One author's look at 400 years of coping strategies shows that, from feminine hygiene on a Conestoga wagon to making executive decisions, women are up to the challenge.
By MARGO HAMMOND
Published October 30, 2003
[Publicity photo]
Gail Collins, editorial page editor at the New York Times, will speak about her new book, America’s Women.
NEW YORK - Dressed in New York's requisite black outfit with her hair cut in a blunt pageboy sans bangs, Gail Collins, editorial page editor of the New York Times, is seated on a comfy couch with her legs curled up beneath her. A multicolored, hand-stitched quilt hangs above; on the opposite wall is another collage of sorts, a crazy-quilt of press passes pinned onto a corkboard, souvenirs from the political campaigns Collins has covered and commented on. A mess of overflowing plants fills a table under the room's only windows.
We are in the tiny anteroom of the wood-paneled editorial offices of the New York Times discussing Collins' new book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. The history is seen through the particular and sometimes quirky stories of its women, from the pregnant Eleanor Dare, the first European woman to set foot on the continent in 1587, to the feminists of the '70s. On a table are copies of the book, with its striking red-white-and-blue striped cover, piled next to some half-filled bottles of Merlot.
Collins is talking about some of the important historical issues she covers in America's Women. Menstruation, for one. (How did those women in covered wagons cope?) And B.O. in colonial America, for another. (Could you go for a whole year without a bath?) She has admittedly a rather unorthodox - albeit utterly captivating - way of looking at the past, as her first foray into nonfiction, Scorpion Tongues, a popular and playful survey of the history of gossip, demonstrated. Not a professional historian, she approaches history like, well, like the inquiring-minds-want-to-know journalist she has been for the past four decades. She likes to ask basic questions. And I mean basic.
"I'm always interested in where people went to the bathroom," she says. "You think that's a question you're not supposed to ask, but really, it's so fascinating. It really shapes all things."
Collins doesn't look anything like her mostly dour-faced predecessors, whose photographs are lined up on the wall as you walk into her office. Forget the image of a bow-tied limousine liberal with an Ivy League pedigree. Collins shatters all the stereotypes most of us still conjure up when we imagine a New York Times muckety-muck. She's from Ohio (Cincinnati). She's Catholic (a 1966 graduate of Marquette University). And, of course, she's female - the first to head the editorial page in the newspaper's august history.
Her rise also has been unorthodox. She has been on the staff of several news organizations, including UPI (which went bankrupt), the New York Daily News (which went on strike) and New York Newsday (which closed) - "like Eliza leaping from one ice floe to another, trying to stay employed," she laughs. In all these places, she was never a manager, but worked as a lively and sharp-tongued columnist. (Think Maureen Dowd, but with a point.)
Joining the New York Times editorial board as deputy editor, after a stint as an op-ed columnist, she was given the top spot in editorial at the end of the summer, 2001. Even though she had never run anything in her life, Collins figured she was a good choice for the job. She was good at spinning dull editorials about boring domestic issues into interesting copy. A month later, however, no spinning was necessary: The news suddenly was anything but dull. The Sept. 11 attacks were followed by two wars, a blackout, the Jayson Blair scandal, and an outbreak of computer viruses in the editorial department.
Collins survived, however, and - so far - has flourished.
Has a woman at the helm of the editorial pages made a difference in the topics chosen for comment, I wondered. That morning, the New York Times had run an editorial about the difficulty of getting around New York in high heels. Would that have been considered an important topic if a man had been in charge?
Diversity, says Collins, does make a difference, but it's not always formulaic. "I don't believe that if a newspaper in this day and age didn't have a lot of women on its editorial board that nobody would write about abortion rights. But I do think with a diverse staff you get a wider idea of what's interesting and what's not interesting. You know, I've got a farmer on my board, who brings stuff to the table that nobody else does," she says, referring to "gentleman farmer" Verlyn Klinkenborg. One of the women on the present editorial board, contrary to type, is a Mets fan.
Still, she admits, the amusing editorial about high heels, written by Carolyn Curiel, had languished while Collins was off on a book tour. "The guys who were editing in my absence just couldn't get into it, and so it kind of sat there for a while," says Collins, who points out that these are "the same guys who are constantly telling me that we have to write about who won the golf tournament." When she returned, she gave the high heels piece the green light. "I've got to say I never understood how Carrie (the character on the HBO series Sex and the City who is obsessed with Manolo Blahnik strappy slingbacks) goes around all day, every day on those things," she adds.
I look down at Collins' feet. She is wearing sturdy walking shoes.
But, I press on, would the Jayson Blair scandal have unfolded differently if a woman had been in charge? After Blair fabrications were exposed, Howell Raines, who was Collins' mentor on the editorial board before he moved on to become executive editor at the New York Times, was criticized for being autocratic and playing favorites and eventually was asked to resign. Would a woman boss have avoided those pitfalls?
"I think speculating about what women would do if they were in charge is a mistake," says Collins. "In making that kind of political analysis, there's this sort of hideous presumption that women are good and men are bad. But look at the temperance movement. You really did have days when women were in charge, or at least they were imposing their ideology on the country, and it was very censorious. It was very we-know-what's-right-and-you-don't."
Strong take-charge women permeate the pages of America's Women. And Collins herself admits that "if I was around the early part of the 19th century, I would have been like Katherine Beecher, one of those women who managed to go around and make speeches about how women are supposed to stay home." But she doesn't want the message of her book to be "well, we were chained to the stove for all these years and in 1970, we got our freedom, and we'll never do that again." It is clear from reading history, she says, that women were making a reasonable choice when they chose to run a household. "The idea that everybody was totally nuts and fooled and had the wrong values for the entire 12 millennia and then 20 years ago, we figured it all out is just really disturbing to me."
But the problem of balancing work and family is a recurring leitmotiv in Collins' chronicle. "People ask me why I stop in the '70s," she says. "Well, I think a huge thing happened in 1970: It was the first time in which, at least theoretically, there was an agreement that men should start sharing the home responsibilities. Obviously, it works differently for different people, but still since then there has been a transformation."
Collins has a theory that some of Hillary Clinton's support during her Senate run in New York came from middle-age women who looked to her for inspiration. "When she was first running for the Senate, and I was on her bus, schlepping along in upstate New York, in all these little towns, there did seem to be something about the crowds that made me wonder if women who had raised families and had made certain sacrifices (sacrifices that in most ways they were happy to have made because they loved their families) were suddenly seeing Hillary and thinking, maybe I've got a whole new shot. You know, maybe it's possible for a woman to do the things she needs to do as a wife and mother, and then have yet another complete shot at something huge and exciting and challenging in her life. That that was really getting a certain kind of woman very juiced up about her candidacy."
Collins, who is married (to Dan Collins, who works at CBS) and has no children ("I have a hamster"), is satisfied with her own choices, she says, but she sympathizes with friends who are trying to balance good careers with family obligations who are "distracted constantly by all this stuff that they want to deal with going on at home." Is it possible for women to devote time to both a family and a career? "You really want there to be a way to do both," she says. "It's not natural or human to think, well, screw family, we're not going to do that anymore. You really want people to be able to have, at least progressively, the chance to do both."
AT A GLANCE
Gail Collins will appear at 12:15 p.m. in Fox Hall.
