Monday, May 15, 2006

The Mother of All Stories

The San Francisco Chronicle for Mother's Day highlighted the lives of four women. Four very unglamorous women and their hard, busy, and sometimes rewarding lives. This wasn't a style piece. It was on the front page.

Back when I was in journalism school, I organized a panel featuring Deidre English, Barbara Ehrenreich and Susan Rasky, among others, to discuss women and journalism. "Write women into your stories," we were exhorted. Don't write about women. This was the first problem of the Chron piece. Talking about them from that perspective only because it was Mother's Day was sort of a cheap way out. There wasn't anything newsworthy about the feature. We all know women work and have families, that being that taxed comes with many other challenges. But this in itself isn't a story. There was no larger revelation to come out of it, no major ephiphany. It felt more like: hey, it's Mother's Day. Throw the women a bone. Pul-eeze.

If I had been the editor for that feature, I would have probably done stories about fathers. To me, in the Bay Area, there's an amazing amount of team work going on to make partnerships and families run smoothly. I know stay-at-home dads, dads who have scaled back hours to manage the child care, and moms who work more, not less, to shoulder the economic burden. Now, wouldn't that have been a cool story to read about.

Maybe someday someone will write it.

1 comment:

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