GOODMAN, Ellen (Holtz)

Born 11 April 1941, Newton, Massachusetts

Daughter of Jackson J. and Edith Wienstein Holtz; married Anthony Goodman, 1963 (divorced 1971); Robert Levey, 1982; children: Katherine

Syndicated columnist Ellen Holtz Goodman has lived all but a short period of her life in the Boston area and uses her family, neighbors, politics, the daily news, and social change as her subject matter. She is an observer and commentator who tries to make sense of the world; she explores and questions, and although she offers opinions, she does not always present answers.

Goodman's social conscience and curiosity were honed in a family that valued an individual's decisions, and political action. Her father was a lawyer and politician who served as a state legislator while in his twenties and later ran for Congress. Her mother, a homemaker, had a strong sense of the importance of fostering the individual. Goodman and her sister, Jane, who became an architecture critic and journalist, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted to do, but doing well in school was expected.

Goodman grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, attended the private Buckingham School in Cambridge, and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College with a degree in history (1963). A week after graduation she married a medical student and moved to New York, where she was hired at Newsweek as a researcher. All the researchers were women, Goodman notes. Only men received reporter jobs, a fact she found disturbing. During her two years at the magazine, she did some freelance work for the New York weeklies.

When the couple moved to Michigan, Goodman became a reporter for the Detroit Free Press. They returned to Boston in 1967, where she was hired by the Boston Globe and assigned to the women's pages. Her daughter was born shortly after. When she divorced in 1971, Goodman's ties with Boston, family, and friends tightened. In 1972 she began her column, "At large," in the Globe. It attracted broad readership, and by the 1990s was syndicated in over 440 newspapers.

Goodman chronicles the changing society in which she lives and tries to make sense of a complicated world. Her 750-word column is like a conversation with a friend whose opinions are open-ended and who waits for your response. After receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, Goodman wrote that she "had a sense of how much things had changed. Ten years ago, what I write about—values, relationships, women's issues, families, change—would not have been taken seriously by the newspaper world." Later, in the same piece she wrote that her articles "deal with life-and-death issues in my own home and in the Congress. They discuss matters which are both public and private, argued in the bedroom and the boardroom, the kitchen and the court: love, work, sexuality, children, war, peace… .The one constant is a desire to find a context and a meaning."

In 1973-74 Goodman spent a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow, researching the dynamics of social change in personal lives. Subsequently, between 1975 and 1978 she interviewed more than 150 people. The result was Turning Points: How People Change Through Crisis and Commitment (1979), a book about how change affects people's lives, particularly the changes brought about by a reexamination of traditional sex roles. It is her only publication that is not a compilation of previously published newspaper columns.

Goodman has won a myriad of awards, including the New England Women's Press Association Woman of the Year Award in 1968, the Catherine L. O'Brien Award in 1971, the Media Award of the Massachusetts Commission on Status of Women in 1974, and the New England Women's Press Association Columnist of the Year award in 1975. In 1980 she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, as well as the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Headliners Best Local Column award. In 1988 Goodman received the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights award for dedication to the cause of equality.

Goodman continued to write her column throughout the 1990s, garnering many more awards, including the President's Award from the National Women's Political Caucus in 1993. She also taught at Stanford University in 1996 as the first Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism. Goodman's voice continued to be one of moderation, and she deplored what she saw as the polarization of politics in the 1990s, which pitted extreme left against extreme right. She insisted such clear-cut views were not the norm for most Americans, who were ambivalent, undecided, or open to question on many major issues. Goodman noted that she was often asked to participate in call-in radio shows where she was expected to give the women's point of view, as if she could represent all female America. But personal insight, not grand pronouncement, was what was most important to her. In the late 1990s she began work on a nonfiction book about women and friendship, coauthored with the novelist Patricia O'Brien. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband.

Other Works:

Close to Home (1979). At Large (1981). Keeping in Touch (1985). Making Sense (1989). Value Judgments (1993).

Bibliography:

Braden, M., She Said What? Interviews with Women Newspaper Columnists (1993). Mills, K., A Place in the News (1988).

Reference works:

CA (1982). Biographical Dictionary of American Newspaper Columnists (1995). WWC (1989-90).

Other references:

Boston Women (Winter 1990). Christian Science Monitor (10 Nov. 1981). Harvard Independent (9-15 Apr. 1981). Harvard (Mar.-Apr. 1979). Utne Reader (Jan.-Feb. 1999).

—JANET M. BEYER,

UPDATED BY ANGELA WOODWARD