He fell asleep while interviewing her
Lucinda Franks started out as a journalist in the 1970s. It wasn’t easy.
Two years after I joined the news service, I won the Pulitzer Prize. I suffered for it mightily. That I was the first woman to win for national reporting — I had been brought to New York to do a five-part series on the violent antiwar Weatherman group — made it only worse. I could see it in their bowed heads: We’ve been striving for years to win that coveted prize and a 24-year-old walks away with it! The entire bureau of men refused to speak to me that day and the days after.
I was haunted by the creeping conviction that I didn’t deserve the prize — I should give it back. For at least the next 10 years, I was too ashamed to tell people I’d won.
Isn’t that nice?
When you get older, gender discrimination gets easier, somewhat predictable and sometimes even funny. But it doesn’t stop — even if you’ve published four books and had a long journalism career. When my last book came out, I was interviewed by a certain talk show host, before he was stripped of his job because of gross sexual misconduct charges. I had hardly opened my mouth before he fell asleep. During the rest of the interview, he kept nodding off while the camera judiciously avoided him. When I left the studio, he had popped awake for his new guests. I saw him waving his hands enthusiastically while speaking with two high-powered male journalists.
Charlie Rose, no doubt. He’s pretty soporific himself.
I remember, back in the day, when women newsreaders on TV were coming in (for I ain’t no spring chicken), my old man would fly into a rage.
Like, I’m not kidding, he would scream at the telly, “Why have they got this stupid bitch on, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about!”. It wasn’t anyone in particular, just any woman. My old man was a bigot in every way imaginable – think Alf Garnett but not funny – but still my jaw would hang agape it was so absurd. I’d be like, “Dad, the old blokes in the suits, they read the news, they don’t make it up off the top of their heads” (I’m thinking, not speaking, because you didn’t talk back in those days).
I’ve just never forgotten how livid he was. It was like some personal insult, that he, a man, should be told what’s happening in the world by a mere woman. I’m like, ten, fifteen, at the time and I thought he was being ridiculous. It was an early lesson in the irrationality of bigotry.
When I was working for the State of Oklahoma, they hired a young man to head the other project (the one I wasn’t head of). One day, because he was new and I had been managing his project between the last guy leaving and this guy starting, he was instructed by our supervisor to go with me to the field site for training.
I had my own project that week, which involved staying overnight on the other side of the state, so I arranged to meet him at his site the following day. We arranged a time and place where he would meet me. As I was leaving my project, I received a message that he would not be coming. Fortunately, my crew from my project was still around, so I was able to shanghai one of them (she came willingly, actually) into helping me do the job that needed to be done on his project.
When I got back to the office, my supervisor informed me that he (my supervisor) would be training the other employee. It seems that this young man refused to be trained by a woman. There is nothing a woman could teach him, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong to boot, because the Bible says that a woman should not teach a man. He had thrown some sort of fit, and my boss had caved in and let him have his way. Why? Because that whole damn place was as sexist as any I’ve worked in, which is saying something. My boss, while not being overtly sexist, had some covert habits that continually served as reminders that he was big man, and I was little woman. I will give him this: he did apologize (sort of) after calling me a feminazi for pointing out one of his most egregious sexist statements.