Last week, I finally finished up the tome I was slogging though for a book group, Personal History by Katharine Graham. I knew little about Graham except that she was in charge of the Washington Post during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. I was more familiar with the former story because of my final graduate class, Journalism History.

I was concerned early on that this would be another "poor little rich girl" kind of story. After all, Graham's rise in her career can be attributed largely to her birth into a prominent family. Strangely, she is remarkably uncocky about what is handed to her. In fact, she downplays her education and work experiences from her single days. It seems strange that such a privileged background, growing up in two mansions run by hordes of servants, would produce such an unconfident person.

Graham attributes much of her lack of confidence to the ways in which her mother tore down her children, when she wasn't ignoring them completely. Only over the course of many years does Graham realize that her self-centered mother is not the only cause of her timidity. The entire culture fed her constant messages that she was nothing and that her talents would never stack up to a man's.

Graham never puts herself forward as any sort of poster child for the women's movement. She in fact faults herself for not being more sensitive to women in her workplace and of doing too little to improve working conditions for women. As a leader, she often deferred to the judgement of male colleagues, often against her better instincts. The way in which she fumbled around professionally actually made me see the women's movement in the 1960s and 70s in a new light. Many women were not bra-burning radicals, but simply intelligent people struggling to make a living and do their jobs competently. I don't think I appreciate enough what the last generation did to overcome barriers and remake our culture so that women could have opportunites to excel intellectually and professionally.

The other thing Graham's book helped me appreciate is how far mental health care has come since the early 1960s. Graham's husband left her a widow when he committed suicide in 1963. He showed all the signs of bipolar disorder, which experts then were just beginning to understand. Lithium treatment was experimental those days--bipolar patients usually received only counseling. I'm close to several bipolar people, including a relative, and I'm awed at what a difference medication makes. Tragic stories like Phil Graham's would be the norm if not for scientific breakthroughs in neurology.