What is a woman’s story?

Lynsey Chutel

Despite being an industry driven by deadlines, the news has no sense of time. The only time is now.

The news as an industry is competitive and relentless. It is an industry that takes the details of the best and worst of humanity and repackages them into 90-second long broadcasts, or 750-word articles, measured in clicks and ratings. While it competes for the attention of a fickle audience, the industry makes many demands of the lives of the people who produce the news.

None of us, though, becomes a journalist to work in an industry. No, we’d like to think that our work falls somewhere between craft and civic duty. We guard journalism’s humanity by remembering that we are storytellers, recording the lives of real people, or as Ruth Weiss put it “learning history through everyday experiences.”[1] But as her own story tells us, it can come at a cost for women.

Weiss’ generation were the chroniclers of a significant moment in my continent’s history—when the region had shaken off the shackles of colonialism, but still dragged around its legacy, all while trying to create and govern a new freedom. Weiss spoke to liberation leaders who’d traded fatigues for suits, sitting down with the powers who would shape history. But she also rejected the idea that history is only for the powerful, when she recorded the stories of women in Zimbabwe, whose stories might otherwise have gotten lost in the grand narrative of Big Men and revolution.

In the news, women, especially African women, are often the objects of violence and oppression. They are very rarely the subject of the story, if only to illustrate some malady. That is why the portrayal of women in all their complexity and agency, and the decision to step away from rolling coverage for a slower more reflective project, is so important. Four decades after the publication of Ruth Weiss’s book The Women of Zimbabwe, we find ourselves in a news cycle that is still reckoning with reporting the full picture of what it means to be a woman. And often, it is women who tell those stories.

When women journalists tell women’s stories, they make a choice to bring women into the foreground, but also risk writing themselves into a corner as “the woman journalist.” Weiss had already built her credibility in financial and then political journalism, both beats dominated by men. The decision to turn to women’s stories was a show of independence yet even then, the difficulty she faced just getting her work published showed the financial and occupational risks she took. It was one of the many forks in the road that are unique to the paths of women journalists.

It’s a reminder that industries, even the media industry struggling to hold on to its humanity, are constructed by and for a patriarchal society. Women may be able to work in these industries, but they are no place for all of who we are. Weiss was constantly forced to choose between her life and her work, constantly maneuvering between the duality of the professional and the personal —the newsroom and the home, reporting and parenting, working and just trying to live.

“I was a little ‘mouse’ at home and a grown woman in the office or in business,” she said once.[2] After years of work — including writing under her husband’s byline — she finally landed the role of foreign correspondent for a major paper, the Financial Mail. It is so telling that one of her first responses was, “[N]ow I knew that I could look after my child and still do what I’d learnt to love — research and write stories.”[3]

If Weiss walked into a newsroom today, she would find more opportunities and fewer stark choices as a woman journalist, but there are still choices to be made.

Footnotes

[1] Ruth Weiss, Ein Lied ohne Musik (Glenhausen, Burckhardthaus-Laetare-Verlag 1981), p. 267.

[2] Angelika Burkhard, “Wir waren Linke ohne Parteibuch: Ein Interview mit Ruth Weiss,“ PädExtra (Mai 1994), p. 45.

[3] Ruth Weiss, “Some Friends, Many Acquaintances and Really Important People,” unpublished manuscript, 2010, p. 91. BAB PA.43 2012: 2.

Archival reference no: TPA.43 21, 157.