Of Mouse and Women
Karenna Gore Schiff Writes About Heroines Who Saved the Day

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 11, 2006

NEW YORK Let's begin with a brief case study in how the cynical, superficial American media (that's us) can distort the lives of political figures and their families.

We are talking with Karenna Gore Schiff about her new book, "Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America." The smart, personable 32-year-old daughter of the Man Who Was Almost President tells us she wrote it as a kind of therapy, an antidote to the "punched-in-the-gut" feeling she got whenever she looked at the newspaper after the 2000 election.

We nod. Seems perfectly understandable.

She also wrote the book, she says, because ever since she was a little girl, she has wished there were "more female faces in the historical pantheon." She remembers sitting at her desk at Arlington's Oakridge Elementary School, looking at the chart of the presidents on the wall and wondering why they were all male.

We'll buy that. We've got daughters ourselves, don't we?

In fact, there isn't the slightest reason to doubt the sincerity of the motives that Schiff cites for launching her literary venture. But we have a problem with them anyway.

Her reasons are just a little too . . . reasonable . We start picturing that glazed look in our readers' eyes, the one that shows up just before they abandon us for the Boondocks and Zippy the Pinhead.

Ah, but then Schiff lets her guard down for an instant -- despite a lifetime of watching journalists turn Al and Tipper Gore into unrecognizable caricatures of the parents she knows and loves -- and lets slip something we can twist into a sexier lead.

Why did she really write this book? Hey, isn't it obvious?

It's because her mom wouldn't let her watch "Mighty Mouse" as a kid.

Hold that thought for a while. It may not be quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

* * *

As Schiff explains the origins of "Lighting the Way," she sips water in the living room of the Upper East Side apartment she shares with her husband, Drew, a physician, and their two children, 6-year-old Wyatt and 4-year-old Anna. Built-in bookcases line one wall. There's a ladder in case anyone needs to reach the upper shelves.

In November 2000, she says, she was exhausted from campaigning and looking to focus on her family. Still, she headed down to Washington now and then to be with her parents -- "sitting on the train or the shuttle and trying not to listen to all the conversations around me, because they were so painful" -- as her father contested the Florida election result.

Just losing would have been bad enough. But losing the way Al Gore lost . . . well, it was "a very dark time."

It got worse with 9/11 (Schiff and her family were in Manhattan that day) and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. She was stunned by the way people who disagreed with the administration's decision to go to war or even questioned the way the war was to be conducted were "shut up and shouted down and pushed aside and more or less called traitors."

Cynicism seemed a logical option, but she didn't want to go there; she had seen too much of it among her generational peers. Instead, she sought refuge in the American past. She would tell the stories of women -- maybe not presidents or even politicians, but public servants just the same -- who had changed the world for the better despite the scorn the "mainstream" heaps on dissenters.

Take anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Born into slavery in 1862, she became the nation's leading agitator against the barbaric practice of stringing up black men for the merest hint of an offense -- never mind if it was false -- toward a white woman. Nothing seems easier today than to say that lynching is wrong, but that was a less-than-mainstream notion in the 1890s. Schiff cites editorials in this newspaper and the New York Times condemning Wells-Barnett for her "exaggerations," as The Post put it, and for her shameful failure to highlight black crimes against whites .

Take Alice Hamilton, a pioneer in occupational medicine. Hamilton "saw men and women poisoned and crippled by their work," as Schiff writes, and became "at the height of the Industrial Revolution, one of the only physicians who made workplace safety her mission." In 1919, she became the first woman appointed to the Harvard faculty, though Schiff notes that the university barred its new hire from ever taking part in commencement or -- God forbid -- receiving "the treasured faculty football tickets."

Or take labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, better known these days for lending her name to a left-wing magazine than for her efforts to confront the early 20th-century horrors of child labor. Mother Jones's personal story (she lost her husband and all four children to a yellow fever epidemic) fascinated Schiff, but she was equally concerned to sketch the forgotten context of Jones's activism.

"It was totally accepted by the leaders of the business and the political worlds that 8-, 10-, 11-year-olds were going into factories, working 12-hour days, getting maimed by machinery and poisoned by new chemical processes," she says. "There was no recourse and there was no accountability. They just blatantly defended that, saying, 'That's the free market.' "

Schiff writes about Septima Clark, whose "citizenship schools" were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement, and about Virginia Durr, who fought segregation from the other side of the color line. In addition to Durr's own accomplishments, she witnessed what Schiff calls "one of the most striking moments in United States history."

At a conference in Birmingham, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was evicted by police when she sat down in the section reserved for blacks. Refusing to abandon the principle of integration, Roosevelt found a folding chair and plunked herself in the middle of the aisle separating black and white. The New York Times, which covered the Birmingham event, failed to mention this.

Four other formidable women round out Schiff's list. None is a household name. Schiff wanted to add faces to the pantheon, not just praise those already enshrined.

We ask what she found most surprising about the lives of these nine women who fought racism, child labor, industrial poisoning and the indifference of society toward the needs of the poor? The answer comes with a short laugh.

"I was surprised -- and sort of oddly exhilarated -- by the venom in the established media toward them," Schiff says.

* * *

So far, so good. There's one thing that has been nagging at us, however, and we need to politely bring it up.

"Mainstream" is clearly one of Schiff's favorite words -- and it mostly carries a negative connotation. The women featured in "Lighting the Way" struggle constantly against mainstream politicians, the mainstream press and mainstream thinking in general.

But isn't there something slightly odd about this choice, coming as it does from the daughter of a man sufficiently mainstream to win the popular vote in a national election?

We're not criticizing dad , we assure her. Yet we're talking about the son of a U.S. senator, a Harvard-educated family scion seemingly born to high office. We're talking about a congressman, senator and then a vice presidential candidate who balanced a centrist presidential ticket by carefully tipping it neither left nor right. We're talking . . .

Schiff politely interrupts to say she sees her family legacy -- differently.

When she first became politically aware, she explains, it was the middle of the Reagan era. "He was immensely popular," she reminds us, yet her father was saying that "he's taking the country in the wrong direction, he's ignoring things that are truly important." This had a big impact, even on a teen soon to enter a rebellious phase. Another relevant bit of family history -- impressed on her "from early childhood" -- was her grandfather's U.S. Senate defeat in 1970 for being out of the Southern mainstream on Vietnam and civil rights. And by the way, have we checked out her dad's speech last month on wiretapping?

We promise to Google the speech later; we then shift gears slightly.

It's not only that Schiff's women seemed to operate further from the political mainstream than Al Gore has, we suggest. It's that they were mostly neck deep in humanity, fighting for people -- be they 8-year-old children sent to work in mills and mines, African Americans terrorized into second-class citizenship, or factory workers poisoned by lead dust. Gore's major concerns, from the arms race to the environment, gravitate more toward systems and abstractions.

"That is definitely accurate," Schiff says, and laughs. She won't cop to Gore-as-wooden-wonk stereotypes, though. He may not be "the schmoozy type," but that's something she happens to love about him.

Speaking of media distortions: Schiff recalls how her mother got typecast as a pro-censorship prude. This was back in the '80s, when she was pressuring the music industry to put parental advisories on its increasingly raunchy and violent products.

The media version "was just so unrecognizable," she says.

Maybe so, we're tempted to say, but what about that disturbing episode with the cartoon mouse?

* * *

Some of you out there might not remember Mighty Mouse, the non-Disney animated flying rodent whose motto was "Here I come to save the day!" Schiff doesn't even know if he shows up in reruns anymore. But the Mouse of Steel, as he was also known, was quite popular when she was 6 or 7 -- and she wasn't at all pleased when her mother told her she couldn't watch.

"I'm still a little bit upset about it," she says.

"It was a huge fight," the villain confirms when we call later to check out the story. "It was one of those things. I said no."

Sex and violence weren't the issue. It was a gender role thing.

"The theme of every episode was that the girl mouse would get into trouble somehow and be kidnapped," Schiff explains, "and then it would be 'Mighty Mouse to the rescue!' and he would come and rescue her and he would be kissing her at the end and she would be fawning all over him."

Tipper Gore says, "It was giving a message to my daughter. I wanted to change that."

Schiff's immediate response was to watch the forbidden cartoon at a friend's house whenever she could, scarfing "Wonder Bread and butter-and-sugar sandwiches" in defiance of the Healthy Food Police as well. But in the long run, her mother's point got through: "I still internalized that there was something to question there."

"She became a feminist at 11," Gore says. "When I say feminist, I'm talking about equality and awareness of perceptions of roles."

So there we have it. Obviously it was just a short step from confronting the gender implications of "Here I come to save the day!" to writing a book about women with the confidence and drive to, well, save the day themselves.

Ridiculous? Of course.

But maybe containing a hint of truth just the same.

For the mother-daughter conversation didn't stop with Mighty Mouse. "She was always reminding us to question how women were portrayed in movies or ads or whatever," Schiff says, "and encouraging us to think that we could do whatever we wanted." The three Gore girls got that message from their father, too.

Schiff went from somewhat shy kid in elementary school to confident high schooler who excelled in lacrosse, field hockey and competitive water skiing. She studied history and literature at Harvard and law at Columbia and did a bit of journalism in between.

Along the way, she went through what she calls a "bratty" phase with her mother. She couldn't help but notice that dad was the one with the big career.

"Why don't you work," she would ask, "you know, like my friend's mom?"

With children of her own, Schiff says she understands the conflicts better now. It's one of the things she tried to highlight in the lives of her nine women.

And her own life? When she looks into the future, what does she see?

Maybe she'll do another book, she says, and maybe it, too, will be history related. (She has given some thought to her Tennessee homeboy, Davy Crockett.) She knows she needs time for her kids; she has already left one legal job in which even a part-time schedule was too demanding. But it's a measure of the way the world has changed since her mother and grandmother's day that she gets the do-you-think-about-running-for-office question all the time.

Schiff doesn't know, she tells us. She hasn't ruled it out. But her book, in part, is an exploration of other ways to be a public servant.

We offer no opinion, of course, but we do know this:

If she runs, she's in for a lot of tough questions about that flying mouse.