The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  WHILE WE WERE GEARING UP for a second lawsuit, the women at the Washington Post were getting restless. Several years earlier they had complained about discrimination, including the lack of women in decision-making positions. That prompted Ben Bradlee, the paper’s executive editor, to issue a directive in June 1970 underscoring the “equality and dignity of women.” Promising to “use all our resources to combat discrimination against women,” Bradlee decreed that words such as “divorcee, grandmother, blonde (or brunette) or housewife should be avoided in all stories where, if a man were involved, the words divorcee, grandfather, blonde or householder would be inapplicable. In other words, they should be avoided. Words like vivacious, pert, dimpled or cute have long since become clichés and are droppable on that account alone.”

  Two years later, on April 12, 1972, fifty-nine women at the Post sent a letter to Bradlee and Katharine Graham, among others, noting that women were losing ground at the paper. According to their statistics, women made up 15 percent of the Post’s staff in June 1970; in March 1972, they made up only 13 percent of the staff. There were no women assistant managing editors, news desk editors, or editors in the Financial, Sports, and Outlook sections, nor were there any female foreign correspondents or sports reporters. This time the Post’s management responded with specific goals and actions. Among other things, Bradlee promised “to increase substantially, and as fast as possible, the number of women on the newspaper, especially in top and middle management.” He also insisted that “there is and shall be no discrimination in the assignment of women to breaking stories involving action and/or violence.” The Post immediately established an internal equal employment opportunity committee and instituted a monthly status report on the employment of women and blacks. (The Post women ended up filing charges of discrimination two years later with the EEOC, which ruled in their favor.)

  Also in April 1972, a group of black reporters at the Post called the Metro Seven filed a complaint with the EEOC charging the paper with racial discrimination in promotion and hiring, especially with regard to the lack of black editors. Bradlee and managing editor Howard Simons quickly negotiated a deal, hiring, among others, Dorothy Gilliam, a former Post writer whom they promoted to assistant editor. Gilliam was the first black editor of the reconfigured Style section. “It was shortly after [the Metro Seven settlement] that I was sought out,” said Gilliam. “I can’t help but think there was some connection.”

  Meanwhile, Kay Graham had undergone her own form of consciousness-raising. As one of only two women publishers of a major newspaper (the other was Dorothy Schiff of the New York Post), Kay was feeling isolated in the professional world, worried, as she wrote, that she would “appear stupid or ignorant when she was the only woman in a room full of men.” Her close friend at the Post was Meg Greenfield, the deputy editor of the editorial page, who had achieved her success before the women’s movement. (In her early days at the Post, Meg had a sign on her office door that read, IF LIBERATED, I WILL NOT SERVE.) But Meg, like Kay, was often the only woman in the room and together they decided to “think through” how they felt about women’s lib. They started by reading books, among them The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

  Then Kay met Gloria Steinem. Gloria had been writing a political column for Clay Felker at New York magazine when she began thinking about starting a feminist magazine (the first issue of Ms. magazine appeared as an insert in New York in December 1971). When Gloria was seeking an investor for her start-up, Felker introduced her to Kay. “She told me that if they put up money, they—the Post—would have to own it,” Gloria told me later. But Kay gave her $20,000 in seed money and asked Gloria to talk to her about the new feminism. At the time, Kay wrote, “I couldn’t understand militancy and disliked the kind of bra-burning symbolism that appeared to me like man-hating.” But Gloria “more than any other individual, changed my mind-set and helped me grasp what the leaders of the movement—and even the extremists—were talking about.” Around that time, Kay even asked her longtime executive assistant, Liz Hylton, who came from West Virginia, to please stop saying “yes, ma’am.”

  One day, Kay asked Gloria to come to lunch at the Post. “She wasn’t being taken seriously by the men she employed,” Gloria recalled. “She had invited Joe Alsop to lunch and asked me to explain this to him while she was sitting right there! I was trying to do Feminism 101 and be reasonable and persuasive about women’s issues in general. It was as if she was calling me in to argue with someone she didn’t want to argue with.” Among the things they discussed was the fact that the Post wouldn’t hire newsgirls to throw the paper on people’s porches in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “After the lunch,” said Gloria, “Kay told me that she had gotten so mad at some employee who told her they couldn’t have newsgirls, she threw an ashtray at him. I was impressed because she was usually so reserved.”

  Kay also had Gloria talk to Oz Elliott about the Newsweek women. “I remember meeting Gloria in Kay’s office and she was very helpful to me,” he told me. “I was impressed with how constructive she was in suggesting how management should deal with the situation.” When Kay discussed Newsweek with Gloria, however, “all I remember was trying to talk her out of being angry at Eleanor Holmes Norton,” Gloria said. “Kay never really forgave Eleanor. She felt wrongly accused—her world had been wrongly accused—and Kay felt Eleanor crossed the line. She felt Newsweek was unfairly targeted, but separate from that was Eleanor and her style.” Later on, when Gloria found herself on the opposite side of Eleanor on an issue, “I could see what Kay meant,” she said. “Eleanor is scary, very scary. She’s tough—and she should be.”

  I, too, felt Kay’s disapproval—or perhaps it was disappointment. Because of my father, she probably felt that I was part of the Post family, which I felt as well. After all, she was responsible for my entrée to Newsweek and now I was the apostate suing her magazine. Many years later, when she was making a speech at Newsweek and recounting the history of the women’s lawsuit, she stopped and said, “and some of the suers are in this room!”—and pointed to me. Whatever the reason, I thought she never forgave me for being disloyal and I felt a coolness in our interactions after the suit. It wasn’t overt. She was always gracious to me, and from time to time she would ask me to come to her office to tell her how things were going with the women’s movement at Newsweek. Over the years, I grew to admire Kay’s courage, especially during Watergate, and as she became more confident, her sense of humor became more evident. At a Newsweek sales conference in Puerto Rico one year, Kay came out to walk with some of us on the beach. It had been a cloudy day, but when she appeared the sun suddenly came out. Kay looked up at the sky, opened her arms, and said mischievously, “Now you know why they call me the most powerful woman in Washington.”

  Primarily, however, I was concerned about my father’s feelings since I now found myself in the unusual position of suing his boss. Dad loved and respected the Grahams and had a special fondness for Kay. When I called him after we filed the first complaint, he listened and never questioned or criticized my actions. At the same time, I knew he was worried about how Kay would feel. “He was nervous,” recalled my brother Maury. “He didn’t want anything that was untoward to happen to the Post and to Kay in particular.” If he ever spoke to Kay—or she to him—about my role in the suit, he never told me. But I know he felt torn by his loyalty to her and his love for me. In 1974, Kay gave my father a gala dinner dance to celebrate his fifty years at the Washington Post. Before I flew down to Washington for the event, my father phoned me and gently asked whether I was planning to shake Kay’s hand on the reception line, clearly wanting to avoid an embarrassing incident. “Of course,” I said. “I’m not angry at her personally, just at the men who run her magazine.” I think he was relieved, and it turned out to be a warm, wonderful evening.

  Meanwhile, our negotiations with management were leading nowhere. After the March 1972 straw vote, the women met again and formally voted to once again take legal action, this
time in two jurisdictions. On May 16, 1972, we announced that fifty-one women had filed a second complaint against Newsweek with the EEOC “because sex discrimination at the magazine remains essentially unchanged.” Two weeks later, Margaret Montagno was the lead plaintiff on a complaint filed with the New York State Division of Human Rights “on her own behalf and behalf of the 50 or more female employees similarly situated.” In a half-page, single-spaced paragraph, enumerating all the ways the magazine discriminated against women, Margaret charged Newsweek with unlawful discriminatory practice, ending the complaint saying, “Because I am a woman I believe I have no chance to become a senior editor or part of top management at Newsweek. Because I am a woman I believe I have very little chance to become a writer, bureau chief or reporter at Newsweek. I believe that to be a woman at Newsweek is to accept a permanent position in those lower paying and/or less prestigious jobs restricted to or predominantly held by women.”

  At the end of June 1972, Oz Elliott returned as editor-in-chief of Newsweek after serving on the business side. “I was astonished no progress had been made,” he told me years later, “and I was surprised by the anger of the women. They were angrier than they had been two years before. One of the first things I did was to put the women’s issues at the top of my list.”

  Oz immediately hired Shana Alexander as the first female columnist in the history of Newsweek. Shana had been the “first” in several publications: the first female staff writer and columnist for Life magazine and the first female editor of McCall’s . But she quit McCall’s in 1971, saying that it was a token job in a sexist environment. (Shana left Newsweek in 1974 and was replaced as a columnist by Meg Greenfield of the Washington Post.) As a concession to the women inside Newsweek, Oz also promoted Olga Barbi, the chief of research, to senior editor. The women were pleased for Olga but it didn’t satisfy our demands to have a woman editing one of the major sections in the magazine. (On the business side, my friend Valerie Salembier was appointed Newsweek’s first female ad sales representative in May 1972.)

  Then there was silence. Between May and September 1972, we had no meetings with Newsweek’s management. That summer, while the Newsweek women were being “trained” at the Famous Writers School, women from outside the magazine were being hired as writers without any trouble, and some without much experience. In July 1972, at the Democratic convention in Miami, Oz met Maureen Orth, a member of a guerrilla TV collective from San Francisco called TVTV. Maureen had graduated from Berkeley with a political science degree, had served in the Peace Corps in Colombia, and earned a master’s degree in journalism at UCLA with an emphasis on documentary film. In 1971, she was pitching a story to New York magazine on the Cockettes, a group of celebrated hippie drag queens from San Francisco who came to New York where they were a big flop. “Clay Felker [the editor of New York] told me he’d pay me $500 and then have Rex Reed put his own lead on it and cut me out completely,” she recalled. “I refused and gave it to the Village Voice.” The story, one of a dozen she had written, ran on the front page.

  Maureen came to New York in September and looked up her Berkeley schoolmate Trish Reilly at Newsweek. Trish asked whether she was interested in writing since the editors were desperately trying to hire women because of the lawsuit. Maureen had an interview with Rod Gander, and then spoke to Oz. “Oz said, ‘Well, I think if we’re going to hire women writers we’re just going to have to make a decision to hire them,’” she recalled. She was sent to Jack Kroll, the Arts editor, “because I came from the West Coast and they thought he would ‘get’ me.” Kroll said he would talk to Rod but added, “There’s no way you can be hired as a writer because there are a lot of women waiting in the wings to be hired.” Maureen told him about Oz’s remark to just start hiring women.

  A few weeks later, Kroll invited Maureen to lunch at the Gloucester House on East Fiftieth Street, the editors’ favorite dining establishment for Saturday lunch. The expensive fish restaurant, staffed exclusively with black waiters, offered such spécialités as shrimp wrapped in bacon and French-fried zucchini strips stacked like Lincoln Logs. Over martinis, Kroll offered Maureen a job as a writer in the back of the book for $14,000 a year. She began in October 1972.

  A month earlier, Linda Bird Francke, a contributing editor to New York magazine, was looking for a staff job when she got a call from Clay Felker, her boss. “He said, ‘You’ve got a job at Newsweek,’” she recalled. “I was startled. I subscribed to Time and had never even read Newsweek, let alone considered it a job prospect. But Clay was insistent. ‘Just call this number,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting to hear from you.’” Linda went to 444 Madison Avenue, bought a copy of Newsweek in the lobby, quickly looked it over, and proceeded upstairs to meet with Russ Watson. “Without any preamble, he offered me any one of four sections: Life & Leisure, Nation, Foreign, and one other,” she recalled. When she said that Life & Leisure sounded fun, he retorted, “No, no, that’s considered a women’s ghetto. You want to be on the front lines in Nation or Foreign, don’t you?” She reiterated that she preferred Life & Leisure, so he went on to discuss salary. “Well,” he said, “I’m authorized to offer you anything up to $19,000, so let’s make it simple and say $19,000. When can you start?” “And so,” said Linda, “I commenced on my totally unexpected and unsought job without anyone looking at a single clip. Maureen Orth came in the same way. We were all hired in an instant to offset the women’s suit.”

  Kay Graham, meanwhile, was feeling under pressure. With blacks suing the Washington Post, the Post women pushing for change, and now a second lawsuit by the Newsweek women, she called in Joe Califano, the corporate attorney for the Washington Post Company. Joe was an old Washington hand, having served as special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson before joining the law firm of Edward Bennett Williams in 1971. “Kay said, ‘I want you to straighten this out,’” he recalled. “She wanted it settled, no question about that, but we didn’t want quotas. Nobody wanted quotas, certainly not Oz. I called Alan Finberg [Newsweek’s general counsel] and said, ‘Let me start by dealing directly with the women’s lawyer.’ That was Harriet Rabb.”

  Joe wrote to Harriet requesting a meeting with her and the women’s committee on September 13, 1972. When we met, he had brought along a young associate, Rich Cooper, who seemed to object to every suggestion we had to move forward. In all our meetings that fall, Rich played bad cop and Joe, the avuncular good cop. Harriet was probably used to such legal maneuverings, and she had a few of her own. “I thought Harriet was a good lawyer,” Joe said. “However, I have a recollection of her saying, ‘I want you to listen to all these women to get you sensitized’—not something I appreciated her lecturing me about.”

  On October 6, Joe wrote Harriet a letter saying the September meeting “encouraged our hope that we are reasonably close on a number of the issues.” But then he went on to shoot down almost every recommendation we made: a grievance procedure the women proposed was already provided in the Guild contract; he had investigated charges that back-of-the-book reporters were discriminated against as compared to bureau reporters, who did similar kinds of work, and concluded that “there is no substance to the suggestion”; and punitive enforcement provisions were not acceptable—instead management would provide detailed periodic reports for ensuring performance under the agreement. Joe ended the letter by stressing that it was in the interest of both Newsweek and the women to settle their differences amicably because “litigation is likely to be long, expensive and divisive.”

  By this time, “goals and timetables” had become common legal tools in job discrimination cases, and Harriet recommended them in her letter back to Joe that same day. She proposed that by December 1973, one-third of the writers and one-third of the foreign and domestic reporters should be women. She stated that priority should be given to in-house women for writing positions and that a woman writer should be placed in each of the six editorial departments, including in the hard-news Nation, Foreign, and Business sections and
not just in the feature-laden back of the book. The letter also stipulated that the percentage of male researchers should approximately equal the percentage of female writers on staff. There was a long section outlining procedures for recruiting and in-house tryouts. Finally, she insisted that one of the next three openings for senior editor should be filled by a woman.

  That was the real sticking point. Mariana Gosnell, the Medicine reporter on our committee, pushed hard for a woman senior editor. “I remember saying that until they put a woman in the holy top bunch, they would have it in their heads that a woman couldn’t be a Wallenda,” she said. The editors refused, saying that the women couldn’t dictate who would be in management. We said we wouldn’t sign an agreement that didn’t include a woman in the meetings where the decisions were being made.

  “I went into the negotiations knowing we were going to end up with goals and timetables,” Joe remembered. “In the beginning, Oz was not for that. He viewed goals and timetables as locking him into things he didn’t want to do. But then we got into this argument about having one or two women senior editors. I’m not sure whether Katharine was or wasn’t for them, but at some point I sat down with her and said, ‘If you want to settle this you’re going to have to do something like this. We’re going to make sure that everybody knows they have a real opportunity and it’s palpable, it’s there. The only issue is who’s going to get it and when.’” According to Joe, Kay’s view was, “if we’re going to do this, we want as much talent up in New York as possible so we can make the right pick.”

  Joe called Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, Mel Elfin, to find out whether any women on the magazine were qualified to be a senior editor. Mel recommended Liz Peer, who was working for him in the bureau. When she was in Paris in the mid-1960s, Liz had wanted to go to Vietnam, but Newsweek wouldn’t send a woman to cover a war. Instead she returned to the Washington bureau in 1969, where she covered the State Department, the White House, and the CIA. “I think Katharine may have known Liz,” Joe later said, “and I think she was more comfortable knowing that there was someone she knew who was capable of doing this, if she turned out to be the person. I was just surprised that Liz Peer was the only person outside New York that they thought worthy.” (For her part, Liz confided to a friend that she felt Kay Graham didn’t want her to be the first woman to succeed.)