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INTRODUCTION
 
From its beginnings in March, 1977, the “Hers” column, written by fifty-two women to date, has had many different voices: serious, funny, factual, nostalgic, reportorial, inward-looking. It has offered brief but intense insights into whatever each author, in eleven or twelve hundred words, most wanted to tell readers. And it has evolved, from a time when writing about the pain of a divorce or the insult of salary discrimination seemed a kind of path-breaking, to the present, so attuned to the enormous changes in women’s roles and expectations that have occurred in the last decade. As a society, in that same stretch of time, we have learned to talk much more freely about what’s bothering us. So it is hard today to remember how new these women’s voices sounded in 1977, particularly in the pages of a daily newspaper.
 
The “Hers” column was created as a forum for women to write, once a week for several weeks, about whatever they chose to. From the first, “Hers” columnists have spoken their minds. They continue to do so, with a candor and directness that have engaged readers in a special way.
 
Whether the subject being addressed is geriatric sex, or why girls must study mathematics, or the saga of being a single parent, or a recollection of Fulton Sheen, the audience keeps reading. When the voice at the breakfast table is compelling enough, a dialogue between reader and writer often ensues. It may be a purely interiorized conversation, or it may inspire clipping, a phone call, a letter. It is this sense of encountering the writer, of hearing from her in person, of caring about what she cares about, that is the special appeal of “Hers.” Columnists have been overwhelmed at the strong reaction they have received from readers, person to person, if they live in New York, and in letters from around the country.
 
Betty Rollin, the television journalist and writer, observed of the response to her columns, “When you write about yourself honestly, you are, it seems, writing about other people too. At least that’s what they tell you. Over and over they let you know that you are speaking for them. It makes you glad you exposed yourself.” In response to Rollins’ column on women’s self-doubt and fear of failure, one reader wrote, “I practically scalded my tongue and fell out of my chair as your words on self-doubt leapt off the page.”
 
“People I didn’t know would come up to me and recite chapter and verse what I had said in a column,” said Letty Pogrebin. “But what was most amazing was the length and intensity of the letters.”
 
Men correspond as often as women. Perri Klass, writing about her tendency to cry under pressure in medical school, received the following letter:
 
“Dear Perri, I have just put down the Thursday Times to write this. Your piece in the ‘Hers’ column is why.… Crying, like laughing, needs no justification.
 
“In 1967 I sat in a tent one night in Tay Ninh, Vietnam, near the Cambodian border, and listened to a record I had never heard before. It was Buffy Sainte-Marie singing ‘The Universal Soldier.’ Some of the words went ‘He’s the one who lends his body as a weapon of the war, and without him all the killing can’t go on.’ I sat there and cried like a baby.…
 
“When I see news film of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the tears return. I usually fight them back. I know that I am saving them, so that some day, when, if, I find myself in the presence of that monument, I can cry, unchecked, for all those people, their loved ones, this nation, this world, and for myself. I look forward to that moment. (signed) Mike Sheller”
 
After recounting her problems caring for an aging but essential farm truck, Sue Hubbell received detailed instructions from a helpful reader on truck and car maintenance, including a nine-point guide to saving gas, clutch and the automatic transmission.
 
Nor is reaction limited to personal pieces. Covering current issues from teenagers and birth control to the exclusion of women from men’s professional clubs, Susan Jacoby, who ignored my suggestion to unlist her Manhattan telephone when she was writing the column, regularly spent a portion of her Thursdays on the phone with readers who wanted to discuss her latest essay.
 
A meeting of the minds, of course, is not necessarily the rule. Among the columns sparking opinionated discussion were Joyce Maynard’s impassioned defense of the nonworking mother and Alice Roller’s pieces on living alone in winter-remote Nantucket.
 
 
Whether a particular author elicits disagreement, indifference or deep attachment (often some of each, depending on the reader), as a group the “Hers” columnists have provided a window into the special concerns of dozens of intelligent and articulate contemporary women. As the novelist and “Hers” columnist A. G. Mojtabai wrote to me recently, “I have always resisted the label ‘woman writer.’ And I have been consistently opposed to the notion that women write out of a life experience separate and distinct from that of men. When I write, I think of myself as anyone—man, woman, child, of any race or condition.
 
“In the process of writing the column, however, I reminded myself that I did have some experiences as a woman that men have not had. (I don’t, for a moment, claim that a male writer, with the talent and the will, couldn’t imaginatively create such an experience.) Here it was—waiting simply for me to pick it up, to acknowledge it as my own. It required no effort for me to describe the experience of, say, putting on a veil [this page–this page]. In doing so, I was reminded of my deep linkage with women everywhere.”
 
The voices of women—their diversity, their richness, their contradictions—are the life of this column and this book. A beekeeper writes from her small farm in the Ozarks (Sue Hubbell); a freelance writer from her urban desmesne of Queens (Elin Schoen). An Indian journalist (Anees Jung) writes half a world away from a feminist in Fort Wayne, Indiana (Mary Kay Blakely), or an author in Hawaii (Maxine Hong Kingston). One columnist is a professor at Wesleyan (Phyllis Rose), another an editor at Ms. magazine (Letty Pogrebin). The worldly resident of Hollywood and London (Jill Robinson) shares space with the sixth-grade teacher in Washington, D.C. (Faye Moskowitz). So far, the youngest columnist has been twenty-six years old (Perri Klass), the oldest, sixty-seven (June Wilson).
 
Separately, they have taken “Hers” in many different directions. The most powerful voices either have conveyed a larger vision—a humane and intelligent concern for the problems and contradictions of our society and the women in it—or have written about their own lives with an intimacy that approaches daring—the deeply revealing, as opposed to the confessional. Such pieces, the best of them, move us invisibly from the particular to the general. In a single Cambodian child we know the lot of all Southeast Asia’s disinherited children; in a mother’s farewell to a son who will not return, we remember our own wounds.
 
Together these women have devised a communal creation, a patchwork quilt of sorts, in bright and somber colors, piece after piece carefully worked and crafted. Stepping back to look for overall patterns may reveal something about the concerns of women today.
 
As editor of the “Hers” column, initially as editor of The New York Times Home Section, then as head of the department made up of the Home and Living sections and the Style pages, I have often been asked how columnists are chosen. Tempting as it would be to put forward a highly schematic system, the reality has been made up of chance, serendipity, and a few last-minute emergencies, as well as a substantial amount of “ideal method” advance planning.
 
Names have been suggested by colleagues, others by my own reading. I have approached well-known writers such as Gail Sheehy, Gail Godwin, Joyce Maynard, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Some distinguished writers have turned me down because they had current commitments; some simply said no. First books have come to me; this is the way I encountered Laura Cunningham, Mary-Lou Weisman, and others. Agents have sent in material; and an enormous amount of unsolicited submissions have come in. These are all read eventually, and a few have yielded columnists. Intangibles of juxtaposition and contrast also play a part in choosing writers: light after very serious, topical after personal, a Midwesterner after many New Yorkers.
 
Once a colleague came into my office with the enormous manuscript of an unpublished novel written by her cousin and asked me, with an expression of false innocence, if I would “look at it”; I could hardly lift it. It languished for a year. One Saturday, catching up on paperwork, I read it. To my delight, and some embarrassment, it was a fine piece of writing; I immediately signed up the author, Deirdre Levinson, for the column.
 
Good writing has been the governing principle in choosing columnists, and though many combine writing with another career, the overwhelming majority have been professional writers. Without exception, they have found the essay form a challenge, and, ultimately, a delight. Gail Godwin said the pieces were “an unforeseen pleasure for me to write. I could have gone on forever. There was something about that length—it just suited the thoughts as they came out.” The essay, it seems, still works its spell on both writer and reader.
 
The “Hers” column came about when A. M. Rosenthal, the executive editor of The Times, attended a party in New York shortly after the first Living Section came out in November, 1976. Among the guests were some leading feminists, whose response to the new section was warm.
 
One of them, the author Lois Gould, said that what was really needed was a place in The Times that would be a special forum for women. At the time, most of what was published in newspapers was written almost exclusively from a male point of view.
 
The Home Section was then being planned, and Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb, deputy managing editor of The Times and Rosenthal’s principal collaborator on the new sections, decided to create such a forum in its pages. Rosenthal foresaw a column different from the typical “women’s column,” one that would take a fresh approach to women’s issues and women’s lives. It would be written for men as well as women. “I didn’t think of it as a column for women,” said Rosenthal. “I thought of it as a column by women.” Authorship would rotate periodically among writers not on The Times’ staff. Fittingly, Lois Gould, who took part in some of the initial discussions, was the first columnist.
 
Since that time, in working with fifty-two columnists, I have been amazed by the unending freshness of their writing, and by the new talent that keeps coming to hand. It seems a justifiable fear that one day a column like this one will double back and start feeding on itself. So far, my experience has been the opposite; I sometimes feel that a small standing army of women writers has marshalled itself across the land, waiting for a trumpet to sound. Perhaps women simply have more to say than men these days—perhaps because more is happening to them. That “more” has been progress for women, in many areas, and it has also been dispiriting reverses.
 
But to receive columns from a twenty-six-year-old medical-school student at Harvard, who has a baby but nonetheless finds time to write about why she will be different from the male doctors around her, is to know change has occurred.
 
Although certain concerns of women have received seemingly endless coverage in recent years—the difficulty of juggling children and career, for example—change will create new concerns, or new versions of old concerns. And columnists, of course, will go back to the perennial subjects, too. These oft-told tales—of death, love, loneliness, divorce—surprise us even today by the power of their reincarnations in the hands of superb writers; several authors have written their strongest pieces about the death of a parent. As an editor, however, I strive for a balance between these timeless subjects and pieces that have current issues as a starting point. There is always a place, too, for the inspired digression, the musings of a narrator who hooks us with the lure of a truly idiosyncratic sensibility.
 
In a letter of April, 1981, to Arthur O. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, a reader in Chicago wrote to suggest that a “Hers” collection be published: “The overall content is interesting, beautiful, moving and relevant to human history in terms of the modern feminine sensibility; they should not be lost.” Here is her book.
 
I am grateful to A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb for their continuing support and interest in “Hers,” and to my colleague Dona Guimaraes, editor of the Home Section, for all that she has done in connection with the column. Above all, I want to thank the writers who have created the column and this book.
 
N. R. N.
January, 1985