WHAT 16 YEARS O ME ABOUT INEQUA by Kenan Heise
I was the chief writer of obituaries for the Chicago Tribune from 1983, until I retired at the end of 1999. That is, I wrote the long pieces rather than the death announcements.
Illustration by C&EN/Wikipedia
For the past six years, students in our school’s American Women’s and Gender History course have worked to create new, or to substantially edit, existing Wikipedia entries about women. One student created an entry on deaf-blind pioneer Geraldine Lawhorn, while another added roughly 1,500 words to jazz artist Blanche Calloway’s entry. This class was supported by the Wikimedia Education Program, which encourages educators and students to contribute to Wikipedia in academic settings. Through this assignment, students can immediately see how their efforts contribute to the larger conversation around women’s history topics. One student said that it was “the most meaningful assignment she had” as an undergraduate. Other efforts to address gender bias on Wikipedia include Wikipedia’s Inspire Campaign; organized editing communities such as Women in Red and Wikipedia’s Teahouse; and the National Science Foundation’s Collaborative Research grant. Wikipedia’s dependence on volunteer editors has resulted in several systemic issues, but it also offers an opportunity for self-correction. Organized efforts help to give voice to women previously ignored by other resources. This is an updated version of an article originally published in 2018. Courtesy of The Conversation. Tamar Carroll and Lara Nicosia are a historian and librarian, respectively, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and they are taking steps to empower their students and their global community to address issues of gender bias on Wikipedia.
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When I began, there was an unspoken rule that obituaries should be overwhelmingly about men. Women could be included primarily if they had been married to a prominent or wealthy man. This was also the unquestioned policy of other major national newspapers, such as The New York Times, and regional papers. In fact, it was not only women whose obituaries were not written, it was also people of color and persons of note who were openly gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans. With few exceptions, obituaries were the crowning glory of white men. There was hope in the 1970s, when it looked as if women would attain equal rights with men in the United States and in Illinois, when the state legislature was considering an amendment to the Constitution, but the Equal Rights Amendment failed to receive enough votes, and the opportunity was lost. It was a comment in The Reader, that obituaries did not cover women to a significant degree, that nudged me. I came to realize that I had an opportunity to contribute to the cause of minorities’ and women’s equality shortly after I became the obituary editor for the Chicago Tribune, a position that I did not seek. The Tribune managing editor, Dick Ciccone, made that decision for me. I accepted, but soon handed him a list of requests for me to do the job I thought needed to be done, namely including “more women, characters, street personalities and even children.” I hoped to make the obits more inclusive and more personal. The next day, Ciccone called me into his office to give me his answer: I could adopt all of these suggestions. And I did, starting immediately. It was the Tribune, and virtually all other newspapers’ styles, for married women’s obits to read, “Mrs. Paul Jones” rather than “Martha Jones” or “Mrs. Martha Jones,” suggesting that these
