CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.

As reporters, we all know one thing for a fact: conflict is a story. Republicans versus Democrats, the “mommy wars,” the “culture wars,” Sh’iite versus Shia, Hillary versus Barack—you name the issue, we can identify the contestants. That’s because conflict equals drama, and drama is the quickest and easiest way of winding up as the lead story. And all journalists, from Rush Limbaugh to Maureen Dowd, recite the same Apostle’s Creed: The Person With The Lead Story Wins.

We live in fractured times, though, and this conflict mentality long ago stopped being a useful method of understanding the world -- which, after all, is what journalism is supposed to be about. I was reminded of this last week, when I saw a story by my friend DeNeen Brown in the Washington Post (“In the Obama-Clinton Battle, Race & Gender Pose Two Great Divides for Black Women,” March 24). It was a thoughtful, well-written story, because DeNeen is a smart and thoughtful person -- but I couldn’t help wishing that she’d chosen a different frame for the picture she presented. If she had, I think she could have discerned a common thread winding through these stories of division.

“The admonitions of white feminists urging black women to vote gender over race have cracked open a scab, a festering sore, that had crusted over the history of this country’s competing isms,” DeNeen wrote, going on to quote a variety of prominent women who had interesting things to say about this subject: Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, NOW President Kim Gandy, Avis Jones-DeWeever.

Almost all of the quotes had the same basic thrust, and it’s an important observation: feminists who frame this election as a choice between the First Black President or the First Woman President, and who urge a vote for the latter, are imposing their narrow idea of sisterhood on the situation while glossing over the complex realities of race. DeNeen quotes Arica Coleman, a professor of black American studies at the University of Delaware: “White feminists reduce everything to their cultural experience.”

That’s a pretty broad generalization, but there’s a whole lot of truth in it. Yet to frame this story in the standard way -- white feminists versus black feminists, race versus gender as the defining element in an election -- fails to capture an important commonality which I haven’t seen anyone remarking on so far.

I will illustrate in the usual narcissistic Baby Boomer way -- by using myself as an example—though I’ve talked with enough women around the country (via various chat loops, e-mail, book appearances etc., over a period of 10 years) to give me grounds to believe that my experiences really are, in many ways, typical. I came of age in the 1970s. When Helen Reddy sang “I Am Woman,” she was singing to me. My mother, an archetypal 1950s housewife, tried to teach me cooking or how to miter a bedsheet or when to throw bleach in the laundry, but I was contemptuous. I was going out in the world to play with the boys, and what she was trying to teach me were about as useful as Sanskrit. Less useful, actually, because a foreign correspondent might have occasion to know a little Sanskrit someday.

So I did go out in the world, and I was a hardworking daily journalist for 20-odd years, with some success to show for it. By the end of my run I was making almost as much money as my dear old dad had ever made during his days as an executive at Delta, and I was quite proud of myself. And then I had kids, and the rules changed overnight.

It’s not like I suddenly morphed into Martha Stewart when our first child was born, in 1996, but one decision led to another, and before I knew it I had given up my job at the Washington Post for the dubious joys of the freelancing/stay-at-home-mother life. I’ve been here ever since. And what I learned in the rather painful transition period -- aside from the fact that knowing how to cook or miter a bedsheet are useful skills -- was this: a) despite lip service to the contrary, big companies usually define work in rigid ways which exact a devastating penalty on caregivers in general and women in particular; b) despite lip service to the contrary, the size of your paycheck is the only really useful indice of your “worth” to society, and c) despite lip service to the contrary about how “children are our future,” our society does not consider child care to be “work.”

And this, painful as it is to say, was for a long, long time the prevailing mindset of modern women’s movement. When Betty Freidan wrote The Feminine Mystique, she spoke for white suburban women desperate to get out of their houses. Her book totally ignored the fact that black women were already out of their houses—in fact, had never left the labor force. Why? The answer, I suspect, is rooted in racism, conscious and unconscious, but more importantly, it had to do with the type of work many of those black women performed. It would have been tough for Freidan and her contemporaries to ignore large numbers of black female CEOs. But it was easy to ignore the millions of maids and nannies and housekeepers and laundresses who made up such a sizeable percentage of the black female work force in 1963—because, really, is that work? C’mon, any moron can push a mop!

Cut to the mid-1990s, when a small but demographically significant number of educated white women started to leave the salaried work force when their kids were born, in large part because those rigid work rules I mentioned frequently made the work/family conundrum an either-or proposition. Like our black cleaning lady counterparts of the 1960s, we found ourselves shunted aside by the traditional feminist take on things, which used job titles and paycheck size as the only real indicators of progress. Now we were at home pushing mops, and we did not like our sudden social demotions one bit. Unlike those 60s-era cleaning ladies, we middle-class white female labor force exiles had ways of making our voices heard—and we did. We bitched and moaned a lot. Hence the birth of the “mother’s movement,” which is beginning to bear fruit today.

The media noticed the mother’s movement fairly quickly, but the way the story got framed was in the standard journalistic style: as stay-at-home moms versus working moms, a.k.a. the “mommy wars.” Only in the past two or three years, when corporations began to discover that they were losing many of their most talented female workers to child-care and elder-care duties, did business and lifestyle reporters begin to wake up to the fact that the story wasn’t about mommy-against-mommy, it was about the difficult societal task of re-defining the terms and conditions of work so as to acknowledge an aging demographic, a trend toward more equitable at-home division of labor, and the fact that workers have families.

So what’s the common thread I mentioned? It’s this: the dynamic which excluded black women from the modern feminist movement in the 1960s was the same one which excluded stay-at-home mothers in the 1990s. It was the inability, or unwillingness, of the debate-shapers to imagine a new paradigm for the concept of “work.” And in both cases, the result was the same: the mop-pushers got shunted aside.

But this is an elusive concept to see if you are trained, as journalists traditionally have been, in the “conflict is news” way of thinking. If that’s the way you’re thinking, it’s easier, by far, to see differences. Hence “black feminists versus white feminists” or “race versus gender” or “the mommy wars.” 

But commonalities are there. When Lisa Crooms, a black woman who is director of the Constitutional Law Center at Howard University School of Law, says of white feminists, “They should know better. That is the most disheartening thing to me: ‘We white women do this and you black women don’t get it’”—that’s me in the back pew, clapping and shouting, “Amen, sister!” When DeNeen quoted black women expressing exasperation with the argument that women should stick together, I’m right in there feeling their pain—because it’s partly my pain too. While I cannot equate my cohort’s experiences with centuries of racism, my tiny little taste of being disregarded leaves me in no mood for more. I too dislike being patronized. And like the women DeNeen talked to, I don’t like being told how to vote based either on race or gender.

An exploration of this common thread would not, perhaps, have been worth a story in itself. But if it had been included in the story DeNeen wrote, a good story would have become a truly illuminating and first-rate story. And in an era when journalism is struggling to redefine itself, this is an important thing to recognize. To paraphrase just slightly something Barack Obama said in his speech last week, “We have a choice in this country. We can accept a [journalism] that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.” Or we can look for a new way of doing things.

Let the hairdos on television yell about the divisions; that’s their job, and there will always be an audience for that sort of thing. Meanwhile, how about taking some of the energy we’ve always devoted to looking for fault lines and using it to explore the ways in which we are bound together? I don’t know where, exactly, that road would lead, but in my experience, the only roads worth exploring are the ones which go in unfamiliar directions.