Former New Yorker editor Tina Brown may be projecting just a bit in her Newsweek dispatch from the Hillary Clinton campaign. A Clinton campaigner in Ohio told Brown that there had been an "outpouring" of female support for the Democratic presidential candidate because of how "she was being treated by the media... we saw this as an attack of misogyny that was trying to beat her down." Brown, 55, then took this quote and extrapolated it into an argument about how women over 50 in America today are invisible, just like blacks in America 60 years ago:
It's a revolt that has been overdue for a while and has now found its focus in Clinton's candidacy. In 1952, Ralph Ellison's revelatory novel, "Invisible Man," nailed the experience of being black in America. In the relentless youth culture of the early 21st century, if you are 50 and female, the novel that's being written on your forehead every day is "Invisible Woman." All over the country there are vigorous, independent, self-liberated boomer women—women who possess all the management skills that come from raising families while holding down demanding jobs, women who have experience, enterprise and, among the empty nesters, a little financial independence, yet still find themselves steadfastly dissed and ignored. Advertisers don't want them. TV networks dump their older anchorwomen off the air. Hollywood studios refuse to write parts for them. Employers make it clear they'd prefer a "fresh (cheaper) face."
Even Oprah abandoned them when she opted for Obama. Am I alone in suspecting that TV's most powerful 54-year-old woman just might have endorsed him so fast for reasons of desirable viewer demographics as much as personal inspiration? Certainly, no TV diva in her 50s who values her ratings wants to be defined by the hot-flash cohort.
Of course, Clinton isn't the only one who gets less attention than Brown might like these days. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brown was a favorite topic of American media elites. She ran three prominent magazines, including Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and spent tens of millions of dollars starting a fourth, Talk, before it folded in 2002.
Since then, Brown briefly had a television show on CNBC from 2003-2005 and now lives the relatively obscure life of a book author and magazine writer.
How nice Brown would find it if both she and Clinton were to recapture, even exceed, the power and glory they had in the 1990s.
Newsweek: Hillary and the Invisible Women
