Melinda Henneberger, a contributing editor for Commonweal Magazine, a former reporter for The New York Times and a former contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, spent 18 months talking to 234 women in 12 states—both “red” and “blue”—about the political issues that concern them most, from national security to abortion rights. Her findings, contained in the new book If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear (Simon and Schuster, May 2007) indicate that for many American women not all political issues are created equal—and that politicians on both sides of the aisle fail to take notice at their peril.
“What I did for the book,” Ms. Hennegerger says, “was get groups of friends who had never talked about politics before together for their maiden voyage, and the result was pretty encouraging – and just the opposite of those high-decibel non-conversations you see on cable. There were lively disagreements, just as you’d hope, but when people felt heard, even by each other, they put their shoulders down and got serious. Some of the groups are still meeting.”
Melinda Henneberger joined Newsweek magazine in 2003 as a Contributing Editor, writing political profiles. Henneberger was for 10 years a reporter for The New York Times, working in Westchester County, New York, Washington and Rome. Previously, she was a reporter for New York Newsday, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, and the Dallas Morning News, where she was a roving reporter on the paper’s state desk and contributed to a special report on homelessness that won the Newspaper Guild’s Heywood Broun award. Henneberger is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and earned a graduate degree in European Studies from the Catholic University of Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. She is contributing editor for Commonweal Magazine.
Ms. Henneberger’s visit is part of the Commonweal Campus Speakers Program, which brings some of the American Catholic Church’s most popular writers and speakers to college campuses.
Change Text Size
