The Good Girls Revolt

by Lynn Povich

  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.

  That led us to the American Civil Liberties Union, where we met with the assistant legal director, Eleanor Holmes Norton. Five feet, seven inches and five months pregnant, Eleanor was an impressive figure with an Afro to match. As we sat in her office explaining our case, she grabbed a copy of Newsweek and opened it to the masthead. She looked at it—then looked at us—and said, “The fact that there are all men from the top category to the second from the bottom and virtually all women in the last category proves prima facie that there’s a pattern of discrimination at Newsweek. I’ll take your case.” (There was one male researcher on the masthead, a political refugee from Greece whom the editors had hired as a favor.)

  Eleanor was perfect for us. A veteran civil rights activist and self-avowed feminist, she was smart, shrewd, and sharp-tongued—“indignant” was her middle name. The great-granddaughter of a slave who walked off a Virginia plantation, Eleanor was from an aspiring and ambitious family. Her grandfather Richard Holmes was one of Washington, D.C.’s few black firefighters and successfully petitioned the department to create the first all-black company in 1921. Her father, Coleman Holmes, a charming and dapper man, went to Syracuse University on a scholarship. In Syracuse, he met Vela Lynch, a shy woman who had grown up on a farm in North Carolina but was sent north after her mother died. They married in 1935 and came back to Washington, where Coleman worked as a public health inspector and Vela took a job in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. More industrious—and more practical—than her husband, Vela went back to school to earn a teaching degree. In the late 1940s, she also joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and paid $1 annual dues toward its “Struggle for Full Emancipation for the American Negro.”

  As the oldest of three girls, Eleanor easily assumed the role of the first-born, scoring top grades and leading school organizations from elementary through high school. Washington was still a Southern, segregated city, where white-owned stores in black neighborhoods wouldn’t even hire “colored people” to work for them. In 1951, at age twelve, Eleanor had what she describes as her first consciousness-raising moment. The educator Mary Church Terrell threw up a picket line around Hecht’s department store, creating one of the biggest civil rights campaigns at the time (even entertainer Josephine Baker dropped by). “You could go in there and use your charge-a-plate [a predecessor to credit cards], but you couldn’t use the bathrooms,” Eleanor explained in her biography, Fire in My Soul by Joan Steinau Lester. Terrell sued the store, citing the District’s 1872 and 1873 open accommodation laws, which made segregation in public accommodations illegal. In January 1952, after six months of protests, Hecht’s opened its cafeteria to blacks but without stools, forcing people to eat standing up. On June 8, 1953, the US Supreme Court affirmed the District’s laws and Hecht’s was forced to integrate.

  A proud member of Washington’s black bourgeoisie—and a debutante—Eleanor went t
o Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she could earn money in a work-study program. In December 1955, just months after Eleanor arrived on campus, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a city boycott led by the twenty-six-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Only a freshman but already head of Antioch’s NAACP chapter, Eleanor raised money and conducted local sit-ins for nearly a year. In November 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the Fifth Circuit Court ruling that Montgomery’s segregated-bus law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. “It was,” Eleanor later said, “the defining experience of my life.”

  After Antioch, Eleanor went to Yale University, where she earned two degrees: a master’s degree in American studies in 1963 and a law degree in 1964. The only other black student at the law school was Marian Wright (Edelman). Mentored by Pauli Murray, a black feminist lawyer who was getting an advanced legal degree, Eleanor started a New Haven chapter of CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). In the summer of 1963, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voter registration drive in Mississippi, where Medgar Evers drove her to meet key civil rights workers, and later helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. “I grew up black and female at the moment in time in America when barriers would fall if you’d push them,” she told Lester. “I pushed . . . and then just walked on through.”

  When we met her, Eleanor was only thirty-two years old but she was already an extraordinarily accomplished lawyer. After clerking for Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., the first black judge on the US District Court for Pennsylvania’s eastern district, she joined the ACLU in 1965, where she made her mark. She wrote amicus briefs for Julian Bond (who was refused his elected seat in Georgia’s House of Representatives), Muhammad Ali (who refused military conscription based on his Muslim faith), and Adam Clayton Powell (who was expelled from Congress for alleged abuses). Eleanor also represented some prominent racists. In 1968, she successfully defended presidential candidate George Wallace when New York City Mayor John Lindsay initially barred him from speaking at Shea Stadium. But her most famous case was in October 1969, when she represented the National States’ Rights Party before the US Supreme Court. A white supremacist group, the States’ Rights Party had been kept from rallying in Maryland on a prior restraint ruling. “I jumped at the opportunity,” she recalled, “because if there is a constitutional or civil liberties point to be made, you make it most convincingly when you stand up for the right of somebody who disagrees with you. You must obviously be serving a higher cause—and I love that idea.” She won that case.

  Next to those high-profile clients, we felt inconsequential, but according to Eleanor, “no case I handled was more important than Newsweek. Defending George Wallace was nothing but an old-fashion First Amendment case. Same with the white supremacists, who were kept from speaking because of their use of defamatory language against blacks and others.” Newsweek intrigued her for two reasons. She was one of the few prominent black women who, along with Dorothy Height and Shirley Chisholm, publicly declared herself a feminist. “I said to black women, ‘Yes, you must be part of the women’s movement,’” she later said. “I remember being so frustrated that when we had one of those feminist parades down Fifth Avenue, I—who never wore dashiki-type garb—put a beautiful African turban around my Afro to make the point that if you’re black, you should be marching here.” But she understood why black women were hesitant to join. “There was great confusion in the black movement at that time,” she said. “We were in the throes of the civil rights movement. For black women to make that transition—to make a partnership with white women, who were among the most privileged in society—was uncomfortable for them.”

  Another reason Eleanor took our case was that we were the first women in the media to sue and, it turned out, the first female class action suit. “At that time, there were almost no classes involving women—certainly none involving white women,” she recalled. “If there had been a women’s class action suit, I hadn’t heard of it.” Most of the cases had involved black factory workers discriminated against via seniority systems or biased testing. We were professional women in a field where advancement depended on subjective judgments. “You essentially had to make a case of deliberate discrimination on where women were placed in the corporation,” she explained. “I thought this was so clear that it was an offer that couldn’t be refused.”

  Eleanor believed our case was a perfect fit for the new Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most controversial section of the act was Title VII, which in its original form prohibited only racial discrimination in employment. The provision protecting women was added only at the last minute, as a joke to scuttle the bill. The chairman of the powerful Rules Committee, Howard Smith (D-VA), was a staunch segregationist and opposed to granting federal civil rights to anybody. “Congressman Smith would joyfully disembowel the Civil Rights Bill if he could,” said a 1964 article in the New York Times Magazine. “Lacking the votes to do so, he will obstruct it as long as the situation allows.” That February, Smith laughingly moved to add “sex” to the Title VII protections, thinking it would make the bill impossible to pass. But with lobbying from the National Women’s Party and Representative Martha Griffiths (D-MI), who had been laboring to get votes, the amendment passed by a vote of 290–130. In the Senate, Everett Dirksen (R-IL), whose support was key to getting it passed, wanted to remove the amendment. But Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) persuaded the Republican Conference to vote against him. On June 19, the legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 73–27. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.

  When we approached Eleanor in the winter of 1970, the regulations were new and the precedents few. “To me, as a discrimination lawyer, this was an easy case,” Eleanor recalled. “Most cases have much of the discrimination hidden. Usually you got cases where all the women are in one place and all the men are on top—that’s the way it is throughout the workplace. But women don’t always have the same background as men. You all had the same background! Here you had women who were not only well educated, you had women who excelled at some of the best schools. What more could Newsweek want?”

  Eleanor agreed to take our case in the winter of 1970, and shortly thereafter Newsweek decided to run the women’s lib cover. Since I had been reporting on the movement, they thought that asking me to work on Helen Dudar’s story would be offensive—and they were right. I was relieved not to be involved. Instead, however, they asked Judy Gingold to be the magazine’s liaison to Helen on the story—needless to say, an uncomfortable position for the mastermind of Newsweek’s own women’s movement. “I felt like Mata Hari,” recalled Judy. “I felt I was betraying Helen, whom I respected and admired—and that was hard.”

  When we heard that the editors went outside the magazine to hire a woman writer, we were furious and exhilarated. Now we had a deadline and, more important, a news peg; we could see the headlines already. We quickly stepped up our recruiting, bringing in concentric circles of five, ten, and twenty women. One beloved addition was Ruth Werthman, the respected head of the copy desk, who was in her sixties and delighted to be part of the gang. We also invited the women in the Letters department, since they were often promoted into research jobs. That provided us with our one black signatory, Karla Spurlock, who was working part-time in the Letters department. Karla’s Barnard roommate, Alison Kilgour, also worked in Letters and had gotten her the job. “Madeleine [Edmonson, the head of Letters] just rounded all of us up one day and told us we were to sign this, so I did,” recalled Karla. We did not approach the female reporters in the bureaus since most of them had been hired from outside the magazine. Nor did we include the editorial secretaries whose skills were different from those of the researchers.

  One of the strong points of our suit was that most of the researchers had the same or very similar qualifications as the men who held higher positions. To prove it, we came up with a list of
nineteen men who had been hired at Newsweek as reporters and writers with no prior professional journalistic experience, including several—such as Rod Gander and Kevin Buckley—who had started as researchers in the early 1960s. (The practice of hiring male researchers ended shortly after that.) The editors always insisted they recruited writers randomly—“over the transom,” as they used to say—but their standard procedure, at least in the back of the book, was to hire guys who had worked on the Yale Daily News or the Harvard Crimson. Several young men from Harvard had been hired right after they graduated, including Jake Brackman (who later became a songwriter with Carly Simon), Rick Hertzberg (now a writer at the New Yorker), and as a graduate student, Ray Sokolov (a former writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal).

  We also suspected that we had been discriminated against in pay as well as position. At one meeting, we decided to divulge our salaries. Phyllis Malamud, one of two New York bureau reporters, had been told she was the highest-paid woman in New York at $15,000. But it turned out that Lucy Howard and Pat Lynden were each making $18,000. “The suit was a sea change,” Pat recalled. “Until then, coming from privileged backgrounds, we all felt we were special and therefore we were better than the other women. But while we were organizing, we started to like and trust each other. We figured we’re all in this together and the risk is worth taking.” Organizing became an unexpected bonding experience and, like D-Day, you never forgot who fought with you in the trenches.

  Now that we had a deadline with the women’s lib cover, we had to quickly convince everyone to take legal action. As budding feminists, we knew that the decision had to be made by consensus, so we invited about twenty women to meet Eleanor and hear her recommendations. We met on February 25, at Mary Pleshette’s apartment, where women were sprawled over her colorful Moroccan carpet. “It was really exciting,” remembered Mariana Gosnell, a reporter in the Medicine and Science sections who was a decade older than most of us. “Eleanor laid out our options, but we were a little timid by her standards. Some women thought it would affect their jobs. I felt good that we had some more radical, recent college graduates who were more confident than I was. I thought, this is the way it is and it wouldn’t change. Still, I don’t think it occurred to many of us that we could actually change the system.”