In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (24 page)

Judy Ginggold, a researcher in Nation, kicked off the women’s revolt. Her impressive credentials (Phi Beta Kappa at Smith, scholarship to Oxford) were just what the magazine looked for in hiring women. That is, she’d gone to a good school and knew how to dress with understated taste. Maybe Judy took the lead in the women’s rebellion because she wasn’t afraid to bitch about the unjustness, the absolute unfairness, of her lot. Her weekly consciousness-raising group based on the Redstockings model had given her a fresh perspective.

“When I was hired,” Ginggold relates, “they told me flat-out that women do not write at
Newsweek
. When they moved me from the library into research, they said I was the luckiest person in the world to get into Nation so fast. I didn’t feel lucky. I felt I was wasting myself, but I didn’t know what to do.”

One evening she poured out her misery to Gladys Kessler, a Washington lawyer. “What
Newsweek
is doing to you is illegal,” Kessler shot back. “Haven’t you heard about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act? Call the EEOC.”

Judy made the call. “First you organize,” said the woman over the
phone. “And,” she added, lowering her voice, “you organize in secret so they don’t pick you off one by one.”

“I was terrified,” Ginggold remembers. “I saw myself as a nice person, not as an angry feminist. But it turned out that I was an angry feminist after all.”

Ginggold put forward some lunch-hour feelers to her best friends in Nation, Lucy Howard and Margaret Montagno. Lucy and Margaret had never done anything political in their lives, but they were heartsick from the years of being passed over. Next the nucleus of three approached Pat Lynden, a former researcher who’d returned to the magazine as a New York bureau reporter after a year of successful freelancing. “A man in the New York bureau with the same job I had was called a correspondent,” Lynden remembers. “But I was just called a reporter.”

Emboldened, the four conspirators extended their net to Lynn Povich, the daughter of a famous
Washington Post
sportswriter, who had just received a promotion to junior writer, the token woman, and treated as such, among fifty men. Lynn was following the Women’s Liberation Movement on her own initiative and filing reports, but little of her work made it into the magazine. “I’d gotten my promotion,” she laughs, “because none of the guys wanted to write about fashion. That was my big break. I seemed to be on my way, at least I hoped so, but I certainly understood that nobody else was.” She offered her cubicle for the secret meetings.

When the women had a solid core of nine, they began soliciting lawyers. “Harriet Pilpel turned us down,” Ginggold remembers. “She just didn’t get it. Flo Kennedy got it, but she wasn’t for us. She was wearing a big cowboy hat and we were such straight and square women. Then we met Eleanor Holmes Norton.”

“Eleanor Holmes Norton was perfect for us,” continues Pat Lynden. “She’d gone to Yale Law School, which was something
they’d
respect. She was black, with a decade of civil rights stuff behind her, and she was pregnant. That was delicious. And she understood exactly what we were after—an end to the unspoken caste system that was making us so unhappy. Eleanor spent a lot of time with us, whipping us into shape. She’d say, ‘You gotta take off your white gloves, ladies. Take off your gloves.’ ”

The conspirators were wracked with doubt.
Newsweek
was like a benevolent, paternal family. The rule of the game was “Work for a couple of years, then leave and get married,” but married or not, this crew had stayed on, lulled by the magazine’s first-name civility, the delightful long lunches, the built-in overtime that allowed them to buy a good pair of earrings or a mink-paw coat while they performed their allotted tasks and waited to be noticed. In weak moments they told themselves that
they
were the problem—they were directionless wimps! Some of their former colleagues (Nora Ephron, Ellen Goodman, and I) hadn’t hung around the research pool waiting to be discovered. Nora had cut out fast and never looked back. “Oh hell, Simone de Beauvoir could walk in here,” somebody sighed, “and they’d put her in research.”

The time to take off their white gloves arrived with Helen Dudar’s invitation to guest-write the magazine’s Women’s Liberation cover. “It was remarkable,” exclaims Lucy Howard. “The Wallendas did not see the irony in this at all.”

Certain they would all get fired and have their names inscribed on an industry blacklist, the ringleaders attempted to involve every woman in the office in the EEOC complaint. Fay Willey, the crusty chief researcher in Foreign, came aboard; she had seen many a young male pup whiz by her in twenty years of faithful service. The letter writers in the backwater of Reader Mail wanted in. But despite Eleanor Norton’s presence on their team, the organizers struck out with
Newsweek
’s five black researchers, whose entry into the magazine had been forged by the civil rights movement only a few years before.

“Our identification at the time was with a black movement, not a women’s movement,” Leandra Abbott recalls. “I remember going to a big meeting at somebody’s house and sitting there feeling this wasn’t my fight. I was thinking,
What about blacks who don’t have opportunity?
It’s interesting—the black women all came to the same conclusion that the petition wasn’t about us.”

“The black women didn’t caucus,” says Diane Camper, a
Times
editorial writer today. “We simply had this feeling that the petition wasn’t going to help us. In retrospect I can say that I certainly benefited from it.”

Oz Elliott, the editor in chief, got wind of the revolt two days before the women went public. He called Fay Willey at home on Saturday night, imploring her in the name of loyalty to stop the complaint from going forward. These were terrible times for journalists, he pleaded. Just recently Vice President Spiro Agnew had called them “a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men,” and the women’s action was certain to play into Agnew’s hand. Willey stood firm, and rushed to tell her cohorts the gist of the conversation.

“In those days an EEOC finding had no teeth, no enforcement procedures,” Pat Lynden recalls, “so we had to go public as a militant tactic. We weren’t the type for sit-ins or guerrilla theater, but we sure knew how to stage a press conference. We’d covered enough of them for the magazine.”

As
Newsweek
with “Women in Revolt” emblazoned on its yellow cover hit the newsstands on Monday morning, March 16, Eleanor Holmes Norton, flanked by Pat Lynden, Lucy Howard, and Mary Pleschette Willis, read the EEOC complaint to a packed room of journalists at the ACLU. Thirty
Newsweek
women were present. They had chipped in to fly one of their number, Sunde Smith, to Washington to present a copy to Katharine M. Graham, the widowed socialite owner of
Newsweek
and the Washington Post Company, while the Wallendas’ copies were delivered to the Wallendatorium on
Newsweek
’s twelfth floor. As it happened, Mrs. Graham was vacationing in the Bahamas at the historic moment when the rebels fired their guns. When the nervous editors reached her by phone, her half-joking response was “
Which side am I supposed to be on?”

Oz Elliott issued a statement for the magazine. “
Newsweek
does not discriminate,” he said. “We’re talking about
a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years.”

So it had, but this tradition was doomed to expire. To the researchers’ great disappointment, Kay Graham did not throw her weight behind them. She took the position that the aggrieved women should have spoken to management first. Years would pass before Mrs. Graham could appreciate that the gathering feminist storm, already in evidence at
Newsweek
, did more than any other factor to recast her as a publisher of stature.

My former colleagues in Nation had invited me to witness their landmark press conference, knowing that it would warm my heart. And so it did. A few weeks later, however, I was startled to receive an urgent phone call from one of the Wallendas, inviting me to meet with them at the office.

I hadn’t seen Lester Bernstein, Bob Christopher, and Kermit Lansner since 1964, and never before had I commanded their full attention. After we shook hands, they got right to the point. Conceding that there was merit to the researchers’ case, they said that the women, bright and deserving, seemed paralyzed in informal tryouts when given a chance to produce the tightly compressed, formulaic newsmagazine prose. The editors wondered if the women had been held back too long. The men were familiar with the internal damage to people’s psyches that resulted from years of conforming to low expectations—they had witnessed the same phenomenon in blacks. But I’d proven myself elsewhere. How would I like to come back to
Newsweek
as a writer in any department I wished?

I wouldn’t. The moment for me as a
Newsweek
writer had passed. And talk about the damage from lowered expectations. I’d knocked out copy in two TV newsrooms and written for
Esquire
and the
Times
, but my idea of a cold-sweat nightmare was eighty-five lines for Nation on a Friday night. It still is.

With the recruitment business out of the way, Kermit Lansner, his shirttails rumpled as I’d remembered, confided that Kay—Mrs. Graham—was nagging them to put Gloria Steinem on the cover.

“Over my dead body,” he or Christopher avowed, and everyone laughed. They were not in the habit of taking editorial cues from the diffident heiress. One year and five months later a steelier Mrs. Graham, buoyed by the feminist upsurge, got her Steinem cover, and no dead bodies were discovered on the floor.

Before we adjourned, Lester Bernstein, my old boss in Nation, asked if I’d mind answering a personal question. My relationship with Lester had been fine and flirty when I’d been a researcher in his department. I was one of his favorites; I’d thought he had understood my frustration and boredom. But now he inquired with puzzled sincerity, “When you worked here, Susan, did you have ambition?”

For two years not a week had gone by without my asking if I could “do more.” He hadn’t noticed.

Two months after the
Newsweek
rebellion, the
women at Time, Inc., the empire of
Time, Life, Fortune
, and
Sports Illustrated
, filed sex discrimination charges with the New York State Division of Human Rights. The women of
The Washington Post
, the
Times
, and many other newspapers would organize soon after. Dissatisfied with the token progress at their magazine, the
Newsweek
women filed a second complaint with the EEOC in 1972. By then the federal agency and the women’s movement had become forces to be reckoned with. Joseph Califano, for the magazine, and Harriet Rabb, for the women, hammered out a specific timetable for affirmative action. This time around the researchers were offered an in-house training program, and several would indeed become
Newsweek
correspondents and writers.

August 26, 1970, marked the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage, a piece of historical information most welcome to Betty Friedan, who was suffering that spring from a strong sense of repudiation. At NOW’s fourth national conference, held in Des Plaines, Illinois, in March, 250 delegates had elected Aileen Hernandez and Wilma Scott Heide to the top two posts, denying Friedan a seat on the board in the process. Refusing to bow out politely, Friedan used the forum of her farewell address, a speech that was clocked at two hours, for an audacious proposal. She called for a “
Women’s Strike for Equality” to commemorate August 26 across the country. Acting unilaterally, the difficult visionary once again proved her prescience.

A national one-day work stoppage, Friedan’s idea, proved too ambitious, although the planners were reluctant to part with their slogan, “Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot.” Coordinated events were, however, to take place around the country. Ivy Bottini, the president of the New York chapter, proposed a march and a rally, to begin after work on Wednesday, August 26.

Thrilled that the living-room feminists were taking to the streets at long last, Ruthann Miller, the young Trotskyist organizer from the Socialist
Workers Party, opened a “march coalition” headquarters on lower Broadway, at a physical remove from NOW’s Lexington Avenue office. The schism between “the bourgeois women” and “the downtown crazies,” as the two factions called each other, was mended in late summer. Bottini, who had raised two children while holding a full-time job, felt a welling of motherly empathy for the young Trotskyist with an infant strapped to her back. The warring headquarters were merged when the women found they could agree on three basic principles: free abortion on demand, community-controlled twenty-four-hour child-care centers, and equal opportunity in jobs and education. Bowing to the SWP’s superior experience in staging marches, NOW accepted the Trotskyists’ parade route. They would assemble at the Grand Army Plaza at Fifty-ninth Street, march down Fifth Avenue, and conclude with a rally of speeches and songs at Bryant Park. The two factions agreed on another piece of strategy. They would solicit Famous Names to address the rally. Betty Friedan, of course. Bess Myerson? Bella Abzug? Gloria Steinem? Kate Millett? They began making calls. Everyone said yes.