The New York Times is a prominent newspaper that is supposed to be non-biased and fairly portray the news as it is. Saying this, why are five out of six main pictures on today’s online front page of men? This paper shows that, to an outsider this paper makes the United States look like a patriarchy. Before I read a paper, what catches my eye first is a picture and pictures say a lot, at least on this front page. The first one is of one presidential candidate, Obama (a man) and proceeds to talk of his victory in the Mississippi Primary. He is smiling and confident looking, then a step below this both literally and psychologically, there is a man helping a boy. Then to the left there is a man leading a woman off stage. There are a few more pictures, but these say it all in a nutshell. Man equals power is demonstrated quite obviously by showing a man running for president, man equals savior is shown by a man helping a boy from the ground in Pakistan and finally man equals guidance is shown all too directly in the picture of a man leading a woman off a stage. This says it all. All that Virginia Woolf talks about in “A Room of One’s Own” is shown right here, or at least most of it.
The differences between the newspaper headlines in Woolf’s book and the headlines in today’s “Times” are most certainly different, but the visual message they encourage remains steadfast and unbalanced. Woolf’s narrator reads about how men decide who is guilty of a murder crime and that women are wrong to want divorce. Then they throw in the day’s weather as if they give little more thought to that than to news of humans (Woolf 33). Granted times have changed, but women’s rights have not changed nearly enough to match the years that have elapsed.