Time_23Mar2020

ESSAY

ThroughouT iTs hisTory, ediTors of TIME aimed Their

curiosity at those who broke free of gravity. Week after week,

year after year, the magazine featured an individual on the cover,

often from Washington but also from Wall Street or Hollywood,

from foreign palaces and humming factories, all outstanding

and almost always men. The “great man theory of history,” so

aligned with the American gospel of bootstraps and bravado,

meant that power boiled down to biography, and to be on the

cover of TIME meant that you had, literally, made big news.

I wonder how different those weekly assessments would

have been had there been any women in the room where they

were made. It would be many decades before TIME’s lead-

ership included many women, 90 years before a woman ran

the whole thing. Likewise in Congress and courtrooms and

corner offices and ivory towers, it was largely men who were

writing the first draft of history, deciding what mattered, and

who mattered, and why. So now that we are marking anni-

versaries, it was an irresistible exercise to go back and look

again, at different ways of wielding power, and the different

results derived. Women were wielding soft power long before

the concept was defined. On the 100th anniversary of women’s

suffrage, TIME’s editors and collaborators revisited each year

since 1920, looking for women whose reach transcended their

time. Their influence in public and private life was not always

positive; part of this exercise is acknowledging failures and

blind spots as well as genius and vision.

There were always women who wore the crown, literal or

not: Queen Soraya Tarzi of Afghanistan or Queen Elizabeth II

of England, global stateswomen like Golda Meir, Indira Gan-

dhi, Margaret Thatcher, Corazon Aquino. But it is interesting

that the first woman to appear on the cover of TIME, in the

summer of 1923, was an Italian actor named Eleonora Duse,

who had announced that she would come out of retirement

to tour the U.S. “Her art rises to supremacy through her mag-

nificent repression,” TIME wrote, “her submersion of per-

sonality in her part.” Honor and glory through “magnificent

repression”—a parable of herstory.

Some art forms are more subversive than others, telling sto-

ries on the surface with countless layers beneath. From a hard-

scrabble childhood in Chattanooga, Tenn., the great blues art-

ist Bessie Smith made her way from street busker to singer to

such success that she traveled in a custom railcar. She recorded

“Downhearted Blues” in 1923, which went on to sell nearly

800,000 copies within the year and eventually made Smith the

highest-paid black entertainer of her era. She sang of prison

and betrayal and capital punishment, of poverty and pain and

the complex loves of an openly bisexual woman in the ’20s.

How do we measure that influence on generations of African-

American protest music? Or the impact of the indelible dance

disrupter Martha Graham, whom TIME would name “Dancer

of the Century” in 1998 but whose concert ensemble’s debut

was called Heretic. Or photographer Dorothea Lange, who

started out shooting portraits of the privileged but whose eye

gave us the faces of poverty and pride during the Depression:

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