By GLORIA STEINEM

Katharine Graham left us as unexpectedly as she arrived. A woman raised mainly to be the wife of a powerful man, she responded to widowhood by becoming a publisher who helped end a war and bring down a presidency. ...

On the face of it, we were unlikely friends, yet she credited me with introducing her to feminism. The truth was that she had her own rage at the injustice she had experienced...

I know she was discouraged by such slights as her exclusion from "All the President's Men," the film that shaped the public imagination of the Watergate investigation. In fact, the reporting on Watergate could not have gone forward without her ultimate approval, her bravery in jeopardizing the federal licenses of the radio stations her company also owned and her personal initiative in taking home the reporters' notes every night, so that if someone was going to be served with a subpoena, she would be the one....

No one can describe better than she has done in "Personal History," her autobiography, the upbringing and the era that taught her to be more ornament than instrument, or the husband who was more welcomed into her family's journalistic empire than she herself, though she had more experience as a journalist. I hope every reader of this article, every journalist, every student of women's history, will meet the woman who lives in the book's pages and recognize the parallels today. We are lucky that she left such an honest testament behind. [Graham won a Pulitzer Prize for it at 80.]

But I also want others to know a woman who had her own misgivings about the unladylike ways of the women's movement yet gave the first seed money for Ms. Magazine, a woman who was all the more admirable for conquering her own shyness and uncertainty. Although her place in history is secure, we will miss some of her power to instruct and inspire if we don't know the price she paid.

As a transitional woman, with all the pain and late blooming that implies, Katharine Graham helped bring us out of a very different past. Because we are all in transition to an equality no one has ever known, she will be a touchstone for the future.

Gloria Steinem is a writer and consulting editor of Ms. magazine.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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Read this, for more on Kay Graham's life & work (M. Berger's article in the NY Times) - fascinating!
Back to Dr. Hobson's website at Adelphi University.
Go here, for more on women's issues