by Lynn Povich
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 - “Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint”
CHAPTER 2 - “A Newsmagazine Tradition”
CHAPTER 3 - The “Hot Book”
CHAPTER 4 - Ring Leaders
CHAPTER 5 - “You Gotta Take Off Your White Gloves, Ladies”
CHAPTER 6 - Round One
CHAPTER 7 - Mad Men: The Boys Fight Back
CHAPTER 8 - The Steel Magnolia
CHAPTER 9 - “Joe—Surrender”
CHAPTER 10 - The Barricades Fell
CHAPTER 11 - Passing the Torch
EPILOGUE:
Acknowledgments
NOTE ON SOURCES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Steve, Sarah, and Ned
and for the Newsweek women
PROLOGUE
WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?
JESSICA BENNETT GREW UP in the era of Girl Power. It was the 1980s, when young women were told there was no limit to what they could accomplish. The daughter of a Seattle attorney, Jessica regularly attended Take Your Daughter to Work Day with her dad and was the academic star in her family, excelling over her younger brothers and male peers. In high school, she was a member of Junior Statesmen of America, a principal in the school orchestra, and a varsity soccer player. Jessica was accepted to the University of Southern California, her first choice, but transferred after freshman year to Boston University because it had a stronger journalism program. When the Boston Globe offered a single internship to a BU student, she was the recipient.
Then Jessica got a job at Newsweek and suddenly encountered obstacles she couldn’t explain. She had started as an intern on the magazine in January 2006 and was about to be hired when three guys showed up for summer internships. At the end of the summer, the men were offered jobs but Jessica wasn’t, even though she was given one of their stories to rewrite. Despite the fact that she was writing three times a week on Newsweek’s website, her internship kept getting extended. Even after she was hired in January 2007, Jessica had to battle to get her articles published, while guys with the same or less experience were getting better assignments and faster promotions. “Initially I didn’t identify it as a gender issue,” she recalled. “But several of us women had been feeling like we weren’t doing a good job or accomplishing what we wanted to. We didn’t feel like we were being heard.”
Being female was not something that ever held Jessica back. “I was used to getting everything I wanted and working hard for it,” said the twenty-eight-year-old writer at Newsweek.com, “so my feeling was, why do I need feminism? Why do I need to take a women’s studies course? And, of course, there was the stereotype of the feminist—the angry, man-hating, granola-crunching, combat-boot-wearing woman. I don’t know that I consciously thought that, but I think a lot of young women do. I went to public school in the inner city, so issues of racial justice were more interesting to me than gender because, frankly, gender wasn’t really an issue.”
Her best friend at Newsweek, Jesse Ellison, was also frustrated. She had recently discovered that the guy who replaced her in her previous job was given a significantly higher salary. She was doing well as the number two to the editor of Scope, the opening section of the magazine that featured inside scoops and breaking news. But that summer, a half-dozen college-age “dudes” had come in as summer interns and suddenly the department turned into a frat house. Guys were high-fiving, turning the TV from CNN to ESPN, constantly invading her cubicle, and asking her, as if she were their mother, whether they should microwave their lunches. They were also getting assigned stories while she had to pitch all her ideas. Since a new boss had taken over, Jesse felt as if she had been demoted. She didn’t know what to do.
Jesse, thirty, sought the advice of a trusted editor who had been a mentor to her. He told her, “You’re senior to them—shame them.” Then he said, “The problem is that you’re so pretty you need to figure out a way to use your sexuality to your advantage,” she recalled, still incredulous about the remark. “Even though I think he was just being an idiot for saying this—because he had really fought for me—hearing that changed my perception of the previous six months. I was like, ‘Wait a minute! Were you being an advocate for me because you think I’m pretty and you want me in your office? And, more important, is this what other people in the office think? Not that I’m actually talented, but this is about something else?’ It really screwed with my head.”
Jesse had grown up in a conservative town outside Portland, Maine. Her mother, a former hippie who was divorced, had started a small baby-accessories business. During the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings, Jesse was the only one in her eighth-grade class to support Anita Hill. She went to a coed boarding school, where she was valedictorian of her class, and then to Barnard, an all-women’s college, where she graduated cum laude. She, too, never took a women’s studies course. “I just felt like I didn’t need it,” she said. “Feminism was a given—it was Barnard!” After a brief job at a nonprofit, she enrolled part-time in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She also got an internship on the foreign language editions of Newsweek and was hired full-time when she graduated with her master’s degree in June 2008. But now, a year later, she, too, was struggling to move ahead at Newsweek. What was the problem?
“It wasn’t like I believed that sexism didn’t exist,” said Jesse. “It was just that it didn’t occur to me that what was happening at work was sexism. Maybe it’s because we are a highly individualized culture now and I had always done really well. So I just assumed that everything that was happening was on the basis of merit. I grew up reading Newsweek and I had tremendous respect for it. I felt like, I’m in this world of real thinkers and writers and I have to prove myself. The fact that I wasn’t being given assignments was simply an indication that they didn’t think I was good enough yet. It didn’t occur to me that it was about anything else. For the first time in my life, I was feeling inadequate and insecure.”
Jessica Bennett felt the same way. “Maybe it’s a female tendency to turn inward and blame yourself, but I never thought about sexism,” she said. “We had gotten to the workforce and then something suddenly changed and we didn’t know what it was. After all, we had always accomplished everything we had set out to do, so naturally we would think we were doing something wrong—not that there was something wrong. It was us, not it.”
What was the problem? After all, women composed nearly 40 percent of the Newsweek masthead in 2009. It wasn’t like the old days, when there was a ghetto of women in the research department from which they couldn’t get promoted. In fact, there were no longer researchers on the magazine, except in the library. Young editorial employees now started as researcher-reporters. There were women writers at Newsweek, several female columnists and senior editors, and at least two women in top management. Ann McDaniel, a former Newsweek reporter and top editor, was now the managing director of the magazine in charge of both the business and editorial sides—a first. So it couldn’t be that old thing called discrimination that was inhibiting their progress. The fight for equality had been won. Women could do anything now at Newsweek and elsewhere. Hadn’t Maria Shriver’s report on American women just come out in October 2009, declaring, “The battle of the sexes is over”?
Jesse and Jessica stewed about the situation, discussing it with other Newsweek women and friends outside the magazine, who, it turned out, were also feeling discouraged in their careers. “It felt so good just talking to each other,” recalled Jesse. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sick of feeling silent and scared. It’s not fair and we should sa
y something.’ That impulse was great; knowing that ‘I’m not alone’ was empowering.”
One day Jen Molina, a Newsweek video producer, was talking about the magazine’s “old boys club” to Tony Skaggs, a veteran researcher in the library. Tony informed her that many years before, the women at Newsweek had sued the magazine’s management on the grounds of sex discrimination. Jen was shocked. She had no idea this had happened—and at her own magazine. She told Jessica, who told Jesse, and the two friends began investigating. Jessica immediately Googled “Newsweek lawsuit” and “women sue Newsweek” but she couldn’t find any reference online. “Funny,” she remarked, “we’re trained in digital journalism, so we think if it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist.”
A few weeks later, Tony walked into Jessica’s office with a worn copy of Susan Brownmiller’s vivid chronicle of the women’s movement, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. A crumpled Post-it note marked the chapter mentioning a lawsuit at Newsweek in 1970, almost forty years earlier. “I just remember sitting at my desk reading it,” she said, “and every two sentences saying, ‘Holy shit,’ because I couldn’t believe this had happened and I didn’t know about it! So I instant-messaged Jesse and said, ‘You have to get over here and read this.’ Why didn’t we know this? Why has this died? And why was there only one person in the research department who had to get this book for us to let us know about it?”
When they read about the case, it all seemed so familiar. “We realized we were far from the first to feel discrimination,” said Jesse. “So much of the language and culture was still the same. It helped drive home the fact that it was still the same place, the same institutional knowledge, the same Newsweek.”
This happened in the fall of 2009, just as a scandal at CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman was making headlines. Joe Halderman, a CBS News producer who was living with one of Letterman’s assistants, had found her diary revealing her ongoing affair with her boss. Halderman threatened to expose the relationship if Letterman didn’t give him $2 million. On October 1, Letterman confessed—on air—that yes, “I have had sex with women who work for me on this show.” That same month, ESPN analyst Steve Phillips, a former general manager for the New York Mets baseball team, was fired from the sports network after admitting that he had an affair with a twenty-two-year-old production assistant. In November, editor Sandra Guzman, who was fired from the New York Post, filed a complaint against the newspaper and its editor-in-chief alleging “unlawful employment practices and retaliation” as well as sexual harassment and a hostile work environment. (The case is pending in Manhattan federal court.)
The Letterman scandal infuriated Sarah Ball, a twenty-three-year-old Culture reporter at Newsweek, particularly after she read an article by a former Letterman writer. “I was galvanized by Nell Scovell’s story on VanityFair.com,” recalled Sarah, who cited the beginning of the piece by heart: “At this moment, there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for Late Show with David Letterman, The Jay Leno Show, and The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien combined. Out of the fifty or so comedy writers working on these programs, exactly zero are women. It would be funny if it weren’t true.” Sarah told her editor, Marc Peyser, about the piece and in the course of the conversation, Peyser suggested a story on young women in the workforce, pegged to the scandals. “He was really into it,” Sarah recalled. “He kept saying, ‘This could be a cover, this could be a cover.’” Sarah, who had seen the Brownmiller book, immediately told Jessica and Jesse about Peyser’s interest. The three women went back into his office and pitched a story combining the old and new elements. “It was perfect,” said Jesse. “It was bigger than us, we had our own narrative that we felt was important, and there was the forthcoming fortieth anniversary of the lawsuit in March.”
Peyser had heard about the lawsuit and told them that it had gone all the way to the US Supreme Court. That night, Jesse started searching online through all the 1970 Supreme Court cases but found nothing mentioning Newsweek. “We knew there was something about a lawsuit,” she said, “but we didn’t know what it meant.” Jessica finally paid to search the New York Times archives, where several articles on the lawsuit turned up. “I was bouncing out of my chair I was so excited,” she said. “We knew we had to do something but it still wasn’t clear from those clips whether the suit had been settled or whether it actually went to court.”
The three women spent the next few weeks digging deeper and calling various sources, including Susan Brownmiller and some former Newsweek women whose names were mentioned in the book. I was one of the women. Jessica and Jesse contacted me when they learned that I was writing about the case. They wanted to find out what had happened and why. They were determined to write a piece for Newsweek questioning how much had actually changed for women at the magazine, in the media, and in the workplace in general.
When I met the two young women for lunch, they reminded me so much of my friends and myself forty years earlier. We, too, had been bright young things, full of energy and expectations. We also had been thrilled to be working at an important magazine and we, too, had begun to realize that something wasn’t right at Newsweek. But if they were post-feminists, we were pre-feminists. Unlike these young women, many of us were far more conflicted about our ambitions and clueless about having a career. My only desire after college was to go to Paris, and I was lucky enough to get a job there as a secretary in the Newsweek bureau. I never imagined that five years later, I would be suing the magazine for sex discrimination.
As I listened to Jessica and Jesse struggle to understand what they were feeling—their marginalization, the sexual banter and innuendo, the career cakewalk for men their age—it reminded me of “the problem that had no name” that Betty Friedan had defined in her 1963 groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique: that “strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction” of the American housewife who, “as she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”
Friedan’s “problem” did not apply to working-class women, who had to earn a living but were confined mainly to low-paying jobs. It was the condition of the postwar suburban housewife. Although many middle-class women had been recruited to work during World War II, they were forced to go home when the soldiers returned. For educated women, whose husbands could support them, not having to work was seen as a status symbol until, as Betty Friedan pointed out, many of them realized they wanted—needed—something more than a husband and children.
Finding meaningful work, however, was not easy. In just about every industry, “office work” for women meant secretarial jobs and typing pools. Even in creative fields, such as book publishing, advertising, and journalism, where there was a pool of educated females, women were given menial jobs. In the 1950s, full-time working women earned on average between fifty-nine and sixty-four cents for every dollar men earned in the same job. (It wasn’t until the passage of the Equal Pay Act in June 1963 that it became illegal to pay women a lower rate for the same job.) And there were very few professional women. Until around 1970, women comprised fewer than 10 percent of students in medical school, 4 percent of law school students, and only 3 percent of business school students.
At Newsweek, our “problem that had no name” in the mid-1960s was sexism, pure and simple. At both Time and Newsweek, only men were hired as writers. Women were almost always hired on the mail desk or as fact checkers and rarely promoted to reporter or writer. Even with similar credentials, women generally ended up in lesser positions than men. One summer, two graduates of the Columbia Journalism School were hired—he as a writer and she as a researcher/ reporter. That’s just the way it was, and we all accepted it.
Until we didn’t. Just as young women today are discovering that post-feminism isn’t really “post,” we were
discovering that civil rights didn’t include women’s rights. Just like Jesse, Jessica, and Sarah, we began to realize that something was very wrong with the Newsweek system. With great trepidation, we decided to take on what we saw as a massive injustice: a segregated system of journalism that divided research, reporting, writing, and editing roles solely on the basis of gender. We began organizing in secret, terrified that we would be found out—and fired—at any moment. For most of us middle-class ladies, standing up for our rights marked the first time we had done anything political or feminist. It would be the radicalizing act that gave us the confidence and the courage to find ourselves and stake our claim.
THIS BOOK IS THE FIRST full account of that landmark Newsweek case, the story of how and why we became the first women in the media to sue for sex discrimination. Like Mad Men, the popular TV series on life at an advertising agency in the 1960s, not only does our tale reflect the legal and cultural limits for women at the time, but it also is a coming-of-age story about a generation of “good girls” who found ourselves in the revolutionary ’60s. But if our pioneering lawsuit has been forgotten by many people, even at Newsweek, our fight for women’s rights still reverberates with the younger generation. There have been many victories. Women today have more opportunities and solid legal support. They are more confident, more career-oriented, and more aggressive in getting what they want than most of us were. But many of the injustices that young women face today are the same ones we fought against forty years ago. The discrimination may be subtler, but sexist attitudes still exist.
Jessica, Jesse, and Sarah, and many young women like them, are beginning to understand that legal principles are not the only impediment to power. They see that the rhetoric they were taught—and believed—does not fully exist in the real world; that women still don’t have equal rights and equal opportunities; that cultural transformation is harder than legal reform; and that feminism isn’t finished. The struggle for social change is still evolving, and now they realize that they are part of it, too.
