The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  CHAPTER 8

  The Steel Magnolia

  HARRIET SCHAFFER RABB was the opposite of Eleanor—a petite Texan with a soft Southern accent and a steel-trap intellect. She was also four months pregnant. Harriet had grown up in Houston, the daughter of two physicians. Her parents practiced in the same building: her father, a general practitioner, at one end; her mother, a pediatrician, at the other. Her father’s practice and examining room were integrated, but he kept his waiting room segregated because he thought people would feel more comfortable that way. Her mother’s practice was mostly white. When her father was serving in World War II, Harriet’s mother took her on her nightly rounds or to the Jefferson Davis charity hospital where she trained nurses. “I admired her beyond description,” said Harriet. “When the phone rang at home and a patient would ask, ‘May I speak to Dr. Schaffer,’ I would always have to say, ‘Which one?’ She was Doc Helen and he was Doctor Jimmy. I thought they were amazing and wanted to be a doctor until I took biology in college and couldn’t stand the labs.”

  Harriet’s family was active in the Jewish community, and she was president of her Jewish sorority, but she felt the sting of anti-Semitism in high school. “The Jewish kids did very well in honor society, drama, and debate,” she explained. “We went to the nationals on the debate team and won a lot of prizes. But when the head of the school would announce the prizes for debate, he would never pronounce our names correctly. He would say ‘Schaffner’ or something like that. They were unhappy with us. We could not be cheerleaders because nobody would have ever voted for us.”

  Knowing what it felt like to be an outsider, Harriet got involved in the voting-rights movement and other civil rights issues when she went to Barnard College in New York City. She was elected president of her freshman class and became chair of the Honor Board senior year. “I liked the process of listening to the evidence and thinking about it,” she recalled, “and at some point realized I wanted to be a lawyer.” She went on to Columbia Law School and got a summer internship with Kunstler, Kunstler and Kinoy, founded by the well-known civil rights lawyers Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy (Michael Kunstler, Bill’s brother and partner, was not involved in their civil rights work). That summer, in 1964, two white civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and their black colleague, James Chaney, disappeared in Mississippi. The Schwerner family was a client of the law firm, so Kunstler and Kinoy tried to get the FBI involved, saying that the kids had been kidnapped. The FBI declined, saying there was no evidence of a crime, and certainly not of a federal crime, so they had no jurisdiction. “There were about five interns at the law firm,” Harriet remembered, “and Arthur [Kinoy] said, ‘Here’s the library, there’s the wall of US statutes. Divide it up any way you want to. I want every single one of those books read by the end of this week and I want you to use your imagination to find any potential statute that could be a basis of the FBI getting into this investigation.’ And we did. We found a document to persuade the FBI that they needed to get into it. Of course by then, the kids were long dead.”

  After law school and a brief marriage, Harriet got a job at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy had set up in Newark, New Jersey. The center represented members of Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, several of the Weathermen who blew up the West Eleventh Street town house, and the black militant H. Rap Brown. “The first time I ever appeared in a court by myself it was with Rap,” Harriet recalled. “He was there for taking a gun on an airplane.” At the time, Harriet was dating a law school classmate, Bruce Rabb, who was working on civil rights in the Nixon White House and whose father, Maxwell Rabb, later became President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Italy. Kinoy was worried about the relationship. He told Harriet that his clients wouldn’t trust her because of her close relationship with a Republican working in the White House. He said she would have to get another job. She was disappointed but understood. She quit the law firm and worked for a year for Bess Myerson, then New York City’s commissioner for consumer affairs.

  In 1970, Harriet and Bruce married and moved to Washington. She tried to get a job in civil rights but she was rejected, she said, either because she was white or because her husband worked in the Nixon administration. Then she found out about an opening as clerk to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where David Bazelon was the chief judge. But two of the judges on the panel had checked Harriet’s extensive FBI record and objected to her appointment. They also threatened to call the White House to get Bruce fired because his wife had worked with Kinoy and Kunstler.

  Judge Bazelon called her in and told her that her FBI file troubled the people on this court; then he asked her to withdraw her application. “Bruce and I talked about it,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t want to run away. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done.’” She told Judge Bazelon that she wasn’t going to withdraw her application. With tears in his eyes, she remembered, he said, “You’re making me ashamed because these judges have told me they won’t work with me on the court if I hire you, and I don’t have the courage to resist because I feel responsible and the court has to work well. You have the courage not to do this. So I’m not going to give you a job but I’ll find you a job.” He found her a position at Stern Community Law Firm, which handled public interest cases.

  Bruce and Harriet moved back to New York in 1971, and she began teaching a clinic on employment-rights law at Columbia Law School with George Cooper. George, an expert in Title VII, had won a grant from the EEOC to train lawyers on enforcing the new antidiscrimination laws. Harriet spent the summer learning the syllabus on employment rights law. When we approached her in October 1971, she had just started teaching, and she and George began to educate us on building a better, stronger case. “The Newsweek case was challenging because it wasn’t an assembly-line job,” recalled George. “It was a subjective test [of talent], so the challenge for the lawyers is to take the subjectivity and say that on a group basis it turns out to be biased.”

  Harriet mobilized her law school class to start taking histories of all the women involved, which could serve as statistical evidence of discrimination and as depositions if necessary. She and George also prepared a detailed chart of prior discriminatory practices, violations of the agreement, and continuing discrimination in every category, outlining the charges and then the methods of proof. “You say, here are the credentials of all the men—where they went to school, what their grades were, what their experience was—and you compare the members of the aggrieved class with the people who got what they wanted,” George later explained. “You show there’s no difference in any measurable things—everybody went to an Ivy League school—and you force them to come back and respond to them using class data.” It was a far different approach from that of the fiery Eleanor Holmes Norton. “Harriet was just right for us,” recalled Mimi McLoughlin. “Different talents for different times.”

  Just before her first encounter with the editors, George took Harriet to lunch at the Columbia Faculty Club to discuss the case. When they got there he said, “I’m not going with you to the Newsweek meeting.” Harriet was stunned. “The bottom dropped out for me,” she recalled. “While I was objecting, he said, ‘You don’t need me, it’ll be fine.’ It was my lack of confidence. I had done a lot of things but I was new to Title VII.” George continued his involvement with our case, but Harriet was out front. “I knew her background,” he later said. “I thought she was great. I knew she could do it.”

  At Harriet’s first meeting with management on December 7, 1971, she proceeded to point out how the magazine was violating the memorandum of understanding by not affirmatively seeking out women to try out as reporters and writers. Only 23 percent of the newly hired writers were female, but 39 percent of the newly hired researchers were male. Of the four Newsweek women who had tryouts, three had failed. In November 1971, Jeanie Seligmann, the Medicine researcher, be
came a writer in the back of the book, the first woman staffer to be promoted. (From that point on, her boss, Dwight Martin, teasingly called her “Female Writer Seligmann.”) Kermit Lansner had asked Phyllis Malamud to try out as writer but she declined, citing management’s hostile attitude toward the women trying out. In a follow-up meeting on January 5, Rod Gander said that “most of the women on the staff haven’t enough experience in writing to show to their proper advantage under a systemized approach in a tryout.” But management refused to define what a tryout actually involved. Rod noted that in the case of men on the staff who came in as researchers or junior writers and got promoted, “the ones who have succeeded best have succeeded under . . . a flexible lack of ground rules.”

  In one meeting Grant Tompkins, the head of personnel, asked if, since the magazine was in the midst of “very difficult” Newspaper Guild negotiations, we would postpone our meetings until those were finished—which we declined to do. The Guild, which was voluntary, had become a pet project for the women. It was dominated by men from Makeup and Photo, and very few editorial employees were members. Two Nation researchers, Noel Ragsdale and Nancy Stadtman (whom we feminists called Stadtperson), encouraged us to join the Guild to make it more responsive to women’s needs, which we did. In 1970, we elected Nancy an officer of the Guild and two years later, she became chair, the first female in that position. “Some of the union men had daggers out for me until the first contract,” Nancy recalled. “We got a good maternity policy but we also got a paternity leave clause, the first one for a news publication.”

  Management still seemed stumped about how to move forward, and at the December and January meetings, they asked us for constructive solutions. Harriet sent a detailed document suggesting a program for training women writers and specifying goals and timetables for the complete integration of women into the magazine. When we met again on March 8, 1972, the editors refused to make any commitments to changing their policies. Harriet replied that if they wanted us to continue talking, management should come up with suggestions for progress within two weeks. Two weeks and two days later—and only after the women’s panel had called an urgent meeting of the women—Harriet received a hand-delivered note from Grant Tompkins ignoring our request and again “welcomed” Harriet’s thoughts on how to increase the number of women writers and reporters while improving the representation of the other groups.

  On March 28, the women’s panel called an emergency meeting, at which we summarized the history of our negotiations and presented a list of grievances. There were now five new women writers on the magazine (Sandra Salmans, a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, had been hired in Business), but since the lawsuit, at least fourteen men had been hired as writers, almost three times as many men as women. In the research category, twelve people were hired from the outside, eight of whom were men. Rod Gander told us that four other women from outside were asked to try out at Newsweek, but they had declined. “After one and a half years, we feel that there is no further purpose to be served by meeting with management,” we said in our report. “The continuing consultation has become, finally, a means for management to present apologia for every breach of the memorandum and thereby to get away with doing nothing at all for Newsweek women.... In our opinion, the women should either go ahead and take legal action or else resign themselves to the present situation and discontinue all attempts to right it through mass movement.”

  Then Harriet spoke. She said that if we wanted to take action, she recommended we do two things: file a new complaint of discrimination with the EEOC and simultaneously sue for breach of contract with the New York State Division of Human Rights. Should we lose the breach-of-contract suit, our federal case would not be prejudiced. Should we win it, we would gain immediate court-ordered relief. After a few questions we decided to take a straw vote. Of the thirty-one women present, twenty-nine voted to file complaints in both jurisdictions, one voted to file only in state court, and one voted to use the legal machinery of the Guild. We sent a memo to the absent women asking for their opinions as well.

  I was amazed by the vote. I couldn’t believe that two years after our lawsuit—after several women had been trained, promoted, and co-opted with titles—the group was still willing to go through another legal action, with all the recriminations and unpleasantness that would inevitably ensue. We “good girls” had become radicalized. “The first time, I was very nervous,” recalled Mimi McLoughlin. “Were we right? Could I defend what we were doing? The second time around I was angrier because I thought they were just stringing us along.” Even Harriet was impressed. “I thought the Newsweek women were incredible—all of you,” she said. “You were committed to Newsweek but you wanted opportunities.”

  For Harriet, we were probably her first clients who wanted to change the system from within. “I learned a great lesson from you,” she told me. “After we started meeting with management, I was concerned that management would try to speak to you all individually. So I remember saying to you, ‘Lynn, if Oz calls you and asks you to come to his office, you tell him everybody needs to go through your lawyer.’ And you said, ‘I work for this man and if he asks me to go to his office, I need to go there.’ It was really evidence of how young I was to take this on. I wasn’t thinking how life was for my clients, partly because I was a teacher. For me, it was breaching the barriers while you all were working there with men who were superiors or jealous. Eleanor and I were litigators. We came in wanting to win. It was so much more complicated for you.”

  We continued negotiating with management in the spring of 1972 while we planned our next action. During the increasingly difficult discussions about how to increase the number of female writers, we realized that the women needed a writer training program to combat the subjective—and, we thought, biased—tryout system. To teach the course, we recruited two of the best writers on the magazine, who immediately agreed. After proposing the course to the editors, one of them snidely asked, “Well, who would you get to teach this course?” When we said, “Peter Goldman and Dick Boeth,” they were silenced.

  The Famous Writers School, as it was called, was an eight-week seminar that began in the summer of 1972 and lasted for three semesters, training more than twenty-five women. As Peter Goldman taught it, the opening conversation was about demystifying Newsweek writing. He would start his writers with a short seventy-line story from a single reporter’s file. Then he moved on to longer stories incorporating files from multiple bureaus. One week, everyone had to write a “Newsmaker,” the gossipy items in the most popular section of the magazine. “It was distilling down a story to its essence, a reduction in cooking,” Peter recalled. “It had a beginning, middle, and end and it had structural demands. Lucy did a perfect Newsmaker.” Each week, Peter did a one-page critique of the women’s copy but we were so terrified that the results would be transmitted to management that the women decided to use pseudonyms. “In the beginning, there were several pieces by ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Emily Bronte,’” Peter said, “but within two weeks everyone knew who it was.”

  Dick Boeth, one of the most creative writers on the magazine, had his own method of teaching and in his course he wrote a hilarious spoof of the Newsweek style. To explain the various ways one could start a Newsweek story, he enshrined “The Wonderful World of Ledes” (purposely misspelled to distinguish it from other pronunciations of “lead”). Some of the best were:• Action—little picture: “Henry Kissinger had not even finished shaving the stubble from his girlfriend’s chin early one morning last week when his tubside hotline to the White House began beeping insistently. At the other end was President Richard Nixon himself and his voice was grim. ‘Hank,’ the President said, ‘hold onto your Barbasol. We’re moving seven divisions into the Dominican Republic before lunchtime.’”

  • Historical: “Not since the Roman proconsul Fabian Cunctator marched steadily backwards for two years before invading elephants of Hannibal has a commander-in-chief sought victory in retreat wit
h the stubborn insistence of President Richard Nixon. But last week the harassed President tired of the waiting game. Without informing anyone but the White House telephone operator, who had to make the necessary calls, Mr. Nixon dispatched seven crack divisions of Marines in a dramatic amphibious invasion—aimed not at enemy strongholds in Vietnam but at the undefended beaches of the Dominican Republic.”

  • Anecdotal: “One February afternoon early in his Administration, Richard Nixon was bobbing around on a rubber duck in the lagoon fronting on his house in Key Biscayne, Fla. ‘You know,’ the President said reflectively to C.R. (Bebe) Rebozo, who was paddling nearby, ‘they all think I came down here to make points for the Southern strategy. What all those pundits don’t realize is that a guy will do almost anything to get away from those Washington winters.’ Last week the President’s search for sun took on new and potentially explosive international dimensions, as Mr. Nixon ordered seven divisions of U.S. Marines ashore in the Dominican Republic in a wholly unexpected dawn invasion.”

  • General lede: “With only three weeks to go until Election Day, Richard Nixon seemed to be a President with all his options foreclosed. Saigon, Manila and Honolulu had fallen in successive weeks to ‘Un-American elements,’ the most recent Gallup poll had reflected a new if razor thin edge for George McGovern, and Pat Nixon had filed for a legal separation. In a bold (some say reckless) attempt to recoup his political fortunes, the President last week dispatched seven Marine divisions to seize control of the Dominican Republic.”

  Yes, it was definitely newsmagazine formula, but when done well it could be brilliant.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Joe—Surrender”