Women Speaking Up in the Nation’s Newspapers

We’ve already talked about how writing can be good for you, but Catherine Orenstein has taken it to the next level. She’s training women to write opinion pieces and get them published in newspapers. So not only are you getting the benefits of writing down your thoughts and ideas, but you’re gaining the satisfaction of seeing them in print and potentially affecting a lot of lives.

Uproars over the sparse numbers of women in newspapers, or on news programs, in magazines, and on best-seller lists regularly erupt every couple of years. A doozy occurred in 2005, after the liberal commentator Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley, then editor of The Los Angeles Times’s opinion pages, got into a nasty scuffle over the lack of female columnists. That dustup is what motivated Ms. Orenstein to take her op-ed show on the road, which she has done with support from the Woodhull Institute, an ethics and leadership group for women.

“It’s a teachable form,” Ms. Orenstein said recently over coffee and eggs. “It’s not like writing Hemingway. You show people the basics of a good argument, what constitutes good evidence, what’s a news hook, what’s the etiquette of a pitch.”

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Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King