I found it infuriating. (Okay, that's probably a bit of an overstatement. I was highly annoyed.) Two pages on the woman who entered Tripoli with the rebels and probably 80% of it is about...her kids. And the fact that she's a woman.
Viv Groskop writes:
At the Edinburgh Television Festival last month Crawford complained that it was "insulting and very, very sexist" to be asked how she raised her children. Today she is less bullish. The woman thing irritates her but she understands it too. She recognises that people see it as unusual that she has chosen to live her life this way, even though that's an incredibly sexist assumption.As if this article - focusing on Crawford's children, what it's like to be away from them, how her husband has to stay at home - is any different. Crawford's had incredible experiences as a foreign corrsepondent and, as the article touches on, had a really hard time getting to where she is.
How can it possibly be that out of her whole life, the most interesting thing to feature on two pages of a daily newspaper is how she deals with being away from her kids? Groskop's article reduces Crawford basically to just a mother who happens to have a job which is a bit time consuming and often takes her away from home. For all it really matters to the piece, she could be a business executive, an athlete, a cabinet minister, and nothing about the article would really fundamentally change.
It would be infinitely better to read two pages about the experience Crawford had in Libya, and to look more in depth at how she became a foreign correspondent at the age of 43, then to mention those facts in passing. What should be an incidental fact - that she has four children - becomes the central fact of her existence. Groskop calls Crawford's views on being a working parent 'refreshing', but there is nothing refreshing or new about this inane focus on how successful women deal with their families. Frankly, I don't care.
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