The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  Jane Bryant Quinn. Jane was the only woman to hold positions at opposite ends of the Newsweek masthead. After leaving the Newsweek clip desk “with great pleasure” in 1962, she went to Look magazine and then was hired by McGraw-Hill to cofound a personal finance newsletter for Business Week magazine. She was listed on the masthead as J. B. Quinn, “because women weren’t thought to know anything about personal finance.” A young mother in need of a job, she reluctantly agreed to the byline, but “I compensated by listing my entire staff—male and female—by their initials, too.” Six years later, when she became the newsletter’s publisher, she switched the masthead to full names.

  In 1974, Jane started writing a personal-finance column for the Washington Post syndicate and in 1979, she was hired back at Newsweek as the magazine’s first female business columnist, alongside economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. “To come back to Newsweek as a respected columnist was a wonderful feeling,” said Jane. “I always loved Newsweek, but I was angry and sorry there had not been a place for me there.”

  In addition to Newsweek, Jane wrote for many publications and authored several books. She married again, had another child, and after her husband died, remarried in 2008. In 2009, Jane and her husband, Carll Tucker, started Main Street Connect, an online community news company. “Although I wasn’t active in the women’s movement,” she said, “I was—and am—proud to declare myself a feminist. I love and respect all those rude and noisy women whose protests—even the silly protests—achieved so much for women’s freedom and choice. It wouldn’t have happened if the movement had been left to polite girls like me, who said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and imagined we could advance, in a man’s world, on merit alone. We and our daughters and our granddaughters are all standing on the shoulders of those tough and insistent personalities who wouldn’t be appeased. Equality is never given, it is taken—and they took it for all of us.”

  Eleanor Holmes Norton. Still a firebrand, Eleanor Holmes Norton continues to fight for civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of the residents of Washington, D.C. After representing the Newsweek women in their first lawsuit, Eleanor became head of the New York City Human Rights Commission in 1970, where she held the first hearings in the country on discrimination against women. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the first woman to hold that position. Eleanor returned to her hometown and in 1990 was elected a delegate to Congress for the District of Columbia. In her position she serves and votes on committees but is not permitted to vote on the final passage of legislation. In 1993, Eleanor divorced her husband after an income-tax scandal. She continues to serve in Congress and as a tenured professor of law at Georgetown University.

  Looking back on her first meeting with the Newsweek editors, Eleanor said, “they were so awkward and didn’t know how to deal with you, the women, or with me. Oz became a good friend and so did Katharine Graham, but here they were, the pillars of progressive America being confronted with a discrimination suit—how embarrassing.” One thing Eleanor regrets is not speaking to the black researchers about joining our suit. “I would have convinced them, I know I would have,” she said. “At that time, it was very hard to go behind you all, but I’m sure they would have all been with you today.”

  Eleanor still regards our lawsuit as a seminal case for women. “This was a case that some would say that you could not win because there was no precedent,” she explained. “But discrimination is discrimination and your case paralleled any case in which there were qualified blacks at the bottom and whites at top. I didn’t understand why this should be any different.”

  Harriet Rabb. After the Newsweek case, Harriet became the go-to lawyer for sex discrimination lawsuits. She represented the women at the Reader’s Digest in 1973 and those at the New York Times in 1974. Harriet continued as director of the Employment Rights Project at Columbia Law School until 1978, where she also served as a professor, director of clinical education, assistant dean for urban affairs—the first woman dean—and vice dean. In 1977, when Joe Califano was appointed secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration, he called up his old Newsweek adversary and asked whether Harriet would be interested in working for him. She declined, but the offer came around again. In 1993, Donna Shalala, the new secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration, hired Harriet as her general counsel. Harriet returned to New York in 2000 and is the vice president and general counsel of Rockefeller University.

  “Look at what we took on,” said Harriet. “The Washington Post and the New York Times—it doesn’t get any tougher than that. What you all did gave other people the courage to do it as well. The Newsweek women were not waiting for God to descend and fix it for all of us. A pool of New York journalists rising up made a picture for every woman in other papers around the country.”

  Harriet believes not only that our case was important, but that it continues to be relevant. “It’s not over,” she said, “and it’s never going to be over—the realization that people always have to have somebody who’s the other, that justice is so hard to come by, that fairness is so hard to come by. You hope that it will get better, and it does get better. But backsliding is so much easier than forward progress and there always has to be somebody who’s willing to step forward. You provided the role models. You all had options. You could have personally had an easy row to hoe. But it just wasn’t who you all were. For you, it was the integrity of the case, to do the right thing. It’s not that there wasn’t courage involved. It took courage, but it was just some well of integrity and decency that says this isn’t right. And that’s at least as great a virtue as courage.”

  Oz Elliott. Although his first impulse was to justify the discrimination of women at Newsweek as “a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years,” Oz turned out to be a quick and lasting convert to our cause. After we had negotiated our first memorandum of understanding in August 1970, Oz thought the mechanisms were in place for progress. When he returned to the editorial side in June 1972, just after we had sued, he made women’s advancement a priority. At that point, Oz was going through his own transition. He was getting divorced and had just started seeing Inger McCabe, who had been married to a Newsweek correspondent in the Far East. Inger was an independent woman—a talented photographer and entrepreneur who started a successful design business called China Seas. “Oz loved women,” said Inger, who married Oz in 1974. “He adored women and yet he didn’t pay enough attention to them. He wasn’t thinking!”

  When Oz left the magazine in 1976 to become New York City’s first deputy mayor in charge of economic development, there was a big party at Top of the Week. As he recalled in his memoir, “The women of Newsweek who had fought so strenuously for their rights gave me a suitably sexist scrapbook chronicling their victory.” In 1977, Oz became dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, stepping down in 1986. He also chaired the Citizens Committee of New York, an organization he helped found in 1975 that encourages local volunteerism. He died of cancer in 2008.

  To his credit, Oz was always honest about his role in Newsweek’s discrimination against women. When he became friendly with Ellen Goodman in later years, she recalled, “He was the first to say, ‘God, weren’t we awful? Can you believe that it was like that then? All those [talented women] who left, as well they should have—why did they ever stay?’ Oz would preempt the discussion but in my mind, there would still be this connection to the women whose careers were basically ended by that [discrimination]. People did something and it had terrible effects on other people. Then they changed and the world changed and Oz certainly changed. I was very fond of him.”

  We all were. Just before he died, I asked him if there was anything he regretted. “Looking back,” he said, “I would have been more sensitive about what it was all about before the storm broke. And in retrospect, I’m sure I would have said something different than that it
was a newsmagazine tradition!”

  As for me, I always say I am an affirmative-action baby and proud of it. After being promoted to Newsweek’s first female senior editor in September 1975, I worked in that job until I left on maternity leave in November 1980, when our daughter, Sarah, was born. When I returned six months later, I negotiated a three-day week to work on special projects. During that time, I packaged seven Newsweek cover stories into books, helped turn one of them into a CBS Reports television documentary, and launched Newsweek on Campus and Newsweek on Health, specialty magazines that were distributed on college campuses and in doctors’ offices. In 1982, Steve and I had our son, Ned, and two years later I returned full-time as a senior editor, often filling in as a Wallenda.

  In 1991, after twenty-five years at Newsweek, I left to become editor-in-chief of Working Woman, a monthly magazine started in the mid-1970s when women were flooding into the workforce. I loved having my own magazine, especially one geared to professional and business women, but it was severely underfinanced (it closed in 2001). In 1996, I took a job as East Coast managing editor/senior executive producer of MSNBC.com, a new Internet–cable TV news venture created by Microsoft and NBC. Working in New York, my team was responsible for creating the Internet content for NBC News and MSNBC cable programs and personalities. It was exciting to be in this new world of digital journalism and I learned a lot. But since broadband—so critical for NBC’s video—wouldn’t happen as quickly as we had hoped, I started to get restless. After a brush with breast cancer (I’m fine), I decided to leave MSNBC.com in March 2001. Since then I have freelanced, tutored in a public school, and been active on the boards of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and the International Women’s Media Foundation, which supports women journalists around the world.

  My husband, Steve Shepard, left Newsweek in 1981 to become editor of Saturday Review, a weekly literary magazine with a distinguished history. But it was on its last legs and folded a year later. Steve was wooed back to Business Week as executive editor and became editor-in-chief in 1984, a position he held for twenty years. In 2004 Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of the City University of New York, asked him to create a new Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. As a product of public schools in New York and a graduate of City College, Steve was thrilled to design the only publicly funded graduate school of journalism in the entire Northeast and he has been the founding dean ever since. We have been blissfully—and blessedly—married for more than thirty-three years.

  My father, who died in 1998, continues to have an enormous influence in my life. He suffered from a damaged heart valve but was writing up to the very end, at nearly ninety-three. The day before he died, on June 4, 1998, he wrote his last column, which was published alongside his obituary. His seventy-five-year writing career provided a front-row seat to the most awe-inspiring sports moments of the twentieth century, yet his columns had never been collected. In early 2003, my brothers and I decided to edit a collection of his sports columns, along with George Solomon, former sports editor of the Washington Post who had worked with Dad for twenty-five years. All Those Mornings . . . At the Post was published by PublicAffairs in 2005, on what would have been my father’s hundredth birthday.

  I was fortunate to be working and without children when the women’s movement came along. If it hadn’t been for the lawsuit, I never would have become a senior editor at Newsweek, a thrilling job that taught me so much about the world, about managing people, and about myself. I am forever grateful to the women who pushed us, the lawyers who represented us and the men who supported us. The lawsuit not only changed my life, it changed my thinking about women: about how we are raised, how we realize our ambitions, how we balance the demands of a career while raising a family. It also set a path for me for the rest of my life: to help other women. In telling our history, I hope our daughters come to understand that sisterhood is powerful, that good girls can revolt, and that change can—and must—happen.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WHEN I LEFT NEWSWEEK in 1991 after twenty-five years, I took home the documents surrounding our 1970 lawsuit. By then, no one seemed interested. I was going to send them to the women’s archives at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, which had requested the material, but I got sidetracked. In 2006, when I finally had time, I realized that to make sense of the papers I had to write a narrative. I started contacting the women involved. When the history grew to 30,000 words, I knew this was a story that should be told.

  Interviewing people about what happened forty years ago, however, was a challenge. My own memory proved inaccurate in several instances and other people’s recollections contradicted one another. I have tried my best to reconstruct what happened using documents, interviews, and research. However people remember it, I am hoping that, as T.S. Eliot said, “the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

  I interviewed over forty people who were at Newsweek at the time, including, just before he died, Oz Elliott. All of them contributed facets of the story and I deeply appreciate their help. But this tale could not have been told without the testimony and insight of Judy Gingold, Lucy Howard, Peter Goldman, Pat Lynden, Margaret Montagno, Trish Reilly, Mary Pleshette Willis, Harry Waters, Mariana Gosnell, Franny Heller Zorn, Betsy Carter, Phyllis Malamud, and Elisabeth Coleman. I am indebted to them for their time and their support. I also want to thank our two inspiring lawyers, Eleanor Holmes Norton in the first lawsuit, and Harriet Rabb, whose files on the second lawsuit were invaluable.

  In capturing what Newsweek was like in the early sixties, I relied on the vivid memories of Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Nora Ephron. Gloria Steinem, Betsy Wade, Anna Quindlen, and Gail Collins provided essential information on the tenor of the times.

  When I started reporting, I didn’t know Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison, and Sarah Ball, three young women working at Newsweek. I am so grateful to them for keeping our story alive. I am also proud that they now call themselves feminists and are passionately carrying on the fight for women’s rights. At Newsweek/Daily Beast, Sam Register, director of the library, and photo editor Beth Johnson were especially helpful.

  I want to thank my friend Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs, who was an early supporter of the project, and PublicAffairs’ publisher, Susan Weinberg, and senior editor and marketing director, Lisa Kaufman, who were enthusiastic about the book from the very beginning. I am particularly indebted to Lisa, my editor, for her sage advice and suggestions in helping me shape the story. Managing editor Melissa Raymond kept me on track, and assistant director of publicity Tessa Shanks provided creative and expert guidance. My lawyer, Jan Constantine, general counsel at the Authors Guild, shepherded me through the contract and made smart recommendations.

  Throughout this project, I was encouraged by many close friends. I am especially grateful to Jack Willis, Sarah Duffy Edwards, Rosemary Ellis, Polly McCall, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin who urged me to keep going whenever I got stuck.

  I could not have written this book without the loving support of my husband, Steve Shepard, a brilliant editor who makes everything in my life better. As I was laboring with my book, Steve began to write a memoir of his life in journalism, from Newsweek and BusinessWeek to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. It’s called Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital. As luck would have it, our books are being published in the same month.

  Our children, Sarah and Ned, bring joy and meaning to my life every day. May this story inspire them to speak up and make a difference.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  MOST OF THE INFORMATION in this book comes from my interviews, original documents or copies of documents, and books, which are listed in the bibliography. All other sources are cited by chapter.

  All quotations from Susan Brownmiller are from her book In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1999).

  Here, in alphabetical order, are the people I inte
rviewed:

  Leandra Hennemann Abbott, Sarah Ball, Jessica Bennett, Helaine Blumenfeld, Susan Braudy, Kevin Buckley, Joe Califano, Diane Camper, Betsy Carter, Susan Cheever, Phyllis Malamud Clark, Margaret Montagno Clay, Eleanor Clift, Elisabeth Coleman, Kate Coleman, Gail Collins, George Cooper, Madlyn Millimet Deming, Dorinda Elliott, Inger Elliott, Osborn Elliott, Jesse Ellison, Nora Ephron, Karla Spurlock Evans, Anna Fels, Joe Ferrer, Penny Ferrer, Susan Fraker, Linda Bird Francke, Rod Gander, Judy Gingold, Peter Goldman, Ellen Goodman, Mariana Gosnell, Trish Hall, Lucy Howard, Liz Hylton, Margo Jefferson, Vajra (Alison) Kilgour, Ed Kosner, Lynn Langway, Grace Lichtenstein, Diana Elliott Lidovsky, Pat Lynden, Ann Ray Martin, Merrill McLoughlin, Joe Morgenstern, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Barbara Bright Novovitch, Maureen Orth, Anna Quindlen, Jane Bryant Quinn, Harriet Rabb, Noel Ragsdale, Trish Reilly, Elaine Sciolino, Jeanie Seligmann, Steve Shepard, Sunde Smith, Ray Sokolov, Nancy Stadtman, Gloria Steinem, Annalyn Swan, Rich Thomas, Jeanne Voltz, Betsy Wade, Harry Waters, Fay Willey, Mary Pleshette Willis, Diane Zimmerman, Franny Heller Zorn.

  PROLOGUE: WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?

  Page xiii Hadn’t Maria Shriver’s report: Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, The SHRIVER Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, ed. Heather Boushey and Ann O’Leary, October 16, 2009; www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/10/womans_nation.html.