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.

She was already on the staff at Eastern Michigan University when my father died of a heart attack at age 58, a month after he took early retirement because of his battle with cardiomyopathy.

I had to smile at Streep’s wardrobe in the film because my mother dressed exactly like her, down to the belted shirtwaist dresses, pearls, sensible pumps and colorful prints.

And, my mother, despite being in a far different situation, fought some of the same battles to be heard that Mrs. Graham fights in the film.

There are several scenes in the movie where Mrs. Graham is shown playing hostess to gatherings at her elegant home in Georgetown. (A colleague of mine at U.S. News & World Report, knowing I admired her, drove me by one evening so I could see it.)

I was particularly struck by one where Steep looks through a doorway at the movers and shakers in her garden, knowing that she is going to have to make a choice.