If I had daughters, I might be inclined to keep them away from newspapers’ obituary sections. Perhaps someday the obituaries of pioneering women scientists, authors, and other professionals will read no differently than those of their male peers, but we’re clearly not there yet.
Case in point: the sexism permeating a recent obituary of celebrated Australian author Colleen McCullough. McCullough penned the blockbuster 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds, and, by the way, also spent years working as a neurophysiologist at Yale University. Not too shabby, right?
Here are the first few lines of her obituary, as published in The Australian newspaper.
COLLEEN McCullough, Australia’s best selling author, was a charmer. Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless, a woman of wit and warmth. In one interview, she said: “I’ve never been into clothes or figure and the interesting thing is I never had any trouble attracting men.”
Oy vey.
How to even begin unpacking this one?
Indulge me if you will, but I think it’s useful to first take a short detour into some Obituary Journalism 101.
There’s a trick to writing a compelling obituary. I learned it years ago, at a newspaper internship that included a few, ahem, glamorous shifts on the obit desk. The trick is this: you don’t start it by declaring the deceased’s age and place of death. That’s just dull.
Instead, you lead with an interesting detail from the person’s life, the more surprising, the better. Your lead, ideally, should do something to reveal the fascinating complexity of the human being who just left the planet. For instance, “Joe Smith, a mild-mannered accountant, lived a double life that would have surprised some of his clients: while he quietly crunched numbers by day, he rocked the house by night as the lead singer of the death metal band Satan’s Deduction.”
See? Wouldn’t you want to read that obituary? I’m not saying that accountants can’t make great heavy metal rockers, but you typically wouldn’t associate the buttoned-up profession with nose piercings, skull T-shirts, and smashed Stratocasters. Such cognitive dissonance in an opening paragraph can draw in a reader as effectively as the most click-baity headline.
Now back to the McCullough obit: If the unnamed author — his or her byline doesn’t appear on the existing online obituary — had indeed hoped to rely on cognitive dissonance to craft a compelling lead, he or she failed miserably. Are readers supposed to be dumbfounded by the idea that a woman can be plain and overweight and yet still witty and warm? Are we to be similarly flabbergasted by the concept that such a creature was attractive to the opposite sex?
If your answer to these questions is “yes” then I can only assume that your opinions are informed by a heinous system of beliefs that emphasizes a woman’s physical appearance as more important than all her other qualities. In other words, you’re pretty sexist, dude.
You can forgive the obituary writer just a little bit — in her quote, McCullough herself called it “interesting” that, despite her lack of interest in fashion “or figure,” men still came calling. Then again, given her known wit, McCullough may have very well been speaking sarcastically. In any case, you could argue that it’s notable that McCullough made that comment at all … so her quote, on its own, would have merited inclusion somewhere lower down in the obituary.
But the writer saw fit, instead, to include that line and observations about McCullough’s attractiveness at the top. Would the obituary of a male author and scientist also give top billing to information about his body type and his success with the ladies? Surely, somewhere in McCullough’s storied life, an entertaining anecdote could have been found to lead the article — one that didn’t reduce a bestselling novelist and accomplished scientist to just a fat chick who could, gasp, still get guys!
Sadly, as critics have noted, this isn’t the first time a woman’s accomplishments were overshadowed by sexist overtones in an obituary. Rocket scientist Yvonne Brill was infamously heralded in the first sentence of a New York Times obituary as making “a mean beef stroganoff” and being a devoted wife and mother. (That obituary’s first paragraph was later edited following heavy criticism.)
I would argue that the Times‘ particular faux pas wasn’t quite as bad as The Australian’s lousy lead. We are now primed to expect that a woman will rarely be successful in both her career and her home life. The fact that Brill excelled in both spheres would, then, prove provocative. But, again, I wish the writer had found a different, surprising piece of information — one that didn’t telegraph the idea that a woman’s role within a family is somehow more significant to the world at large than even the most momentous professional achievements.
What message do such obituaries send to young girls? That it doesn’t matter whether you cure cancer or broker peace in the Middle East, all anyone cares about is what you looked like, whether you found a husband, and how well you cooked for your progeny?
If this continues to be the case for decades to come, then I’d like to offer some advance help to whichever beleaguered soul might someday be saddled with writing my obituary: I make a fantastic meatloaf.
You’re welcome.
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