A WOMAN OF THE TIMES.

• Author: Yoffe, Emily
• Position: Review

WOMAN OF THE TIMES by Marilyn Greenwald Ohio University Press, $26.95

CHARLOTTE CURTIS WAS BOTH the first woman on the masthead of The New York Times and one of the last women to always be the only woman in the room in the world of big-time journalism. Although she covered some of the same territory as Tom Wolfe--he coined the phrase "Radical Chic" to describe the party Leonard Bernstein had for the Black Panthers about which both he and Curtis wrote celebrated stories--she has fallen into obscurity only 12 years after her death. But at the height of her career she was one of those rare print journalists who are as famous as the famous people she profiled. When she became op-ed page editor of the Times she was regularly cited as one of the most influential women in America.

In this biography, subtitled Journalism, Feminism, and the Career of Charlotte Curtis, author Marilyn Greenwald attempts to put Curtis' life into a larger context. Through Curtis she wants to explore how women break into formerly male institutions, and how they change them once they get there. Even 25 years after a landmark sex discrimination suit was filed at the Times, those issues are still unsettled. Now-departing Times metro editor Joyce Purnick gave a speech early in her brief tenure regretting that she had never had children, but asserting she also would have never achieved such an exalted position--and questioning whether she would have deserved to--if she had tried to fit her career around her children's needs, as do so many of her women colleagues. Purnick was shocked by the furor that resulted.

Greenwald is looking at the right questions, and in Curtis, she has found a subject who had a compelling life. Yet this biography is frustrating, despite the obvious diligence and enormous hard work that went into it. One of the best parts of the book is the portrait of the early life of Curtis' mother, Lucile, who was a suffragist and the first woman foreign service officer. But the book suffers from the mismatch between author and subject. Where Curtis was caustic and sharp-witted, Greenwald is plodding and dull. There are many dramatic points in Curtis' life--in 1953, at age 25, this Vassar graduate divorced her proper, priggish husband to devote herself to the newspaper job she loved better; shortly before she was promoted to editorship of the op-ed page, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and told, incorrectly, that she would probably be dead in five years--but...