The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  Joe asked Oz to interview Liz Peer as a candidate for senior editor. “Mel had told Liz that it would cost, like, 25 percent more to live in New York than in Washington, and he told her, ‘You gotta get more money and you gotta get this and you gotta get that,’” Joe recalled. “In the course of the meeting with Oz, Liz asked about salary and Oz, who was in the middle of a difficult divorce and sick and tired of talking to women about money, made some snide remark. When I asked Elfin about getting Liz to New York, he said it wasn’t a good meeting. I think Oz was just very unhappy.”

  Once Joe was assigned the Newsweek case, I found myself in an awkward position as a member of the women’s committee. My older brother, David, was a law partner of Joe’s at Williams, Connolly & Califano, so I didn’t discuss our case with him. But at one point I was so annoyed with Rich Cooper’s sarcastic remarks that I called David to ask about him. David said Rich really was a good guy, very smart, and then explained that he was just doing his job. Then David called me one day to tell me a story, laughing on the phone. Joe had come into his office complaining about the Newsweek negotiations. “These women are really tough,” David recalled him saying. “They don’t give an inch and your sister is one of the ringleaders. I don’t know what to do.” At this point David looked up from his desk and said simply, “Joe—surrender.”

  The negotiations carried on through the spring of 1973. On May 21, Mariana Gosnell noted in her diary that we “just spent the day negotiating with the lawyers about our women’s agreement. It’s still being haggled over and they keep backtracking and driving us mad. Men are REALLY pigs”—short for “male chauvinist pigs,” the worst thing you could say about a man in those days. By June, Joe had finally convinced Newsweek’s management to accept goals and timetables for a female senior editor. “Katharine was fine so long as there was talent,” Joe recalled. “I think Oz took it reluctantly, but he took it because Katharine was aboard. His divorce had an enormous impact on him. It was a bitter, bitter fight, and whatever was going on with his wife was consuming him.”

  On June 28, 1973, we announced that fifty Newsweek women had signed a second, twenty-two-page memorandum of understanding with management. We also withdrew our complaints with the EEOC and the New York State Division of Human Rights. The new memorandum stated that by December 31, 1974, approximately one-third of the magazine’s writers and domestic reporters would be female and by the end of 1975, one of every three people hired or transferred to the staff of foreign correspondents would be a woman. We gave management more than two years—until December 31, 1975—to appoint a female senior editor in charge of one of the six editorial sections of the magazine.

  Newsweek also committed to providing writing and reporting training programs for women, an arbitration procedure, and reports three times a year on the magazine’s affirmative actions. Editors now had to fill out forms on all the applicants for researcher, reporter, and writer vacancies, noting their age and gender, whether they had applied to or been approached by Newsweek, their experience and education, samples of their work, whether an interview was held and by whom, and the result: if rejected—why, if kept on file—why. The document, witnessed by Rich Cooper, was signed by Oz and Harriet and the six women on our committee: Connie Carroll, Merrill Sheils (McLoughlin), Margaret Montagno, Mariana Gosnell, Phyllis Malamud, and me. Newsweek paid Harriet $11,240 in costs and fees, payable to the Employment Rights Project at Columbia University.

  According to Joe, Kay was pleased that it was settled. “She was sympathetic, but I had no sense of her being a feminist in any way at all during the Newsweek negotiations,” he said. “She really was a business woman and a publisher, but she had a sense of fairness. I don’t think she ever would have done anything she didn’t think was right.” We finally felt the system would change. One unnamed member of the women’s committee was quoted in the press release saying, “All of the women at Newsweek worked very hard to bring this about, and we feel it’s a great accomplishment, not only for us, but for other women in the media. The strength of this agreement—its specific goals, timetables and training programs—shows the strength of Newsweek’s commitment to equal employment for women. We think congratulations are due all around.”

  Again, we didn’t ask for back pay. “It was a failure of will and imagination,” said Harriet, looking back. “It was either your judgment or ours that if we asked for money, they wouldn’t settle without litigation.” At the time, recalled Harriet, the Newsweek case was fairly straightforward. “You all didn’t have different job categories or salaries,” she said. “You were a homogeneous class. Guys had better opportunities but they looked like you in background and qualifications.”

  Indeed, our case was relatively simple compared to Harriet’s discrimination suits against the Reader’s Digest in 1973 and the New York Times in 1974, both of which included women in different job categories and on the business side. The women at the Reader’s Digest “were treated worse,” said Harriet. “At the Digest, corporate was resistant because they felt they were good to women. There were women who worked in ‘Fulfillment,’ filling subscriptions—one of the least fulfilling jobs ever. In the morning, you could order dinner for two, three, or four people because Mother Reader’s Digest wouldn’t want you to go home without food, and women should feed their families well.” But when it came to giving the women higher pay or promotions, the Digest was not so concerned. “There were end-of-the-year reviews with two lists of names—the editors and the ladies, who were also editors—and the factors for promotion. ‘He’s a family man, we need to help. She’s a single woman, doesn’t need more.’”

  At one point, the Digest even went after Harriet. The plaintiffs had asked her to talk to an open meeting of other female employees who might want to learn about their case and either join or support them. Some Digest loyalists taped her remarks and turned the tape over to the company’s lawyers. “The Reader’s Digest filed a sanction against me saying I had breached legal ethics by encouraging people to litigate, that I was ‘ambulance chasing’ to get clients,” Harriet explained. “It was scary because they were after my license. I wrapped myself in the flag and told the judge that management didn’t want people to tell them their rights and that’s what I did and I’m proud of it.” The judge dismissed the Digest’s motion from the bench. In the end, the Digest settled and 5,635 women plaintiffs got $1,375,000 in back pay—about $244 each.

  In the case of the New York Times, said Harriet, “management really took off on the women and trashed them, unlike Newsweek’s management, which didn’t fight ugly. The Times women were angrier than the Newsweek women, in part because they were older and because many of them came out of the labor union movement. They also had seen their salaries because the union saw salaries, and there’s nothing like money to make you angry.”

  The Times women began organizing in 1972, right after we filed our second suit in May. “Grace [Lichtenstein, a young Times reporter] kept saying, ‘What are we doing sitting around like this when the Newsweek women are stirring things up?’” recalled Betsy Wade Boylan, the named plaintiff on Elizabeth Boylan v. The New York Times Company. In the spring of 1973, six Times women hired Harriet to represent them and in November 1974, filed a class action lawsuit. Management was furious. At one point, according to Harriet, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times and a former trustee of Columbia University, called Michael Sovern, then dean of Columbia Law School, and asked whether he thought that what Harriet was doing with these cases in her law clinic was legitimate. “He led Michael to believe that he really wanted to stop the lawsuit, that he thought it was unfair,” recalled Harriet. “Michael refused, and didn’t tell me about it until the case was over.”

  Four years later, as the Times women were preparing for a September 1978 court date, a machinists union strike hit all three New York daily newspapers in August. The Times settled the suit in October, though the strike didn’t end until November. The case had gotten so poison
ous that going to court probably would have damaged not only the paper but also the women. Still, said Harriet, “I think they settled because if their defense was that the women weren’t promoted because they weren’t any good, then these were the same women—Nan Robertson, Marilyn Bender, Eileen Shanahan, Grace Glueck—whose bylines were in the paper.” The Times ended up paying $350,000 to settle the suit, $233,500 of which went to back pay for the 550 women and $15,000 was divided among the plaintiffs and women who had testified in depositions. Employees with twenty or more years of service were given $1,000 with the others paid on a sliding scale down.

  Afterward, several of the original editorial plaintiffs saw their careers stall—or worse. “We did a brave and a noisy thing and we knew it wasn’t going to be for us,” said Betsy Wade. Eileen Shanahan, a top financial reporter in the Washington bureau, left the Times in 1977, before the settlement. “I had repeatedly asked for editing jobs and couldn’t get them,” she later said. “That’s one of the reasons I left. The other was knowing what retaliation was going to come from the suit.” (Ironically, Shanahan went to work as the assistant secretary for public affairs officer for Joe Califano, who had become the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration). Grace Glueck, a gifted writer whose stories often ended up leading the culture page, was never made a top arts critic, while Joan Cook, a talented reporter, editor, and ideas person, was relegated to day rewrite, a backwater of the news department.

  When she began organizing the women in 1972, Betsy Wade had been in a high-ranking position as head of the foreign copy desk. Getting nowhere, she took a position during the litigation as assistant travel editor so that she would be in a protected Guild job. She ended her career at the Times writing the “Practical Traveler” column, a secure but going-nowhere job. “I was sidelined because I was a woman,” she recalled, “and I wasn’t going to be promoted to the jobs that the people I trained were going to be promoted to.”

  “We were born ten years too early,” said Grace Lichtenstein. “If I were born ten years later, I would have been a sportswriter. If Betsy were born twenty years later, she would have been managing editor or executive editor and certainly foreign editor.” Although she felt disheartened by how little credit they got from young journalists “who don’t understand all the opportunities that have opened up for them,” said Grace. “We changed the way the New York Times looks at news.” For Betsy Wade, the lawsuit “was the most important thing I did in my life.” But she insisted it also had a broader impact. “It was important at the Times but it was even more important for the great newspapers out there,” she said. “That’s why the women at Newsweek were so important, because they were so early and people said, ‘Holy Hosanna.’ The Newsweek suit created a mold that showed that it could be done.”

  Anna Quindlen, who was hired at the New York Times at the age of twenty-four, considers herself one of the beneficiaries of the lawsuit. “I was convinced that I was hired because I was a whiz journalist,” she said. “But I was hired there because of six courageous women who brought the women’s suit. They weren’t going to get a lot out of it, but I did. I call it the gift that keeps on giving. I was editor of the metropolitan section at twenty-nine and an op-ed columnist at thirty-three.” Quindlen left the Times in 1995 to write novels, very successfully, and then went to Newsweek as a columnist in 1999, a position she held until 2009. “So you could say I was also the beneficiary of the Newsweek suit in taking over Meg Greenfield’s spot on the back page.”

  At the New York Times, said Anna, “The women’s suit changed the paper a lot! The content changed. Look at my ‘Life in the 30s’ column [which she wrote in the mid-eighties]. That was a direct result of the women’s suit. One letter to my column said, ‘I never thought the New York Times would write about what I was thinking about.’ We understood the readers—a population that male editors had never known about.” She also said the lawsuit changed who ran the paper. “Now we have women on the masthead,” she added. “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see a woman on the New York Times masthead.”

  Gail Collins, the former editorial page editor of the New York Times and now an op-ed columnist and best-selling author, also credits the pioneering women. I first met Gail in 1973 when she invited me to speak to women journalists in Connecticut about our lawsuit. Gail was running the Connecticut News Service, which she had started in 1972 after covering the state legislature for the weekly Fair Press. “The idea of inviting you was not in the context of a suit,” remembered Gail. “It was rather getting you to inspire everyone.” But according to Trish Hall, the current op-ed editor at the New York Times who was then at the New Haven Journal-Courier, after my talk the women decided to sue. On October 4, 1974, fifteen women filed sex discrimination charges with the EEOC against the New Haven Register Publishing Company.

  Gail was not part of that suit, but she extols all the women who put their jobs on the line. “I arrived in New York approximately one second after the women at places like the New York Times and Newsweek had filed lawsuits,” she recalled. “The women who fought those fights were not the ones who got the rewards. People like me, who came right behind them, got the good jobs and promotions. I know many of the heroines of those battles and they aren’t bitter. They’re still very ticked off at their former employers, but they’re very happy and proud of the women who came after and got the opportunities that rightfully should have been theirs. To me that’s the definition of a great heart.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Barricades Fell

  WOMEN’S PROGRESS TOOK a dramatic leap in the 1970s when Congress, the courts, and the media began responding to feminist demands. Between 1971 and 1974, Congress extended employment benefits to married women working in the federal government, prohibited sex discrimination in Social Security and other pension programs, and proscribed creditors from discriminating against women (until then, women couldn’t get credit—or credit cards—in their own name). In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act banned sex discrimination in education programs and activities, giving women equal access to advanced math and science courses, medical and vocational schools, residential facilities, and in 1975, college sports. When twenty-nine-year-old Billie Jean King, who had been campaigning for equal prize money for women athletes, defeated fifty-nine-year-old tennis champion Bobby Riggs in three straight sets in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes,” she legitimized women’s professional sports and inspired female athletes everywhere.

  Politically, feminists were beginning to enter the national arena and their agenda was shaped around issues affecting women’s lives. In 1964, Patsy Mink (D-HI) was the first Asian American elected to Congress, and in 1968 Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) became the first African American woman representative. They were followed by social activist Bella Abzug (D-NY) in 1970, civil rights leader Barbara Jordan (D-TX) in 1972, and a thirty-one-year-old lawyer named Pat Schroeder (D-CO) in 1973. Chisholm, Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, among others, founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 to increase the participation of women in political and public life. Two years later, the National Black Feminist Organization was formed. Its “statement of purpose” declared thatthe distorted male-dominated media image of the Women’s Liberation Movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of this movement to Third World women, especially black women. The Movement has been characterized as the exclusive property of so-called white middle-class women and any black women seen involved in this movement have been seen as selling out, dividing the race, and an assortment of nonsensical epithets. Black feminists resent these charges and have therefore established The National Black Feminist Organization, in order to address ourselves to the particular and specific needs of the larger, but almost cast-aside half of the black race in Amerikkka, the black woman.

  Meanwhile, sex discrimination suits were proliferating, including one against the giant telephone company AT&T. The largest emplo
yer of women, the Bell System (of which AT&T was a part) classified jobs by gender, prevented women from serving as line workers, and denied women the promotions it offered to men. The suit was settled out of court in 1972, when AT&T agreed to a multimillion-dollar payment to workers and promised to end the company’s discriminatory practices.

  In 1971, a young feminist attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg successfully argued before the US Supreme Court that an Idaho law giving preference to men as executors of estates was unconstitutional. That decision was the first time the court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause protected women’s rights, which over the next thirty years was used to strike down many laws discriminating against women and men. In 1973, as a result of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court established that a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion, with certain qualifications, was a fundamental liberty under the US Constitution.

  But there were several significant defeats. The Equal Rights Amendment, which passed Congress in 1972, failed to get ratification from enough states to become law. In 1971, Congress had approved the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have provided child care on a sliding fee scale to working parents as a matter of right. However, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, saying it would commit “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to childrearing over against [sic] the family-centered approach.”