- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Ashkinaze talks about women in journalism and her decision to write about women's issues (5:27)
- Creator:
- Ashkinaze, Carole
- Contributor to Resource:
- Paulk, Janet, 1932-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 2001-04-26/2001-04-27
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Fulton County, 33.79025, -84.46702
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, 33.749, -84.38798
United States, New York, Suffolk County, Long Island, 40.81677, -73.06622 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Carole Ashkinaze was born in Manhattan, New York, on January 20th 1945. Ashkinaze spent her childhood in the suburban town of Malverne, Long Island in Nassau County, approximately twenty miles outside of New York [City]. She attended St. Lawrence University in New York and eventually went on to pursue a master's degree in journalism from Columbia School of Journalism in 1967. After graduating, Ashkinaze worked for a number of newspapers including Newsday in Long Island. But it was her role as reporter and then columnist and editorial board member for the Atlanta Journal Constitution that won her national recognition. Ashkinaze worked for the AJC from 1976 through 1989, eventually moving to the Chicago Sun-Times, working as both a columnist and as a member of the editorial board. In Atlanta, Ashkinaze wrote about a number of controversial issues including the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, women's rights, feminism, poverty, health-care, politics, education and race. In Chicago, where Ashkinaze was the only pro-choice commentator for any major Chicago news organization, and a member of the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board, her columns won many journalism awards and a large popular following; she was also a popular radio and TV personality, and regular panelist on, ""The Lassiter Group."" Her pro-choice columns in the Sun-Times also made her a target of abortion foes, one of whom sent her several nude pictures of himself, bearing obscene messages. In 1992, following the publication of her 1991 book, The Closing Door: Conservative Policy and Black Opportunity (with Gary Orfield), Ashkinaze left the Sun-Times and returned to Atlanta to work with former President Jimmy Carter on his first domestic policy initiative, The Atlanta Project (later called The America Project), which was an attempt to alleviate the worst aspects of poverty across an entire community. She contributed her services to that project, working pro bono until the following year, when she was named Media Chief of the United Nations Children’s Fund and moved to New York. She later left UNICEF and moved to Washington, D.C. where she worked as a freelance journalist for a number of national publications including Business Week, Horizon, and Moment magazines. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, she became a consultant to the American Civil Liberties Union. Reports she wrote and edited for the ACLU included Civil Liberties After 9/11 (2002), Freedom Under Fire (2003). She also worked with the Communications Consortium Media Center, the Harvard Civil Rights Project, the Fulbright Program and other nonprofits.
shkinaze discusses her childhood in Long Island, her college experience at St. Lawrence University, and her graduate career at Columbia Gradate School of Journalism. She recalls her early experiences as a reporter at Newsday in Long Island and what it was like working for what she calls a ""hometown"" newspaper. Ashkinaze describes her move to Atlanta, where she was given the opportunity to work for other papers, including a thirteen-year stint at the Atlanta-Journal Constitution. She reflects on her early involvement with the AJC and how she began as a reporter, then worked on features, and finally became a columnist as well as a member of the newspaper's editorial board. As a features reporter, Ashkinaze covered Georgia politics, including the ERA campaign, and she describes in detail the ERA movement in Georgia. In 1989, Ashkinaze left Atlanta for Chicago where she continued covering politics, women's issues, and race. She regularly wrote about abortion, and as a result, received an abundance of hate mail. Ashkinaze discusses some of the conflicts present within the women's movement, particularly the perception that the women's movement was primarily a ""white woman's cause,"" and how potentially damaging that misconception was to the movement.
Transcript of this excerpt: CA: But I could see, very close to home, that there was no such thing as equal treatment for women. Women did not receive the same salaries that men got. The newspaper, in its zeal to prevent women from -- to just prevent general unrest, tried very, very hard to keep unions out of the newsroom, so that it became difficult to compare salaries. But we knew. We knew we weren’t getting paid on the same scale that men were, and that we couldn’t aspire to the same positions. Even to ascend to the editorial board of The Atlanta Constitution. In 1982, the year that the ERA went down, I became the first woman in the history of either The Atlanta Journal or The Atlanta Constitution to be named to the editorial board. And it was something I could not have even aspired to when I joined the paper in 1976. I just had no [female] role models at the paper at all, not at The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. So the women’s movement spoke to me as a journalist, it spoke to me as a woman, and when I began writing my column, there was -- can I tell you about my first column? JP: Sure. CA: I don’t know how much time we’ve got. JP: And I want to know how often you wrote it and what were -- CA: Sure. JP: If you had parameters or -- CA: Sure. When I wrote my first column, I was told, “You can write about anything you want.” It didn’t have to have anything to do with women. I could have written about show business or sports or anything that I wanted to. That’s what a column is. But it went into the features section of the newspaper, into a new and improved weekend edition, once a week on Saturdays. And I just looked around at what other people weren’t writing about that I was interested in. And there were, ”the one thing that nobody else seemed to be interested in was in the women’s movement and the battle to get an ERA approved in Georgia. The legislature had last voted on it in 1974, this was 1976. I realized soon after getting to Georgia that people didn’t even know that Georgia hadn’t gotten around to ratifying women’s suffrage until 1970, and this was 1976. It just wasn’t news. Things that had to do with women weren’t news, unless they had to do with food and fashion and child rearing and that sort of thing. And I heard that Jimmy Carter, who was running for president was creating an unprecedented outreach to women voters in America in his campaign for president. Somebody on his staff had had enough smarts to do the math, and they realized that 51.3 percent of women were voters, were registered voters, and Carter, in a long-overdue nod to that fact, created a “51.3 Percent Committee” on his staff to reach out to women voters and also to begin early the process of searching for and identifying women who could hold jobs in his administration. He had said at one point that he wanted to be to the women’s movement what Lyndon Johnson had been to the civil rights movement, and no Georgia paper reported it. I had gone to a Democratic caucus meeting in New York, as a journalist, where I heard him say it, and nobody did anything with it. So I did. I wrote my first column about Carter and that statement and his “51.3 Percent Committee,” and the day, the morning the paper hit the streets, my phone started ringing. I just apparently hit Atlanta like a thunderclap. And not because of the fact that this was an outreach to women or even because of what Jimmy Carter said. And certainly not because of my purple prose, but because it was unprecedented for the hometown newspaper to treat women [and] women’s news, with that kind of dignity and seriousness. It had never happened, apparently, because I was deluged with calls from women who said, “Would you be interested in writing about the Rape Crisis Center at Grady Hospital?” “Would you be interested in writing about teen pregnancies?” “Would you be interested in writing about military pensions that discriminate against women?” “Would you please come and talk to us about our issues?” We have been unable to get any of the male reporters or editors or political editors at The Atlanta Constitution to listen to us.” - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2105
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2105/manifest.json
- Language:
- eng
- Additional Rights Information:
- Copyright to this item is owned by Georgia State University Library. Georgia State University Library has made this item available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
- Bibliographic Citation (Cite As):
- Cite as: Carol Ashkinaze oral history interview, Georgia Women's Movement Oral History Project, W008, Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives, Special Collections and Archives, University Library, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Ga.
- Extent:
- 60 pages (three audio cassettes)
- Original Collection:
- Georgia Women's Movement Project Collection
Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives - Holding Institution:
- Georgia State University. Special Collections
- Rights:
-
