Ellen Goodman

          Ellen Goodman never expected to become such an influential writer or to win a Pulitzer price. After she attended Radcliffe College, she got married and started to raise a family. She started her writing career in 1961 by becoming a researcher for Newsweek, which was a job that she felt underpaid her and didn’t take her seriously. After Newsweek, she moved Detroit in 1965 and started writing feature stories about women’s issues for the Detroit Free Press. Her family then moved to Boston in 1967, and here she began writing for the women’s section of the Boston Globe. Ellen Goodman was writing at the heart of the women’s movement and her columns started to become the issues on front pages and editorial pages. She then became a columnist and went back to school at Harvard in 1974 because her stories were so influential on the movement. Her column for the Boston Globe was syndicated by the Washington Post, which made her even more popular. Her writings invoked social change in America, especially involving the women’s movement and its effect on people’s private and public lives. Goodman made a career out of telling people what she thinks about pressing issues.

Her writing style developed while she was a columnist. She went from an extremely combative approach in her writing to a more calm, controversial, and even humorous approach on the issues. However, no matter what Goodman wrote about, she always retained her feminist perspective. She likes to show both sides in her confrontational arguments and wants to make sense out of the issues. Her column appeared in over 300 newspapers, along with in speeches, on television, on the radio, and online. Her columns include all sorts of topics from the American family to her own family, from Supermom to Sarah Palin. According to Media Watch, Ellen Goodman is the most widely syndicated progressive columnist in the country. She has written books and collections of her columns have been published. In 1980 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary.

Another accomplishment of Ellen Goodman, aside from her popular column and her Pulitzer prize; is The Conversation Project. She co-founded the project with colleagues and other media professionals. The goal of The Conversation Project is to make it easier for people to talk about dying so that their wishes are known when the time comes. She was inspired to co-found this project because of her own personal experience with her mother’s death. Ellen Goodman’s opinion matters to many people and her columns, books, and project have influenced the lives of many.

Sources

"Ellen Goodman." Ellen Goodman. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.

Ritchie, Donald A. "Ellen Goodman." American Journalists: Getting the Story. New York:

Oxford UP, 1997. 316. Print.

"The Conversation Project." Ellen Goodman Co-Founder and Director. The Conversation

Project, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.