Gwyneth Paltrow has serious mom shoes to fill. Her own mother, Blythe Danner (you’ve probably seen her in those osteoporosis ads, or as almost everybody’s TV/movie mom…) is a spectacular actress who took a long professional hiatus to stay home with her kids as they grew up. If you had seen her show up at that MASH unit in Korea as Hawkeye Pierce’s great lost love, or as Alma in Eccentricities of a Nightingale you’d know just how much she gave up and we all lost. Her daughter has often acknowledged how aware she was of that decision.
I think one reason it’s tough to watch all the hating on Gwyneth, especially by other women, is that her mother is so extraordinary. I interviewed her once for a story on the Girl Scouts, of all things, and she was fierce. About acting, about her leave from acting, about not raising her kids in Hollywood, about almost everything.
As I’ve watched her daughter all these years, with weird baby names and regimens and what seem like odd decisions, I’ve watched her the way a mother might. Understanding and probably respecting the quest, the efforts to build an original life and, of course, the professional success, and worrying about The Interview and other events that made her sound more shallow than she probably is. Springing to her defense, as Danner did, seems reasonable. The downpour of venom does not.
I know I’m challenging a lot of women I deeply respect but it just seems so — unnecessary. The women of America face a true political emergency, and if the right takes over Congress this fall we are in real danger. Let’s hate more on the people responsible for that and leave this poor, complicated woman to fix what she can and recover from the rest.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
View all posts by Cynthia Samuels
Gwyneth Paltrow has serious mom shoes to fill. Her own mother, Blythe Danner (you’ve probably seen her in those osteoporosis ads, or as almost everybody’s TV/movie mom…) is a spectacular actress who took a long professional hiatus to stay home with her kids as they grew up. If you had seen her show up at that MASH unit in Korea as Hawkeye Pierce’s great lost love, or as Alma in Eccentricities of a Nightingale you’d know just how much she gave up and we all lost. Her daughter has often acknowledged how aware she was of that decision.