As a Norland College graduate, Ashford had always worn her Norland uniform through every job until a day when she went with one of her charges, baby Pippa, to a National Health Services baby clinic after the war. "What's the good in having a Norland nanny?" a mother there asked her as they both sat in the waiting room. "They don't work – they don't like to get their hands or their uniform dirty. I mean to say, it's ridiculous. Who needs a nanny in a cape?" When Ashford got back to the house, she took off the uniform. "I am sure [Norland principal] Mrs. Whitehead would have had a blue fit," she wrote. "But the world had changed so much since 1939. As we entered the 1950s a nanny in a uniform seemed strangely outdated. Society was changing, and I had to be seen changing with it."
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
