00:00The first line of an obituary about a female rocket scientist described how
00:05she made a mean beef stroganoff. And of course the internet was like, uh, she was
00:10a rocket scientist. Like, how about that? Is the first line of her obituary?
00:14That's Jessica Bennett, gender editor at the New York Times. And she told me that
00:18since 1851, obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men.
00:24But now, the paper of record is going back to correct that record.
00:27Yes, they're finally admitting that they overlooked a lot of remarkable people who just happened
00:33to be mostly women. Like Ida B. Wells. She was the Beyonce of journalism, but she didn't
00:38get an obituary and neither did Charlotte Bronte and she wrote Jane Eyre. So why were so many
00:44remarkable women overlooked? I mean, I'm pretty sure it's because the racism and sexism on
00:49which this country was founded actively prevented anyone who wasn't white and male from making
00:54history, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm Elisa Kreisinger and as a white woman on the internet, I have
01:00a lot of opinions. Each week, I set out to prove myself wrong by talking to an expert who
01:05might not have all the answers, but they certainly know more than I do. That's why this is Strong
01:10Opinions Loosely Held.
01:13So why were so many women and women of color excluded from the New York Times? And how are
01:18they going to fix that? Between 20 and 25 percent of the obituaries were devoted to women. So
01:23obviously men are not 75 percent of the deaths that occur. Unfortunately. Yeah, exactly. So Overlooked
01:31is a project to write the New York Times obituaries for the women who never got them, but should have.
01:38About 150,000 people die every day throughout the world. I know, it's a real bummer, but not every
01:46one of those people gets an obituary in the New York Times. In fact, only about three of them will.
01:51The three people who found fame, fortune, or made the biggest contributions to society. Their saying is,
01:57if you make news in life, you make news in death. But that's a pretty exclusive group, and it's mostly
02:03dudes.
02:04Who were some of the women that you realized were overlooked?
02:07Yeah. Okay, Frida Kahler, did she get an obituary? Yes, she did, but she was referred to in the first
02:12line as the wife of Diego Rivera, not as a painter and artist in her own right. Ida B. Wells,
02:19the
02:19journalist and suffragist. Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Bronte. Like when Charlotte Bronte died,
02:27um, she received nothing. And yet when her husband died, he received an obituary in which he was referred
02:33to as Charlotte Bronte's husband. No way. Can you talk a little bit more about that and the role
02:37that obits play in how we honor cultural contributions? You know, you can literally
02:43tally up how many men versus women appear on a week-to-week basis. And the way that New York
02:49Times obituaries have traditionally been written is some editor or a group of editors determining that
02:55this person had had a social impact large enough that they warranted an obit. And it was sort of like
03:02making a determination about this person's work and their life's worth. And so I think it can actually
03:10be really reflective of the way that we have have seen race and gender over time. It's worth noting
03:16that Betty James named the Slinky and she got an obituary in the Times. And so did the woman who
03:21invented stovetop stuffing, Ruth Seams. Both are American treasures, do not get me wrong. But what
03:28does it say about our culture that those women were recognized and Ida B. Wells wasn't? She was the
03:33country's most famous black woman. Remember, she's the Beyonce of journalism. She pioneered reporting
03:40techniques that journalists still use today, like collecting data and using it to back up investigative
03:45reports. She was one of the most influential reporters despite being born into slavery.
03:52For a long time it was largely white men determining what had made a mark. One of the really fascinating
04:00discoveries as we were going through these archives was that until the early 1970s, if you were a woman
04:06who appeared in the pages of the New York Times, you were Mrs. Husband's name. And so all of these
04:13women
04:14and all of these photographs that we have down in our archives in our morgue, they're just Mrs.
04:19Husband's name. And so you don't actually know who they were in their own right. And all of these
04:24things were so telling about, you know, women's place in the world and who was running media at the
04:29time. Right. Yeah. So who was running media at the time? I mean, I think a lot of white men.
04:32Yeah. Who's
04:33running media now? I mean, still a lot of white men, but less white men. Right. Right. I think like
04:38everyone's pretty
04:39transparent about how we need to continue to do better. And we need to think about how we can
04:44incorporate more diversity into our pages about the living as well. What's fascinating to me about
04:51Overlooked is that it forced institutions like the New York Times to publicly take responsibility
04:56for their mistakes of the past and then actively correct them for the future. Like what other
05:01institution does that? Why do Overlooked now? I do feel like we are in a moment where we are looking
05:08back at how culture has been created and how culture has been interpreted and who are the voices
05:17that are explaining these cultural narratives. When you're barred from colleges and universities,
05:23banned from businesses and shut out of political parties, it's harder to make history. But talking to
05:29Jess reminded me that despite our very problematic history, there were so many women and women of color
05:34who broke through. Sure, the tables of power were and still are filled with men, but let's not continue
05:41to overlook the women that flipped them.
