When Women Take the Lead
Across the centuries and around the world, and in unexpected domains
Two years ago, an editor at the New York Sun who was following the Train Campaign suggested that I write for them. He alerted me that the Sun “tended right of center/libertarian.” That did not immediately put me off, but the use of Larry Kudlow on their subscription pop-up did raise a red flag. I knew little about Kudlow except that he was a gold standard Fox News commentator who’d worked for Trump. And an old white guy. I also learned that the New York Sun was likely to pay peanuts, if at all. I did not pursue the lead.
But I have ended up reading the Sun now and then because there are two men I admire who write there regularly. James Brooke lives here in the Berkshires and writes about Ukraine and Russia. His articles often provide fresh information, as well as a perspective that comes from years of experience in the region. Definitely recommended!
My friend and colleague Carl Rollyson also writes for the New York Sun, reviewing a wide variety of biographies. He is the right person: he has written many successful biographies himself (and many about women: Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Amy Lowell, and Sylvia Plath) and wrangled with the myriad challenges that beset biographers - most important, the interference of living subjects or the heirs. His A Confessions of a Serial Biographer makes clear that only the strong survive - and only then if they have a good lawyer at their side. (Carl’s wife, fortunately, is an attorney.)
I particularly admire his biography of Jill Craigie, filmmaker as well as wife of the British politician Michael Foot. I’ll be talking to him about Craigie and Foot on next week’s podcast, and we’ll hear how he fell out with Foot over control of what went into To Be a Woman.
This morning Carl sent me his review of Berkshire’s Women & Leadership, a new edition published earlier this year. It’s such fun to see where he went with it.
Review: Arts+ What Happens When Women Take the Lead
CARL ROLLYSON Dec. 4, 2024 NEW YORK SUN
As comprehensive as the organization of this book seems, the editors suggest that yet another edition could be written. Why not make ‘Women and Leadership’ a multi-volume enterprise? I have some suggestions.
“It is the best of times. It is the worst of times.” What the editors of “Women and Leadership” have in mind is “a greater interest in shared and distributed forms of leadership” and the “global rise in autocratic leadership,” a reassertion of “‘strongman style’ masculinities.”
This is by no means a programmatic collection of histories and biographies. Included, for example, is a chapter on “Conservative Women Leaders,” concerning what is “taught in schools but also in battles connected with sexuality, such as pornography, birth control, and abortion.”
There is, as well, a chapter, “#MeToo and Its impact,” in the context of a broader term, “sexual aggression,” and how it affects women and men in “positions of leadership in many domains.”
The book includes less well-known figures, such as Soong Mei-ling and Jiang Qing, and famous ones — Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Rachel Carson, and, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt, observed by one of FDR’s advisors, after sitting down next to the president, “holding his eyes firmly [and saying] to him, ‘Franklin, I think that you should. …’”
She provoked strong reactions from men. William Faulkner, I learned while working on his biography, named one of his mules after her. Cole Porter made fun of her effort to create her own financial independence by endorsing Simmons’ mattresses in national magazines. One version of his classic “Anything Goes” includes the lyric: “So Mrs. R with all her trimmin’s can broadcast a bed from Simmons, ’cause Franklin knows, anything goes!”
. . . As comprehensive as the organization of this book seems, the editors suggest that yet another edition would include a former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, “widely seen as the most powerful woman in the world, the unofficial leader of the West,” which would entail considering the invasion of Ukraine and her “blind spot when it came to dependence on Russian oil and gas.”1
Why not make “Women and Leadership” a multi-volume enterprise? I have some suggestions: Until recently, Marilyn Monroe would not have been considered as a leader or someone with power. Yet she formed her own production company and broke her Hollywood contract, and was openly supportive of civil rights and figures who suffered from discrimination, such as Ella Fitzgerald, which made it difficult to book her into the most important performing venues. Sylvia Plath, by the way, dreamed and wrote about Monroe with a respect unusual for women and men in the 1950s and early 1960s.
My next candidate is Rebecca West, quoted once in this volume: “People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” She befriended Paul Robeson and a CIA chief, Allen Dulles, and in her 50s had a passionate affair with FDR’s attorney general, Francis Biddle, a Nuremberg prosecutor. She made the cover of Time and inspired a generation of women like Martha Gellhorn, who was also there at Nuremberg, continuing West’s example of reporting on world events. . . .
This is turning into one of those reviews in which the reviewer starts conceiving of a book he would have written, rather than the one at hand, which deserves the deepest respect for the depth and breadth of its subjects and contributors, who inspire the desire to look for other examples of leadership and how those examples play out in the lives of women all over the world.
We’d like to think that the moral universe always inclines towards justice, but humans don’t change quickly and there remains a lot of work to be done. It helps to look at how individual women have made a difference in spite of obstacles that were often far more daunting than those we face today.2
Readers of this newsletter can order a copy of Women and Leadership directly from Ingram Global (worldwide) at 40% off until the end of January 2025.
This week Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times dived into this question. “From 2008 to 2016, Merkel and Obama were the two most powerful politicians in the western world. They got on well — which is not surprising, since they were similar characters. They were both outsiders: the first female chancellor of Germany and the first Black president of the US. They were both raised well away from the metropole, in east Germany and Hawaii respectively. | Both Merkel and Obama are self-assured, highly educated, intellectual and cautious by temperament. These are qualities that endeared them to cautious, educated liberals. (I plead guilty.) But, in retrospect, their careful rationalism made them ill-equipped to deal with ruthless strongman leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.” Read the rest.
Women’s history helps me keep my perspective. For example, there is a great deal of discussion about gender identity in women’s sports right now. I was coeditor of the International Encyclopedia of Women and Sports with two leading scholars, and what I’ve been remembering is how controversial it was to have women participate in competitive sports, and the incredible commitment and endurance it took to become a successful athlete. I’ve also reread the article about the history of gender verification, and about women trying to compete in men’s sports. More on this in a future letter, and if you happen to want a really broad perspective, I recommend Women: A World History by Pamela McVay.