Miss Manners Explains the Women's Pages While I Explain My Mother
My mother, before she learned to run like a girl.
I was outside (we were always outside) playing with girlfriends. We raced each other, and my mom came out from behind the screen door. She said, "You shouldn't run with your fists clenched! You are a girl. You should be more feminine. Here, let me show you." She demonstrated a few adorable steps with hands flapping listlessly beside her. She stopped and glared at me. "See?" I dutifully practiced, feeling terribly frustrated. How fast can someone run if they to think about how cute they look while doing it? Not very.
I was never able to integrate that pretty, graceful girl my mom had in her mind's eye. And I suspect that those women who were raised in the days of segregated women's and men's employment newspaper ads, and women's news, mostly had difficulty with these superimposed requirements. So when I read Judith Martin's In defense of women's pages in this week's Post, I read it with astonishment, then admiration.
Judith Martin was a reporter assigned to the "For and About Women" section, before Ben Bradlee invented Style in 1969. Her editor, Miss Sauer, was a dragon lady who inspired fear and devotion in her reporters. They went to every event, including Marin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, picking up the anecdotes and quotes that are now routine parts of news stories. They were not, then. Judith attended embassy parties and asked high-ranking officials questions that they answered, not aware that they were speaking to the press . "How was I to know that girl was a reporter?", an ambassador would say, after he had found his words in the paper the next day.
Ms. Martin, alias Miss Manners, remembers those days with apparent pride and a sense of group accomplishment. She writes to remind us that women can do what is powerful and inventive even under the harsh hand of oppressive stereotypes. We needn't look down our noses at those relics of sexism.
As for my own running, I did run for exercise for years. My mother would tell me, over the phone, that running was "bad" for me. I "should walk, because it's the best exercise". She read it in a women's magazine, but never did it herself. Maybe it is time I put her advise away. She never knew a Judith Martin. But we do.
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