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Women's Fiction
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A Woman of the Times: Journalism, Feminism, and the Career of Charlotte Curtis |
List Price: $29.95
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Reviews |
Description:
New York Times journalist Charlotte Curtis's mother was a prominent suffragist who was the first woman American Foreign Service Officer. But Curtis was not her mother's brand of feminist, nor was she a proponent of the women's lib movement of her contemporaries that hit its stride during the 1970s. (She was even at times openly scornful of its tactics to win equal pay and other rights.) Instead, Curtis, who began at the Times as a society-column writer in 1961, ended her career (she died of cancer in 1987) as the powerful editor of the paper's op-ed page. Instead of confronting the inherent sexism at the paper--she did not join the class-action suit filed against it by other women employees in the 1970s--she seemed work within it. Curtis used her society columns to write subtle sociological critiques. She listened carefully to "newsmakers" and their wives when they spoke off-guard at parties and wrote pieces about their lives and what drove them. She covered Leonard Bernstein's fund-raising party for the Black Panthers, Truman Capote's famous Black and White Ball, and the pop-culture allure of the Mafia. Soon, these types of impressionistic stories moved from the back pages of the paper to the front. Curtis helped change the face of journalism: today, as readers know only all too well, the story of a prominent person's life is as newsworthy as his or her accomplishments. This engagingly written biography strongly traces the arc of its subject's career. It is less clear in its analysis of whether Curtis's success led to lasting positive changes for other women at The New York Times. Still, it is an interesting account of an exceptional woman and her times. --Anna Baldwin
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