The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  The editors, who had supported the struggle for civil rights, were completely baffled by this pregnant black woman who questioned their commitment to equality. But they were also horrified that the women had, as they said, “hung out their dirty laundry in public.” Eleanor had warned us that Oz would immediately ask why we hadn’t come to him first with our dissatisfactions. Right on cue, that was his first question and we could barely stifle our giggles. “I was surprised by the anger of the women,” Oz later told me. “But when I look back I’m only surprised that the women didn’t wake up earlier.”

  Shamed and chagrined, Oz immediately agreed to enter into negotiations. He and Kermit, along with Grant Tompkins, Newsweek’s head of personnel, and Rod Gander, the chief of correspondents, represented management; Eleanor and ten representatives selected by the women composed the negotiating team (I was one of them). For several weeks we met in Oz’s eleventh floor office, a den-like room with bookshelves, a large wooden desk, a green patterned sofa, and matching green drapes. We had asked that as the proprietor of the magazine and one of the few female media owners Kay Graham attend the negotiations. But she declined, saying that the editors who ran the magazine would deal with the matter. “Kay was concerned, obviously,” Oz told me, “but she never said, ‘You’ve got to settle this Goddamn thing’ or ‘Screw them.’ She never got involved.”

  As she wrote in her remarkably candid, 1997 Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography, Personal History, Katharine Graham said that when she first took over the Washington Post Company, she felt inadequate as a company boss and a “pretender to the throne.” A smart, talented young woman who had been a reporter for the San Francisco News, Kay had stopped working after she married Phil Graham. But after he committed suicide in 1963, she courageously stepped in to keep the paper in the family. Kay was immediately elected president of the Washington Post Company. Assuming she would be a silent partner, she was terrified. “I didn’t understand the immensity of what lay before me,” she later wrote, “how frightened I would be by much of it, how tough it was going to be and how many anxious hours and days I would spend for a long, long time.” Six years later, she became publisher of the Post, a title both her father and her husband had held, but she was still riddled with feelings of inadequacy. “In the world today, men are more able than women at executive work and in certain situations,” she told Women’s Wear Daily in 1969. “I think a man would be better at this job I’m in than a woman.”

  Although Kay never commented publicly on our lawsuit, it was clear that she wasn’t happy about it. A week after we filed charges in March 1970, in another interview with Women’s’s Wear Daily, she was asked about the feminists at Newsweek. Kay replied that she encouraged her employees to speak their minds because people perform best when they have their say. Then she added, “Sometimes when I go home at the end of the day, I think they all have too damn much freedom to speak up.”

  One day in April, as we were meeting with management, Kay was spotted in her Newsweek office at the other end of the eleventh floor. When Eleanor heard this, she stopped the proceedings. “I understand Mrs. Graham is in the building,” she said, “and I want her to come to this meeting. We will not continue these discussions until she comes.” Kermit dutifully wandered off to find her and came back dragging a clearly uncomfortable Kay Graham, who sat down, tightly wrapping her legs around each other like a pretzel.

  The topic that day was how women were excluded from meeting visiting dignitaries who came to the magazine. We were talking about Val Gerry, a researcher in the Foreign section who also reported on the United Nations. When a UN official came to Newsweek for lunch, Val had not been invited. Kay offered a response and to this day, nearly every woman remembers her words. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know why anyone would want to go to those lunches anyway. You know they’re really very boring, and by the time you invite the four Wallendas, the Foreign editor, and the head of the UN and his entourage, there’s really no place left at the table.” We were flabbergasted. Clearly Kay was not a “sister.” “When Kay said those lunches were so boring,” said one researcher later, “it might have been boring to her because she had been involved in these kind of events her whole life!” After the meeting, Eleanor remarked that it was a good thing that Kay hadn’t been in the negotiations after all.

  Before the next meeting, Eleanor asked us whether there was anything in particular we wanted to ask for in the negotiations. We said that since the chief of correspondents was a senior editor, we felt that the longtime head of researchers, Olga Barbi, should also be promoted to that title. Positive that the men would go for it since they liked Olga and she had the power to hire and fire, Eleanor confidently made her pitch. The men rejected it outright, saying we were trying to elevate research and that Olga didn’t do senior-editor kind of work. Afterward, Eleanor was furious that we had been so tactically stupid and excoriated us to never again ask for something when we weren’t sure of the outcome.

  But Eleanor held the editors’ feet to the fire. At one meeting, Oz was explaining that hiring women writers was difficult because there were only so many slots open when he said, “You know, we’ve made a commitment on this magazine to get black writers, too.” Eleanor immediately fired back, “All you’re telling me, Mr. Elliott, is that now you’ve got two problems!”

  Our negotiations moved rapidly, partly because Eleanor was pregnant and partly, although we didn’t know it, because she had been approached by Mayor John Lindsay to be chair of New York City’s Commission on Human Rights. The job was to begin April 15, a month after we filed our suit. (Many of us attended her swearing-in at the Blue Room of City Hall.) Luckily, most of the terms had been hammered out by mid-April. We had negotiated a memorandum of understanding, which stated that Newsweek was committed to “substantial rather than token changes.” In the memorandum, the women agreed to accept management’s “good faith” to “affirmatively seek out women”—including employees—for reporting and writing tryouts and positions; to integrate the research category with men; and to “identify women employees who are qualified” as possible senior editors. The agreement also stipulated that Newsweek would invite women to join editorial lunches, panels, campus speaker programs, and other public functions. To monitor the magazine’s progress, management agreed to meet with our representatives every two months.

  The language we settled for in the memorandum was vague. Quotas were illegal and although “goals and timetables” had been established as a method of relief in some legal cases, we didn’t use them. Before he died in 2007, Rod Gander told me that Eleanor hadn’t pushed for numbers because, “being pregnant, I think she was happy to get the thing done.” Eleanor later admitted that she had to “turn this case around—I didn’t get into depositions because I was trying to settle the case without going further.” But she insisted that as far as setting goals and timetables, “it was not at all clear that the precedents had developed. All of the cases at that time had come out of the Deep South, where working-class black men were deliberately put into situations where they couldn’t use the facilities but they could do the work. So the use of numbers had come out of harshly negative discrimination. I don’t think we would have opened up numbers in this case.”

  We picked a historic date for signing the memorandum: August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. To celebrate women’s right to vote—and to launch a new crusade for women’s rights—Betty Friedan had called for a nationwide “Women’s Strike for Equality” that day. Designed to appeal to both the older, liberal branch of the movement and the younger, more radical factions, the demonstrations were organized around three demands: equal opportunity in education and employment, free abortion on demand, and a network of twenty-four-hour, free child-care services. Women in more than forty cities and around the world participated.

  The event was scheduled for 5 P.M. in New York, so that working women could attend, and many of us did. Reports said that bet
ween 25,000 and 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue, spilling over from the police-approved single lane to fill the street curb to curb. Carrying hand-lettered signs that read FIGHT SEXISM, WHISTLE AT TRUCK DRIVERS, and EVE WAS FRAMED, the women gathered for a rally in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. Betty Friedan was joined on the platform by congressional candidate Bella Abzug, writers Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett, and our own Eleanor Holmes Norton. “Sex, like color, is a meaningless criterion and an oppression criterion when it is made a condition for a job,” Eleanor told the crowd. Friedan ended the rally with a plea for unity. “We have learned that the enemy is us—our own lack of self-confidence,” she said. “We know that the enemy is not men. Man as a class is not the enemy. Man is the fellow victim of the kind of inequality between the sexes that is part of this country’s current torment and that is perpetrating violence all over the world.”

  But some men still didn’t get it. Describing the event on the ABC evening news that night, anchor Howard K. Smith introduced his report by saying, “Three things have been difficult to tame: the ocean, fools, and women. We may soon be able to tame the ocean, but fools and women will take a little longer.” In fact, it was the largest protest for women’s rights since the Suffragettes, and it solidified Friedan’s nascent National Organization for Women (NOW) and a scattering of women’s lib groups into a national political movement.

  When sixteen of us gathered in Kay Graham’s eleventh-floor office on that Wednesday morning to sign the agreement, our spirits were high. We now numbered sixty plaintiffs, as more women from research, Letters, and Photo had joined the suit. Sitting at her conference table, the Newsweek managers—Osborn Elliott, Kermit Lansner, Rod Gander, and personnel chief Roger Borgeson—signed the 1,500-word document. Then they circulated it around the table to the women from the negotiating committee: Judy Gingold, Merrill Sheils (McLoughlin), Fay Willey, Madeleine Edmonson, Lucy Howard, Pat Lynden, Phyllis Malamud, Mariana Gosnell, Mary Pleshette, and me. Eleanor returned for the signing to join Mel Wulf, from the ACLU, and Kay Graham at the table. Kay said she was pleased that the signing had taken place on such a historic day and Oz congratulated everyone, adding, “I am sure that this agreement will contribute significantly to our editorial excellence.”

  As we toasted one another with wine afterward, we tried not to lord it over the editors but we couldn’t conceal our triumph. We’d done it! We had forced management to at least acknowledge their prejudices and to promise to change their ways. We were still worried about what would happen to us and whether the editors would actually carry out Oz’s orders, but we were hoping for the best. In a New York Times story about the agreement, titled “Newsweek Agrees to Speed Promotion of Women,” I am quoted as saying, “We are very pleased with the progress so far,” adding, “We feel a lot better now about things at Newsweek.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Mad Men: The Boys Fight Back

  THE FIRST SIGN OF TROUBLE came only weeks after the agreement was signed. Oz Elliott moved over to the business side as president of Newsweek Inc., leaving Kermit Lansner in charge of the magazine’s day-to-day operations. Kermit was an intellectual and a creative man but he often was oblivious to what was going on around him. A paunchy man with the waddle of a duck, he would wander around the eleventh floor staring vaguely at the ceiling. Once, when he was walking through the copy area, a visitor saw him and said, a little too loudly, “What does that float represent?”

  Kermit couldn’t be bothered with enforcing our agreement, so the editors made the easiest changes first. They invited more women to Top of the Week lunches, panels, and public events and sent out several researchers to the bureaus on reporting internships. But when it came to giving women the chance to write, they were recalcitrant. Since we felt that most of the senior editors were biased, we had devoted five paragraphs in the memorandum to how reporting and writing tryouts were to be conducted. Each step—from requesting and evaluating the tryout to deciding whether she had made it as a writer—was to be done with the approval of top management.

  The first researcher to ask for a writing tryout was Mary Pleshette, who had been freelancing for small publications. Jack Kroll, her senior editor, was immediately defensive, saying that he disagreed with her quote at the news conference—that discrimination was a “gentleman’s agreement” at Newsweek. He agreed to give Mary a tryout but then gave her only a few pieces to write. There was no formal assignment schedule or evaluation of her writing. In fact, none of the pieces she wrote for him ever made it through the complete editing process; they just stalled on his desk. First Mary was annoyed and then she was angry. “I felt he gave me the tryout because he had to,” she recalled. “At a certain point it was clear he was just going through the motions.” At one point, Jack told Mary that he really liked a piece she wrote on Patsy Kelly, who played a sidekick in the old movies, but he never ran it. Instead, she sold it to Newsweek’s syndication unit for publication in newspapers around the country. “Nobody wanted you to succeed,” she later said. “I didn’t feel the editors were doing hatchet jobs, but I felt it was an exercise in futility. There weren’t many teeth to our agreement.”

  Lester Bernstein offered Pat Lynden a tryout in “Where Are They Now?,” a section in the front of the book recapping what had become of once-famous people. Pat accepted but was wary. At the time, she confided to friends that “no matter how well I did, I thought I might fail so that the editors could point to me as evidence that women didn’t have the right stuff to write for Newsweek.” She later said, however, that “it was also clear that declining the offer was not an option. I had been one of the most outspoken women in our suit, I had the so-called track record, and “Where Are They Now?” was probably the easiest section in the magazine to write.” Pat decided if she didn’t make it, she could live with it. “I intended to leave Newsweek in a year or so,” she recalled. “I was newly married, working on starting a family, and planning to move out west. I could afford to fail and if I did, it would show the editors’ bad faith.”

  Pat’s pieces ran for several weeks but she didn’t get any feedback. “I didn’t have a ‘rabbi’ among the top male writers or editors like the men who tried out always had,” she said. Then Newsweek decided to do a feature on child care. Pat was given the assignment because she had written a cover story on the subject for the New York Times Magazine in February 1970. The senior editor on the story, Joel Blocker, told Pat to come to him with any problems or questions about the assignment and that he would be glad to help. She took him at his word and gave him her first draft. “The next thing I knew, he called me in to his office to say he’d turned over the assignment to Jerry Footlick,” she recalled. “I asked what the problem was and said I wanted to fix it. But Joel shook his head and said Jerry was doing the story. That was the end of my tryout and I returned to the New York bureau.”

  This was the problem we had anticipated in arguing for more women writers: the judgment of what is good reporting and good writing is purely subjective. “The senior editors are idiosyncratic,” admitted Rod Gander in the negotiations, defending the editors. “Their views of what constitutes good Newsweek writing differ.” Maybe so, but the editors were united in believing that no woman could do it. One was either “born” with the Newsweek style or not, they said, and it seemed that only men were born with it—whatever “it” was. According to Rod, it was “nearly impossible to make any kind of empirical set of credentials as to what makes a good Newsweek writer. We have had many writers who cannot do it although they produce beautiful stuff in other media. We have found people of no experience who can do it.”

  There were Newsweek writers who seemed to be born with the gift: Dick Boeth, Jack Kroll, Harry Waters, Pete Axthelm, and Liz Peer. The best was Peter Goldman. “Some of the top writers could go 180 degrees wrong, but Peter never went wrong,” said Steve Shepard, the former head of the Nation section who edited him for four years. “I never saw any writer do as much work before actually
writing the story. Peter spent hours reading the files from the reporters and background material, underlining everything in different color pens and pinning the files on his wall. When he sat down to write, he had so absorbed the reporting he was able to integrate it and compress it into a poetic style that was brilliant.” But that was rare.

  Most writers had to learn the newsmagazine formula, which differs significantly from the newspaper style. Newspapers use the “inverted pyramid” construction: the lead sentence or paragraph consists of the most important facts—who, what, where, when, why—and subsequent paragraphs contain information of decreasing importance, which allows editors to cut from the bottom for space. The newsmagazine story, at that time, was written in an authoritative voice that told the reader, “Here’s what you have to know.” Unlike newspapers, magazines put a premium on stylish writing with a beginning, middle, and end, and compressed as many details and as much color as possible onto the page. Mike Ruby, a writer in the magazine’s Business section, used to call Newsweek writing f—k-style journalism: Flash (the lead), Understanding (the billboard—why is this story important), Clarification (tell the details of the story), and Kicker (bringing it all together with a clever ending). Dwight Martin, a senior editor at Newsweek and a former editor at Time, described it simply as “literary bricklaying—you’re not born with it, it’s a skill to be learned.”

  “It’s such a constipated writing style and yet they elevated it to some mystical form,” remembered Margaret Montagno. “Some guy who graduated from Harvard and came to Newsweek over the transom had it—he was a writer—while some woman who graduated from Radcliffe was only a researcher.” Even women who had journalism experience, such as Mary Pleshette, Pat Lynden, and Susan Brownmiller—or who had worked on their college publications, as Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, and Betsy Carter had—were still hired as researchers. When Kermit Lansner was asked once why women such as Nora Ephron had to leave the magazine to write, he snapped, “Newsweek isn’t a training ground, you know.” But it clearly was for men.