The mentor women need today should do more than smile. Go ahead and speak up, too.
Early in her new memoir, “Going There,” Katie Couric mentions "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and how the character Mary Richards had inspired her.
“I’d spent many a Saturday night for seven years watching [the show],” she writes, “transfixed by the ambitious, independent heroine setting out for a career in TV news.
“Gee, I thought, I want to turn the world on with my smile too!”
Journalist Rebecca Traister, whom I admire as a journalist and as a friend, drilled down on that passage in a recent profile of Couric for New York magazine.
“I also remember Mary Tyler Moore,” she tells Couric, “and I know you’re being funny here, but when I read that line, it struck me hard how (expletive) up that particular evocation of ambition was.”
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Their exchange is instructive:
Couric: “Maybe we’re treating this a little too seriously. I just liked the theme song. It opened my eyes to know there was more for me out there than becoming Samantha Stephens," who, as Traister points out, was the central character of the hit show "Bewitched." "Mary Tyler Moore and Julia, with Diahann Carroll, told me you can have a career.”
Traister: “Right, it told you that you could become a journalist. And you become the highest-paid journalist in the world. And the theme song for your ambition was about turning the world on. With your smile.”
Couric: “Yeah. I guess that is kind of (expletive) up. Now that you’re pointing that out.”
Mary Richards, mentor to many
My heart sank, but my spirit soared.
Couric and I were born in the same year, 1957. Traister was born in 1975, the year Couric and I, both cheerleaders, graduated from high school. Couric and I attended different schools in different parts of the country and surely my journalism career is no match for her fame, but we were a matched set in our beginnings and our aspirations.
It is easy now, and righteous, to criticize this promoted notion of the happy, harmless feminist. No woman should have to chirp her way into a career. In 1974, though, even the character of Mary Richards was emboldening because she was the first of her kind on network television. She was smart and independent and, yes, unfailingly kind – but she was also unapologetically ambitious. She prioritized her career over marriage and babies, and, yes again, how unfortunate that Mary felt forced to make that choice. But, hey, she still had a sex life! No wonder she was smiling.
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Mary Richards was the mentor we’d been waiting for. The takeaway for me, a working-class girl in the Midwest, was that I could grow up to be ambitious and happy, too. Holy cow, look at that Mary go.
There have been so many hurdles since then. In her memoir, Couric describes walking into an editorial meeting full of men at CNN in the early 1980s. The man running the meeting saw her and said, “That’s not why Katie is successful. She’s successful because of her determination, hard work, intelligence, and – breast size.”
“I froze,” she writes. “The place went quiet. Some people laughed nervously. Others looked down uncomfortably. I took my seat.”
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A decade later, I was a new reporter in the Plain Dealer newsroom when a senior editor stood in front of my desk and interrupted my attempt to update him about my story. “Forget about all that,” he said in the crowded newsroom. “What I want to know is, when are we going to get a motel room and get away from all this.”
No one said a word in my defense in that moment, including me.
Angry, optimistic and ... smiling
Couric’s book is full of stories of like this, because our profession has been full of men like that. I’m grateful for her willingness to call them out. I’m also grateful for Rebecca Traister and other talented young women like her who, by word and deed, are changing what it means to be a working woman in America. We’re not where I thought we’d be, these four decades later, but their courage and ambition make me so optimistic about where we’re headed.
Do read Couric’s book. It is wild romp of a tale, but she is also unsparing in what she perceives to be her missteps and mistakes. It is such a womanly thing to do, to be hard on yourself. I say that with admiration. I am silently tallying that long list of powerful men who should be just as honest about their mistakes and the harm they’ve inflicted, but who are too vain and gutless ever to admit it.
If I sound angry about that, don’t worry. I’m still smiling.
Connie Schultz is a columnist for Paste BN. She is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, "The Daughters of Erietown," is a New York Times bestseller. Reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz