The Good Girls Revolt (10 page)

Lucy, Margaret, and Pat approached the researchers in the Nation, Foreign, and Business sections while Judy and I took those in the back of the book. “To get into the inner circle you had to be vouched for,” explained Lucy. “Given how we were raised, we didn’t trust women, we didn’t want to talk to women, we didn’t even want to sit next to women. It was all about catering to men. You really had to trust someone to make sure she wouldn’t see it as an advantage to rat you out. Judy knew Lynn and Lynn knew Mary.”

Mary Pleshette and I were becoming good friends. Mary was the Movies researcher and we often double-dated. I first met her boyfriend, Jack Willis, in the fall of 1969, when we went to see
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
at the Lincoln Center Film Festival. To me, Mary was the consummate New Yorker. The daughter of a prominent East Side ob/gyn, she had grown up on Madison Avenue, graduated from Sarah Lawrence, and was an aficionado of art, theater, food, and French, which she spoke fluently. Mary was a wonderful storyteller and wanted to be a writer. She had begun to freelance for the counterculture
Village Voice
and other publications when I invited her into our office one evening and closed the door. Explaining that the situation for researchers at
Newsweek
was illegal, I said, “We’re beginning to organize—would you be interested in joining us?” “Absolutely,” Mary said without hesitation. We ended the conversation by swearing her to secrecy.

Judy and I then approached Phyllis Malamud, who had the office next to ours. Phyllis, whose father was the cantor at the Actors Temple in Times Square, was hired at
Newsweek
in 1960, after graduating from the City College of New York, and had worked her way up to a reporter position in the New York bureau. “Like most women those days, I thought I would meet a guy and get married,” she later said, “but I never met the guy, and after working at
Newsweek,
all of a sudden I had a career.” Judy and I stood in her doorway, not wanting to look too conspiratorial, and made our usual pitch: “We’re thinking about doing something—do you want to join?” Phyllis was surprised by our proposal but readily accepted. “It was the first time I even thought about the injustice,” she recalled.

I also enlisted Elisabeth Coleman, the Press researcher, whose nickname was Lala. With long golden-red hair and green eyes, Lala was, hands down, the most beautiful woman at the magazine. Guys lusted after her and many at the magazine tried to date her. After graduating from Vassar, she had come to New York City wanting to work in journalism “as an assistant to a smart man,” she recalled. “My parents asked, ‘Have you ever thought about being a journalist yourself?’ and I replied, ‘Oh my gosh, no—I couldn’t do that. That’s for men.’” Luckily Lala’s boss, Bruce Porter, was a generous mentor, taking her along on assignments and training her to become a good reporter. When Bruce was away one day, I walked into the Press office and closed the door. In a hushed voice, I told Lala about our plans and asked if she would be interested in joining our group. She was so excited by the offer she immediately said yes. “I had this tightly wound feeling that we were changing history,” she recalled, “that something was going to explode!”

What we didn’t know was that for the past year Lala had been asking Rod Gander if she could go to a bureau for a summer internship. Rod, the chief of correspondents, reminded her that the summer positions were reserved as a training program for young black men. When Lala pointed out that white guys from the
Harvard Crimson
and the
Columbia Spectator
were also being recruited for summer internships, Rod told her it was simply too expensive to send her as well. One day over drinks, Lala said, “Rod, there’s something you’re not telling me. What is it?” After a few more drinks, Rod confessed, “I don’t want to say this but—men don’t want to work with women.”

I also talked to my friend Mimi Sheils (now Merrill McLoughlin), who worked across the hall in the Religion department. Tall, curly-haired, and super smart, Mimi was a proper girl on the outside, but a wild child underneath. She had majored in religion at Smith College, a decision her father, an advertising salesman at
Time,
ridiculed, saying it would get her a job as a telephone operator at Dial-A-Prayer. Instead, it got her a job as the Religion researcher at
Newsweek
. At her 1966 interview, the chief of research, Olga Barbi, asked Mimi what she was interested in. When she told her she had majored in religion, “Olga jumped out of her chair and said, ‘No one has ever said they were interested in Religion,’” Mimi recalled, laughing. Mimi wanted to be a doctor and finished her premed requirements in college, but she spent the summer after graduation at Radcliffe taking secretarial courses—just in case. “I got married in ’68 and I thought I was going to med school,” she recalled, “which is why I never expected to be a journalist or magazine person.”

When I approached Mimi, “I wasn’t offended that my path was being cut off,” she recalled, “because I didn’t think my path was there.” But she was angry about other talented women being blocked. “I’d always been a little rebellious—I was a bad teenager,” she said. “So to some extent rebelling wasn’t all that new to me. I was always running afoul of my father, who set very strict rules, and I set my life to break them.” As the Religion researcher, Mimi did a lot of reporting and was upset that her work wasn’t recognized. “I did a lot of reporting, which was heavily used in stories, and I rarely got credit or mention in Top of the Week [where staffers were acknowledged before there were bylines]. That annoyed me no end.”

Another early recruit was Trish Reilly, a tall, impeccably dressed researcher in the Arts sections. Trish’s seeming sophistication belied the fact that she was the first in her family to go to college, at UC Berkeley. Born in Alameda, California, Trish was raised with the expectations of becoming a schoolteacher, getting married, and having kids, and she never aspired to rise beyond that. “I knew what was being done to women at
Newsweek
was as wrong as slavery and I was happy to be part of the lawsuit,” she recalled. “But I saw myself as someone whose own life wouldn’t be changed by it.” Trish had qualms about joining the women and talked it over with Mary Pleshette. “I don’t know about this whole business of women being in men’s jobs,” she confessed to Mary. “I like the differences between men and women and I think we should keep them.” Mary asked her which differences she was afraid of losing. Trish didn’t answer for a long time. “Oh well,” she finally said, “we’ll still be women—we’ll just have better jobs.”

As the circle widened in the winter of 1970, we asked the five black researchers on the staff to join us. “I had divided emotions,” recalled Leandra Hennemann Abbott, a researcher in the back of the book. “Here was the women’s lib movement and while I certainly could identify with that, it seemed to me that women’s liberation wasn’t out front in support of black liberation and never reached out to black women. I believed the difficulties we felt were because of being black and that a lot of the issues for white women didn’t apply to us because we didn’t have a choice. They were talking about work and we were working all the time. Our issues were larger than the work world. We had to be strong for the family, too.”

Diane Camper, a Syracuse graduate who was a Nation researcher, said that although the black women never caucused, they informally discussed what to do. “There was a feeling that there had been all these conversations going on among the white women about agitating for more women to be reporters and we were an afterthought,” she later explained. “At the time, there was more identity with race than gender. People just didn’t see the strategic advantage of joining in.” In the end, much to our disappointment, the black women decided not to join us.

There were several women we didn’t approach. One was Rita Goldstein, the Newsmakers researcher, who was dating a Wallenda,
Newsweek’
s executive editor, Bob Christopher (they would marry in May 1970). We were so paranoid about being discovered that we felt we couldn’t risk any pillow talk. We also were worried about approaching Madlyn Millimet, who had married Angus Deming, a writer in Foreign, in January 1970, two months before we filed the lawsuit. But in the end Maddy signed the complaint.

A critical convert to our cause was Fay Willey, the head researcher in the Foreign section. Almost a decade older than most of us, Fay had joined
Newsweek
in 1955, when Vincent Astor and other wealthy stockholders owned the magazine. On election nights, the Astors would invite British nobility in to watch the proceedings, as if the staff were animals in a zoo. Fay was well respected by the top editors, who appreciated her maturity and experience. She had established a solid reputation in the world of foreign affairs and provided important context to
Newsweek
stories with authoritative commentary from “the domes,” the scholars and government sources she carefully cultivated. We weren’t sure she would join us but we knew our position would be greatly enhanced if she did.

Judy and Pat nervously paid a visit to Fay at her immaculate Upper East Side apartment, the parlor floor of a brownstone filled with antique furniture. Little did they know that Fay had been seething for years about the condescending way research was regarded at the newsmagazines. In October 1964, Otto Friedrich, a
Time
editor, wrote a famous piece in
Harper’s
magazine titled “There are 00 Trees in Russia: The Function of Facts in Newsmagazines,” which infuriated Fay. Friedrich’s article argued that the newsmagazine fetish for “the facts” did not necessarily represent the truth. He explained that
Time
and
Newsweek
had evolved “a unique system which makes it theoretically possible to write an entire news story without any facts at all.” By putting in “TK” for “to kum” (“kum” being a deliberate misspelling of “come” to warn copy editors and proofreaders not to let the word get into print)—or, in the case of statistics, “00,” to be filled in later—it enabled the writer, he said, “to ignore all the facts and concentrate on the drama.”

To guard this fact “fetish” at newsmagazines, Friedrich wrote,

There came into existence an institution unknown to newspapers: the checker. The checker is usually a girl in her twenties, usually from some Eastern college, pleasant-looking but not a femme fatale. She came from college unqualified for anything but looking for an “interesting” job. After a few years, she usually feels, bitterly and rightly, that nobody appreciates her work. The beginning of the week is lackadaisical and so is the research, but toward the end, when typewriters clack behind closed doors and editors snap at intruders, there are midnight hamburgers and tears in the ladies’ room. For the checker gets no credit if the story is right, but she gets the blame if it is wrong. It doesn’t matter if the story is slanted or meretricious, if it misinterprets or misses the point of the week’s news. That is the responsibility of the editors. What matters—and what seems to attract most of the hostile letters to the editors—is whether a championship poodle stands thirty-six or forty inches high, whether the eyes of Prince Juan Carlos of Spain are blue or brown, whether the population of some city in Kansas is 15,000 or 18,000.

Fay wrote a scathing letter to the editor of
Harper’s
that was published in the December 1964 issue. “As the researcher (not checker, please) who arrived at the number of trees in Russia, permit me to say that Otto Friedrich’s article is enough to send any researcher to the ladies’ room for a few tears,” it read. “Aside from his insulting remarks about what we do to earn a living and how we do it, Mr. Friedrich says we are not
femmes fatales,
which is most ungallant, and ‘unqualified for anything,’ which is untrue. We can be quite
fatale
in circumstances other than telling a writer that his story is all wrong (perhaps none of us ever trained her guns on Mr. Friedrich), and as for our training, researchers by and large have the same education as the writers they are working for, if not a better one.” She ended the letter by citing four facts in Friedrich’s article in need of correcting. At the bottom of her letter was his reply: “I am mortified at the accusation of ungallantry and, if guilty, deeply apologetic. As for the rest of Miss Willey’s ‘corrections,’ I say, ‘
Qui s’excuse, s’accuse.
’” (He who excuses himself accuses himself.)

When Judy and Pat discussed our plans with Fay, she was cool to the idea of taking legal action. She herself didn’t want to become a writer, but she did feel women should be allowed to write. What she wanted was for research to be more valued and for researchers to be considered as important to the magazine as the correspondents in the field. She was particularly unhappy that the editors entertained her sources at
Newsweek
lunches and didn’t include her. Fay had been horribly embarrassed when a China scholar she had cultivated was asked to
Newsweek
one day and she hadn’t been invited. The next time someone asked her to call the man for a quote, she was overheard saying, “Call him up your bloody self—you just had him to lunch!” Fay felt strongly that we should first air our grievances with the editors. She wanted to make sure we had given them a fair chance. The more she thought about the lack of respect given the researchers and their work, however, the more upset she got. She decided to join our band of sisters.

Meanwhile, we had been shopping for a lawyer of the female persuasion. The first attorney we approached was Harriet Pilpel, a senior partner in the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, which specialized in First Amendment issues. With no experience in the new field of employment rights law, she declined to represent us. Even so, recalled Margaret, “she was thrilled we weren’t lesbians. I don’t know if she used those words, but she was delighted that we were nice, soft-spoken, decently dressed young women and not part of the lunatic fringe.” We then approached the lunatic fringe—Florynce Kennedy, the flamboyant black civil rights lawyer and fiery feminist who had defended Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. Greeting us in her apartment in the East Forties wearing her signature cowboy hat, Flo had lots of ideas of what we could do, including sit-ins and guerrilla theater, but most of them were too outrageous for us. She also discussed how much money she would need, which made us realize we should think about a pro bono lawyer.