The Good Girls Revolt (2 page)

Peyser had heard about the lawsuit and told them that it had gone all the way to the US Supreme Court. That night, Jesse started searching online through all the 1970 Supreme Court cases but found nothing mentioning
Newsweek
. “We knew there was something about a lawsuit,” she said, “but we didn’t know what it meant.” Jessica finally paid to search the
New York Times
archives, where several articles on the lawsuit turned up. “I was bouncing out of my chair I was so excited,” she said. “We knew we had to do something but it still wasn’t clear from those clips whether the suit had been settled or whether it actually went to court.”

The three women spent the next few weeks digging deeper and calling various sources, including Susan Brownmiller and some former
Newsweek
women whose names were mentioned in the book. I was one of the women. Jessica and Jesse contacted me when they learned that I was writing about the case. They wanted to find out what had happened and why. They were determined to write a piece for
Newsweek
questioning how much had actually changed for women at the magazine, in the media, and in the workplace in general.

When I met the two young women for lunch, they reminded me so much of my friends and myself forty years earlier. We, too, had been bright young things, full of energy and expectations. We also had been thrilled to be working at an important magazine and we, too, had begun to realize that something wasn’t right at
Newsweek
. But if they were post-feminists, we were pre-feminists. Unlike these young women, many of us were far more conflicted about our ambitions and clueless about having a career. My only desire after college was to go to Paris, and I was lucky enough to get a job there as a secretary in the
Newsweek
bureau. I never imagined that five years later, I would be suing the magazine for sex discrimination.

As I listened to Jessica and Jesse struggle to understand what they were feeling—their marginalization, the sexual banter and innuendo, the career cakewalk for men their age—it reminded me of “the problem that had no name” that Betty Friedan had defined in her 1963 groundbreaking book,
The Feminine Mystique
: that “strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction” of the American housewife who, “as she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”

Friedan’s “problem” did not apply to working-class women, who had to earn a living but were confined mainly to low-paying jobs. It was the condition of the postwar suburban housewife. Although many middle-class women had been recruited to work during World War II, they were forced to go home when the soldiers returned. For educated women, whose husbands could support them,
not
having to work was seen as a status symbol until, as Betty Friedan pointed out, many of them realized they wanted—needed—something more than a husband and children.

Finding meaningful work, however, was not easy. In just about every industry, “office work” for women meant secretarial jobs and typing pools. Even in creative fields, such as book publishing, advertising, and journalism, where there was a pool of educated females, women were given menial jobs. In the 1950s, full-time working women earned on average between fifty-nine and sixty-four cents for every dollar men earned in the same job. (It wasn’t until the passage of the Equal Pay Act in June 1963 that it became illegal to pay women a lower rate for the same job.) And there were very few professional women. Until around 1970, women comprised fewer than 10 percent of students in medical school, 4 percent of law school students, and only 3 percent of business school students.

At
Newsweek,
our “problem that had no name” in the mid-1960s was sexism, pure and simple. At both
Time
and
Newsweek,
only men were hired as writers. Women were almost always hired on the mail desk or as fact checkers and rarely promoted to reporter or writer. Even with similar credentials, women generally ended up in lesser positions than men. One summer, two graduates of the Columbia Journalism School were hired—he as a writer and she as a researcher/ reporter. That’s just the way it was, and we all accepted it.

Until we didn’t. Just as young women today are discovering that post-feminism isn’t really “post,” we were discovering that civil rights didn’t include women’s rights. Just like Jesse, Jessica, and Sarah, we began to realize that something was very wrong with the
Newsweek
system. With great trepidation, we decided to take on what we saw as a massive injustice: a segregated system of journalism that divided research, reporting, writing, and editing roles solely on the basis of gender. We began organizing in secret, terrified that we would be found out—and fired—at any moment. For most of us middle-class ladies, standing up for our rights marked the first time we had done anything political or feminist. It would be the radicalizing act that gave us the confidence and the courage to find ourselves and stake our claim.

THIS BOOK IS THE FIRST full account of that landmark
Newsweek
case, the story of how and why we became the first women in the media to sue for sex discrimination. Like
Mad Men,
the popular TV series on life at an advertising agency in the 1960s, not only does our tale reflect the legal and cultural limits for women at the time, but it also is a coming-of-age story about a generation of “good girls” who found ourselves in the revolutionary ’60s. But if our pioneering lawsuit has been forgotten by many people, even at
Newsweek,
our fight for women’s rights still reverberates with the younger generation. There have been many victories. Women today have more opportunities and solid legal support. They are more confident, more career-oriented, and more aggressive in getting what they want than most of us were. But many of the injustices that young women face today are the same ones we fought against forty years ago. The discrimination may be subtler, but sexist attitudes still exist.

Jessica, Jesse, and Sarah, and many young women like them, are beginning to understand that legal principles are not the only impediment to power. They see that the rhetoric they were taught—and believed—does not fully exist in the real world; that women still don’t have equal rights and equal opportunities; that cultural transformation is harder than legal reform; and that feminism isn’t finished. The struggle for social change is still evolving, and now they realize that they are part of it, too.

Here is our story.

CHAPTER 1

“Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint”

O
N MARCH 16, 1970,
Newsweek
magazine hit the newsstands with a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement titled “Women in Revolt.” The bright yellow cover pictured a naked woman in red silhouette, her head thrown back, provocatively thrusting her fist through a broken blue female-sex symbol. As the first copies went on sale that Monday morning, forty-six female employees of
Newsweek
announced that we, too, were in revolt. We had just filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charging that we had been “systematically discriminated against in both hiring and promotion and forced to assume a subsidiary role” simply because we were women. It was the first time women in the media had sued on the grounds of sex discrimination and the story, irresistibly timed to the
Newsweek
cover, was picked up around the world.

“‘Discriminate,’ le redattrici di
Newsweek?
” (
La Stampa
)

“Newsweek’s Sex Revolt” (
London Times
)

“Editors File Story; Girls File Complaint” (
Newsday
)

“Women Get Set for Battle” (
London Daily Express
)

“As Newsweek Says, Women Are in Revolt, Even on Newsweek” (
New York Times
)

The story in the
New York Daily News,
titled “Newshens Sue Newsweek for ‘Equal Rights,’” began, “Forty-six women on the staff of
Newsweek
magazine, most of them young and most of them pretty, announced today they were suing the magazine.”

The UPI photograph capturing the announcement shows three young white women sitting alongside our attorney, a serious black woman with an imposing Afro. Behind them are pictured several rows of women in their twenties; I am shown standing in the corner with long dark hair. At 10 A.M. our lawyer, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, began reading a statement to a packed press conference at the ACLU’s office at 156 Fifth Avenue. “It is ironic,” she said, waving a copy of the magazine, “that while
Newsweek
considers women’s grievances newsworthy enough for such major coverage, it continues to maintain a policy of discrimination against the women on its own staff. . . . The statistics speak for themselves—there are more than fifty men writing at
Newsweek
, but only one woman.” She pointed out that although the women were graduates of top colleges, held advanced degrees, and had published in major news journals, “
Newsweek’
s caste system relegates women with such credentials to research jobs almost exclusively and interminably.”

Eleanor noted that a copy of the complaint had gone to Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
and president of the Washington Post Company, which owned
Newsweek
. “The
Newsweek
women believe that as a woman, Mrs. Graham has a particular responsibility to end discrimination against women at her magazine,” she said. She called on Mrs. Graham and the editors to negotiate and asked for “the immediate integration of the research staff and the opening of correspondence, writing, and editing positions to women.”

Then she opened the floor to questions for the three
Newsweek
women at the table. One reporter asked who was the top woman at the magazine. Lucy Howard, a researcher in the National Affairs department, replied that it was Olga Barbi, who was head of the researchers and had been at
Newsweek
for forty years—which got a big laugh. Then Gabe Pressman, the veteran investigative reporter for local WNBC-TV, pushed his microphone in front of Mary Pleshette, the Movies researcher, and asked whether the discrimination was overt. “Yes,” she answered. “There seems to be a gentleman’s agreement at
Newsweek
that men are writers and women are researchers and the exceptions are few and far between.”

It was an exhilarating moment for us, and a shocking one for
Newsweek’
s editors, who couldn’t have been more surprised if their own daughters had risen up in revolt. We had been secretly strategizing for months, whispering behind closed doors, congregating in the
Newsweek
ladies’ room, and meeting in our apartments at night. As our numbers increased, we had hired a lawyer and were just reviewing our options when we were suddenly presented with a truly lucky break. In early 1970,
Newsweek’
s editors decided that the new women’s liberation movement deserved a cover story. There was one problem, however: there were no women to write the piece.

I was the only female writer on the magazine at the time, but I was very junior. As a researcher at
Newsweek,
I had also done a lot of reporting, and my editor in the Life & Leisure department had liked my work. When he decided that he didn’t want to write about fashion anymore, he suggested that I be promoted to do it, and in mid-1969, I was. In addition to fashion, I wrote about social trends, including the gay-rights and women’s movements. But things weren’t going well. The senior editor who promoted me had moved to another department and the new editor thought my stories were too sympathetic to the activists. My copy was often rewritten.

When the idea of doing a women’s lib cover was proposed in early 1970, the editors were savvy enough to realize they couldn’t have a man write the story. Though I was not experienced enough to tackle a cover story, another woman on the magazine could have written it: Liz Peer, a gifted reporter in
Newsweek
’s Washington bureau. But the editors never reached out to her. (When I asked my editor why they hadn’t asked Liz, he told me that although she had been a writer in New York and a foreign correspondent for five years, he “wasn’t sure” she could write a
Newsweek
cover.)

Instead, for the first time in the history of the magazine, the editors went outside the staff and hired Helen Dudar, a star writer at the
New York Post,
to do the piece. (Helen’s husband, Peter Goldman, was a top writer for
Newsweek.
) That galvanized us. Our case might take years to wind its way through the EEOC backlog, but announcing our lawsuit the morning the “Women in Revolt” cover came out would get us prominent press coverage. We knew that worse than being sued, the publicity would mortify the magazine’s editors, who prided themselves on the progressive views and pro–civil rights coverage that put
Newsweek
on the map in the 1960s.