The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  Judy Gingold. As with many of the women on the front lines of a legal complaint, the mainspring of our movement never fully benefited from her courageous act or her enormous talent. Judy’s last job at Newsweek was editor of the “My Turn” section, shepherding essays from prominent experts and everyday readers. In 1982, she left the magazine to move to Los Angeles with her husband, David Freeman, a screenwriter. In LA, Judy did some book reviews for the Los Angeles Times and freelance pieces for the Wall Street Journal. She continued her interest in feminism as a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Women and Men in Society at the University of Southern California, where Betty Friedan led a feminist think tank, and at the Center for the Study of Women at the University of California at Los Angeles.

  In 1996, Judy wrote a groundbreaking piece on liposuction, which was published in the Atlantic. Recently, she has worked on several health topics and written some lighter, more humorous pieces. “The Newsweek suit was the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done,” she told me. “I can’t think of anything I’ve done subsequently that comes close.” Looking back at her role in starting it all, she said, “I am very proud of my part in the suit. Pride is what enables people to make that psychic switch, whether it’s black pride, gay pride, or women.” Though Judy feels that the suit didn’t help her professionally, she believes it helped her grow personally. “I was a good girl,” she said. “I learned something about the world and found the courage not to be a good girl.”

  Lucy Howard. Lucy spent her entire career at Newsweek. After reporting for the Justice section in New York, she returned to the Washington bureau in 1976 and worked as a correspondent there for ten years. When Lucy came back to New York, she wrote for the Periscope section and eventually was promoted to senior writer. Lucy took a buyout in 2002, leaving Newsweek after thirty-nine years. “I should have pushed myself more,” she said, “but I’m not going to look back and say, ‘Boohoo.’ I have no regrets about staying, but the most enduring pleasure is the amazing range of people I worked with, and the lasting friendships I made.” Lucy went back to her roots: she bought several small shares in racehorses and became active in environmental issues in Maryland. She never married.

  Margaret Montagno Clay. Although Margaret enjoyed her stint writing on Newsweek’s international edition, “I never really thought of myself as a journalist nor thought I had a future as a journalist,” she said. In the summer of 1978, she married Pete Clay, a scientist and inventor, and left Newsweek later that year. Since 1981, Margaret has lived in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she has raised two children and done volunteer work.

  “To me the situation at Newsweek was glaringly unfair and totally at odds with the editors’ liberal views,” she said. “When Oz said this wasn’t discrimination but a long-held tradition, it was staggering.” At the time of the lawsuit, Margaret recalled, “I knew this was not a just way to run the world but I didn’t have a vehicle for it. I went to some early consciousness-raising groups where everyone sat around until they arrived at some consensus. The lawsuit seemed like a better route to change. You could actually do something about it with people whose abilities were known to you. It was the most concrete thing I’ve ever done.”

  Pat Lynden. Pat was going to be a journalist no matter what, just not at Newsweek. She was still a reporter in the New York bureau when she married Allen Gore, a police detective, in August 1970, the month we signed our first memorandum of understanding. She left Newsweek in May 1971, when she was pregnant with her son, Richie. Pat has worked as an editor on several magazines, including Viva, Connoisseur, and Longevity, and freelanced for others, including New York Woman, founded and edited by Betsy Carter, a former Newsweek researcher. Now divorced and a grandmother, she is a freelance writer and editor and is currently writing a novel.

  Pat looks back on Newsweek with mostly positive feelings. “I loved the smart, interesting people, the lifelong friends I made,” she said. “But I don’t feel good about the fact that journalistic advancement for us didn’t come from hard work and talent, as it did for the men. I adored reporting and would have given anything for a foreign bureau assignment, but that was out of the question. To this day I’m sad that I never got a crack at that professional experience.”

  For Pat, the lawsuit was a vindication of our belief in ourselves. “During those many nervous-making months when we were planning our action—right up to the day of the press conference—we proved to ourselves, and finally to the guys, just how smart and capable we were,” she said. “It was amazing how clueless and dumbstruck they were by what we pulled off! Of course, our action took place in the cauldron of the women’s movement that was roiling every household in America. But we contributed a nice piece to that history and I’m glad I was part of it.”

  Fay Willey. Fay was an example of why the women’s movement at Newsweek didn’t necessarily work for everyone. Fay never wanted to be a writer, but feeling pressured by several women to move up the ladder—and seeing others try out who knew far less than she did—she relented, tried out, and was promoted to a writer in the Foreign section in May 1973. Her pieces were smart and she knew how to build a story, but she remained a middle-of-the-section writer. When Newsweek started a Japanese-language edition in 1984, the editors asked Fay to teach the Japanese how to make a newsmagazine. Two years later, she returned to the Foreign section as a writer. Although Fay was always proud of her part in the lawsuit, she has said that she regretted being talked into becoming a writer. She never again had the standing and influence she once held as chief researcher. In 1988, Fay took a buyout with sixty-four other staffers. After a brief marriage in college, she never remarried and continues to be actively involved in the world of foreign affairs and the arts in New York and in London, where she lives for several months a year.

  Merrill (Mimi) McLoughlin. Mimi is an example of what women can accomplish if given the chance. From Religion researcher to writer to the senior editor for National Affairs, Mimi had a meteoric rise at Newsweek—and then rose higher. In 1986, she left to go to US News & World Report with her husband, Mike Ruby, also a Newsweek editor, where they became coeditors in 1989. Mimi was the first woman to edit a national newsweekly. In 1999, they left US News and are now living in the Southwest, writing and coauthoring books.

  “The women’s movement at Newsweek was definitely a turning point for me,” said Mimi. “Had it not opened the doors, I probably wouldn’t have hung on—I would have looked for another thing to do with my life. I wanted to be a doctor or I might have become a full-time mother. I didn’t want to be an editor, ever—even at US News—but I liked writing.” For Mimi, the lawsuit was a great confidence builder. “Coming together in a group was a very liberating experience,” she said. “I can’t imagine doing it on my own, but we had that sense that we were acting together and that it was a just cause.” “When you look back,” she added, “Newsweek ended up in a very good place.”

  Trish Reilly. Trish was so smart and talented, yet she was unable to benefit from the women’s movement. In 1973, she left Newsweek in a panic but found herself just as anxious at CBS News. “I wound up doing very well there,” she recalled, “but it still didn’t change who I was. With every success, I became more depressive.” After her three-year contract ended, Trish married and moved to Los Angeles. Six years later, she got divorced and moved back to Northern California, where she got a license doing real estate appraisals for probate court until she retired in 2000. “I never pursued anything that would make me a star or put me out there like that,” she said. “Working for probate court didn’t threaten my image of myself as a ‘good girl’ who didn’t seek attention, who didn’t seek higher achievement. I had that fire of youth that propelled me out of Alameda, but I never could overcome that other part of myself that said, ‘Who do you think you are?’ I understand the other part of this—the women who didn’t push themselves.”

  Looking back at her Newsweek experience, Trish said, “Ultimately the women’s movement helped me
relate to men like an equal, but I was so entrenched in traditional values that it wasn’t until my forties that I finally realized it. On the one hand I’m very sad about what could have been for me, but I don’t feel regret. There are women who never tried. I can take pride in what I did do.”

  Liz Peer. Liz was at the top of her game in the 1970s. She had been a star reporter and writer at Newsweek and was promoted to Paris bureau chief, covering Western Europe and North Africa. In 1977, she finally got her wish to be a war correspondent—in Somalia. Liz won an award for her reporting there but riding in a Land Rover with no springs, she suffered a broken coccyx, causing a cycle of chronic pain. That same year, her father committed suicide—seventeen years after her older brother was found dead in a New York City rooming house, also an apparent suicide.

  In 1978, Liz married at the age of thirty-nine. She continued to write in the back of the book, but her pain began to affect her personality and slow her journalistic skills. She became more volatile, more difficult, and more depressed, and by 1982 her marriage had disintegrated. In April 1983, according to a Manhattan Inc. article by Gwenda Blair, Bill Broyles, the new editor of Newsweek, terminated Liz but offered her a deal: Newsweek would help her find a new job and if she couldn’t find one, she could freelance and do consulting work for the magazine. Liz was distraught. “What always concerned me about Liz was that her identity was completely with Newsweek,” recalled her friend Linda Bird Francke, a former Newsweek writer. “She would start every sentence with ‘We feel, we know, we think’—meaning her and the magazine. You can’t lose yourself so much. When she got fired, I knew terrible things would happen. That completely destroyed her.”

  Liz was negotiating with the magazine for health insurance and was even considering suing Newsweek when the editors, seeing her deterioration, offered to hire her back. According to Gwenda Blair, when they didn’t promise her a level of work comparable to what she had done in the past, she turned them down. She was to go on permanent medical disability in July 1984, but on the evening of May 26, Liz put on a pale blue negligee, laid out her favorite ball gowns, and propped her feather boa around a mirror. Listening to French songs on the stereo, she wrote letters to her mother and her estranged husband. “I don’t like the person I’ve become,” she wrote to her husband. “I’m dog-tired living with an ice pack belted to my rear and I can’t bear the sense of failure that stretches from my first waking moment until I fall asleep.... When friends ask why, tell them it’s simply seven years of pain.”

  She drank some wine and swallowed pills. She was forty-eight years old.

  “They could have kept Liz,” said Linda Francke, still bitter today about what happened to Peer, as many Newsweekers are. “She could have written something. She would have taken less pay. She would have done anything. They didn’t need to fire her but they did. After speaking at her funeral, I walked out of the church and burst into tears. Several editors were there, looking stricken, and they came up to me and said. ‘We didn’t know, we didn’t know.’ And I said, ‘You’re assholes for not knowing.’”

  Mary Pleshette Willis. During Mary’s writing tryout for Jack Kroll, which was going nowhere, her fiancé, Jack Willis, was hit by a wave while body surfing off Long Island and broke his neck. It was July 1970, two months before they were to marry. Mary immediately took a leave from the magazine until November and, she recalled bitterly, “Kroll never called once to find out how Jack was.”

  Luckily, Jack Willis recovered, and he and Mary married the following year. In 1972, the couple wrote a book about their experience, But There Are Always Miracles. “When the advance was more than I was making at Newsweek, I quit,” said Mary. In 1975, Mary and Jack moved to Los Angeles when their book was optioned for a television movie, which they cowrote as well as several other made-for-TV films. They moved back to New York in 1978 with their two daughters, and Mary freelanced and wrote afternoon TV specials. She published her first novel, Papa’s Cord, in 1999, still freelances, and is writing another novel.

  “I felt I was one of the early guinea pigs,” said Mary, looking back on her Newsweek experience. “Had I stayed, I might have gotten some of the benefits of the suit, but I left before there was really any change. The highlight of my time at Newsweek was filing the lawsuit.”

  Diane Camper. Diane was one of the black researchers who decided not to join the lawsuit. In 1971, she was sent on a summer training program to the San Francisco bureau and the following year was promoted to a reporter in Newsweek’s Washington bureau, covering the Watergate break-in and trials. Diane took a leave in 1976 to go to Yale, where she earned a master’s degree in law. She returned to the Washington bureau the following year to cover the Supreme Court. In 1983, the New York Times editorial board hired Diane to write on education, welfare, and other social issues. She left journalism briefly to go to the Annie E. Casey Foundation as public affairs manager in 1997. In 2004, Diane went to the Baltimore Sun as assistant editorial page editor until June 2008. She is currently communications officer at the Public Welfare Foundation in Washington, D.C. She never married.

  Thinking about the situation of women then and now, Diane said, “Whatever oppression I felt then, I identified [it] more as a racial thing. But I do know that women, particularly black women, have suffered. To that extent, I think we could have identified on both a racial and gender basis without compromising the racial piece of it. I have probably benefited by being both black and female, so I identify now in a more positive way with both race and gender.”

  Elisabeth (Lala) Coleman. Lala had been a reporter in Newsweek’s San Francisco bureau for three years when she was hired away by KQED-TV in 1973. The following year she went to work for ABC News before becoming press secretary to California Governor Jerry Brown in 1976. She resigned in 1978, when she married Rock Brynner, Yul Brynner’s son. Lala came back to New York, got divorced, and started working for a media communications firm. She joined American Express in 1990, rising to vice president of international public affairs and communications before retiring in 2004. She is currently writing a memoir.

  “The Newsweek lawsuit played a huge role in my life,” said Lala. “I was immediately dispatched to a bureau and then given the first bureau reporter opening. If we had not filed, others probably would have, but I suspect they would not have been as successful as we were.”

  Phyllis Malamud, Jeanie Seligmann, and Mariana Gosnell were Newsweek lifers. Phyllis was promoted from New York reporter to Boston bureau chief in 1977 and returned to New York in 1983, where she became editor of the “My Turn” section. In 1986, at the age of forty-eight, Phyllis married Newsweek’s longtime Medicine editor, Matt Clark. She and Matt took a buyout in 1988 and have since retired. “The suit was helpful in getting me the Boston bureau chief position,” said Phyllis, “and that was helpful in terms of establishing myself as a manager.”

  Jeanie Seligmann worked at Newsweek for twenty-eight years. After being promoted to writer in 1971, she became editor of the Letters section in 1999 and took a buyout in 2002, retiring at fifty-seven. She never married. “Without the women’s suit, I don’t think I would have had the gumption to push for a tryout,” said Jeanie. “I was much more of a follower than a leader. I guess my consciousness got raised.”

  Mariana Gosnell left Newsweek in 1988, after twenty-six years. “I often thought about leaving but I couldn’t figure out a better job,” she said. On her off-hours, Mariana got a pilot’s license and in 1961, she bought a single-engine airplane. At one point, she took a three-month leave of absence and flew solo across the country. In 1994, when she was sixty-two, Mariana published a book about her bird’s-eye journey in her plane, Zero Three Bravo. In 2007, she wrote another called Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of This Astonishing Substance, which the New York Times reviewed and pronounced “remarkable.” “I wasted too many years at Newsweek,” said Mariana, who had a long-term relationship but never married. “It was a lack of knowing one’s possibilities and a lack
of belief in your capabilities. Doing the flying book gave me more of a sense of accomplishment, but the reporting at Newsweek determined a lot about how I write.” Sadly, Mariana died unexpectedly in March 2012.

  Eleanor Clift. One of Washington’s most respected reporters and commentators, Eleanor credits the Newsweek women’s suit with giving her the first boost. “It was this great unseen hand in New York that gave me the entrée to ask for a reporting internship,” she recalled. In 1970, Eleanor was the Girl Friday in the Atlanta bureau. After her reporting internship in the summer of 1971, she was promoted to correspondent in Atlanta and started covering Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Her big scoop was getting Hamilton Jordan’s game plan for how Carter could win the presidency. In 1976, Eleanor followed Carter to Washington as Newsweek’s White House correspondent. She left Newsweek briefly in 1985 to go to the Los Angeles Times but returned to the Washington bureau thirteen months later. She covered Capitol Hill and then the White House again from 1992 to 1994. Eleanor is currently a contributing editor at Newsweek and a regular on the syndicated TV show The McLaughlin Group.

  Married to Brooks Clift (Montgomery Clift’s brother) from 1964 until their divorce in 1981, Eleanor has three sons. In 1989, she married fellow journalist Tom Brazaitis, who died of kidney cancer in 2005 at the age of sixty-four. Three years later, she wrote Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics, which weaves the experience of Tom’s death with the events surrounding the Terri Schiavo case during a two-week period in March 2005.

  When she first heard about the women’s suit, Eleanor recalled, “I thought there was a lot of anger at Newsweek on the part of the men and the women. But in the end, I think it changed the chemistry of the magazine and how we looked at gender. It wasn’t about ego—this was before bylines. It was about women wanting to be in the game and it was a group effort.”