Honoring Molly

By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser

If someone asked me when I was a little girl what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wouldn’t have answered “kick-ass op-ed writer.” In fact, I wanted to teach deaf people, and my grandmother, Helen Buttenwieser, herself a pioneering lawyer, told me I was too young to know what I wanted to do. Given that she’d done something outrageous in terms of career, you’d think she’d have wanted to encourage her granddaughters (in fact, although liberal, she didn’t consider herself a feminist). I
must have been about eight at the time. I’d read all about Helen Keller, and darn it, I knew. It turned out that a couple of years later I learned sign language and that I spent much of middle school and high school volunteering at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf. I think I actually did what I set out to do.

A couple of years back, a flurry of media frenzy over the paucity of female op-ed writers kicked up. By then, I’d begun to write some opinion pieces of my own, and I took those columns—and the numbers themselves, which were in the first two months of 2005, 19.5 percent of op-ed pieces at the Los Angeles Times written by women, 16.9 percent at the New York Times and 10.4 percent at The Washington Post—as a
challenge, a call to pen-mightier-than-sword arms. That, I thought to myself, is what I want to do; I want to do my part to raise the number of women op-ed writers, at least by one.

I came to this goal honestly. Besides wanting to teach the deaf, as a child I loved to make up stories and to read stories. Writer flitted in and out of favor as potential work. And political activism was in my blood. I organized from forever: shows with the cousins, children’s rights initiatives in elementary school, everything from protests to a support group for children of divorce to blood drives in high school, reproductive rights work in college and throughout my twenties, and on... The writer and the organizer/activist come together into one when writing opinion pieces.

The opinionated women writers I most admire are those who bring themselves into their work, melding belief and voice and life experience, including Anna Quindlen, Ellen Goodman, Katha Pollitt, and of course Molly Ivins.

Losing Molly Ivins is to hear only silence where once was a booming voice, one that championed women and peace and justice and common sense and salty wisdom and never ignored the power of humor to help call it like you see it. The world’s just not as good without her. But she inspired many of us, and with our unique voices—mine’s less salty—I believe that she encouraged us to assert our strong female voices. I certainly feel additional urgency to use mine.