DEBORAH
BIELE EDITOR OF THE NOW
YORK TIMES
"All the news that would give The
Times fits."
I was born in New York City at the French Hospital in
1939. My parents were both
children of Jewish immigrants fleeing from oppression against Jews in
Russia and Hungary.
By my
grandparents’ standards the life they made for themselves here was a
god-sent gift; despite the fact that they worked till they dropped. I did not know my paternal
grandparents and on my mother’s side only my grandmother remained. For me she was the great refuge I
needed during my pre teen years.
She died when I was twenty-one.
After
WWII, my father and my mother’s sister started a small manufacturing
business making private label bras contracted for by the Peter Pan Company and
perhaps one or two other well known manufacturers. My grandmother and aunt worked as
the Foreladies of the business and my father was the treasurer/accountant
of this dismal pursuit.
Mother was working for Fadiman Associates (Clifton and Edwin
Fadiman) in mid town New York.
Every day she took a bus into the City from Bayonne, NJ where we
were all living in only a 2 bedroom apartment. I slept in a small bed in the same
room with my grandmother and aunt who shared a double bed. My grandmother used to store her
home made raisin wine and her home made dill pickles in huge glass jars
that were stored under my bed.
On wash days, my grandmother and my aunt Ann would pull a clothes
line across the room above the middle of the bed and hang their corsets on
the line along with other large, ugly ladies bloomers. Despite the cramped apartment and
corsets and bloomers hanging out to dry over my grandmother’s bed, it was
a place of love and security for me.
It was short lived.
After
my father came back home and moved into the 2nd bedroom with my
mother every one shifted their focus to him. My parents argued and my mother
argued with my grandmother and I felt lost in the cracks that were
separating all of us.
The
legacy of those years is that I learned to fend for myself. I was an angry and distrustful
little girl who found ways to escape through art and imagination. I was sullen and lonely with no
girl or anyone my age to play with except two little boys who always tried
to draw me into games of sexual exploitation that I successfully resisted
with my fists.
My
mother and father finally moved out of Bayonne to the Bronx, NY when I was
nine years old. Space, my
god, I finally had space, my own room, my own closet and chest of
drawers. My first couple of
years there were wonderfully happy.
I had friends who lived in the same apartment building and at
school, which was just across the street from my house.
The
cracks in the relationship between my mother and father widened and my
relationship with my father completely collapsed. By the time I was a junior in high
school I could not wait to get out of my parental home.
Therapy, a lot of therapy carried me through my early
twenties and I started to put my life into some kind of reasonable
order. By 1969 the news of
the feminist activists was reaching my ears. At this time, I was working with
my partner, Maria in an art studio business we began a year earlier and it
was doing well.
Though
later in life my sexuality evolved into a bi-sexual orientation, at the
time I considered myself a
lesbian. I was in
a relationship with Maria and
most of the women I met in the movement just seemed to accept us without
questioning us about our sexuality.
Maria and I joined NOW, New York and began going to meetings.
In 1970 Betty Friedan was planning
a national Strike for Equality on the 50th anniversary of the
19th Amendment and NYNOW”s committee led by Jacqui Ceballos,
was planning many of actions for that day in the city. Three weeks before the
26th a press
conference was held to announce Strike events. Bella Abzug, then running for
Congress, and the very popular Gloria Steinem, who had made it clear she
was a feminist, were invited in order to impress the press, which at that
time, was all male and mostly anti feminist . But Betty didn’t show… later
we learned that the Long Island Railroad was , as usual, late… so Jacqui Ceballos took charge and told the press several things women would
do on the 26th…including writing and circulating a newspaper written as though
women ran the world.
The press picked
up on it, and we had to make it happen. I volunteered to produce the newspaper and several NOW members, including the president, Ivy Bottini,
eagerly became the Editorial Committee, and we turned the fabulous NOW YORK TIMES
… now a collector’s
item. I was editor, Articles were written
tongue in cheek by
Dolores Alexander, Lee Walker, Betty Berry, Pat McQuillan, and other New York NOW members. On the 26th we handed the newspaper out to all
the writers at the New York Times building and later plastered it all over the city.
I
became the first chair of a new Women in the Media committee and the group
of women who came to the first meeting at my house became the core group
for a research project to demonstrate how women were negatively portrayed
in programming and also how biased the media was towards feminist
causes. We also were able to
prove that women were very underrepresented in jobs in television. We decided to focus our efforts on
WABC because we felt that
Roger Grimsby, the news anchor at the station demonstrated a particularly
egregious attitude towards feminists and feminism generally. We challenged WABC ‘s license with
the FCC and we WON! Their
license was denied and the station was forced to negotiate with a
committee to upgrade their programming and to come into compliance with
the hiring of more females in higher positions at the station.
Maria
and I separated in September of 1971. I was still in my early 30’s and I
had a secret desire to go back and finish my college degree. I moved out of the city to Stony
Brook, NY to go back to school.
I finished my undergrad degree and went straight into the PhD program there. I was in my third year of the PhD
program when I started interviewing for jobs as a professor. That’s when reality hit me, as the
kids say, upside the head. I
was not prepared to take a vow of poverty to teach sociology. That being the case, I abandoned
my pursuit of a doctorate and settled for my master’s degree. In 1980, the job market for a
woman with an advanced degree was a fertile field and I started a new
career as a social scientist.
I have never had regrets about leaving the art world. The last years of my research
career were spent at the University of the Miami School of Medicine doing
really interesting work on diseases that have a dramatic impact on
families like Type II diabetes.
I am retired now but I have a research idea in the pot and I hope
to have a proposal that will interest a publisher who has a track record
for putting out work in gender studies.