She Said What?

American author and journalism professor Maria Braden’s non-fiction book She Said What? Interviews with Women Newspaper Columnists (1993) features interviews with 13 women journalists including the syndicated humorist Erma Bombeck and the legendary politics reporter Mary McGrory. She Said What? "proves to be as informative as it is lively" (Publishers Weekly).

In the introduction, Braden sketches out a brief history of women in journalism in which she details the accomplishments of pioneering figures like Nellie Bly and Dorothy Thompson. In 1887, Bly gained renown for going undercover as an asylum patient and publishing her observations in Ten Days in a Mad-House. Thompson is best known for being among the earliest public individuals to sound the alarm about Nazism and other fascist movements. In 1934, she became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, and in 1939, she heckled the speakers at a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, resulting in her ejection from the arena.

Braden devotes the first chapter to Mary McGrory, one of the most accomplished Washington, D.C. reporters of the Nixon era. Born in 1918 in Boston, Massachusetts, McGrory began her publishing career as a book reviewer for the Boston Herald. Inspired by the title character of the Jane Arden comic series, McGrory sought to become a reporter at a time when very few newsrooms hired women journalists. Her first reporting gig came in 1948 when the Washington Star hired her to cover politics. After six years, McGrory gained national recognition for her coverage of Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist hearings. Both Irish-Catholics, McGrory was familiar with bullies like McCarthy and conveyed that to readers in her columns. Another career peak came in 1975 when she earned a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her analysis of the Watergate scandal. A fierce opponent of the Vietnam War, McGrory considers it a badge of honor to be included on Nixon's famed "Enemies List." She also describes being approached by The New York Times for a job but being told by Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston that she would need to learn to use the switchboard.



Braden interviews Erma Bombeck. Born in 1927 outside Dayton, Ohio, Bombeck began her journalism career at the age of thirteen, writing a humor column for her junior high newspaper. In high school, she obtained a job at the Dayton Herald as a "copygirl" typing and running errands. With her foot in the door, Bombeck had her first newspaper feature published at the age of 16. Despite displaying a clear passion and talent for the craft of journalism, Bombeck was rejected by the student newspaper at Ohio University, which she attended for a year before running out of tuition money. With few opportunities to become a full-fledged reporter at the local newspapers, Bombeck began to write a humor column about her life as a housewife. The column became a hit, and by the 1970s, it was syndicated to 900 newspapers in North America and read by 30 million readers twice a week. Despite her success, Bombeck is wryly dismissive of newspaper columnists, characterizing them to Braden as leeches. "We attach ourselves to something and say here's another viewpoint for you. How do you like this? How does this play for you? All we do is sort of dissect it and go round again, and never come up with anything really new."

Next, Braden interviews the financial journalist Jane Bryant Quinn. Originating at The Washington Post, her finance column "Staying Ahead," ran for 27 years in more than 250 newspapers. She tells Braden about the challenges of working in journalism as a woman during the 1960s, when mailroom and research positions were usually the only jobs available. Her female coworkers used to laugh at her when she said she planned to work her way up. "'Look around you, Jane, you idiot,' they said. I realized the men were all writers, and the women were all older and older researchers."

In 1973, the Chicago-based foreign affairs columnist Georgie Ann Geyer became the first Western journalist, male or female, to interview Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.  Geyer describes the stress of writing a column that can go away at any moment if readership dips. "I feel like an entrepreneur because all the risk is mine," she says.



Born in 1941, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman wrote a syndicated column that straddled the line between politics and lifestyle: "As a person, you live with many concerns—you're concerned about your kids and you're concerned about nuclear warfare, and the fact that you can only write about one or the other is absurd."

Originally wanted to be a research scientist, The New York Times science and nutrition columnist Jane Brody, born in 1941, earned a degree in biochemistry. In 1976, she used that expertise to begin writing her widely-read "Personal Health" column.

Braden’s other interviews include Dorothy Gilliam, the first African-American female reporter at The Washington Post; Judith Martin, who is better known by her pen name "Miss Manners"; Mona Charen who, unlike most of the women profiled here, is a conservative commentator; Joyce Maynard, who made her name writing young adult columns for Seventeen magazine; Merlene Davis who remains one of the few female African-American columnists in the United States; and Anna Quindlen who wrote a biweekly column in Newsweek between 1999 and 2009. Braden ends by speaking to Molly Ivins, one of the first women to cover Texas politics.



She Said What? is an enlightening and entertaining look at the challenges women newspaper columnists face, then and now.