Ginger Rogers, Having It All, the Times and the Twitterati

Updated below

My Twitter feed is filled with outrage over a New York Times obituary. Science writer extraordinaire Ed Yong (whose excellent National Geographic blog happens to be called Not Exactly Rocket Science) started it off by tweeting:

Rocket scientist dies. NYT obit leads with her cooking skills, husband and kids. Oh just [f@!*] off.

That tweet has, as of this writing, earned 732 retweets (and an additional 140 favorites). In case Yong’s objection wasn’t clear from his tweet (or from the obit itself), here’s another version, from someone else responding to Yong:

Lesson to women scientists: even when you’re totally badass, you will be remembered for "following your husband from job to job"

Later, co-science writer extraordinaire Steve Silberman (who tipped Yong off to the obit in question) tweeted to Yong:

Notice we’re in the middle of a social science experiment? People enraged about [Yong’s tweet critiquing the obit]: male. People who got it: female.

In an effort to distinguish myself from my soon-to-be-90-year-old father-in-law, I try to spend as little time reading NYT obits as possible. So I hadn’t seen it. But after reading these and many, many similar tweets in my feed, I pointed my browser on over there, prepared to be outraged, too. 

But you know what? I’m not.

For the fairest test of your own reaction, I was going to advise reading the obit first. But as I was writing this, the Times edited the lede (without indicating that it did so), presumably in response to the Twitter backlash. I provide the new lede and the link to the obit below. But first, let's focus on what, until a short time ago, the obit used to say and why people are so worked up about it.

The offending obit read, in its opening sentences, as follows:

Yvonne Brill, a Pioneering Rocket Scientist, Dies at 88 

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

To my mind, the most offensive thing about this is the absence of an Oxford comma in the opening sentence. Yes, I get that one way to interpret the lede is to see the writer as privileging Brill’s husband’s career and her own domestic achievements over her scientific accomplishments, by leading with the former. That would be an extremely odd choice of emphasis by the writer, since the Times could scarcely care less about the millions of women who can be described by the first two sentences but not by the third. And it strikes me as a pretty uncharitable reading.

It seems clear to me that the point the writer is making — which stretches beyond the first two sentences to include the third — is that Brill became a brilliant scientist despite also facing traditional demands we place on women, and managing to excel at them, too. If the obit is to be believed, here is a woman, from an older generation no less, who truly did “have it all.” She did what society of her time (and to a significant extent, our time, too) told her to do: move multiple times to accommodate her husand's career and spend years devoting herself full-time to raising their children. And yet despite being saddled with those expectations — and meeting them — she also managed a brilliant career of her own.

So if you want to be outraged, I think you have to be outraged at the decision to give extra credit where it’s due by pointing out that, like Ginger Rogers, Brill had a career that rivaled her male peers, but did it backwards and in heels. So is that problematic to point out? If it is, as far as I can tell, it’s problematic for one of two reasons — neither of which sound in sexism or merit the kind of outrage and snark the obit is receiving on Twitter.

It might be said that the piece somehow glosses over the inevitable sacrifices she must have made in career, personal life, or both, and thereby gives false hope to young women who continue to look for ways to “have it all,” or shame those older women who feel they have failed in one or both domains. For instance, pointing out that she was able to have a brilliant career while also moving multiple times for her husband’s career and abandonning her career completely for eight years in order to raise their children, it might be said, dubiously suggests that most women can make these same sacrifices for their children and their partners and still rise to the very top of their chosen profession — and if they don't, they have no one to blame but themselves. 

Or it might be said that, even if emphasizing the fact that she was a woman living in a man’s world admirably amounts to recognizing her for dancing backwards in heels, it has the unfortunate side effect of overshadowing her professional accomplishments by framing her life in the context of women’s liberation and the mommy wars. If that’s the problem, then maybe it’s equally problematic to point out, as the obit does later, that Brill is “believed to have been the only woman in the United States who was actually doing rocket science in the mid-1940s.” Why not just say that Brill was a rocket scientist? As the adage attests, that’s usually accolade enough.

As I said above, just before I went to post this, the Times edited the lede to read as follows:

She was a brilliant rocket scientist who followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.”

No more beef stroganoff. [UPDATE 3/31/13 3:40pm: see the before and after versions here, which include a few alterations beyond the stroganoff.] Some on Twitter are declaring victory, but others are still unsatisfied. Writes one:

But, the obit lede is STILL sexist. The lede should have nothing to do with being a woman.

And another:

I'm afraid they made it worse, frankly.

Oddly enough, I'm with the continued malcontents on this one, in a way. The original obit didn't offend me (and neither does this one), but I'm having a hard time articulating a principle that made the beef stroganoff offensive but not everything else that remains in the revised obit. 

What say you, Lounge readers?

UPDATE: Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan tweets that she "sure agree[s]" with the criticism of the Brill obit. She also points to this thoughtful piece about why "it doesn’t help when journalists treat every female scientist they profile as an archetype of perseverance," which describes a seven-part test for avoiding this pitfall.

There's a lot to admire and agree with in that piece, and the idea of a profile of a female scientist (or other professional) that does not so much as mention the subject's gender is appealing in many ways. On the other hand, being a woman in the particular kind of society we live in is, for better or worse, very much a part of most women's lives. And as I understand them, obituaries — even when they appear in the Times and so necessarily emphasize the individual's professional accomplishments, as Brill's obit does — are about the fullness of people's lives, and not only about their professional accomplishments. Might we lose something important — both about their individual lives and about the times they lived in — through a rule that forbids mention of these aspects of people's lives?

By way of analogy, is it racist to tell Jackie Robinson's story by framing him as the first African American to play in the major leagues, rather than just a really, really good baseball player? Does deliberately avoiding mention of the race-based barriers he faced help us move towards a more racially just society, or does it just discount the additional struggles he had to endure and paint an falsely pristine picture of that time period?

And does it matter how Brill or her suriving family want her to be viewed and remembered? Her son, for instance, offered that Brill preferred to be called "Mrs. Brill." Does her preference, and his memory, count? Even if it's to some extent the writer's story to tell and to some extent society's to hear, doesn't an obituary remain at least partly the decedent's and survivors' story, too? One Twitter commenter thinks not:

“Even if she wanted to be remembered this way [for her family accomplishments], irresponsible for NYT to reinforce such a common stereotype w/ lede.”

Just to be clear, I think the extent to which a profile or obit should mention the subject's race, gender, etc. is a difficult question. And it's good that journalists are having these kinds of conversations. But I think the questions are difficult, the circumstances are varied, and the answers aren't obvious. And so, as much as I love Twitter, I'm skeptical that the most thoughtful and balanced solutions will come from shaming writers and editors into covert rewrites through viral charges of sexism.

Comments

[LawPrawfWhoSpendsTimeWithPhysicists]

Thank you for this thoughtful post. My one observation is that there are issues of gender in hard science, particularly in some subsets, that make the critique of the NYT piece salient and arguably meaningfully different than in other professional contexts. I will spare the plethora of anecdotal evidence as arguably unrepresentative samples, but the point is, it is a sensitive subject and the NYT happened to light the spark. Twitter is just latest medium to have fanned the flames in an area where moments of mysoginism (unintentional or otherwise) can happen with the ease of batting an eyelash.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Twitter is structurally adverse to the communication of careful thinking, or the proper maintenance of the English language for that matter. In fact, it's rather conducive to the simultaneous or instant expression of anything that comes to one's mind, rarely a good thing, and of all the social media, most liable to both ignite and fan the sort of flames that generate far more heat than light.

[TJ]

I don't think the appropriate comparison is framing Jackie Robinson as a trailblazer in racist times. Rather, imagine a story on Jackie Robinson that began,

His favorite food was fried chicken, he was an excellent dancer, and always stood aside for ladies on the sidewalk. "He was surprisingly well-spoken and articulate," said a coworker.

But Jackie Robinson, who died on Wednesday at 53 in Stamford, Connecticut, was also a trailblazing baseball player....

[Michelle Meyer]

Hi TJ: I meant the Robinson analogy as a response to the Finkbeiner test (linked to above), which forbids, as one prong in its “simple” (!) seven-part test, mentioning that a woman was the "first to do X." There, I think the analogy works pretty well, and I wondered if those celebrating the Finkbeiner test without qualification would apply it equally to, say, the upcoming Robinson biopic (and recent PSAs I’ve seen in which contemporary African American athletes thank Robinson for paving the way for them) and similar discussions of pioneering individuals who are members of disadvantaged groups.

But even as an analogy to the original Brill lede, although I take your point, let me push back at least a little bit and suggest that the Robinson obit you offer isn't fully analogous to the Times’s obit for Brill. For instance, I take it that "His favorite food was fried chicken" is supposed to be analogous to "She made a mean beef stroganoff." First, I note that both references possibly could be defended by arguing that the subjects simply valued and identified with these things (fried chicken, cooking) and that although the fact that their preferences happen to run consistent with racial and gender stereotypes, respectively, may make readers feel uncomfortable, this discomfort may be insufficient reason to exclude the references from the obit. That gets into the questions I alluded to above about whose story it is to tell, the ethics of inconvenient facts about people that have damaging side effects of perpetuating stereotypes, etc.

...continued below because Typepad is evil

[Michelle Meyer]

...Continued from above

But let's leave that set of questions aside. The stroganoff reference strikes me as ambiguous (in a good way) while the fried chicken reference isn't. The stroganoff reference lends itself to both an uncharitable interpretation (in which it was included because all profiles of women must make some mention of their domestic skills because cooking is part of the female essence, or whatever) and a more charitable interpretation (in which Brill is lauded as a quasi-hero for overcoming obstacles, even if this "perseverance narrative" is, as the Finkbeiner test suggests, problematic in other ways). How on earth does making a mean stroganoff amount to perseverance? Well, I take it that the stroganoff reference was meant to stand in for a host of domestic talents, and although domestic skills may seem trivial, being Martha Stewart is a pain in the ass and it takes time – time that cannot be spent on one’s career outside the home. I can’t see a way of reading the fried chicken reference as a way of acknowledging that Robinson essentially worked two full-time jobs, or as any other sort of compliment. The “excellent dancer” reference can certainly be read as a compliment, but one that seems to have nothing to do with explaining why Robinson’s baseball success was all the more extraordinary.

...Continued in next comment

[Michelle Meyer]

...Continued from above comment

The reference to Robinson having “always stood aside for [white?] ladies on the sidewalk” is, I assume, meant to be analogous to the reference to the fact that Brill “followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children.” The sidewalk reference suggests – to me, anyway – approval of that behavior as race-appropriate, as in “he always minded his manners and took care not to get uppity.” The analogy to that would be if the Times had said that Brill “knew how to please her man and followed him from job to job, taking eight years off from work to raise his three children.” But again, I think the more charitable — and in fact the more natural — reading of the Brill obit is as a depiction of someone who faced societal challenges and made sacrifices that perhaps she should not have been asked to make, rather than someone who was rightly fulfilling gender-based duties. (Some readers may have preferred a subject who rejected those gender roles, rather than finding a way to accommodate both them and her professional ambitions, and had that been the case, perhaps we wouldn’t be seeing charges of sexism.) Now on this one, I’ll grant you that I’m reading approval of race-based roles into the sidewalk reference and the absence of approval of gender-based roles into the husband and kids reference. I think the rest of the Brill obit provides a context that makes that interpretation fair.

As for “‘He was surprisingly well-spoken and articulate,’ said a coworker,” the appropriate analogy to that, I think, would have been if the Times writer had said “Brill had a surprising knack for science.” I don’t think anything in her obit can be read as expressing surprise at her natural talent for science due to her gender, and certainly not this: “‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said.” At most, the Brill obit conveys that we should be impressed that she managed to excel at science not because she’s a woman and women, as everyone knows, can’t think clearly, but, rather, because as a woman she was saddled with a whole set of social expectations that ran counter to a career in science and made that career much less likely. When one acknowledges those social expectations, it frankly *does* seem surprising that she managed to succeed as much as she did in such a male-dominated field, and I’m not sure it’s fair to characterize that surprise and/or appreciation as sexism (even if, as I’ve conceded, the perseverance narrative may be problematic), whereas it would be entirely appropriate to characterize as racist someone’s surprise that an African American is “well-spoken and articulate” (or “clean,” to complete the reference to Biden’s gaffe).

[David B.]

Michelle, I had a similar reaction to yours.

[Michelle Meyer]

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/gender-questions-arise-in-obituary-of-rocket-scientist-and-her-beef-stroganoff/?pagewanted=all

[Carolyn Thomas]

Such an interesting discussion here, Michelle. Reminds me of an applicant for a career posting many years ago in the corporation where I worked at the time. Some of us were reviewing a resume that had just been couriered over, and one sharp-eyed colleague noted that, for some reason - you rarely see this on professional CVs, I guess - this particular applicant had listed her interests including "Western Canada Chili Cook-Off Champion" and "chocolate making".

These two completely irrelevant pieces of personal information had absolutely nothing to do with the job posting, of course, but sure told us something about the applicant. In another workplace, perhaps inappropriate - but in our particular office, most of us absolutely could not wait to meet this chocolate-loving chili chef.

What could have elevated that NYT piece to obituary super-stardom would be including Dr. Brill's beef stroganoff recipe. Now THAT'S an intriguing obit.