly got the feeling they were talking to a colleague, not a journalist. They expected me to be this little flighty know-nothing, and when it was readily apparent that I wasn’t one of those, that intrigued them and so they stuck with me.” Physicians also began to trust her because she checked the accuracy of what she had written with sources. The refusal by many journalists to let a source read a story prior to publication is a “cockamamie principle,” she says. “I think it’s stupid. I have them read it for accuracy. I let them know in advance they’re not to change style unless style makes something wrong.”

When she began reporting in the mid-1960s, Brody says, she was paid less than her male counterparts and given less risky assignments. For example, even though her science beat at the Times included sexual topics, a male was assigned to write about the groundbreaking Masters and Johnson study on sexual behavior “because they did not think it was proper material for a woman.”

She later broke long-established unwritten rules at the Times, pressuring the paper to use direct, accurate language for sexual acts and body parts. Savoring the memory, she says she was the first to get the term “sexual intercourse” on page 1 of the Times, and to get the words “ejaculation” and “penis” in the paper. It took four years for her to persuade the paper to run a column on masturbation. “She helped us ride over taboos,” recalls former executive editor Rosenthal. “We began to print what had made [past] editors spin like tops.”

“There was so much squeamishness,” Brody says. “Most of those battles involved sex . . . because the Times was the newspaper of record, the family newspaper, the good, gray Times.” She tells of writing about a new birth-control method that involved putting cervical mucus on a kind of litmus paper. The editors cut out the description of the test because the term “cervical mucus” bothered them, she says. “I blew my stack.”

Another time she wrote a story based on sex researcher Shere Hite’s anecdotal material showing that the overwhelming majority of women do not have orgasm without direct stimulation of the clitoris. “Get this in the Times, right?” she says, snorting derisively. “They held it the first night.” Brody tells of going to see Arthur Gelb, who showed it to his wife. “She said, ‘Do you know how important this is? Do you realize how many divorces are caused by men’s failure to know this?”’ The story ran.

Although Brody has often challenged the medical establishment, she enjoys the respect of physicians and other health care professionals. Practicing physicians frequently distribute her columns to patients. Others say patients often clip and bring in a Brody column and ask for their reaction.

She decides what to write each week “by default,” using a principle she calls critical mass. “I get an idea for something, start pulling material together, keep an eagle eye open for new information, some peg or something, and when the material reaches a critical mass and is ready to write, I sit down and reread the file and maybe make a couple of phone calls.” Sometimes a chance remark prompts her to tackle a topic. A column on sudden death in athletes, for example, was sparked by a comment she overheard in a ladies’ room: A woman asked a friend whether such deaths could be prevented. Some ideas are pegged to the season, and others are related to the development of new medication. “I get ideas all over,” she says.

“She is extremely well informed, always bubbling with ideas,” said Times science editor Nicholas Wade. And after more than twenty years of doing her column, her writing is still fresh. “I’m sure in some way it must come from her vivacious personality,” Wade added. “She’s a delight to be with. . . . She has a knack for getting people to tell her their stories . . . and a lively interest in people.”

Readers often say she has a sympathetic approach. Brody says that’s probably what Gelb recognized when he asked her to write the column in the first place. “I am an empathetic person, the kind of person who sees somebody struggling with something on the street, a total stranger, and offers to help,” she says. “I see somebody standing with a map on the corner, I say, “Where do you want to go?” My husband often tells me to mind my own business. But that’s my personality, my nature. I’m not comfortable minding my own business when people seem like they’re in need of assistance.”

“She was empathetic,” Gelb agreed. “She knew how to take complicated health subjects and make the information simple to absorb without lowering her journalistic standards. She was a genius at that. She was able to communicate some of the gobbledegook that doctors were saying. She broke it down into understandable language.”

Early on Brody came to the conclusion that a lot of the things that made people sick were in their own hands—how they lived, what they did or didn’t do, what they ate, whether they moved, how they managed stress, what substances they abused, whether alcohol or cigarettes, and even whether they used seatbelts. “Combined with the economic situation, the practicality of it all said to me that we should be preventing some of this instead of just patching people up afterward.” She wants people to understand what goes wrong with them and give them the opportunity to avoid it.

Over the years, Brody has become “sort of disgusted with traditional medicine” and increasingly interested in what people have done for millennia to keep themselves healthy—things that have been tossed aside as unscientific. She has written about alternative healing methods and tried to focus on what has been substantiated. “Most old wives’ tales are based on some real physiology—who would have dreamed that sticking needles in people would do what it does?” she asks. “Scientific medicine has its limits. It’s time to bring back some of the traditional medical techniques that have time-honored value.” Brody’s interest in alternative medicine is reflected in two books she co-authored, You Can Fight Cancer and Win and Secrets of Good Health.

And her interest in good health extends to the kitchen, where she uses natural ingredients and experiments with new combinations. Her kitchen is paneled in warm brown wood; she designed the cupboards herself. Spices and herbs line the shelves in glass bottles. Cooking is a passion, “the only way I can express myself in artistic fashion,” she says. Her concern about healthy eating coupled with her love of cooking prompted her to write Jane Brody’s Good Food Book, a collection of essays on nutrition accompanied by recipes. On this day, a huge stockpot of vegetable and bean soup is simmering on the stove; later she will deliver it to a local shelter for the homeless.

Time started getting especially tight when Brody began writing books in addition to her weekly column and regular science articles. The one thing she doesn’t have time for is answering the mail from readers. She says it overwhelms her. “I no longer have time to read it, much less answer it,” she says. “It’s just gotten out of hand. I used to spend weekends answering mail. When I started writing books, I simply couldn’t do that.” But no additional books are in the works—she finds the editing and publication process “horrendous.”

Writing her first book on nutrition in 1980 was perhaps the hardest project she’s tackled, but she calls it her greatest achievement. Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book started out to be a debate on a number of questions about nutrition. But in typical Brody fashion, she got little more than a chapter written when she realized there was no debate—she saw a better answer for each of the questions.

Knowing that nutrition was a little understood area, Brody expected to be attacked as a quack by physicians, dieticians, nurses, and chiropractors. Instead, dieticians recommended the book, physi...