Our Voices

It’s hard to believe now when women’s voices dominate the radio networks—less likely, still, in television—that there was a time within memory when it was somewhat surprising to hear a woman’s voice reporting breaking news. It would have taken a great deal longer for this obvious but hierarchy-threatening change without the work of four women journalists who broke down the barriers at what was then a chaotic start-up, National Public Radio.

Lina, Linda, Cokie and Susan were the four, and it seems appropriate to write about them without their last names, now so generally known. At the start of their work, they were relegated to the women’s pages, as women had been for generations, writing about recipes, weddings and debut parties.

Never satisfied with these constraints, or with the belittling questions of male editors—one was denied coverage of the birth control pill because she was a virgin—they worked together as a foursome, slowly and laboriously dismantling prejudice. The result: Susan became one of the long-time hosts of All Things Considered, Lina covered the Supreme Court and broke the story of Anita Hill’s sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, and we now hear as a routine matter women’s voices reporting from all over the world, including sites of conflict as in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But it took years of work and optimism to bring about this result, which no single woman, no matter how accomplished, could have achieved on her own. Now, as the United Nations prepares to launch an ambitious three-hour program called “Women Forward,” I wonder if future generations will have to fight some of these battles. Progress doesn’t stay progress forever.

And I have to recognize that we have not made the progress in the arts that women have made in journalism for reasons of class and white privilege: the price of theatre tickets alone points to exclusion and it has taken decades of activism, beginning with the Guerrilla Girls, to force museums and galleries to show the work of women—with the very understandable objection on the part of galleries that this work doesn’t sell. That, in turn, raises the question about the buying habits of women who can afford art and theatre tickets. Are we still hampered by outdated ideas about what matters?

I’m glad to be part of the UN program, which will air in June, although as I mentioned to the organizers, fifteen minutes allotted to art as a political power seems a bit skimpy. I am one of three women who will speak, probably a little breathless as I try to get all I want to say into my five minutes.

I will be thinking of the ground-breaking work of these four estimable women journalists who didn’t let obstacles deter them.

[For more on The Women of NPR, visit The New York Times book review or see the new book, The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR.]

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