Heated Conversations

After years of feminist pressure to integrate the bylines of America's journals and newspapers of record, women's opinion pieces and political commentary remain scarce. Flora Lewis and Elizabeth Drew were notable forerunners, but the real change came with the women who broke into print in the late 1980s and 1990s: a group that included Barbara Ehrenreich, Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Ellen Goodman, and Katha Pollitt. To varying degrees, they transformed the voice of the pundit on high to an identifiably female one, routinely treating "women's" issues, setting up confiding relationships with readers, and using feminist tartness as a weapon of choice when it came to deflating and skewering enemies.