The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  For two months there was no word from the top, and the fortieth anniversary of our lawsuit was approaching in March. “At that point, I was physically ill, going from lethargic to depressed to angry,” said Jessica. “Jesse lost her voice, Sarah was crying, and we were a mess. We felt if this didn’t run we would have no faith in humanity.” As a reminder of the history of discrimination at Newsweek and the fortieth anniversary news peg, the three women pinned up copies of the 1970 “Women in Revolt” cover over their desks.

  At one point, Newsweek’s general manager, Ann McDaniel, asked to see them. “She was coming from a management perspective,” recalled Jesse. “She wanted to see if we had legitimate complaints about the way we were treated, but we didn’t say anything. She talked about convening monthly lunches where we would talk about the women, but none of that happened. It was good to talk to her but it was unclear what her motives were.”

  Then they met with Mark Miller, Newsweek’s editorial director, and begged him to run the cover. Miller asked whether the women had been personally discriminated against. “Our strategy was to be positive,” said Jesse. “We felt that the more we said we were discriminated against, the less [likely it was] they would run the piece. So we talked about how it’s not really about Newsweek, it’s bigger than Newsweek, it’s a cultural thing.” Marc Peyser was upset that the women hadn’t relayed their personal grievances. He called Miller and told him about the women’s experiences—and the piece got going.

  The four-page story, “Are We There Yet?,” finally ran in the March 22, 2010 issue, almost forty years to the day that we had charged Newsweek with sex discrimination. Leading with our landmark suit, the women questioned how much had actually changed for women since 1970, not only at the magazine but in the workplace in general. They cited statistics showing that full-time working women who haven’t had children still make seventy-seven cents on the male dollar and that in their first job out of business school, female MBAs make $4,600 less per year than male MBAs. In the media, they wrote, “female bylines at major magazines are still outnumbered by seven to one; women are just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and less than a quarter of law partners and politicians.”

  They also wrote about Newsweek. In 1970, women made up 25 percent of the editorial masthead; forty years later that number was 39 percent. (Overall, they pointed out, 49 percent of the entire company was female.) But perhaps the most damning statistic they cited was that “men wrote all but six of Newsweek’s 49 cover stories last year—and two of those used the headline ‘The Thinking Man’” (“The Thinking Man’s Guide to Populist Rage,” for example). Then, to cover their tracks, they wrote,: “We should add that we are proud to work at Newsweek. (Really, boss, we are!) We write about our magazine not because we feel it’s worse here, but because Newsweek was once ground zero for a movement that was supposed to break at least one glass ceiling.” The women explained how “somewhere along the road to equality, young women like us lost their voices. So when we marched into the workforce and the fog of subtle gender discrimination, it was baffling and alien. Without a movement behind us, we had neither the language to describe it nor the confidence to call it what it was.” Recognizing that sexism still exists, they said, “is one of the challenges of the new generation.”

  The response inside Newsweek was overwhelmingly positive from the young female and male staffers. “One woman said, ‘I can’t believe you guys did this—I truly thought there was no chance in hell it would see the light of day,’” recalled Jessica. “The only negative response we got was hearing that the middle-aged editors thought we were very entitled, that we were just complaining and didn’t appreciate what we had. But it sparked a lot of conversation among the young women in the building.” After the story came out, several women got promotions and there were more covers about women, written by women. Jon Meacham never spoke to the women about the story.

  Five months later, in August 2010, the Washington Post Company sold Newsweek for $1 plus its liabilities to ninety-two-year-old audio pioneer Sidney Harman. The magazine had been hemorrhaging revenue and readership for years, but Harman thought it had value and he had the money to invest in it. After a very public search for a new editor, Harman made news again. In November 2010, he announced that Tina Brown, the first female editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, would become editor-in-chief of Newsweek in a joint venture with her website, the Daily Beast. It happened almost by accident, but forty years after forty-six terrified young women sued Newsweek for sex discrimination, there was finally a female name at the very top of the magazine’s masthead. Tina tipped her hat to us in her press interviews. “A merger has created what the lawsuit couldn’t,” she told National Public Radio. In her first editor’s letter, she said she was “honored to be the first female editor of Newsweek,” but unaware of the behind-the-scenes details of our lawsuit, she also wrote, “I’m both humbled and grateful to know that the trail was blazed long ago, and that Kay Graham blazed it. This issue is dedicated to her memory and inspired by her example.”

  Today many women hold senior writing, editing, and producing positions at news organizations but very few women have made it to the top. The New York Times has the best record of women running both the business and editorial sides of the paper. Janet Robinson was president and CEO of the New York Times Company from 2004 until 2012; in June 2011, Jill Abramson was appointed executive editor, the paper’s highest editorial position, which she still holds. The Washington Post has a female publisher, Katharine Weymouth, Kay Graham’s granddaughter; Gracia Martore is president and CEO of Gannett, which owns eighty-two daily newspapers including USA Today; and Mary Junck is chairman, president, and CEO of Lee Enterprises, which publishes fifty-four daily newspapers in twenty-three states. On the editorial side, the Associated Press elected Kathleen Carroll executive editor in 2002, its highest editorial position; Debra Adams Simmons, an African American, was named editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in June 2010; and women are running smaller newspapers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Roanoke, Virginia, and Davenport, Iowa. But whereas several major dailies, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Oregonian, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Des Moines Register and the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, all had women editors in the past, none of them has women at the top today. Time magazine has never had a female managing editor, its top position, nor has a woman ever headed the network news operations of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News network.

  It’s hard to believe that two generations later there are still so few females in the executive suite. Who would have thought it would take so long? We believed the lack of advancement was merely a pipeline problem: once there were enough women in the workforce, they would naturally advance—all the way to the top. We didn’t realize how hard it would be to change attitudes and stereotypes. There still are not enough stories on women’s issues, not enough women quoted as sources, and not enough women editorial writers and commentators. Perhaps most important for women’s advancement, there still is no private or public support for working families, who rely primarily on mothers to care for the children. According to the 2011 Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media, conducted by the International Women’s Media Foundation, the regions with the most women at the top of their news organizations are those with the best support system for parents: the Scandinavian countries, Europe, and Eastern Europe.

  Oz Elliott once said that the two most important things that happened in the twentieth century were civil rights and women’s rights. As in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement didn’t solve all the problems, but our actions at Newsweek continue to have an impact. “Finding out about the lawsuit and writing the story was a real turning point for me,” said Jesse Ellison, who is a staff writer and articles editor at Newsweek and the Daily Beast. “It was hugely empowering and put a finger on what we were feeling—tremendous self-doubt. Once I understood that things aren’t just my problem, they’re a problem, it made me bolder, more wi
lling to push for my stories and realize that I am as smart as the dude sitting next to me.” Jesse found that in working on the Newsweek story, “there was an element of personal growth in our own journey and how that compared to—and was reflected in—learning about your journey. As we kept rewriting the Newsweek piece, it made the story more effective and strengthened my voice.”

  For Jessica Bennett, now executive editor of Tumblr and a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Daily Beast, “It was our modern ‘click!’ moment,” she explained. “Now I see almost everything through a gender lens. I’m writing a lot about women’s issues. Part of me doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the women’s writer, but I am naturally drawn to these stories in ways I never was before.” Learning the history of our lawsuit, she said, was a “sub-education—it’s become so useful to me, thinking about stories, knowing the background and how things evolved. It’s enabled me to understand what’s changed and what hasn’t.”

  Sarah Ball didn’t consider herself a feminist before she started working on the Newsweek story. “I’m just young enough not to have ever been in a situation before Newsweek where there were more men than women,” she said. “I only knew ‘feminism’ as a denigrating term. Doing the story, it was fascinating to dive back to its beginnings and understand how feminism was—and is—such a necessary term to use and to espouse. I’m now aware that we didn’t just get this one day. There were a lot of women who got this for us and I’m glad I will never be ignorant of what came before.”

  Sarah was particularly moved by a fortieth reunion of the original Newsweek plaintiffs at my home in June 2010. “I’m so grateful that I can put a face to the people I owe this incredible debt,” she told me. “I had so many meaningful conversations that night with very smart, educated women who have a lot of history and a lot of experience. There was something about the way that experience resonated with you all—it was so important a cause, so much bigger than yourselves, and so selfless risking the job you already had rather than just protesting from outside. I don’t know if anything would make women coalesce like that today. It made me feel very jealous, as if our generation missed out on something.”

  Jesse and Jessica acknowledge they also feel a bond with us, although we are old enough to be their mothers. “There was a sense of a Newsweek culture that hadn’t really changed—even to calling the editors the Wallendas—so we could share these stories from forty years apart,” said Jessica. “We have a great feeling for the women who came before us, who were proud of what we were doing and were supporting us in our fight. I used to keep the ‘Women in Revolt’ cover over my desk and it still gives me chills when I see it. It was an honor to be associated with it.”

  The women’s movement is an incomplete revolution. Many issues remain unsolved for this generation, including the continuing stereotyping of women, the increasing sexualization of society, and the infighting that still exists in the women’s movement. After the Newsweek piece was published in March 2010, the feminist blog Jezebel attacked the young women for a narcissistic “focus on your magazine and its past covers, and your childhood, and your issues with the F-word.” It also excoriated them for not including women of color in their story. “If the actual staff of Newsweek doesn’t include much in the way of diversity,” Jezebel opined, “isn’t it time to utilize those reporting skills of which the traditional media is supposed to be the last guardians?”

  Stunned by the criticism from their fellow feminists, Jessica and Jesse answered Jezebel in a blog they had started called The Myth of Equality. They pointed out that the women they interviewed for the piece were either directly involved in the suit, wrote about it, or had recent books, articles, or studies related to women in the media and in the workplace. “We should also note—and this was one of many things that didn’t make it into the final piece—that the women of color at Newsweek didn’t sign onto the suit in 1970, for various reasons,” they wrote. The Jezebel experience cut deep. “You can argue about sexism,” said Jesse, “but in the feminist blogosphere, there’s a strange infighting that happens that’s destructive. When Jezebel attacked us, I felt like I lost a best friend. Nobody can be feminist enough. I see so much of that on these sites. Feminism takes on an exclusionary sensibility and competitiveness.”

  This year, the political attacks on reproductive rights have begun to galvanize this generation. “Just as we grew up being told we could ‘do anything we put our mind to,’ we took having freedom over our bodies for granted,” said Jessica. “Plan B [the morning-after pill] has been around since I was a teenager, available over the counter. I’m sure the Right would like to argue this made me a bigger slut—it didn’t—but it did make me assume that these kinds of rights would always be available to me. So here we are, suddenly having to fight for something we never had to think much about.”

  As they see their friends having babies, these young women also worry about how to balance work and family. “The idea of being able to ‘have it all’ is still prevalent,” said Sarah Ball, who left Newsweek in the fall of 2010 to work for Vanityfair.com. “It’s become easier because you can work remotely, but it still eats at your core. It’s what a lot of my friends talk about.” Free and accessible child care has always been a fundamental demand of the women’s movement, but the legislative efforts to pass such measures have failed. “Everything that our generation asked for as feminists was getting the identical things of what boys had—access to the Ivy League or professional schools or corporate America,” said psychiatrist Anna Fels. “Women now are up against a much deeper structural problem. The workplace is designed around the male life cycle and there is no allowance for children and family. There’s a fragile new cultural ideal—that both the husband and wife work. But when these families are under the real pressure of having a baby or two, there’s a collapse back to old cultural norms and these young parents go back to the default tradition.”

  While women are increasingly taking on leadership positions in what are considered “caretaking” professions—medicine, social work, teaching, and even politics—in other professions, such as business and law, said Fels, “there’s still a huge backlash against women who are openly ambitious and there are fewer women at the top. The data show that once you’re a mother you’re written off in terms of a career. Some of it is prejudice and some of it is reality. If husbands don’t change their roles, if family structure doesn’t change, and if corporate attitude toward families doesn’t change, then women are in a lose-lose situation.”

  Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg agreed. “We reward men every step of the way—for being leaders, for being assertive, for taking risks, for being competitive,” she said in 2012 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And we teach women as young as four—lay back, be communal. Until we change that at a personal level, we need to say there’s an ambition gap. We need our boys to be as ambitious to contribute in the home and we need our girls to be as ambitious to achieve in the workforce.”

  Jessica, Jesse, Sarah, and many of their friends are already working on these problems. “Five years ago we didn’t really talk about women’s issues,” said Jessica. “Only when we got to the workforce did we start to care about gender issues. Now a lot of young women are realizing sexism still exists. They’re writing about it and starting blogs about it. I think something’s happening.”

  This recognition of sexism in the workplace perhaps explains why this young generation loves Mad Men. My generation identifies with the sexualized office culture, the subjugation of women, the 1960s clothes, and the scotch-soaked parties. That was our life. I always thought that younger women viewed the TV series simply as a historic costume drama. But they understand that the most compelling part of the show takes place in the office and they relate to that. They see how Peggy, the talented, ambitious secretary who becomes the first female copywriter, and Joan, the smart, voluptuous office manager, battle sexism at work. “Peggy’s having this feminist awakening,” said Jessica, “and many
of the things she talks about are things women still debate.”

  In 1970, we challenged the system and changed the conversation in the news media. For the women who participated in the lawsuits, the struggle rerouted our lives, emboldened us, and gave many of us opportunities we never would have had. It made Newsweek a better place to work and a better magazine. Like us, today’s young women are challenging assumptions and fighting their own, more complicated battles in the workplace. They, too, are having a feminist awakening. We are standing in their corner and rooting for their success. For we now see that as with Mad Men, our history isn’t just history. It has become a legacy for the young women who followed us.

  EPILOGUE:

  WHERE THEY ARE NOW

  IT HAS BEEN FORTY-TWO YEARS since we became the first women in the media to sue for sex discrimination and the first female class action suit. All of us are proud of the historic role we played but the effect of the lawsuit on our lives has been mixed. For some women, it opened doors and offered career choices they never would have imagined. For others, it remains the high point of their professional lives. For a few, it’s a bitter reminder of regrets and never-realized ambitions. But for all of us, now in our sixties and seventies, it was an experience that changed our perspectives about ourselves, about men and women—and womanhood—and about justice and ambition.