Meryl Streep’s Performance In ‘The Post’ Reflects What Our Working Mothers Went Through

There’s a wonderful moment in ‘The Post” when Katherine Graham, played by Meryl Streep, interrupts a man who has interrupted her.

“I’m talking to Mr. Bradlee,” she says, meaning the executive editor of the Washington Post.

In some theaters across the country, audiences are applauding at the end, once it’s clear that journalism has prevailed.

At my showing in Ann Arbor, the theater burst into applause when she said that.

Streep’s performance in “The Post” is more than just her latest bravura portrayal of a true life character.

It is a master class in what women in the 1970s went through, both to be viewed as professionals and to be taken seriously.

My mother was one of them. She and Mrs. Graham were roughly the same age. My mother was born in 1913, Mrs. Graham in 1917.

(I’m going to use the honorific for her, because we all did in the newspaper business while she was alive.)

Like Mrs. Graham, who took charge of the newspaper after the suicide of her husband, my mother returned to the working world because of my father’s illness and death.