The Good Girls Revolt (24 page)

The following month, in October 1977, Steve had proposed a cover story on “Is America Turning Right?,” a prescient topic three years before Ronald Reagan was elected president. For the cover, he borrowed one of my writers, David Gelman, who could be eloquent on conceptual topics. The Friday night before the cover closed, I went down to the eleventh floor to see how David was doing. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t in great shape, but Steve assured me that they would fix it and it would be fine.

At home on Saturday, I felt bad for Steve and David. But sitting alone in my bachelorette sublet on East Sixty-Ninth Street, I realized that what I really felt was stupid. Here was this great guy at
Newsweek
whom I really liked, and I was crazy not to go out with him. On the pretense of finding out how the story came out, I called Steve at the office on Saturday around 5 P.M. He assured me that David had turned the cover around and it was about to go to the printers. “Well, to thank you for all your hard work, I’d like to take you out to dinner,” I said. There was a silence at the other end. Clearly he had other plans. Finally he said, “Okay, I can change some things and meet you for dinner.”

We met at La Goulue, a little French bistro on East Seventieth Street, right around the corner from my apartment. Steve had the usual Saturday night dinner that editors often ordered to celebrate the magazine’s closing: a martini, a big fat steak, french fries, and a glass of red wine. We chatted about the cover story and Reagan and all the
Newsweek
gossip. At dessert, I asked if he would like to share some profiteroles. Steve confessed that he had never had profiteroles, so we ordered some. I dug my spoon into the creamy pastry puff dripping with chocolate and offered him the first taste. Our eyes met and, as we say in Yiddish, it was
bashert
—destiny. We went back to my apartment after dinner, where I realized that not only did I like this man, I was falling in love with him. From then on we were a couple and to this day, we celebrate our first-date anniversary on the last Saturday night in October.

In the beginning, we kept our relationship secret. It helped that we worked on separate floors and reported to different Wallendas. Although as single senior editors there was no ethical issue, reporters are professional gossipmongers and we didn’t want to deal with the rumors. In February, we decided to go on vacation to Virgin Gorda and the only people we told were our two bosses. At dinner the first Friday night at Little Dix Bay, we toasted each other, thrilled that we were looking at the moonlit Caribbean rather than working at
Newsweek
until two in the morning. Just then, a waiter brought over a bottle of wine. We looked around the restaurant and didn’t recognize anyone. Bewildered, we finally saw the card. It read, “Enjoy! From all your friends at
Newsweek.
” The surprise had been staged by my Sports pal Pete Bonventre, whose brother worked at Little Dix. Those
Newsweek
reporters were good! Steve and I married in September 1979, and when I left on maternity leave in November 1980, I was given a big send-off at Top of the Week. It was another breakthrough—
Newsweek’
s first pregnant senior editor.

In the 1980s,
Newsweek
did better in hiring and promoting women than most media organizations, but progress was slow and painful. There were backtracks and broken promises, injustices and discrimination—and still no women were at the top. When I went on maternity leave, I told the editors to fill my senior editor slot, because I wanted to work part-time when I returned. But there were other candidates who could have risen up the masthead. Mimi McLoughlin, who had the talent and experience to become the first female assistant managing editor, left the magazine in 1986 when she and her husband, Mike Ruby, another
Newsweek
editor, departed for
US News & World Report
. In 1989, they became coeditors of
US News,
making Mimi the first woman to edit a national newsmagazine. Annalyn Swann, a music critic at
Time,
was hired at
Newsweek
as a writer in the Arts sections and took over as senior editor in 1983. At one point Kay Graham, a friend of Annalyn’s family, had encouraged her to think about becoming a Wallenda. But, Annalyn later recalled, in talking to Rick Smith, then the editor of
Newsweek,
“He told me that any Wallenda should be seasoned by front-of-the-book experience as well as back-of-the-book.”

But Rick changed his mind. In 1986, he hired Dominique Browning from
Texas Monthly
as the senior editor for my old sections. Two years later—and eighteen years after our first lawsuit—Rick promoted Dominique to assistant managing editor (AME), the magazine’s first female Wallenda.

After Dominique left in 1992, several women became AMEs, but none of them made it to the very top. Alexis Gelber, a former National Affairs editor and AME, was a strong contender, but she was married to Mark Whitaker, who became the editor of
Newsweek
in 1998, the first African American to lead a national news magazine. That put Alexis out of the running. Ann McDaniel, who ran
Newsweek’
s award-winning Monica Lewinsky coverage as Washington bureau chief—and held the title of managing editor—was a favored candidate, but she didn’t want to leave D.C. In 2001, Don Graham hired her as vice president of the Washington Post Company. Dorothy Kalins was hired in 2001 as
Newsweek’
s executive editor, the number-three position, but as an accomplished lifestyle editor and founder of
Metropolitan Home, Saveur,
and
Garden Design
magazines, she clearly would never become the top editor of a newsmagazine.

Every masthead is a snapshot of a moment in time: women do better at some times than at others. That’s natural, as long as progress flows as well as ebbs—and that usually depends on the person at the top. Some editors, such as Rick Smith and Maynard Parker, worked well with women and hired or promoted many of them. Others seemed to feel more comfortable with a circle of men. In 2008, Don Graham appointed Ann McDaniel to the newly created position of managing director of Newsweek Inc., overseeing both the business and editorial sides of the magazine. It was the second time, since Kay Graham, that
Newsweek’
s editor reported to a woman.

AND THAT’S WHERE things stood in October 2009, when Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison, and Sarah Ball persuaded their editor to let them write a story about young women in the workplace today. Since the piece was bound to be controversial, the editor, Marc Peyser, kept it under wraps until it was ready. “The three of us had so much fun working on the story,” said Jesse. “We felt like there were echoes of what you all had done forty years earlier—the secrecy of it and the sisterhoodness of it!” They decided not to put their names on an early version that went to the top editors. Instead, they bylined the story “the Dollies,” the patronizing name given the Nation researchers of old. “Marc was worried about repercussions and he thought it would be safer if we didn’t sign it, just for the first draft,” explained Jessica. “He thought it would make the editors think more about who—and how many people—were saying this. But his biggest concern was that they could hold it against us and if it never ran, it would hurt us.”

The women submitted the story to the editors right after Thanksgiving. Then they heard nothing. In January 2010, various editors responded with particular points and fixes they wanted made. The story went from 2,500 words to 6,000 words, then to 3,000 words and finally back to 2,000 words. When Peyser felt it was ready, he resubmitted it. That’s when
Newsweek’
s editor, Jon Meacham, decided to recuse himself from overseeing the story. “That was a perfect, silent way of killing it,” explained Jessica, “because nobody would make any decisions without Meacham’s approval.”

For two months there was no word from the top, and the fortieth anniversary of our lawsuit was approaching in March. “At that point, I was physically ill, going from lethargic to depressed to angry,” said Jessica. “Jesse lost her voice, Sarah was crying, and we were a mess. We felt if this didn’t run we would have no faith in humanity.” As a reminder of the history of discrimination at
Newsweek
and the fortieth anniversary news peg, the three women pinned up copies of the 1970 “Women in Revolt” cover over their desks.

At one point,
Newsweek’
s general manager, Ann McDaniel, asked to see them. “She was coming from a management perspective,” recalled Jesse. “She wanted to see if we had legitimate complaints about the way we were treated, but we didn’t say anything. She talked about convening monthly lunches where we would talk about the women, but none of that happened. It was good to talk to her but it was unclear what her motives were.”

Then they met with Mark Miller,
Newsweek’
s editorial director, and begged him to run the cover. Miller asked whether the women had been personally discriminated against. “Our strategy was to be positive,” said Jesse. “We felt that the more we said we were discriminated against, the less [likely it was] they would run the piece. So we talked about how it’s not really about
Newsweek,
it’s bigger than
Newsweek,
it’s a cultural thing.” Marc Peyser was upset that the women hadn’t relayed their personal grievances. He called Miller and told him about the women’s experiences—and the piece got going.

The four-page story, “Are We There Yet?,” finally ran in the March 22, 2010 issue, almost forty years to the day that we had charged
Newsweek
with sex discrimination. Leading with our landmark suit, the women questioned how much had actually changed for women since 1970, not only at the magazine but in the workplace in general. They cited statistics showing that full-time working women who
haven’t
had children still make seventy-seven cents on the male dollar and that in their first job out of business school, female MBAs make $4,600 less per year than male MBAs. In the media, they wrote, “female bylines at major magazines are still outnumbered by seven to one; women are just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and less than a quarter of law partners and politicians.”

They also wrote about
Newsweek
. In 1970, women made up 25 percent of the editorial masthead; forty years later that number was 39 percent. (Overall, they pointed out, 49 percent of the entire company was female.) But perhaps the most damning statistic they cited was that “men wrote all but six of
Newsweek’
s 49 cover stories last year—and two of those used the headline ‘The Thinking Man’” (“The Thinking Man’s Guide to Populist Rage,” for example). Then, to cover their tracks, they wrote,: “We should add that we are proud to work at
Newsweek
. (Really, boss, we are!) We write about our magazine not because we feel it’s worse here, but because
Newsweek
was once ground zero for a movement that was supposed to break at least one glass ceiling.” The women explained how “somewhere along the road to equality, young women like us lost their voices. So when we marched into the workforce and the fog of subtle gender discrimination, it was baffling and alien. Without a movement behind us, we had neither the language to describe it nor the confidence to call it what it was.” Recognizing that sexism still exists, they said, “is one of the challenges of the new generation.”

The response inside
Newsweek
was overwhelmingly positive from the young female and male staffers. “One woman said, ‘I can’t believe you guys did this—I truly thought there was no chance in hell it would see the light of day,’” recalled Jessica. “The only negative response we got was hearing that the middle-aged editors thought we were very entitled, that we were just complaining and didn’t appreciate what we had. But it sparked a lot of conversation among the young women in the building.” After the story came out, several women got promotions and there were more covers about women, written by women. Jon Meacham never spoke to the women about the story.

Five months later, in August 2010, the Washington Post Company sold
Newsweek
for $1 plus its liabilities to ninety-two-year-old audio pioneer Sidney Harman. The magazine had been hemorrhaging revenue and readership for years, but Harman thought it had value and he had the money to invest in it. After a very public search for a new editor, Harman made news again. In November 2010, he announced that Tina Brown, the first female editor of
Vanity Fair
and the
New Yorker
, would become editor-in-chief of
Newsweek
in a joint venture with her website, the
Daily Beast
. It happened almost by accident, but forty years after forty-six terrified young women sued
Newsweek
for sex discrimination, there was finally a female name at the very top of the magazine’s masthead. Tina tipped her hat to us in her press interviews. “A merger has created what the lawsuit couldn’t,” she told National Public Radio. In her first editor’s letter, she said she was “honored to be the first female editor of
Newsweek
,” but unaware of the behind-the-scenes details of our lawsuit, she also wrote, “I’m both humbled and grateful to know that the trail was blazed long ago, and that Kay Graham blazed it. This issue is dedicated to her memory and inspired by her example.”