The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  The famous “click!”—that moment of recognizing the sexual politics of a situation. Jane O’Reilly would later coin the term in the 1971 preview issue of Ms. magazine. O’Reilly was writing on “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” such as watching one’s husband step over a pile of toys that needed to be put away. But in fact, she was writing about every woman’s moment of truth. “The click! of recognition,” she wrote, “that parenthesis of truth around a little thing that completes the puzzle of reality in women’s minds—the moment that brings a gleam to our eyes and means the revolution has begun.”

  JUDY’S “CLICK!” MOMENT was the spark of our rebellion. It might have happened eventually but in the fall of 1969, that moment of insight at her consciousness-raising group got Judy thinking—and Judy was a thinker. Raised on the liberal Upper West Side of New York City, Judy was from a smart but humble family. Her father owned an electrical supply company and doted on his daughter, but from the beginning her parents’ marriage was troubled and the household was tense. “I don’t recall very many pleasant moments with them,” recalled Judy. “They either fought or there was silence.” Judy’s younger brother Alfred, who became an actor and humor writer, filled the void at the dinner table with jokes and funny stories. Judy agonized. “My mother’s favorite color was red and my father’s favorite color was green, and when people would ask me, ‘What’s your favorite color?’ I would chose orange,” she said. “To me, orange looked like red but tasted like green. I saw myself as someone who couldn’t take sides. I loved my parents equally but if I sided with my father, my mother would call me disloyal.”

  In seventh grade, Judy was admitted to Hunter High School, the elite public school for intellectually gifted girls, but four years later she transferred to Dalton, a top private school. She was attracted by Dalton’s progressive curriculum and by its superior record of college acceptances. Judy chose to go to Smith College, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, but she was still filled with insecurities and self-doubt. Her senior thesis at Smith, “Some Metaphysical Views of Logical Necessity,” was submitted for a prize that came with the honor of publishing it as a book. Judy won the prize but wouldn’t let Smith publish her thesis because she didn’t think it was good enough.

  After graduation, Judy went to Oxford University in England on a prestigious Marshall Scholarship. At that time, the Marshall was awarded to only twenty-four students and, unlike the Rhodes Scholarships, accepted women as well as men (the Rhodes wasn’t extended to women until 1977). At Oxford, she did the typical three-year course in PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics) and wrote her thesis, “Freud’s Use of the Concept of ‘Meaning’ in the Theory of Dreams.” She was planning to stay in England, where she was happy and away from family strife, when she received a phone call from her mother in 1967. After twenty-seven years, her father had finally walked out. Her mother was so hysterical that Judy, ever the “good girl,” came home.

  Back in New York, this brilliant Marshall Scholar couldn’t find a job for six months. She thought about going to graduate school in psychology, but “I didn’t have a real goal,” Judy said. “I didn’t have a goal of getting married, but I didn’t have a career goal either. I thought about law school but I needed money.” She also needed a home. While living with her mother, Judy continued to see her father, which infuriated her mother even more. Judy finally left, sleeping on friends’ couches until, with the help of her father, she rented an apartment at 14 East Ninety-Second Street.

  Later that year, Judy got an interview at Newsweek with Rod Gander, the chief of correspondents, who told her up front, “If you want to write, go someplace else.” Short of money, she took a job as the “Elliott girl,” the young woman—always a woman—who ran copy from Oz Elliott to the editors on Thursday and Friday nights until two in the morning, and all day Saturday. It was a terrifying job because when Oz would call “copy,” he would eye you like a cop waiting to nab a perp, sternly looking over his glasses to make sure you took the story from the correct wooden out-box. But it was a good schedule for Judy because it allowed her to continue to search for a job where she wouldn’t have to type. After six months of looking for work, Judy reluctantly took a research position in early 1968 in the Nation department. The other Marshall Scholar at Newsweek was her boss, Nation editor John Jay Iselin, a direct descendant of one of the founding fathers, John Jay.

  In the fall of 1969, Judy got a call from Gladys Kessler, a friend of a friend who had just moved to New York. Over lunch Gladys, a lawyer, asked Judy about her job at Newsweek. When Judy explained what she did at the magazine and how all the women were researchers, Gladys said, “You know that’s illegal?”

  Judy was incredulous. Gladys explained that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based on sex, among other things, and told her to call the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which had been set up in 1965 to handle such cases. The next day, Judy went to work and, on the magazine’s free tie-line to Washington, dialed the EEOC office. Hesitantly, she explained the situation to the woman on the other end of the line. “I don’t think these men know that it’s illegal,” she said. “They’re very liberal and they have daughters and I think we should talk to them.” The gruff-voiced woman barked back, “Don’t be a naive little girl. People who have power don’t like to give up that power. What’s so wonderful about your case is that it couldn’t be more clear-cut and that’s going to change if you let on. You have to organize and keep it secret and file a complaint. If you ask them about it, they will hire two token women and that will be the end of it.”

  Click!

  Judy was shaken by the call. Now there was a moral issue. “I thought if this is illegal and it’s going on here, then I should do something to correct it,” she later explained. “That was really hard.” She also knew that what she was going to do would change her life. “I saw myself as a nice person but I was starting to behave in a way that I never had before,” she said. It was tearing her apart. As she weighed her thoughts, Judy struggled, with great inner courage, to overcome a deep-seated code of conduct. “Part of what is involved in participating in cultural change is violating what you were raised to believe was sacrosanct,” she said. “It is getting yourself to accept a different set of values and relinquish old ones. That is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I felt I had to sue.” She scheduled a lunch with her two pals in the Nation department, Margaret Montagno and Lucy Howard.

  Margaret and Lucy were close friends and later shared a weekend house in the Hamptons, but they were from different worlds. Margaret had grown up in Columbus, Ohio, the daughter of an engineer and a housewife—“standard issue 1950s Republican conservatives,” as she described them. More liberal than her parents, she had always been interested in history and avidly read the newspapers. After public school, Margaret went to St. Mary’s College, the sister school of Notre Dame, and earned a master’s in medieval history from Fordham University. She was working on her PhD in Russian history at New York University when she landed a job at Newsweek, which she found far more interesting than a previous teaching job.

  A petite brunette with a sardonic sense of humor, Margaret became a Nation researcher just as the 1968 campaign season was heating up. “I loved being plugged into the political scene,” she said. She was sent out on the Eugene McCarthy campaign and covered the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Margaret quickly gave up the idea of teaching and became a political junkie, keeping meticulous track of the ever-changing convention delegate counts on a giant chart in Nation. “We were all obsessed with politics,” she recalled. “That’s all we talked about, especially in the early part of the week before the files came in. I think that’s what brought us all together.”

  Lucy Anne Calhoun Howard was descended from John Eager Howard, a member of the Continental Congress, a senator from Maryland and former governor for whom Howard County, Maryland, is named. On her mother’s s
ide, she was related to the famous American painter Charles Willson Peale. Her father’s family had lost everything in the Civil War and, at the age of fourteen, her grandfather went into the investment banking/brokerage business and bought a seat on the stock exchange. After he lost money in the Depression, he wanted his son to become a minister. Instead, Lucy’s father became a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

  Lucy’s mother, also named Lucy, didn’t work outside the home but she was very competitive. She excelled in fox hunting, and after she had children, continued to play tennis—“club tennis,” her husband disparagingly called it. She hated to lose and she also hated to give up her maiden name. “Everyone knew her as Lucy Iglehart,” said Lucy. “Late in life she said things like, ‘If I had been a young woman in the 1980s and 1990s, I would have been a jockey and ridden in the Hunt Cup.’ She was a very good rider but women weren’t allowed to do that.”

  Lucy grew up on a small farm outside Baltimore, Maryland. She had a horse, which she showed in competitions and rode to hounds. She was far more competitive in school and sports than her two older brothers. At Garrison Forest, a boarding school, Lucy played field hockey and was a member of the riding team. “I was conditioned to want to do well in school—and I did,” she said. “But I didn’t do it to get into college. I did it to get more points for my [intramural] team. I was a very competitive person, that’s why I wanted to be at the top of the class—you got more points for that. Part of me didn’t want to lose that status. But part of me hated it and wanted to disappear from it because it put so much pressure on me and I was always anxious.”

  A pretty girl who hid her strong opinions beneath a pleasing demeanor, Lucy was also a debutante like her mother. “All my friends were debutantes,” she explained. “That’s what we were thinking about—parties, dancing, boys, and martinis.” Although her parents didn’t care whether she went to college, Lucy chose to go to Radcliffe because a cousin went there. “Something was driving me to get out of how I grew up,” she said, and indeed, she found life on campus liberating. “I had a good time at Radcliffe. You could goof off. I got contact lenses—I wasn’t ‘froggy four-eyes’ anymore—and I got honors. I didn’t take advantage of all the academic things, but I became much more adventuresome in terms of meeting all kinds of people, which is why I came to New York.”

  In New York, Lucy found herself totally unprepared for the work world. “The word ‘résumé’ was completely foreign to me,” she recalled. “I didn’t have a goal. I thought I was going to get married.” Determined not to be a secretary—“at Radcliffe, they fill your head with the ‘best and brightest,’” she said—she scoured the “Help Wanted—Female” ads for something other than menial jobs and two weeks later, ended up at the Career Blazers employment agency. “They told me there was a training program at Newsweek,” she recalled. “Did I ask what was involved? Did I have any idea what it was?” In her best dress and gloves, she went off to the interview at Newsweek, where an editor asked her if she knew George Trow, another Harvard graduate who later became a writer for the New Yorker. Worried that she might say the wrong thing, Lucy cautiously answered that she knew George had written the Hasty Pudding show at Harvard. The editor said, “His father’s my best friend—when can you come to work?”

  Lucy joined Newsweek on the mail desk in September 1963, and got hooked on news when, in November, the first wires came across that President Kennedy had just been shot and Newsweek scrambled to cover the story. In March, she moved to Nation as a researcher. During the 1968 primary, when Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and later, Bobby Kennedy were running for the Democratic nomination, Lucy and Margaret did a fair share of reporting. “Jay [Iselin] sent us all out because there were so many candidates in 1968 and not enough guys to cover them,” said Lucy, “and we suddenly realized we could be reporters.”

  In the fall of 1969, Judy Gingold invited Margaret and Lucy to lunch at the New York Women’s Exchange, a cheery consignment shop and restaurant on Madison Avenue whose aim was to help “gentlewomen in reduced circumstances”—the perfect description for our little group. Founded in 1878 so that Civil War widows could earn a living by selling their wares, the Women’s Exchange was overflowing with knitted baby clothes, hand-made rag dolls, and beautifully embroidered linens hanging on the walls. In the back, down a few stairs, was a small restaurant filled with wooden tables and chairs. Over the next six months, the Women’s Exchange became “Command Central” for the Newsweek crew as we plotted our homegrown revolution over home-baked crab cakes and claret lemonade.

  When Judy approached her, Lucy had just returned from a month in San Francisco, California, where women’s lib was in the air. She had brought back tie-dye shirts from the Haight-Ashbury district and buttons that read UPPITY WOMEN UNITE. Over lunch with Lucy and Margaret, Judy explained about Title VII and they discussed writing an anonymous letter to the EEOC describing the Newsweek situation and asking the commission to investigate. After endless meetings, they gathered one night at Margaret’s apartment on Eighty-Ninth and York, where the three women finally drafted the letter. “Judy was the philosopher and theoretician—super smart and could talk every angle,” explained Lucy. “Margaret could cut right to the heart of the matter and say this was wrong, this is what it should be. My role, as I saw it, was to make sure everything was nailed down, that there were no holes or openings for mistakes. On the way home I was supposed to drop the letter in the mailbox but like a good researcher, I wanted to reread it once more, so I didn’t mail it after all.”

  Lucy was particularly offended by the treatment of her friend Pat Lynden, a fellow researcher in the Nation section. Pat had been reporting on New York Mayor John Lindsay, who was hoping for a slot on the Republican presidential ticket in 1968. But just before the Republican convention in Miami that summer, Pat was told that she wasn’t going. Instead, a young male reporter would take her place—and by the way, would she please turn over her notes to him? “That made me really angry,” said Lucy. “The summer in Berkeley had really changed my view of Newsweek. I don’t think I was capable of initiating the suit, but when I saw what happened to Pat, that galvanized me.” Margaret also felt aggrieved on behalf of both Judy and Pat. “For Judy to come back from a Marshall and be offered a job running copy—that was mind-boggling,” she recalled. “Judy was very angry at that point. Pat was someone who did want to be a journalist and had done a lot of reporting work in New York, and then to have to turn over everything to a guy—that was unfair.”

  Lucy and Margaret suggested that they bring in Pat, who was everything they weren’t—ambitious and combative. Pat had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she had worked on the Daily Cal and won awards for her reporting. In January 1962, on her way to Europe, she fell in love with New York and landed a job on the Newsweek mail desk. After she became a Nation researcher, she wrote several freelance pieces, including cover stories for the New York Times Magazine and for the Atlantic.

  A fearless reporter—the kind who was assigned to cover the riots in Newark—Pat had an unusual background. She was a “red-diaper baby,” the epithet given to children of American Communists or Communist sympathizers. Her uncle was Archie Brown, the trade union director of the Communist Party in California. Her father, an official of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union, had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. There was a profile relief, in hammered copper, of Joseph Stalin over her grandmother’s china cabinet. “I wasn’t sure whether it portrayed the Soviet leader or my Russian-born Jewish grandfather as a young man,” Pat wrote in an article for New York Woman magazine. “I never asked, I suppose, because to me my grandfather and the USSR were one and the same.” During the 1950s, Pat and her family became untouchables, she wrote, “partly through our own choice—we had been raised to reject much that capitalism had wrought—but in large measure it was because dur
ing the depressing postwar decade of the blacklists . . . doors were closed to us as well as our parents.”

  That left a powerful impression on Pat. “On the positive side of this Leftist heritage,” she wrote in New York Woman, “is the pride in a political tradition that stands for egalitarianism, the rights of minorities, economic justice . . . and civil liberties. But ours is also a subculture that will always feel vulnerable to the powers that be; we will always believe that we are irrevocably outsiders. We often wonder when the government will, once again, need political scapegoats and choose us. As a consequence, we have very little faith in, or regard for, duly constituted authority. We also know that friends are often friends only to a point.” Still, Pat was no fan of the Communist Party either—giving her a healthy skepticism about everything. “I was aware of a lot of the bullshit on the Left—the hypocrisy and the philandering and the mistreatment of wives,” she later told me. “I kept myself on the sidelines.”

  In 1965, Pat met Allen Gore, a lieutenant of detectives in the police department’s Pickpocket and Confidence Division (they would later marry). Two years later, Allen got Pat entrée to the Gypsy subculture for a cover story in The Atlantic. But when she showed a draft of the story to Ed Kosner, a friend in Nation, he said, “‘You’re a good reporter but you’re not such a good writer,’” she recalled. “I was devastated.” After the Lindsay assignment was taken away from her in the summer of 1968, she said, “my confidence began to flag and I left.” She worked for a columnist for a while and went back to San Francisco to do some reporting. She returned in late 1969 when Newsweek offered her a job in the New York bureau. Shortly after that, Lucy and Margaret approached Pat in the Newsweek ladies’ room. “I thought about it for two hours and said, ‘Yes, I’ll join you,’” Pat recalled. “Then a week or two went by and we didn’t know what to do. Who else do we know? Who can we trust? Women just didn’t trust each other. We didn’t talk about our salaries. We fought over the bones like crazy. We competed with each other instead of saying, ‘We’re not the enemy.’”