Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, and yes, I can’t resist pointing out the irony that it’s the one day of the year that is an hour shorter than the others–as if we weren’t trying to do too much in too little time already.
The theme this year is “Make it happen.” For me, that means write about things in a way that will help change women’s lives for the better–something I try to do through novels and essays. I feel really strongly that for women to reach equality, one of the places we need to be better represented is the opinion pages of our newspapers. It’s often where change begins. So I spent yesterday writing a piece about the subtle ways gender presumptions still show up even in the best of media; keep your fingers crossed for me that it will find a home.
I’d like to point anyone who doesn’t know about it to the OpEd Project, which is working to expand the number of voices heard.
I’ve also gathered quotes from six women journalists I admire, which I hope will inspire you:
“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”
– Anna Quindlen, from Living Out Loud
(Maybe that’s true for you? It was for me.)
“Nothing attracts me like a closed door.”
– Margaret Bourke-White, from Portrait of Myself
“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
– Nora Ephron, from I Feel Bad About My Neck
(Amen.)
“I lose my friends and complexion in my devotion to the rites of flagellating a typewriter – and although the use of everything I send is madly satisfactory in the end, I’ve had time to be depressed to unproductivity, near suicide, or a change of career.”
– Lee Miller, in a December 1944 letter
(OK, I know it seems odd to call that one “inspiring,” but I find it comforting, anyway, to know that even strong and talented women like Lee Miller struggle. She wrote those words from Europe during World War II.)
“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”
– Martha Gellhorn, in a February 5, 1939 letter to 1st Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, from The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn by Caroline Moorehead
“The key to success for any woman who wants to have a really serious career and a family is to marry a guy who is going to take at least half the responsibility for the house and kids – and sometimes more than half. When I read all those Victorian novels in which a woman’s entire happiness hinges on finding a suitable husband, I think well, in a weird way that’s still true.”
– Gail Collins, from a fabulous interview in Cosmopolitan
Yes, I did sneak in one photojournalist–two if you count Lee Miller, who both wrote and photographed. I hope you have an inspired International Women’s Day. – Meg
