The question of who deserves an obituary has long vexed editors at newspapers and magazines. Should they limit themselves to the most well-known public figures or dig deep into the less well-known but often fascinating lives of the hoi polloi? Do you cover the lives of the notoriously awful as well as the virtuous? And what tone should a writer take toward a controversial figure?
Answers to such questions could be found in the many books written by professional obituarists; titles such as The Dead Beat (Marilyn Johnson), Obit (Jim Sheeler), and Find the Good (Heather Lende) offer sage advice about how best to offer as ecumenical an obituary section as possible.
But the New York Times evidently decided to consult its social justice conscience for an answer. The result, just in time for Women’s History Month, is a lavish project called “Overlooked,” whose opening salvo says it all: “Since 1851, obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now, we’re adding the stories of 15 remarkable women.”
If 15 feels like a measly postmortem mea culpa, at least readers can be reassured that the paper’s gender editors and correspondents have made retroactively rooting out sexism a full-time job. “We’ll be adding to this collection each week,” the editor’s note says, “as Overlooked becomes a regular feature in the obituaries section.” Among the first 15 ladies selected are Ida B. Wells, Sylvia Plath, and Ada Lovelace—all worthy choices, to be sure.
And yet it’s clear this project isn’t only about celebrating important dead women; it’s about the Times flagellating itself for its past lack of wokeness. In a piece outlining the old obituary selection process, William McDonald (Warning: He’s a white male!), the Times obit editor since 2006, noted, “Sometimes we choose a subject in part to represent a group whose contributions were forgotten or ignored.” He cited a past obituary of Violet Cowden, a Women Airforce Service pilot during World War II, as an example.
But token Violets are not enough these days, and McDonald’s piece, which reads like a forced confession, wrestles with the question of why so many dead white men littered his pages. Is their dominance evidence of “conscious or unconscious bias”? He concedes that “perhaps” the paper’s standards for selection “unfairly valued the achievements of the white, male mainstream over those of minorities and women who may have been more on the margins.” Why not “more women and people of color” and “why, for that matter, not more openly gay people, or transgender people?”
McDonald knows (or has been made to know by his gender editors): “Because relatively few of them were allowed to make such a mark on society in their own time. . . . The tables of power were crowded with white men; there were few seats for anyone else.”
There’s no harm in casting a wider net when it comes to honoring the dead, of course, but we could do without the social justice scolding to go along with it. Obituaries, the Overlooked editors write, are “a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.” They are also a reminder that even death can’t protect you from ideological nonsense.
