Early, who goes by Alex, grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, not far from where I grew up, in Newton (alas, a bit earlier). She wanted to be a child actress, was into sports, and in her yearbook at Arlington High School, Class of 2003, she was named Teacher’s Pet.
Her parents were both activist journalists — Gordon is the author of numerous books about health care; dad, Steve Early, is a lawyer and union organizer who writes about labor. “Throughout my whole life,” Alex told me, “whenever I was upset about something,” they would suggest: “You should write an article about that.”
That’s how she — and her parents — recall the backstory of “Wanted: Girl Heroes.” Little Alex was upset by the princesses always needing to be saved on King Arthur and the Knights of Justice and the fact that even the strong female characters in X-Men were always dressed in sexy clothes. Her parents told her to write it up and sent it to someone they knew at the LA Times.
“The men on these shows do basically everything,” says the column now posted above my desk. “They do the shooting, and they save the girls. If anybody’s in trouble, the girls go and get the good-guy men. If the girls are part of the bad-guy team, they go and get the bad-guy men.
“And then the good-guy men and the bad-guy men fight it out,” it continues. “The women just watch and hope that the person who’s on their team wins. The women never get to save anybody. This makes me feel terrible.”
Alex got active in politics as a teenager, opposing the Iraq War, and majored in Latin American studies at Wesleyan. After graduation she got an internship in El Salvador, working for a nominally Christian organization, though she identifies as “culturally Jewish.” She ended up staying for years, partly because she met the man who would become her husband.
So that’s where she was in 2011, when The New Yorker published the Jill Abramson profile that mentioned my having given her Alex’s “Girl Heroes” column. A month later, the magazine published a letter to the editor from one Alexandra Early in San Salvador.
“The Salvadoran organization I work with empowers women to find their voices in their communities and in political decision-making — tasks that first require them to persuade their husbands to abandon macho ideas about women’s role in society,” she wrote then.
“I am very pleased to hear about Abramson’s appointment at the Times — indeed, the women’s movement in the United States has made many advancements since I was a little girl — but my experience as a woman working in El Salvador indicates that we still have a long way to go in much of the world.”
When we met via Zoom a few weeks ago, I read Alex her decades-old column. She said she feels like television and “media representation” generally has radically improved, with shows like Sex Education not only having strong female characters but “people with so many different ethnicities and genders and sexualities.”
“I don’t watch a lot of superhero movies,” she said. “I’m more into watching how real people interact.” Her favorite show is Jane the Virgin, where Gina Rodriguez stars as a young, working-class, Catholic, Latina single mom. A superhero of another sort.
“My partner makes fun of me because I’m watching it for, I think, the third time,” Alex said with a laugh. “I think I love it because it’s got a character who has a kid, and has this big family that’s helping her out all the time, and she’s also got these love interests. And she’s got a job and she’s a writer, and it’s so interesting to me to watch her juggle things.”
But for all the improvement and diversity available on streaming services in the United States, Alex said, she cringes at the television her 15-year-old niece in El Salvador is subjected to.
“I remember this really homophobic, sexist show that I was watching with her, and seeing her react to it, with her parents,” she said of a recent visit. “I was trying to talk to her about, like, ‘I have friends who are gay and they have these beautiful relationships and it’s OK, you can be whoever you want’ in my non-perfect Spanish.”
