Myra MacPherson, a wide-ranging feature writer for the Washington Post’s Style section and an author whose books included a study of the competing demands of politics and marriage among power couples in Washington and a volume on the enduring traumas of the Vietnam War, died Feb. 2 in hospice in Washington. She was 91.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said her son, Michael Siegel.
When Ms. MacPherson applied for her first journalism job in 1956, with ambitions to cover major news stories, an editor at the Detroit Free Press informed her that he had no openings on the women’s page.
“I said I wasn’t considering the women’s department,” she recalled, “and he looked at me as if I had said I just shot my mother or something. He said, ‘We have no women in the city room.’”
She spent the early 1960s relegated to women’s issues and society coverage at the Washington Star and the New York Times before the Post’s top editor, Ben Bradlee, poached her in 1968 for a new features section called Style. She was promised a freewheeling mandate to cover contemporary affairs and personalities with the irreverent verve of a glossy magazine.
Assigned to cover the New York Mets in 1969, the year the team won the World Series for the first time, Ms. MacPherson was denied the full access granted to her male colleagues, and she wrote a scathing story about “being treated like a non-eunuch in a harem.”
As she recounted decades later in a letter to the Times, a columnist griped to her: “The next thing, you girls are going to want to get into the locker room.”
“We don’t want to use the urinals,” Ms. MacPherson said she replied, “just the typewriters.”
Her first book, The Power Lovers (1975), was an unblinking look at the pressures of Washington marriages. “I am his mistress,” Marian Javits, the wife of Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R., N.Y.) told her. “His work is his wife.”
Ms. MacPherson conceived her book about Vietnam after watching the 1979 TV movie Friendly Fire. As a mother, she said, she was deeply moved by Carol Burnett’s performance as the grief-stricken parent of a dead Vietnam War soldier.
“When I watched the show, I realized that I didn’t know anyone in Washington who had a son in combat,” she recalled in an interview with California’s Riverside Press-Enterprise. “The sons I knew were mostly those who had escaped to college, gone into the National Guard or who had protested the war.”
The damage done by the Vietnam War was still fresh and in many circles was not a welcome subject for discussion when Ms. MacPherson began writing what became Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (1984).
Long Time Passing examined the war and its aftermath through the lives of hundreds of people profoundly affected by the conflict.
Ms. MacPherson included the perspectives of nurses, mothers, and wives as well as servicemen — some of whom said they were proud of what they did and some who said they were ashamed of it or traumatized by it. Some said they were deserters.
She also interviewed historians and psychologists, and she helped bring the concept of posttraumatic stress disorder to wider attention. In its best passages, author Donald Knox wrote in his Times review, the book “sings, soars, explodes with feeling” and “shines a powerful light on the differences that divide this generation.”
Myra Lea MacPherson was born in Marquette, Mich., on May 31, 1934, and grew up in Belleville, a town of 800 between Detroit and Ann Arbor. Her father worked for the camera company Argus, and her mother was a homemaker.
Ms. MacPherson was editor in chief of her high school newspaper, and she became night city editor of the student newspaper at Michigan State University in East Lansing. She graduated in 1956 with a degree in journalism.
After compiling the TV listings at the Free Press, she left for the Detroit News, where her professional experience improved, to a point. Assigned to cover the Indianapolis 500 in 1960, she said, she was the only female reporter at the race. She was denied access to the press box and the speedway’s Gasoline Alley, where drivers and their crews worked, and had to conduct interviews through chain-link fences along the track’s periphery.
Her first marriage, to Washington sportswriter Morris Siegel, ended in divorce. In 1987, she married Jack Gordon, a liberal Democratic state senator from Miami Beach whom she met years earlier when covering an Equal Rights Amendment convention in Tallahassee. She and Gordon moved to Palm Springs, Calif., in 2001, but maintained a home in Washington. He died four years later after being struck by a car.
Her daughter, Leah Siegel, a sports producer at ESPN, died of breast cancer in 2010. Survivors include her son, Michael Siegel, and three grandchildren.
Ms. MacPherson, who left the Post in 1991, spent years contributing articles to Vanity Fair and other publications. Her books included She Came to Live Out Loud (1999), a look at dying and grief from the viewpoint of a woman diagnosed with breast cancer at 37; All Governments Lie (2006), a biography of the left-wing independent journalist I.F. Stone; and The Scarlet Sisters (2014), a dual biography of two fiercely independent 19th-century siblings, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.
“I would definitely like to think I would have been out blazing a trail in Victorian times, probably in the liberal wing of the suffragist movement and also in journalism,” Ms. MacPherson told the website Edwardian Promenade, reflecting on her last book.
“When I sought my first newspaper job, there were no women covering anything but society news, fashion,” she added. “I fought my way out of that niche and was one of the few women covering regular news. I don’t know if I could take the pummeling the sisters [Woodhull and Claflin] did, but in a much lesser way, women in the ’60s and ’70s were breaking new ground and I was among them.”
