Library Assistant Leona Anthony recommends Dinners with Ruth by Nina Totenberg.
Rarely does a person wake up one morning and decide that she is going to be a trailblazer. Timing, opportunity, and a supportive sisterhood of friends can pivot a hardworking woman with curiosity, determination, and empathy toward a successful career to then open doors for other women in the same field.
Prize-winning reporter Nina Totenberg was a trailblazer for female journalists when women were traditionally offered jobs as secretaries, nurses, and schoolteachers.
In Dinners with Ruth, Nina recounts how her steadfast sisterhood of friends, which included Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thrived and survived because they consistently showed up and cared for one another through life’s highs, lows, and in between. This is an uplifting book filled with devotion, hope and optimism.
In 1975, when Nina walked into National Public Radio (NPR) in Washington, DC, it was a small organization that focused on the daily ninety-minute show, All Things Considered. What primarily stood out to her was that women held important jobs within the organization, and they were helping each other succeed.
While her career as a journalist flourished, it was Nina’s enduring sisterhood of friends who sustained her. This sisterhood enabled Nina to weather through varying stages of her storied career as a DC political reporter from the evolving high courts to the legislative branches and the White House.
Her support group also saw her through the illness and eventual death of her first husband, Floyd Haskell. The simple and caring act of showing up for each other was deeply rooted and abiding. Death eventually dismantles her supportive circle but the unwavering lifelines that Nina and her friends freely gave to one another are remarkable.
One of these lifelines was with Ruth Bader Ginsburg who Nina met in 1971 when both were in New York to attend a legal conference. They met, decided to forgo the conference, hopped in a taxi, went shopping, and talked the rest of the day. This was the first day of a friendship that would span over fifty years. Their unwavering acts of showing up for one another exemplified a level of trust and comfort that enabled their lifelines to thrive for the rest of their days together.
Although Ruth was born more than a decade before Nina, they weathered unforeseen illnesses of their partners and their own aging. The two were tactfully true to each other to enable positive outcomes and redeeming qualities to do their jobs in public and to thrive privately. Showing up matters.
