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Book Review: Washington’s Golden Age
Aug. 6th, 2018 07:49 amJoseph Dalton is Hope Ridings Miller’s grand-nephew, and his book Washington’s Golden Age: Hope Ridings Miller, the Society Beat, and the Rise of Women Journalists has both the weaknesses and the strengths that one might expect from a history that is also a family memoir. On the weakness side, Dalton’s prose is pedestrian at best, and he has a tendency to dwell on family minutia that is not always interesting to a wider audience. This is particularly evident in the first chapter about Miller’s early life; I nearly gave up the book.
But Dalton’s personal relationship with Hope (as he always calls her) is also a great strength, because he’s writing about someone he knew and loves, which results in a richer and more personal portrait of her. He does such a good job evoking Hope’s personality, and picks excerpts from her writing so skillfully, that by the end of the book I wanted to rush out and read at least one of her books. (I’m gunning for Embassy Row: The Life and Times of Diplomatic Washington, but Scandals in the Highest Office wouldn’t go amiss.)
The book is also particularly strong in its evocation of Washington’s women press corps between the thirties and the early sixties. Did you know that there were so many female reporters in DC at that time that they had their own press club - which every year put on a musical revue that parodied current events in Washington? Now that’s a movie waiting to happen!
Seriously, though, it has everything. Music, dance, ravishing 1930s fashions, a panoply of vibrant female characters (and every possible excuse to make them all talk like the cast of His Girl Friday: they’re newspaper reporters!), and alongside the glitz and the humor, a chance to say something about gender in America, about the workings of politics, about the way that women’s work is assumed to lack value - oh, you could use this to explore all sorts of themes.
For the most part Dalton avoids commenting on political or societal issues, but on this last subject he does have a few tart words. “Society editors,” he notes, “get little more than a passing aside in the histories of the press. Even the studies of women in journalism move quickly to expound about the pioneering political reporters, those who had ‘real jobs.’” Sexism pops up even in books that are trying to fight sexism! I knew this, but had not thought about this particular facet of it.
But Dalton’s personal relationship with Hope (as he always calls her) is also a great strength, because he’s writing about someone he knew and loves, which results in a richer and more personal portrait of her. He does such a good job evoking Hope’s personality, and picks excerpts from her writing so skillfully, that by the end of the book I wanted to rush out and read at least one of her books. (I’m gunning for Embassy Row: The Life and Times of Diplomatic Washington, but Scandals in the Highest Office wouldn’t go amiss.)
The book is also particularly strong in its evocation of Washington’s women press corps between the thirties and the early sixties. Did you know that there were so many female reporters in DC at that time that they had their own press club - which every year put on a musical revue that parodied current events in Washington? Now that’s a movie waiting to happen!
Seriously, though, it has everything. Music, dance, ravishing 1930s fashions, a panoply of vibrant female characters (and every possible excuse to make them all talk like the cast of His Girl Friday: they’re newspaper reporters!), and alongside the glitz and the humor, a chance to say something about gender in America, about the workings of politics, about the way that women’s work is assumed to lack value - oh, you could use this to explore all sorts of themes.
For the most part Dalton avoids commenting on political or societal issues, but on this last subject he does have a few tart words. “Society editors,” he notes, “get little more than a passing aside in the histories of the press. Even the studies of women in journalism move quickly to expound about the pioneering political reporters, those who had ‘real jobs.’” Sexism pops up even in books that are trying to fight sexism! I knew this, but had not thought about this particular facet of it.
