The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  It was around that time, in October 1969, that Judy suggested I join the group. She had transferred from Nation to the Education section the year before and had just been promoted to head researcher in the back of the book. We were sharing a small inside office on the twelfth floor and had become best friends, but approaching me was tricky. My father was a good friend of Kay Graham’s and he was working at the Post when her father, Eugene Meyer, bought the paper in 1933. In the spring of 1965, as I was finishing up at Vassar, he had asked Kay Graham to set up a job interview for me at Newsweek, which she had graciously arranged. But there were no job openings in Paris at the time.

  My father was a well-known journalist in Washington and the sports world, widely admired for his integrity, his fairness, and his graceful writing. He was also an Orthodox Jew from Bar Harbor, Maine, the summer playground of the wealthy “rusticators”—the Astors, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies. Every June, they journeyed to Mt. Desert Island on their private railroad cars to spend three months at their “cottages,” more often fifty-room mansions with stables and servants’ quarters. Dad’s father had come from Lithuania to Boston in 1878 at age twelve with his father. They had peddled north, with packs on their back, to Bar Harbor, where they opened a furniture shop on Main Street and lived above the store. The seventh of nine children, Dad caddied at the tony Kebo Valley Golf Club, where one of his clients was Edward B. McLean, owner of the Washington Post (his wife, Evalyn, was the owner of the Hope Diamond). Mr. McLean offered Dad a job at his paper if he would continue to caddy for him at his private golf course off Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. So in 1922, at seventeen, Shirley (not an unusual male name in Maine) started as a police reporter at the Washington Post before he went to cover sports for $5 more a week.

  My mother, Ethyl Friedman Povich, was born in Radom, Poland. Her father, a tailor, had emigrated to Washington with fellow landsmen in the early twentieth century. In 1912, he brought his wife and children—my three-year-old mother and her six brothers and sisters—to live with him (another son would be born in the United States). After meeting on a blind date and marrying two years later, my parents lived the high life, traveling to New York and Florida and clubbing with the other sportswriters and their wives (their honeymoon was at the Washington Senators’ spring training camp in Biloxi, Mississippi). But after they had children, and with Dad constantly on the road, Mom became our anchor at home, providing a sweet, warm presence for us.

  Sports was the lingua franca at home, especially with two older brothers. Every February, we moved to Orlando, Florida, where the Washington Senators held spring training and where we went to school when we were young. While my brothers were living out their dreams as batboys, I rooted from the bleachers. Since girls weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, Dad always arranged for Mickey Vernon or Eddie Yost to play catch with me after the game. Needless to say, I became a big sports fan and understood the finer points of baseball. One of my proudest achievements was when my father used my scorecard at a Senators game to write his column.

  Although I played team sports, I didn’t want to compete in that arena, so I chose to become a dancer. I was a serious ballet student until, at thirteen, my teacher recommended that I go to the School of American Ballet in New York City. The idea of moving to New York, and not going to college, was out of the question for my family and me—a bridge too far. I switched to modern dance and became part of a performance troupe founded by Erika Thimey, a German émigré who, along with Ruth St. Denis, brought a spiritual dimension to modern dance.

  Given the strong personalities of my father and brothers, our house was infused with testosterone. The good part was that I felt comfortable around men and sports, something that helped me later in my career. But at the same time, our house revolved around the guys. I know it bothered my mother (she used to call us “motherless children,” since everyone referred to us as “Shirley’s kids”), and she took out her frustrations on me, often by being critical. I chafed under her, but I, too, was annoyed that many people didn’t even know that Shirley Povich also had a daughter.

  At home, the boys ruled. My parents sent my brothers to summer camp each year and, after elementary school, to Landon, an all-boys private school. I went to camp just one summer and continued in public school. After the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared that separate but equal schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional, my junior high school went from being 90 percent white to about 60 percent black. The problem was not the kids, as I remember it. In fact, the gangs in my school were mostly white and my best friend was black. The administration just couldn’t deal with the racial tensions or the influx of new students. After graduating from the ninth grade at Paul Junior High School in 1958, I went to Sidwell Friends, a private, coed Quaker school across town.

  At Friends, I was one of three new students in a class of fifty-three, most of whom had been there since kindergarten. Friends wasn’t a fancy school then—the most famous students were children of diplomats, not media stars—and it instilled in us the Quaker values of peace, simplicity, and social justice. I appreciated the silent contemplation of the weekly meetings for worship as well as Friends’ first-class education, which helped me get into Vassar.

  Still, I shied away from writing. I admired my father’s talent and read his column eagerly (he wrote six days a week), but how could I measure up? I once gave an eighth-grade paper to my father to look over. He was a witty and elegant writer and cared deeply about his craft. With the best intentions and wanting me to be a good writer, he criticized my story in what he thought was a constructive way. But to me, it was devastating. I had failed the test; I couldn’t play in his league. I never again showed him anything I had written.

  I was expected to do well in school, but it was never explained to me that I might have to earn a living. Nor did I realize that I would have to develop my own professional skills and talents. My family’s expectation—and mine—was that I would work until I married and had children, like my mother had. But seeing my father out in the world and meeting interesting people certainly appealed to me more than being a housewife. And although it hadn’t occurred to me to follow in his footsteps, here I was doing just that.

  When Judy confided in me in the fall of 1969, it was complicated for another reason: I was no longer a researcher. My boss, Harry Waters, had suggested that I be promoted to junior writer, and I was in March 1969. “You never voiced much ambition and I don’t remember your pushing to get ahead,” Harry recalled. “But I thought from your files that you should be a reporter and writer.” Still, Judy knew I would be sympathetic to the idea of a lawsuit. In 1969, I had begun covering the gay-rights and the women’s lib movements, which was expanding my worldview. I interviewed the radical Redstockings, who insisted on talking only to female reporters, and covered the first Congress to Unite Women, where the Daughters of Bilitis were dropped as a sponsor because Betty Friedan feared that lesbian associations would threaten the new women’s movement. I would return to the office fired up by these encounters and Judy and I would talk excitedly about them. That fall, I had suggested a six-column story on women’s lib. I was sent to Chicago and Boston to do the reporting because there were no women in the bureaus. My senior editor had moved to another department and Dwight Martin, the fill-in editor, thought I was “too close to the material.” He asked a guy to rewrite the piece but the story kept getting delayed and never ran. Then Judy told me about the EEOC.

  I must admit I wasn’t the first woman to “get it,” nor was I particularly angry, although I came to value those who were. People like Judy and Pat who were angry pushed the rest of us to make it happen. But my consciousness was getting raised and the blinders were beginning to fall. We were competing against one another and now I, too, began to question why there was just one slot for a woman and, more important, why we were willing to go along with the system. I had been lucky enough to break through the ranks, but even
if I hadn’t personally been held back, I knew too many women who had. I signed on.

  CHAPTER 5

  “You Gotta Take Off Your White Gloves, Ladies”

  FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, we were skulking around the office like spies, waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on our next recruit. Our strategy was to bring in women one by one, keeping things as secret as possible until we knew what we were going to do. The Newsweek ladies’ room was a favorite ambush spot. Peering under the stalls to make sure no one else was there, we would start a casual conversation at the sink about how bad things were. “I would say, ‘Oh God, I have to research a story by some male writer and I’m sure I could write it better myself,’” recalled Lucy Howard. “If the woman agreed, then I would tell her some of us had been thinking about what we could do to change this—and slowly bring her in.”

  Lucy, Margaret, and Pat approached the researchers in the Nation, Foreign, and Business sections while Judy and I took those in the back of the book. “To get into the inner circle you had to be vouched for,” explained Lucy. “Given how we were raised, we didn’t trust women, we didn’t want to talk to women, we didn’t even want to sit next to women. It was all about catering to men. You really had to trust someone to make sure she wouldn’t see it as an advantage to rat you out. Judy knew Lynn and Lynn knew Mary.”

  Mary Pleshette and I were becoming good friends. Mary was the Movies researcher and we often double-dated. I first met her boyfriend, Jack Willis, in the fall of 1969, when we went to see Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice at the Lincoln Center Film Festival. To me, Mary was the consummate New Yorker. The daughter of a prominent East Side ob/gyn, she had grown up on Madison Avenue, graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and was an aficionado of art, theater, food, and French, which she spoke fluently. Mary was a wonderful storyteller and wanted to be a writer. She had begun to freelance for the counterculture Village Voice and other publications when I invited her into our office one evening and closed the door. Explaining that the situation for researchers at Newsweek was illegal, I said, “We’re beginning to organize—would you be interested in joining us?” “Absolutely,” Mary said without hesitation. We ended the conversation by swearing her to secrecy.

  Judy and I then approached Phyllis Malamud, who had the office next to ours. Phyllis, whose father was the cantor at the Actors Temple in Times Square, was hired at Newsweek in 1960, after graduating from the City College of New York, and had worked her way up to a reporter position in the New York bureau. “Like most women those days, I thought I would meet a guy and get married,” she later said, “but I never met the guy, and after working at Newsweek, all of a sudden I had a career.” Judy and I stood in her doorway, not wanting to look too conspiratorial, and made our usual pitch: “We’re thinking about doing something—do you want to join?” Phyllis was surprised by our proposal but readily accepted. “It was the first time I even thought about the injustice,” she recalled.

  I also enlisted Elisabeth Coleman, the Press researcher, whose nickname was Lala. With long golden-red hair and green eyes, Lala was, hands down, the most beautiful woman at the magazine. Guys lusted after her and many at the magazine tried to date her. After graduating from Vassar, she had come to New York City wanting to work in journalism “as an assistant to a smart man,” she recalled. “My parents asked, ‘Have you ever thought about being a journalist yourself?’ and I replied, ‘Oh my gosh, no—I couldn’t do that. That’s for men.’” Luckily Lala’s boss, Bruce Porter, was a generous mentor, taking her along on assignments and training her to become a good reporter. When Bruce was away one day, I walked into the Press office and closed the door. In a hushed voice, I told Lala about our plans and asked if she would be interested in joining our group. She was so excited by the offer she immediately said yes. “I had this tightly wound feeling that we were changing history,” she recalled, “that something was going to explode!”

  What we didn’t know was that for the past year Lala had been asking Rod Gander if she could go to a bureau for a summer internship. Rod, the chief of correspondents, reminded her that the summer positions were reserved as a training program for young black men. When Lala pointed out that white guys from the Harvard Crimson and the Columbia Spectator were also being recruited for summer internships, Rod told her it was simply too expensive to send her as well. One day over drinks, Lala said, “Rod, there’s something you’re not telling me. What is it?” After a few more drinks, Rod confessed, “I don’t want to say this but—men don’t want to work with women.”

  I also talked to my friend Mimi Sheils (now Merrill McLoughlin), who worked across the hall in the Religion department. Tall, curly-haired, and super smart, Mimi was a proper girl on the outside, but a wild child underneath. She had majored in religion at Smith College, a decision her father, an advertising salesman at Time, ridiculed, saying it would get her a job as a telephone operator at Dial-A-Prayer. Instead, it got her a job as the Religion researcher at Newsweek. At her 1966 interview, the chief of research, Olga Barbi, asked Mimi what she was interested in. When she told her she had majored in religion, “Olga jumped out of her chair and said, ‘No one has ever said they were interested in Religion,’” Mimi recalled, laughing. Mimi wanted to be a doctor and finished her premed requirements in college, but she spent the summer after graduation at Radcliffe taking secretarial courses—just in case. “I got married in ’68 and I thought I was going to med school,” she recalled, “which is why I never expected to be a journalist or magazine person.”

  When I approached Mimi, “I wasn’t offended that my path was being cut off,” she recalled, “because I didn’t think my path was there.” But she was angry about other talented women being blocked. “I’d always been a little rebellious—I was a bad teenager,” she said. “So to some extent rebelling wasn’t all that new to me. I was always running afoul of my father, who set very strict rules, and I set my life to break them.” As the Religion researcher, Mimi did a lot of reporting and was upset that her work wasn’t recognized. “I did a lot of reporting, which was heavily used in stories, and I rarely got credit or mention in Top of the Week [where staffers were acknowledged before there were bylines]. That annoyed me no end.”

  Another early recruit was Trish Reilly, a tall, impeccably dressed researcher in the Arts sections. Trish’s seeming sophistication belied the fact that she was the first in her family to go to college, at UC Berkeley. Born in Alameda, California, Trish was raised with the expectations of becoming a schoolteacher, getting married, and having kids, and she never aspired to rise beyond that. “I knew what was being done to women at Newsweek was as wrong as slavery and I was happy to be part of the lawsuit,” she recalled. “But I saw myself as someone whose own life wouldn’t be changed by it.” Trish had qualms about joining the women and talked it over with Mary Pleshette. “I don’t know about this whole business of women being in men’s jobs,” she confessed to Mary. “I like the differences between men and women and I think we should keep them.” Mary asked her which differences she was afraid of losing. Trish didn’t answer for a long time. “Oh well,” she finally said, “we’ll still be women—we’ll just have better jobs.”

  As the circle widened in the winter of 1970, we asked the five black researchers on the staff to join us. “I had divided emotions,” recalled Leandra Hennemann Abbott, a researcher in the back of the book. “Here was the women’s lib movement and while I certainly could identify with that, it seemed to me that women’s liberation wasn’t out front in support of black liberation and never reached out to black women. I believed the difficulties we felt were because of being black and that a lot of the issues for white women didn’t apply to us because we didn’t have a choice. They were talking about work and we were working all the time. Our issues were larger than the work world. We had to be strong for the family, too.”

  Diane Camper, a Syracuse graduate who was a Nation researcher, said that although the black women never caucused, they informally discussed what to do. “Ther
e was a feeling that there had been all these conversations going on among the white women about agitating for more women to be reporters and we were an afterthought,” she later explained. “At the time, there was more identity with race than gender. People just didn’t see the strategic advantage of joining in.” In the end, much to our disappointment, the black women decided not to join us.

  There were several women we didn’t approach. One was Rita Goldstein, the Newsmakers researcher, who was dating a Wallenda, Newsweek’s executive editor, Bob Christopher (they would marry in May 1970). We were so paranoid about being discovered that we felt we couldn’t risk any pillow talk. We also were worried about approaching Madlyn Millimet, who had married Angus Deming, a writer in Foreign, in January 1970, two months before we filed the lawsuit. But in the end Maddy signed the complaint.

  A critical convert to our cause was Fay Willey, the head researcher in the Foreign section. Almost a decade older than most of us, Fay had joined Newsweek in 1955, when Vincent Astor and other wealthy stockholders owned the magazine. On election nights, the Astors would invite British nobility in to watch the proceedings, as if the staff were animals in a zoo. Fay was well respected by the top editors, who appreciated her maturity and experience. She had established a solid reputation in the world of foreign affairs and provided important context to Newsweek stories with authoritative commentary from “the domes,” the scholars and government sources she carefully cultivated. We weren’t sure she would join us but we knew our position would be greatly enhanced if she did.