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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Columnist Never Short Of Insights

Stephanie Hoo San Jose Mercury News

Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman has traded the East Coast and its knee-high snowdrifts for balmy, palmy Palo Alto this winter, teaching journalism at Stanford University for a quarter.

“Winter quarter?” she asked incredulously. “They call this winter?”

Goodman, 54, describes her generation of working women as having been “on the cutting edge of change.” She began her career at Newsweek magazine in 1963, at a time when sex discrimination was still legal. She worked there as a researcher because only men were allowed to be reporters.

Now a prize-winning columnist with a national following, Goodman applies the ideas of the women’s movement to current events, writing about social issues such as equality, children and welfare.

On a recent Thursday in her Stanford office, Goodman offered a sample of her trademark insight.

Q. One of the courses you’re teaching is a seminar on covering the 1996 campaign. What, for you, are the most pressing issues of this campaign?

A. I think the issues on people’s minds are issues of a disintegrating sense of well-being - issues of the economy. I mean, look around here - issues of job loss. AT&T firing 30,000 people. The company that used to be called “Ma” Bell - not much of a family at work, is there? And that sense of economic insecurity combined with what we have loosely titled issues of values.

Q. What do you think of how Hillary Clinton is being treated with regards to Whitewater?

A. I think she’s getting battered left and right. My niece calls this Wifegate.

What person has been following Whitewater? They don’t know where it is, let alone what it is. So all they are getting is this impression emanating out of Washington that she did something (wrong).

She has been a very controversial figure because she has been a surrogate for how people feel about changing women’s roles. During the 1992 campaign, she was the lightning rod for all of this anger, anxiety, interest about women. It was directed at her rather than at, say, Dianne Feinstein.

She really took all of that heat and the rest of them didn’t take that heat. It was a good Year of the Woman; it was a lousy Year of the Wife.

Q. You wrote in a column last fall that the current welfare reform debate marks the end of the long cultural debate about motherhood: Both sides agree that a mother’s place is in the work force, that work equals worth, that when poor women stay home with the children they are not pulling their weight in society. What do you think is most to blame for this dramatic change in thinking?

A. Not to blame. It’s just what’s changed. What has changed is the norm for women’s lives. The norm is that you’re going to have to take care of yourself and your family, that you’re going to be balancing work and family. …

It’s everything from not being able to get a plumber to your house when you’re actually home, to not being able to make an appointment with your kid’s teacher because the hours are when you’re at work, to the incredible expanding work hours where anybody working 35 hours a week now is considered to be working “mommy hours.” Everything is still geared to a one-worker family when life has changed enormously.

Q. What are some ways society and government should address these changes?

A. Just take a couple of funny statistics that pop up. When do girls get pregnant? I mean, literally, what time of day? They get pregnant in the afternoon. And when do teenage boys get in trouble? They get in trouble in the late afternoon. So, what do you do? You can have elaborate, judgmental programs directed at teenage girls. You can say we’re going to get tough with teenage boys and we’re going to treat them all as adults in the courtroom. Or you could say, hmm, gee whiz, 3 to 6 (p.m.). Maybe if we gave them something to do, we kept them in school, we gave them sports and cold showers, and we kept them busy until their parents were home, maybe that would be a good idea.