“STEVE, THERE’S AN important story developing in Israel and I haven’t seen anything about it on television.”
It was always a good idea to emphasize the exclusive nature of a proposed story to the executive producer of NBC’s The Today Show.
“It’s a good story for a Woman to Woman segment—women on both sides, Israelis and Arabs, defying the blockade to work together. I’d like to go to Israel and meet them. I can use an NBC news crew in the region.”
He stared at me incredulously. “What do you know about the Middle East?”
I had to admit, not much—but I continued to try to convince him to give me permission to go and report this story. It was a bold request, given that I had never reported an international story and never even traveled to the region, where there were news reports at the time of violence in the streets.
“No. Not a good idea,” he said, standing to clearly end the meeting. “There’s plenty of real news about Israel every night on the Nightly News. We have experienced foreign correspondents on the ground, and if these women are an important story, those guys will cover it.”
Dismissed. In a toxic mixture of anger and disappointment, I called my producer, Coby Atlas, whom I had already convinced that this could be a compelling segment for Woman to Woman on Today, the weekly conversations I produced and hosted. “I’m going to pursue the story anyway,” I heard myself saying. “I’m going to Israel.”
I could make such a decision much more easily at this point in my life because Mark was away at school and my turbulent and unsatisfying personal relationship was on a hiatus. The appeal of an adventure that included faraway travel and new experiences was undeniable; I booked my first flight to Tel Aviv.
MY FIRST VIEW of Jerusalem will stay with me as a visual and emotional memory forever. Driving in at sunset is to witness the walls turn to a soft pink glow. Inside those walls, the sounds of prayers rise from the various synagogues, mosques, and Greek Orthodox and Catholic churches on nearly every narrow, crowded block.
I couldn’t have been farther from my roots, but I felt a familiarity that didn’t make sense, given that everything around this city, this country, this region of the world was a far distance from what I had known or ever experienced.
I had read a lot to prepare, of course. In particular, I had been captivated by Martha Gellhorn’s The View from the Ground, a collection of her reports and stories from the front lines of many conflicts. As I walked into the bar of the American Colony Hotel on my first night in Jerusalem, I was trying to channel Gellhorn’s confidence and even appearance, as I had actually purchased a sort of fatigue-looking jacket in an attempt to look the part of a war correspondent.
I had read in her reports and others’ that this bar was the hookup place for news and connections, and it looked and sounded like that: voices spoke in various languages and accents and conspiratorial-looking conversations took place at small round tables. I could tell from inquisitive and somewhat dismissive glances toward me that my efforts to look the part had failed. Gratefully, I had planned to meet up there with my crew, who arrived and walked right toward me, another clear indication that I was the newbie in the bar.
I had been well advised to hire a mixed crew, meaning Israeli and Arab, and I had done that before arriving through the NBC bureau. They turned out to be experienced and prepared for anything, which was good because I was not. But I was eager to learn everything and to meet the women I had been reading about, and the Israeli cameraman and Palestinian sound guy—yes, we had two-man crews in those days… and yes, man crew is the accurate description of 99 percent of the television news crews working in conflict zones. A few years later, an extraordinarily brave and talented camerawoman named Margaret Moth, working for CNN, would break that barrier for women.
On my second day in Jerusalem, the camera crew and I found our way to the Mothers in Black, a group that stood on street corners every Friday to demonstrate a peaceful resolution to the occupation. They held signs that read “Mothers for Peace.” I quickly recognized Anat Hoffman, founder of the group, from her pictures and approached her, explaining I was from the United States and making a documentary on the women in the region. That was the first time I had described what I was doing there in that way, but I thought documentary sounded more serious than a segment on a US morning show. Anat agreed that we could cover the demonstration; she would even give me an interview.
“We can’t be a country obsessed with war and occupation,” she told me when we sat down after the demonstration that she had organized in support of the uprising of Palestinian youth referred to as the intifada. “The intifada has led to the activation of women in my country. Women have a better understanding of the issues connected to oppression and inequality, and we are responding with peaceful demonstrations to raise awareness of the reasons for the violence.”
Over the next few weeks, Anat opened both her home and her community of women to me, and the story I had come to tell was becoming more real—and to me, more important—with every encounter.
Because members of my crew had experience overseas, having worked for the BBC as well as US networks, and with support from my friend Carla Singer’s high-level Israeli connections, I was able to travel the country with them. I listened to the stories of Israeli bombings and evacuations of people from their homes and met the Israeli survivors of Palestinian rockets that often struck civilian homes near the borders. I was realizing with each encounter and each story that this wasn’t as simple as a story about women who wanted peace and men who wanted war. Or even a simple story of victims and oppressors. I met women in the Jewish settlements who told me that they carried guns in their purses and would shoot without hesitation to protect the land they felt was rightfully theirs. I met Palestinian women who were proud of their sons who led the violent protests.
And everywhere I traveled, I met women on both sides of the conflict who were willing to take enormous risks to their personal safety to reach across the divides to work together for peaceful solutions to long-held differences and deeply held opinions about what belonged to whom. In the weekly meetings I was privileged to attend at Anat’s invitation, I observed the bonds between these women as examples of how women can navigate differences better when they have built foundations of shared experiences as mothers and community leaders, and share a commitment to creating a better future for their children.
Dr. Hanan Ashrawi was an important leader in this group and in the region. She would later serve as the official spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace process. In one of our interviews, she reflected a truth about women as peacemakers that I was witnessing and believing more every day.
“Women in both our communities (Jewish and Arab) have had to endure a lot,” she told me, “and because of that, we are better suited and more prepared to negotiate peace.”
Hanan had become good friends with an Israeli lawyer, Leah Tsemel, who had provided public-defender services for young Palestinian youth. During the long weeks of one of the trials, both Hanan and Leah were breastfeeding their babies, who often slept on the court benches. Whenever one cried from hunger, whichever of the two mothers wasn’t otherwise engaged fed her. That made the two little girls, according to Arab culture, milk sisters. I got to meet the milk sisters on a visit to Hanan’s home in Ramallah. The two girls, then nine years old, played and laughed together, connecting without a common language and in spite of a history intent on keeping them apart.
This is a story that stayed with me long after it was shared in one of the segments I produced for NBC’s Today on this time in Israel. Over the years, I have shared the story of the milk sisters and their mothers as a model of the kinds of alliances we can, as women and mothers, form and sustain.
Hanan continues to dedicate her life to making peace. “It’s not for the fainthearted,” she told a reporter not long ago. “I started when I was a young undergraduate in hot pants, and now I’m a grandmother in a pantsuit.” The Israeli/Palestinian divide, she said, isn’t a religious conflict. “It is a man-made one, and definitely not a woman-made one.” As for Leah Tsemel, she continues her fight for justice in Israeli courts, and her long-standing and tireless dedication has been recently documented in a 2019 film called, appropriately, Advocate.
I RETURNED FROM my first international reporting experiences with boxes of videotapes and a passion to share what I had seen and learned. Coby Atlas, The Today Show producer, got me an offer to broadcast segments under the terms of my contract, which gratefully she had kept NBC from canceling while I was in Israel learning on the job how to tell a story about conflict and deep-rooted differences and a new story about women’s leadership.
I got a call to have lunch with a brilliant UCLA professor named Dr. Diana Meehan, who had been one of my guests on Woman to Woman. She had written an excellent book about women’s images in the media, Ladies of the Evening: Women Characters of Prime-Time Television. Diana was smart, provocative, funny. Her partner of many years, Gary David Goldberg, had created Family Ties, a comedy based in large part on Diana and Gary’s own early hippie life together. Gary had a big deal at Paramount Studios, and together they had begun to explore good causes to fund.
I had an idea for her. As I started to describe what I had seen and the film I wanted to make about these women, Diana interrupted:
“What do you need?” she asked.
I hadn’t thought about how much I would ask for, but I needed an answer now. “Fifty thousand dollars to get an edit process started.”
“Is that all?” Diana asked. Then, to my astonishment, she took her checkbook out of her purse.
Just like that, I had $50,000—and a new producing partner. That was Diana’s idea, and I loved it.
We edited a few of the interviews for Today and decided to use Diana’s funds to continue filming, as the story was starting to become bigger.
Several of the women in the group I interviewed, plus other women leaders in the Knesset, Israel’s elected representative body, decided to convene the first-ever international peace conference on the conflict, providing a forum for Israeli and Palestinian women from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to negotiate a peace agreement.
“You keep documenting it,” Diana told me, “and I’ll keep funding it.”
Along with nearly one thousand other women, leaders from the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, I traveled to Brussels in May of 1989. Proudly hanging on the front of the European Parliament building was a banner: “Women: GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.”
Shulamit Aloni, a member of the Knesset, admonished the group at the opening plenary to remember that, “We only have a weekend. We have no time for speeches or long lists of grievances about which side did what to whom. We have to return home Monday to take care of children, husbands, our jobs, and our families and we are going to return with an agreement that will end the conflict destroying our communities.”
And they did. With no loud voices or long speeches, they negotiated a one-page document with only seven paragraphs that could have gone a long way to ending the occupation. But when the Israeli delegation returned to Tel Aviv, the Knesset refused to review the document, saying it had been drafted at an unofficial, and therefore illegal, gathering; the Palestinian National Authority made the same judgment, and as far as I know, that document has never been officially considered.
It was also at that historic conference that a colorful congresswoman from New York, Bella Abzug, made a statement that has lived in my head and heart every day since. “In the twentieth century,” she proclaimed, “women will change the nature of power, rather than power changing the nature of women.”
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, there still aren’t enough examples of this in the world, but I’m a believer in Bella’s prediction because I have seen what can happen when women use their power, individually and collectively, taking big risks to get a seat at the table for themselves and others. And when there isn’t a seat, remember the advice from Shirley Chisolm, an African American congresswoman from New York who was also a Presidential candidate in 1972: “Bring a folding chair.” Being at the table, in the conversations that matter, does matter and is all part of changing the nature of power by how we use it for ourselves and for others.
DIANA AND I, who both have Irish roots, were closely following the eruptions again of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The Troubles had been roiling between the Catholics and Protestants since the British occupation in the late 1960s. Nearly 3,000 people had died, either in IRA bombings or through retaliation by the British forces. The women of Northern Ireland were, once again, on the front lines.
There had been a big peace movement in the mid-seventies. Mairead Corrigan Maguire, raised Catholic, and Betty Williams, raised by a Catholic mother and Protestant father, joined forces to gather as many of the women in Belfast as they could to march for peace. A gathering of a few hundred women for the first march swelled to more than 10,000 for the second, and soon the Women for Peace movement amassed more than 35,000 people demonstrating against the violence. Their efforts contributed to a peaceful end of that eruption of The Troubles, earning the two Irish women the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.
Unfortunately, declarations of an absolute peace were premature, with bombings, hunger strikes, and paramilitary groups on the rise. That The Troubles were very much a presence was apparent the moment Mary Muldoon, my partner from Woman to Woman, and I arrived in Belfast in 1989 to produce a documentary. Soldiers carrying guns held in “ready to fire” positions were everywhere. Hotels were accessed behind sturdy barriers and locked gates. The tension was palpable. Everywhere we went, people asked us to repeat our surnames. Gratefully, Mary “Muldoon” passed muster with the Catholics; “Mitchell” was understood to be Protestant, so we got into the homes and meetings and hiding places we needed.
As I’d found in Israel, women were crossing the battle lines to keep lives and families together, not only parading and protesting, but organizing work groups. The Troubles were keeping a lot of men and women from getting jobs to support their families.
“Northern Ireland consists of open mouths and closed minds,” one of the women in the group I interviewed told me. “When you are six feet under the soil, it doesn’t matter who the soil belongs to.”
Another said, “We must let ourselves feel the pain of every person still suffering and say to ourselves, we’ve not done enough.”
“Religion doesn’t come into it,” another added to our conversation. “If there’s poverty in my area, there’s poverty in their area too. You can’t blow up a factory and expect there to be jobs in the morning.”
“Certainly the women couldn’t do any worse than the men had done,” yet another said. These working women were not politicians or even activists; they were wives and mothers and for them, the front line was economic survival. Their work helped bring about another uneasy peace.
Before Mary and I left Northern Ireland, we got to celebrate their victory and the election of the Republic of Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson, who proved during her tenure that women can change the nature of power by the ways they use it for the good of others. In this case, President Robinson used her power to be an effective advocate for reproductive rights and protections for the environment, and she continues that work as a global advocate at the UN for human rights and the environment and as the chair of The Elders, a small group of wise and revered global leaders. Through her foundation, Climate Justice, she devotes her seemingly inexhaustible energies to alert the world to the urgency of response to the climate crisis, even cohosting a podcast, appropriately called Mothers of Invention.
“Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize is a lot of responsibility,” Mairead Corrigan told me. “One day you’re washing the dishes, and then suddenly, the world’s media arrives and asks how you’re solving world peace.”
Mairead is one of only seventeen women who have ever been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and she decided to use her fame and global status and become more dangerous—those were her words! Every year since she won the Nobel, Mairead fasts the forty days of Lent to bring attention to the conflicts in the Middle East. At the end of the forty days, she travels to Jerusalem to break her fast in the chapel on the Mount of Olives, the ridge high above the Old City where Jesus is said to have prayed.
One year, Mairead invited me, Diana Meehan, and our crew to document the small ceremony. I was back in Jerusalem, this time with another peace warrior from another conflict. Once again, the city captured my heart and I remember every detail of this special day. As we drove up the winding road to the chapel, the sounds of Jerusalem became a glorious cacophony: the calls to prayer from the mosques, the bells ringing in the Catholic church towers, the choir sounds from Greek Orthodox churches, and the prayers in the synagogues and from the Wailing Wall. Diana and I rode in silence, giving ourselves over to the magic of the moment, feeling the privilege of being there.
A Catholic priest led a brief mass in the chapel as we knelt at the place named to honor the symbol of the olive branch, praying for a lasting peace to come inside the pink-washed walls of the Holy City.
“May all those who call Jerusalem their home and holy place live there peacefully together,” he chanted. Diana, Mairead, and I prayed we would return to a more peaceful place one day together.
As we stood to leave, Mairead fainted, weak from the fast and the heat. But she recovered quickly, regaining strength with some holy water from the helpful chapel attendant. We decided to make one more stop before leaving. At the Wailing Wall, we found a place among the large numbers of people praying, folded up our tiny papers with our personal prayers written on them, and tucked the folded papers together into one small crevice.
As we walked away, with the sunset turning Jerusalem’s walls to a rose color that I have never seen anywhere else, I realized that I had been on a profound learning journey. My view of the world and my connection to the women I now knew and so deeply admired had already set a new course forward.
BACK IN LOS Angeles, Mary Muldoon and I went to work in a small editing room. Within a few days, I had discovered a new love! Finding the way to weave together the personal stories of these amazing women while explaining the complex backgrounds of the conflicts was challenging but exhilarating. We didn’t know the rules of documentary making—looking back on this effort, I cringe a bit at the narration and structure—but I’d discovered a medium that would be the right format for me to tell the stories that mattered, the stories that could compel social action.
A&E, then a new cable channel, liked what we created and broadcast the documentary, now called Women in War: Voices from the Front Lines. Mary and I were hooked on the subject and with Diana on board, too, proposed an additional story about the dual role of women in the civil war in El Salvador. Some were on the front lines in the rebel army known as the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) and some were on the government side, advocating for a peace agreement.
Propaganda posters from the FMLN boasted several female comandantes, women carrying and using weapons, commanding troops, living in the forests where the rebels hid in camps. One story we read featured a comandante named Ana Guadalupe Martinez, who was shown with her companion, the leader of the FMLN, holding her baby on one hip and on the other, a rifle. Here was a women-in-war story not to be missed. A&E agreed.
We landed in San Salvador and headed for the American embassy to register that we were in the country. All of my news-correspondent friends had tried to talk me out of going: “too dangerous,” they said. Nuns had been raped and killed a month or so earlier; the conflict was getting worse and moving closer to the capital; and besides, we didn’t even speak the language! How did we plan to negotiate our way to the front lines to meet any of those women comandantes?
I admit to feeling a little scared as we approached the building with a small sign saying “American Consulate.” Inside, there was no one in sight. Mary and I signed our names in the book that lay open on the front desk, then knocked on a closed office door. A middle-aged man emerged, looked us up and down, and barked, “Journalists?”
“Well, not exactly,” I began. “We’re here to get some stories for a documentary on women in conflict.”
“Don’t sign the book,” he said, and seeing that we already had, he obliterated our names with a sharp black pen. “We don’t want to know you’re in the country. The American government has not approved your visit. You are in a war zone and we consider it unsafe for you and if anything happens, we won’t bear any responsibility.” With that, he closed the door.
We exchanged glances of concern. But it was too late—we were too committed to the story to return home. We met the BBC crew recommended by our Israeli cameraman, and we began to look for leads to get us to the women on the front lines. During our meetings at the hotel, I also noticed a couple of men, obviously American, whom we would see there and everywhere we went. CIA? Possibly, but we never found out. What we did discover was that it was harder than we thought to get connected to the women we came to interview, and days passed with lots of time in that hotel. Good thing we had come prepared with an entire locker full of snacks and food.
Yes, Mary and I were so sure that we would be in the mountains, trekking with the FMLN, that we brought our own food. How we expected to carry that heavy two-foot locker hadn’t been calculated, and when we did get to the mountains, the locker was left behind.
One morning the headlines in the paper featured a big photograph of Febe Elizabeth Velasquez, leader of the activist labor movement in El Salvador, who had just been released from prison for protesting government policies. Through a translator/fixer that the crew found, she agreed to meet with us at a labor confederation headquarters outside San Salvador.
Febe was a powerful presence. A round-faced, smiling, almost angelic-looking woman, she was articulate, informed about labor movements around the world, and clearly a leader—no surprise that she was considered a threat by her government… and perhaps ours, too.
“Here thousands of women in different fields are giving their part to this struggle,” she told us; she was convinced the FMLN would win and workers would have a better life. “What is missing is the real determination to make peace. Determination to finish this war. Determination to impel an economic program that will benefit everyone and get us out of this critical situation.”
Not one moment of pessimism, no defeatist attitude; in our hour together that day, I saw Febe Velasquez as one of the most beautiful and inspiring women, inside and out, I’d ever met anywhere.
Febe’s final words to us as we were packing up the equipment were, “I believe it’s possible some of us will lose our lives along the way. We will not stop until we get a more just life. These are the hopes that we have especially for the children… we are doing it for them.”
“We’ve got to build an entire segment around Febe, she’s amazing!” I told Mary as we headed outside. Suddenly an enormous explosion threw us to the ground, debris raining over our heads. We staggered to our feet, raced to the van, and threw the equipment inside as people poured from the building we’d bolted from seconds before. “Get out of here—fast!” someone screamed and we did, shaking with disbelief at how close we had come to getting blown up—and worried about the fate of Febe.
Back at the hotel, we saw no sign that anyone knew (or cared) that just a few miles away, a bomb had destroyed a building and trapped or killed people inside. Later, on the local news, we saw Febe’s photo and knew that she’d been the target of the bomb attack. She was dead. So were eight of her colleagues and dozens more injured by the bomb, which many believed had been planted by the government. It had been a close call for us, for sure, and we were shaken and decided it was best to return to the United States—after Febe’s funeral, which we wanted to attend and film so that we could include her and her story in the documentary.
At Febe’s burial, a man approached us and offered us the opportunity we had come to El Salvador for: to go to the front lines and interview Ana Guadalupe Martinez.
We took a helicopter part of the way, hovering low to avoid detection by the El Salvadoran military. We landed on a grassy knoll and hiked the rest of the way up the mountain to a small clearing where we met and talked with Ana Martinez. She was with one of her two children, both born since she’d become an FMLN comandante, and two other female rebel fighters. For the rest of this surreal afternoon in an idyllic forest setting, we sat in a circle with women dressed in camouflage uniforms with their rifles within easy reach.
It was a disconcerting image, and I was both awed by their bravery and courage and dismayed by their decision to take up arms. They had tried negotiations and talking, they said in answer to my questions about the decision to join the rebel forces, and after years of being unheard and policies not changing, they chose to change their tactics and become dangerous themselves—not only because they were now carrying guns and prepared to use them, but because they had a ferocious commitment to ending discrimination and oppression and shifting the power dynamic in their country.
Ana and the comandantes had created coalitions of village women who became their pipeline for shelters and supplies. Later we met with the so-called conmadres, fifty or so mothers marching for peace and social justice, all having lost loved ones. They were fighting for a better life for the majority of El Salvador’s population—70 percent of the country’s land was owned by only 10 percent of the people—but there were big questions about how they would implement the changes if they managed to oust the current regime.
A&E wanted to present both sides in this conflict, so we also interviewed the highest-ranking woman, the leader of the ruling party, about the role of women in government. She expressed some camaraderie with the FMLN and was prepared to meet with them once there was a peace agreement. That didn’t look likely when Mary and I boarded our flight home, holding our breath as the plane made its way down the runway. We were feeling lucky to be alive, having come closer to danger than either of us had ever before, as well as incredibly fortunate to have had this experience. We had gained a deeper appreciation of the women and men who commit themselves to the urgent work of keeping the world informed about places most of us will never go but need to better understand.
SAFELY BACK IN the United Sates, Mary and I started the long process of viewing the hundreds of hours of footage, hiring translators for the interviews, and shaping a narrative for the documentary that would communicate our own great respect and admiration for women on the front lines of war and give context to their choices as well as to the conflicts in these countries.
Just as we were finishing the El Salvador segments, the FMLN declared a truce and peace talks were called by Costa Rican president Óscar Arias. The crew and I returned and were welcomed warmly by Ana and two other female comandantes who, it turned out, had led the FMLN to the peace table. We heard them offer terms for surrender of the FMLN along with their vision for a sustainable peace that could only be accomplished by including women in the decision-making positions and by extending education and health care as part of the agreement to end the fighting.
This was women using power differently. They were willing to lay down arms—but not willing to give up on their demands for greater economic opportunity and participation in government. It was clear to me that the negotiations would have ended without an agreement many times had the women not been present. With each point of blockage, they offered another perspective, a compromise or shift in language, and argued persuasively for guarantees about families and children of the FMLN that might not have been otherwise included.
Women at peace tables make a difference. Swanee Hunt, chair of the Institute for Inclusive Security, which includes the Women Waging Peace Network, has supported women and their peacemaking contributions for more than two decades and documented the difference their presence at peace tables can make for a more sustainable peace and postconflict prosperity. This work is also a priority for the Carter Center, where Karin Ryan, director of the human-rights program, is an effective advocate for more women at every table where policies for enhancing human security, ending violence, shaping peace, and sharing prosperity are being negotiated.
Some of the FMLN leaders, including Ana Guadalupe Martinez, made a radical transition from leadership in a rebel army to government. She ran for and secured a seat in the next Congress and over the next few years, emerged as a peacetime leader in El Salvador’s government. In fact, all of the women I met and interviewed, whose stories we told in a documentary, are models of what Bella Abzug (and I too) believes is possible: women using our power differently for different outcomes—to change the nature of power and shape a more peaceful and just world.
I RETURNED FROM my year of living dangerously with a much more informed worldview and greater confidence about what I could do, professionally and personally. I’d taken some risks and dared to do something I hadn’t done before—and at an age when most war correspondents were retiring, not starting—and produced a two-hour documentary, having never produced one before. There was no going back, but what did moving forward look like?
My partner and original benefactor, Diana Meehan, was also gratefully hooked on the power of documentaries to inform, inspire, and shape opinions and even policy. We decided to form a production company, and since Paramount Studios had built a special office complex for her partner Gary and his talented team of writers and producers, we could set up shop there. Sherry Lansing, then Paramount CEO and the first woman to head a studio, referred to us as the studio’s “good cause” group and gave us parking spaces and our own (very tiny) office suite next door to Gary Ubu Productions.
Diana and I decided to call our company VU Productions, which was both shorthand for “voice of Ubu” (Ubu was the name of Diana and Gary’s beloved black Labrador) and also the name of an obscure French photojournalism magazine from the twenties. Explaining what VU Productions meant took the first ten minutes of every meeting. We added Diana’s longtime friend Lynne Tuite and my former producer at Today, Coby Atlas, to the group, and declared ourselves ready to produce documentaries and specials on the critical issues of relevance to women and girls with the purpose of impacting policies and politics.
We had a lot of important subjects and some good ideas, but not many buyers. The donated funds from Diana and Gary split four ways didn’t go far, and I explained that I needed to get more paying work. I called up Charles Kuralt, host and executive producer of CBS’s Sunday Morning, one of the best programs on television for longer, more engaged storytelling. Fortunately, he was looking for an arts correspondent, and even though I had few credentials for that assignment, he assured me that “covering museum exhibitions and interviewing artists would be a lot safer than helicoptering into war zones.”
Soon I was working seven days a week to juggle both documentary production and my CBS responsibilities, bouncing between LA, Santa Barbara (where I was living with a significant other), and New York, producing reports on artists like Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Salle for Sunday Morning. “I can’t believe you pay me to hang out with these talented people,” I told Charles, with gratitude for one of the best gigs in television, then and now.
Coby took on freelance production work, and Lynne and Diana secured some funding for educational videos. We made films about infant-mortality rates and child labor, and we actually had some measurable impact on policies through congressional screenings and strategic advocacy work with the effective Kathy Bonk, founder of the Communications Consortium Media Center. Lifetime also commissioned us to do a series on women in politics during 1992, when so many more women were elected to Congress and as mayors and governors that it was actually called the “Year of the Woman in Politics.” Finally, in 2018, those numbers, which had been until then our high point, grew, with more women running—and winning—elections than at any time in US history.
Women in history became our next big project: VU Productions proposed a ten-hour series documenting the stories of women’s contributions to the twentieth century—a history largely untold in the history books. In 1992, we were already in the century’s last decade.
I was thinking about how good my life was as that decade began—pulling into my special parking place on the Paramount lot; coming into our cramped but well-positioned offices to be greeted by friends, colleagues, and partners; truly enjoying again the experience of working with women; pursuing projects of passion and purpose; and lunching at the Commissary next to the fully costumed Star Trek cast. I was feeling more settled and satisfied with my life and work than I could remember ever being. I wasn’t feeling that familiar urge to try something new, to push another door open or confront another challenge or chase another parade.
So why was I packing a bag to fly to Atlanta and meet Ted Turner?
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Christiane Amanpour
Christiane and I were colleagues at CNN when she was becoming the network’s most recognized face and most famous war reporter in the world. I have always admired her courage and her commitment to doing what’s right and not what’s easy. We got to work together once, producing a documentary, Revolutionary Journey, which chronicled her first return to Iran, where she’d lived as a child, to visit her family home with her father. Today, Christiane continues as the chief international anchor for CNN and host of its nightly Amanpour, as well as host of a new PBS program, Amanpour and Company.
During a recent visit, I asked her whether she agreed that we are living in dangerous times and whether such times call for more women to become risk-takers.
Christiane: These times are dangerous because hard-won freedoms and rights that form our democratic world order are threatened from within, not from an external enemy. When the patriarchy challenges the basic concepts of truth, evidence, rule of law, and democracy itself, then it’s time for women to rise up and reclaim the moral high ground, posing a real danger to the status quo.
Do you think of yourself as a dangerous woman?
Christiane: I do regard myself as a dangerous woman because I have always used my platform (at CNN and PBS) for something much bigger than myself, to speak truth to power and try to rebalance the global scales of justice.
Was there a specific time when you felt you were becoming more dangerous, and what was it that inspired or encouraged you?
Christiane: Covering the Bosnian War of the 1990s was when I first felt a sense of being dangerous. Firstly there was real physical danger, as it was the first war where journalists were deliberately targeted by armed groups. I have lost many friends in the line of fire on the front lines of truth-telling. But there was an almost greater moral and intellectual danger, in being conscious and daring enough to be truthful rather than neutral. In other words, that was where I learned that our profession’s golden rule of objectivity did not mean drawing a false moral equivalence between aggressor and victim. I have applied this dangerous lesson learned to everything from war and peace to climate change, where there is no equivalence between the overwhelming weight of science and the tiny minority of deniers.
Who inspires you to be more dangerous?
Christiane: I’ve been inspired by many other dangerous women: women from the heights occupied by Gloria Steinem to ordinary but determined women in the trenches who have blasted tiny holes in the patriarchy that rules science, business, sports, media, and every other field! And especially I am inspired by the women who a hundred years ago fought bravely for some of us to get the right to vote!
What is the most important role for dangerous women today?
Christiane: Really dangerous women will vote and run for office! When you choose to be dangerous, you give up the right to be complacent and safe, but you gain the ability to change the world. There are too many danger zones worldwide for women to count, starting from the real and present dangers women face because of their bodies, from the external threats of terrible sexual and domestic violence to the cultural and legal threats that deny women basic rights over their own bodies. I do believe that “dangerous times call for dangerous women” because men have had the whole sweep of history to rule solo, so given these dangerous times, why not let the other half have a go? What have we got to lose?