८ मार्च, २०१८

"Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky."

"The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones; even in the last two years, just over one in five of our subjects were female. Charlotte Brontë wrote 'Jane Eyre'; Emily Warren Roebling oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill; Madhubala transfixed Bollywood; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching. Yet all of their deaths went unremarked in our pages, until now...."

From "Overlooked/Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now, we're adding the stories of 15 remarkable women." (NYT). Among the omitted are Diane Arbus, who died in 1971. You'd think by 1971, the NYT would have caught up to the idea that women are people. But perhaps the fame of Diane Arbus was slow-developing, mostly post-death.  I was, at first, struck by the failure to do an obituary for Sylvia Plath, but she died in 1963, and I think it's pretty clear in that case that her fame arrived posthumously, perhaps because women's-movement proponents were working to elevate stories about women.

Yes, we the general public got to know Arbus because of a book of her work that came out in 1972 (a year after her death), and Sylvia Plath got big because of "The Bell Jar," which was published in 1971, 8 years after her death. And both Arbus and Plath committed suicide. As the NYT says in its late-arriving obituary for Plath, "Because the death was a suicide, Plath’s family did not much advertise it...." If someone who is not already quite famous commits suicide, I'm guessing, obituaries are rare, even for white men.

As for obituaries like the one for the man who invented Stove Top stuffing and the man who named the Slinky, they don't stand for the proposition that men don't have to do much to get a NYT obituary. They stand for the NYT practice of doing quirky obituaries for people with interestingly specific accomplishments. These are a wonderful sub-genre in the NYT, some of the most fun reading the newspaper offers. Don't diminish these obituaries as evidence of sex discrimination. I love those things, and they're often about women.

Here's an article from last year about a documentary about writing obituaries in the NYT:
The range of what The Times considers interesting enough for an obituary accounts for what has made those pages so captivating every day. Mr. Weber, Mr. Vitello and fellow obit writers Margalit Fox, William Grimes and Douglas Martin are as amusing about as they are amused by some of their subjects, whether it was Manson Whitlock, one of the last typewriter repairmen, who died at 96 in 2013, or Meadowlark Lemon, the seemingly indestructible clown prince of the Harlem Globetrotters, who died at 83 in 2015.... And one comes away from [the film] “Obit” grateful that the paper has at its disposal a team of humane, gifted people who make commemorating the dead a lively, lasting art.
The NYT should show respect to its own writers, and to the minor characters like Manson Whitlock, whose deaths were plucked from obscurity not because they were white men but because there was a subtle, lovely humanity at the NYT:
Over time he fixed more than 300,000 machines, tending manuals lovingly, electrics grudgingly and computers never.

“I don’t even know what a computer is,” Mr. Whitlock told The Yale Daily News, the student paper, in 2010. “I’ve heard about them a lot, but I don’t own one, and I don’t want one to own me.”...

The shop, near the Yale campus, attracted a tide of students and faculty members; the Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Robert Penn Warren, Archibald MacLeish and John Hersey; the Yale classicist Erich Segal, who wrote the best-selling novel “Love Story” on a Royal he bought there; and, on at least one occasion, President Gerald R. Ford.

In recent years, however, until he closed the shop in June, Mr. Whitlock was its entire staff, working with only a bust of Mark Twain for company....

“Has the typewriter remained in use because of me,” he wondered aloud in an interview with the Yale alumni magazine this year, “or am I still around because of the typewriter?”
IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandistein considered something that I'd thought of but dismissed as inconsistent with the text I was reading: Was it possible that "the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky" were women? Amazingly, they were!

"Betty James, Who Named the Slinky Toy, Is Dead at 90" — "Paging through a dictionary in 1944, Mrs. James put her finger on the word slinky because she thought it best described the sinuous and graceful movement and the soft sound of the expanding and contracting metal coil her husband, Richard, had fashioned. Mr. James was an engineer at a shipbuilding company in Philadelphia in 1943 when a torsion spring fell off a table and flipped end over end on a ship’s deck. 'I think I can make a toy out of this,' he told his wife."

"Ruth M. Siems, Inventor of Stuffing, Dies at 74" — "[I]t divorces the stuffing from the bird, sparing cooks the nasty business of having to root around in the clammy interior of an animal... [I]t frees stuffing from the yoke of Thanksgiving; it can be cooked and eaten on a moment's notice any day of the year."

Those links were right there in the quote I quoted in the title, but I didn't take the second it would take to make sure there were men. The implication that women are systematically slighted was so strong that I didn't bother. Why did they choose those 2 and hide their gender? Maybe initially they had intended to say that important women haven't received the recognition of a NYT obit and it's sexist and perverse to have honored women with trivial accomplishments in cute, feminine places — like toys and cooking. And then they decided against insulting themselves and those women but didn't bother replacing the examples of quirky obits with stories about white men like Manson Whitlock.

६८ टिप्पण्या:

Ralph L म्हणाले...

First it was the mean girls, now it's the dead ones.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

Who put the 'bitch' in 'obituary' ?

Crimso म्हणाले...

Great work, don't break your arms patting yourselves on the back. Now go back and rewrite all the stories of misdeeds by politicians when you buried (if not omitted) the fact that a person was a Democrat. Of the two exercises (obituaries vs. Name That Party), I think it is of much greater public interest and importance to know all relevant details about law-breaking politicians.

Fernandinande म्हणाले...

You'd think by 1971, the NYT would have caught up to the idea that women are people.

Oh, I dunno, that's a pretty tricky concept for unwoke people.

On the other hand, maybe the wimminfolk should've done something more interesting than taking pictures and writing poems - perhaps a little knitting?

like the one for the man who invented Stove Top stuffing

"Ruth M. Siems, a retired home economist whose best-known innovation will make its appearance, welcome or otherwise, in millions of homes tomorrow, died on Nov. 13 at her home in Newburgh, Ind. Ms. Siems, an inventor of Stove Top stuffing, was 74."

Shouting Thomas म्हणाले...

The same fucking story some feminist shill has been publishing with some regularity since for as long as I can remember.

Why keep pretending that re-running this shit is new, controversial and daring?

We've been kissing women's asses my entire life. I suspect that the same was true during my dad's life and my grandfathers' lives.

How much ass kissing is enough?

Ralph L म्हणाले...

"An" inventor? Is she like the poor woman who helped Watson and Crick, or is it like the NYT wedding announcements--a daughter of Power Man1 & Power Woman2 and Power Woman1 and Power Man3?

tcrosse म्हणाले...

Why wait until they die ? Preport their death with a prebituary.

Sebastian म्हणाले...

"caught up to the idea that women are people" They and we never knew! But we got woke! Yes, they are people! They all deserve an obituary, being people!

jwl म्हणाले...

Daily Telegraph obits are the best.

--------------

Roy Dommett, the aeronautical engineer, who has died aged 82, was Britain’s Chief Missile Scientist during the Cold War; as a release from the pressures of his top-secret job he also developed a lively interest in Morris dancing.

The author Francis Spufford, in his book Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2003), quotes another rocket scientist’s account of bumping into Dommett in Bristol: “These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder – and I said to my wife: 'Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is the brains behind Britain’s nuclear deterrent.’ ”

Michael K म्हणाले...

"Is she like the poor woman who helped Watson and Crick, "

Jim Watson stole the idea of the double helix from Rosalind Franklin who had done the x-ray crystallography that showed it. Watson's contribution to the concept was that. The rest was Francis Crick and Crick's wife who drew the diagram that appeared in their article in Nature.

Henry म्हणाले...

I like Crimso's idea.

What if the Times started over. Rewrite all the stories and fix the ellipses.

For example, Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. His New York Times obituary makes no mention of him inventing baseball. Yet a rewritten New York Times obituary would have to mention that other people promoted him as the inventor of baseball. Thus, baseball would enter into his obituary after all.

Another idea. There's nothing about the space-time continuum that says you have to wait until people die to write their obituaries. Or that they get only one.

fivewheels म्हणाले...

Typical Times illogic. Their two propositions are:

1) Women and minorities have been held back and discriminated against and denied opportunities to excel throughout history.

2) But despite this, there are totally equal numbers of accomplished women and minorities throughout history despite this massive societal oppression.

Pick a lane, people.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

Death is insensitive to the needs of women, minorities, and the LGBT community.

fivewheels म्हणाले...

So are 4 out of 5 obits now going to be about women so that parity will be achieved, or are they just going to have to admit that there's an achievement/noteworthiness gap between men and women (especially among people old enough to be passing away) that cannot be closed retroactively?

Henry म्हणाले...

Jim Watson stole the idea of the double helix from Rosalind Franklin who had done the x-ray crystallography that showed it.

Good grief. Watson used Franklin's x-rays to validate the theory that he and Crick were developing. Franklin was an experimentalist and Watson was arguably greedy for her data, but to claim that Watson stole the idea of the double-helix from Franklin makes as much historical sense as saying he stole the idea from Linus Pauling's triple-helix concept.

The story of DNA from Pauling's POV is fascinating. One fact is that Maurice Wilkins, Franklin's colleague, refused to share his data with Pauling.

Maurice Wilkins: [Pauling] wrote to me at one stage in, I think, the beginning of 1952, saying could we send him some x-ray diffraction photographs of DNA? I replied and I said "no, thank you very much for asking," or something, that "we need more time," we wanted to spend more time looking at them ourselves.

I don't feel ashamed of saying "we'd like more time, if you don't mind." But what I do know is that if he had come over in 1952 and visited our lab to look at those x-ray diffraction [photos], I'm sure I couldn't have resisted showing him every damn thing we had. Because it was this sort of god-like presence. It would be such an honor to show these things.


Wilkins did share Franklin's data with Watson, which is hardly surprising, given that he was lecturing about it in public as early as 1951.

MikeR म्हणाले...

"What do I want people to say at my eulogy? Hmm, I guess something like, 'Wait - I think he's moving!'"

Henry म्हणाले...

@Michael K -- I think we've had this argument before, in the Althouse' comments section.

the 4chan Guy who reads Althouse म्हणाले...

Lily did not know why it happened, or how, just when: this morning, 7:55 am. She strode into the lobby of the skyscraper where her office perched on the seventeenth floor, just past the public restrooms and the framed faded print of some art exhibition from twenty years previous, commemorating an artist she didn't know...

She used to come into the office early, sometimes even before six. But the dedication did not lead to the promotion she desired, so she returned to the eight-to-five, of which 'five' was more often 4:15...

The elevator was empty, save for the balding man in his forties who always exited on the fourteenth floor. He was a regular on the 7:55 elevator, and over the months Lily observed that his appearance gradually grew more unkempt, and he seemed to be gaining weight: evidently he did not get the promotion he desired, too...

In a court of law Lily would've have sworn she pressed the button for floor seventeen: she had been pushing that very same button for over eight years now: enter elevator, push 17, stare at the ceiling tiles, coffee cup in hand. The only difference she observed was that floor fourteen guy was gaining weight, and that his breathing was growing more audible...

In that court of law she would have sworn that she pushed 17, sworn it under oath, but when she exited she knew something wasn't right: the framed print of a teapot on a table in summery light was not there, and there was a janitorial closet where the restroom was supposed to be...

A woman in a floral dress passed by, and Lily held up a hand for her to pause.

"What floor am I on?" she asked.

"Floor Eighteen' the woman in the floral dress replied, then continued on her way down the hallway that obviously was not floor Seventeen..

The eighteenth floor? How did this happen? Lily stood by the closed elevator doors when a feeling passed over her like the shadow of a cloud over a meadow: this is not how her life was supposed to be, here on floor eighteen, none of this was how her life was supposed to be...

From: "Elevator Stories About Women", a compilation of women authors writing stories about experiences on elevators.

Maybe I read the Althouse tag wrong.

The Germans have a word for this.

MikeR म्हणाले...

Women and minorities hardest hit...

Eric the Fruit Bat म्हणाले...

I have yet to see any reason why I should ever read an obituary.

Henry म्हणाले...

I want the Times to start publishing quirky wedding stories and get some parity there.

Eric the Fruit Bat म्हणाले...

And would people please stop commenting "R.I.P." on the internet when someone dies?

It's stupid.

Henry म्हणाले...

When the Times dies and writes its own obituary is it a he or a she?

JOB म्हणाले...

Well, it’s like the poet says, white men die a thousand deaths with all their exits and entrances, but hell hath no fury like a woman scorned when she cannot taste the fame of death but once!

Or something like that...

JOB

MikeR म्हणाले...

"Jim Watson stole the idea of the double helix from Rosalind Franklin" Uh, no. The critical idea was how the two sets of base pairs fit together perfectly and matched, and Watson and Crick were the ones who had that idea. Everyone was searching for the idea that worked, but no one else thought of it, not Frankling, not Linus Pauling, no one else.
I have no doubt that others would have found it soon.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

The NYT has paid obits, if a girl wants to get in.

CJinPA म्हणाले...

These are a wonderful sub-genre in the NYT, some of the most fun reading the newspaper offers.

You've chronicled the War Against Fun previously. Add this to it. There will not be room for fun tales AND the passing of "Longtime Women's Advocate _______." Fun has to go.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

I have yet to see any reason why I should ever read an obituary.

You might get a laugh out of your own.

WK म्हणाले...

Perhaps the Times could pull up obituaries from 20years ago and interview the writers and ask if they would write them differently today. Sort of a reobituary.

Henry म्हणाले...

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And no Obitu'ry.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet
Feels far less time to me
The Times first told me of my death
In nineteen sev'ty three –

A Delayed ‘Obituary’

Sal म्हणाले...

There will probably be more Asian men in future obituaries. Like white men, they invent stuff.

AlbertAnonymous म्हणाले...

Good Lord! Reason number 17,005 for why I DO NOT read The NY Times.

Death and Taxes, right. But here we have “death” and “women and minorities hardest hit”

Ugh

I Have Misplaced My Pants म्हणाले...

mostly white

That shit is really starting to get under my skin.

Fernandinande म्हणाले...

and the man who named the Slinky

Betty James, Who Named the Slinky Toy, Is Dead at 90

Birches म्हणाले...

I cannot eyeroll hard enough.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

@Fernandistein

Thanks for looking that up on Stove Top stuffing. I considered the possibility that it was a woman and considered looking it up, but dismissed it because it doesn't fit the story.

Oh, and the Slinky too! Whoa! Seems like the had an idea about which women break through to the NYT obits and then they never stated it.

Tnaks.!

Mike (MJB Wolf) म्हणाले...

I think the NYT silence all these years speaks volumes about what they feel about the women in question. All this is just smoke and mirrors covering for their lack of sense earlier.

n.n म्हणाले...

Diversity or "color" judgment. One step forward. Two steps backward.

n.n म्हणाले...

The left is woke but drowsy, or perhaps drowning, in a sea of selective, opportunistic, and congruent choices.

Cath म्हणाले...

tcrosse wins the thread, not once but twice!

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"The NYT has paid obits, if a girl wants to get in."

The technical term is "death notice," not to be confused with "obituary." Please observe the distinction.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"I have yet to see any reason why I should ever read an obituary."

It's a special kind of news. It's news that the person died, but the facts that make the death newsworthy happened at various times in the past, so there's a randomness to the information that's an interesting break from the usual flow. And of course, it's also random that this particular person died just now. I like that by chance I'll be reading about things that happened in some decade I remember, some person I hadn't thought of in a long time floats to the top of the present-moment consciousness.

I don't have an "obituaries" tag, so it's hard to collect my posts that are based on obituaries, but if you could you could get a lot of detail about what's worth reading in the obituary genre (in my opinion).

Etienne म्हणाले...

Now that no one reads the paper anymore, they can drop crumbs on the street for homeless women to maybe buy a copy just to read about the hysterical women who croaked.

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

DEATH is called the great equalizer. No matter the score one runs up in the game of life, that is when God wins. Alexander the Great of Macedonia comes to mind. He ran up the score ( King of Macedonia, Pharoah of Egypt, King of Persia, King of Asia) and lost it all when he died at 32.

The ancient civilizations of the East tried to beat this by imposing greater suffering when taking life from a captive enemy. Rome either beheaded or crucified their targeted opponents. Today's MS13 likes to keep murder victims alive days in increasingly small pieces, as did the Japanese Army.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

I think obituaries get more interesting as you get older because the dip back into decades is to times you lived through. For example, Marty Allen died recently. If you watched Ed Sullivan in the 1960s, that's interesting. If not, you don't need to get up to speed on why anyone cared about him.

victoria म्हणाले...

I read the obituaries every single day. Started reading them when i was 12, San Francisco Chronicle. I have the NYT obituaries bookmarked on firefox. It is essential for me to start my day out looking at who died. Why? Beats me. I have always loved them and the lyrical quality to well written obits. Spoken like a true journalism major.


Vicki from Pasadena

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

Obits are also the final gossip about people unless some one writes a book. My Great Uncle read them every day to look for any of the people he had known, after his retirement from 30 years as Bishop of the Diocese of Bethlehem.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

Hello Dere.

JMW Turner म्हणाले...

Quotas!

hombre म्हणाले...

Considering the likelihood that the predominance of white males in NYT obituaries has nothing to do with prejudicial discrimination may cause cognitive dissonance in some people.

BarrySanders20 म्हणाले...

"I have yet to see any reason why I should ever read an obituary."

"It's a special kind of news. It's news that the person died, but the facts that make the death newsworthy happened at various times in the past, so there's a randomness to the information that's an interesting break from the usual flow."

One of the funniest books I have read recently is Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, which so happens to be available through the Althouse portal to the netherworld called Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Steyns-Passing-Parade-Appreciations-ebook/dp/B00JSFVNGS

I read the first line or so of the dozens of death notices just long enough to see the description of how people's loved ones describe their death: Hazel died, Harold passed away, Jane went to the Lord, Ethel went to heaven, Gladys is reunited with her husband Bud, Art was 99, Jane died peacefully, Mary died peacefully surrounded by her family, Tom went to the great pub in the sky . . .

JAORE म्हणाले...

Worst obit I ever read was Time magazine on Groucho Marks. It read something like, Groucho Marks, Jewish comedian dies, age XX.

He had the bad luck (or poor timing, a Cardinal Sin for a comedian if ever there was one) to die the same week as Elvis. Elvis got a bunch of pages. Understandable, but the proportions were (IMO) way off.

I wrote a letter expressing dismay. Time in a shocking lack of justice printed one from Woody A. and Dick Cavett (sp?).

rcocean म्हणाले...

I'm looking forward to reading John McCain's obituary. Hopefully, it will be soon.

No doubt the title will be:

"Maverick" Senator beloved by Democrats and the MSM dead at 81.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

I read a death notice once which began by saying that the deceased had gone to join God and his wife. It was news to me that God had a wife, but it could explain a number of things that puzzled me about Him.

Char Char Binks, Esq. म्हणाले...

Why do people only say RIP after someone dies? Why not say it while they can still appreciate it?

RIP to all of you, especially Eric the Fruit Bat!

Ralph L म्हणाले...

We've missed the obvious solution to the obit diversity chasm. We need to bump off lots of notable women. Now where shall we begin? Hmmm.

Michael K म्हणाले...

osse said...
I have yet to see any reason why I should ever read an obituary.

You might get a laugh out of your own.


Yogi Berra said, "If you don't go to people;'s funerals, why would you expect them to come to your own?"

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

Jeez Louise- layers and layers and layers of fact checkers at The Gray Lady, and they miss the details of Stove Top Stuffing and the Slinky?

Levi Starks म्हणाले...

When reading this blog post the first, and really only question/response I have is, will Ann Althouse receive the notoriety of a NYT obituary?

fivewheels म्हणाले...

Well the wedding was in there, so I suppose the obit someday will be too.

Unfortunately, now we won't know if it was because of obituary affirmative action or not.

Ralph L म्हणाले...

WaPo charges a fortune for death notices but runs obits for free--but on their schedule.

We wanted to announce the sudden demise of the Step-Monster to all my parents' friends that she'd driven away, but she wasn't worth the money.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

will Ann Althouse receive the notoriety of a NYT obituary?

Obituaries of likely subjects are pre-written for the files, to be updated as events demand. Which is why a person's own obituary could make interesting reading, like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

One day a person will be revived from the dead by an auto-correct error in their obituary.

Ambrose म्हणाले...

If a publication began to publish a disproportionately large number of obits for women and people of color, might they be accused of celebrating their deaths?

TML म्हणाले...

Only obits worth reading are the Economist's

Freeman Hunt म्हणाले...

Unless they start printing obituaries for great stay-at-home mothers and teachers and nurses who haven't done anything in the public eye, there will always be a disproportionate number of men because women fill these roles in disproportionate numbers.

mtrobertslaw म्हणाले...

What exactly did Sylvia Plath contribute to the human condition?

readering म्हणाले...

"quirky obituaries for people with interestingly specific accomplishments"

For a fine example read the obit now up on Paul Magriel, famous as backgammon player and writer in seventies and eighties. Great ending.