Girls As Trailblazers

I walked joyfully out of a movie theater recently after watching “The Post” with my wife Laura, a newspaper photographer. Now I want to see it again with two young friends – girls who plan to become the first Boy Scouts. [su_button url=”https://terrywinckler.com/subscribe” target=”self” style=”default” background=”#2D89EF” color=”#FFFFFF” size=”3″ wide=”no” center=”no” radius=”auto” icon=”” icon_color=”#FFFFFF” text_shadow=”none” desc=”” onclick=”” rel=”” title=”” id=”” class=””]Subscribe[/su_button]

Actually, they don’t want to become boy scouts, they want to be scouts in a local Boy Scout troop. I want them to see “The Post” because it portrays a woman succeeding brilliantly in a male culture.

The movie is set nearly 50 years ago when women were beginning to make their presence felt as reporters, but had yet to dent the editor ranks, let alone the board room where the real power is. As a young man, I witnessed that hoary men’s-only club in operation, and for 20 years as an editor joined in. I loved the work but hated the chest-thumping and the way women were so-often abused and used when they finally got into the power ranks. I saw three heroes who paved the way for women to come.

Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post and the lead character in “The Post,” started out as a victim and turned into a hero. She had never even held a job until her husband’s death dumped the newspaper into her lap. Previously, she had played the role of supportive consort to a powerful man – the kind of fluttery, flattery role baked into being a woman back then. As the movie progresses, she learns to unlearn the role and take on the job. Given the chance, she floundered at first…until she learned to quit asking permission from the men surrounding her. The real power, she realized, was within her. From that moment, she succeeded by seizing the chance.

Another woman I knew also succeeded brilliantly at running a newspaper. Her name is Mary Ann Dolan. Ten years after Katherine Graham rose to power, Mary Ann became the first female editor of a major newspaper – The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. She was smart and unabashedly female. She thrived as leader of that paper without adopting male pattern boldness; and in doing so, helped create a more inclusive environment for other women. 

Mary Ann’s path to power might have been paved 10 years earlier by a woman named Doris who took on an oppressive male boss at that same Herald-Examiner. The place was on strike and in chaos. It was full of drinking, swaggering men who ran the joint and women who were supposed to do their bidding. Doris, who had once been the nation’s first female network radio broadcaster, boiled with inner rage at the inequity but kept quiet because she had seven kids and needed the job. But there came a day when her boss’s brutality overcame her hunger and Doris lashed out.

The boss fired her.

Doris fired back as the whole place watched silently in horror.

“You can’t fire me,” she shouted. “I fire you.”

Doris marched up to the publisher’s office and didn’t return.

The next day, Doris came back to a standing ovation from all the workers. Her boss had been fired. She kept her job. I like to think her action helped make it possible for Mary Anne to eventually step up.

I knew Doris. She was my mom. She went on to become a nationally syndicated TV newscaster, guided by the advice she handed down to her children at the top of her lungs: don’t wait for permission – make your own chances.

Which brings me back to my two girl pals and the Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scouts of America has said it will accept girls starting next year. Members of a local troop don’t want to wait and my pals don’t want to be ladies-in-waiting. They want to seize the chance now – to do the challenging things that boys do through scouting. And they want to become Eagle Scouts – an achievement highly respected in power structures still dominated by men.

These girls are determined to enter one of the institutional pathways to power traditionally reserved for boys – a male culture that on one hand they must learn to navigate, and that on the other they will change for the better just by being equal participants in it. In that sense, they will be pioneers in a movement to end gender-based acculturation.

For too long, men and women have been raised and trained separately. That unequal division has produced an out-of-balance power structure – and out-of-control men. In the last few months, we’ve seen women take to the internet, to the airways and to the streets in a revolt against that structure. Heads have rolled; but no revolution succeeds by guillotine alone. Minds must be changed – and that most effectively happens at the grassroots level.

What could be more grassroots than Boy Scouts – or simply Scouts, as I expect one day it will be called. I envision an organization where gender is a fact not a dividing line; an organization where all young people are given equal opportunity to learn about power and how to wield it.

I am trying to figure out how to explain all this to my two girl pals after we see “The Post” together. I might talk about how the role of women has evolved since Katherine Graham, and that they are inheritors of opportunities that society now offers women because of trailblazers like her and Mary Ann and Doris.

Or maybe I will just shut up and listen to what they have to say, and then watch as they blaze their own trails. Their time, as Oprah said a few weeks ago, is now – and they know it.

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