Personal History (79 page)

My friendship with Gloria Steinem was also an important influence in
my thinking. Being younger, she had been shaped by the 1950s, a very different time from my own frame of reference. I had watched the burgeoning women’s movement, of which she was a distinguished leader, from afar at first and was put off by the pioneering feminists who necessarily, I now suspect, took extreme positions to make their crucial point about the essential equality of women. I couldn’t understand militancy and disliked the kind of bra-burning symbolism that appeared to me like man-hating. I remember being repelled by a
New York
magazine cover showing young Abby Rockefeller with a belligerent raised fist to illustrate a story on feminism. This kind of thing made me overlook the real issues and think that there was something wrong with the whole movement.

As time passed, Gloria, more than any other individual, changed my mind-set and helped me grasp what the leaders of the movement—and even the extremists—were talking about. I remember her first efforts to talk with me seriously about the issues. My response was, “No, thanks, that’s not for me.” She persisted, however. I recall her encouraging me to throw off some of the myths associated with my old-style thinking. She said, “That’s General Motors passing through our womb—you know, it goes from our fathers to our sons. But there is this kind of authentic self in there that is a guide if it’s not too squelched, and if we’re not too scared to listen to it.” I was pretty certain that whatever authentic self I may have had had been pretty well squelched, but Gloria kept telling me that if I came to understand what the women’s movement was all about it would make my life much better. In time it inevitably dawned on me, and how right she was! Later, when Gloria came to me for funds to start up
Ms
. magazine, I put up $20,000 for seed money to help her get going.

More effective even than Gloria was my personal experience in the workplace and the cumulative effect of the many rooms into which I walked, boards on which I sat, meetings I attended, as the only woman. I saw endless examples within our own company of how women were viewed. Both the
Post
and
Newsweek
certainly operated in the old ways, assuming that white men were the chosen ones to run the business and edit the news. Both organizations were totally male-oriented on the business, advertising, and production sides, and predominantly so on the editorial side. To much too great an extent, I accepted this as the way the world worked.

Liz Peer was one of the exceptions who not only survived but thrived. Having just graduated from Connecticut College, she applied to
Newsweek
in 1959 and was told not even to bother if what she had in mind was a writing position. She persisted, however, and took a job on the mail desk, running copy for Oz Elliott on Friday nights as one of what were known as “Elliott Girls.” Liz was the
only
woman given a writing tryout at
Newsweek
between the years 1961 and 1969. (Among the talents that
Newsweek
overlooked were Ellen Goodman, Nora Ephron, Susan Brown-miller, Elizabeth Drew, and Jane Bryant Quinn, all of whom served the magazine in the traditional woman’s role of researcher.) Liz Peer finally became a writer in 1962 and a correspondent in the Paris bureau in 1964. She said later that, when she hesitantly asked if the promotion to the Paris job involved a raise, Oz replied indignantly, “What do you mean? Think of the honor we are paying you.” She has told me that what she found most destructive about minority-group psychology “is that one comes to share the conviction of the majority: that one is less able, less intelligent, less educable, less worthy of responsibility.” My sentiments, exactly.

To my surprise, all this was becoming very much a part of me. Though I was still simplistic in my thinking, I was beginning to understand the seriousness and complexity of the issue. Obviously I was in a good position not only to think about the problems of women in the workplace but to do something about them. As I began to understand more, I also began to acknowledge my responsibilities. I did try—in some small ways, some larger—to do something about raising the visibility of women and increasing the sensitivity toward matters of particular concern to them.

As a manager, I was aware of the issues but had no clear idea how to lean on male-chauvinist managers to make changes. I felt that I and other women in management positions had a special duty to bury the old prejudices—first by refusing to accept them, and then by refuting them wherever and whenever we encountered them. Attitudes needed to be modified on both sides. Women had accepted the dubious assumptions and myths about themselves for much too long. And men had to be helped to break out of the assumptions of which they, too, were victims.

I worked hard to educate the men around me, to raise their consciousness, even as I myself was in the early stages of consciousness-raising. I circulated among the executives at the company an article that appeared in
New York
magazine, “The Female Job Ghetto.” I wrote a note to our personnel director after I had received a copy of a memo he’d sent around introducing some new people at the
Post
, pointing out what I viewed as a subtle example of bias. In his memo, this head of personnel had referred to all the men by their last names and the women by their first names. “Here is an example of the need for more sensitivity,” I wrote. “Uniformity of either kind is OK. I prefer first names throughout. Although this seems superficial, attitudes which it reveals are not. No doubt it could have been written by Mary—but she works for Jones.”

At the company I often received requests to listen to women’s complaints. Elsie Carper told me of repeatedly receiving mediocre assignments. Meryl Secrest from “Style” came to tell me of always being assigned women or wives to interview and never men. After our talk, I
wrote her that I’d always be there to listen to her views but I stood by the editors: “I think editors have to decide issues such as how and where to use reporters.” I fear I didn’t lean on the editors to change their ways.

When
Newsweek
was looking for a “Back of the Book” editor, I suggested the able art critic of
The New York Times
, Aline Saarinen, whom the editors dismissed out of hand, condescendingly explaining that it would be out of the question to have a woman. Their arguments were that the closing nights were too late, the end-of-the week pressure too great, the physical demands of the job too tough. I am embarrassed to admit that I simply accepted their line of reasoning passively.

Although I was head of a company, I had a hard time making change happen under the white males running things. I think I made some small inroads, however. Ben and I were always talking about the language used in the paper. In 1970, which was “the year of the woman,” I was one of five women admitted for the first time to the Washington chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalism society. I spoke at the dinner on the night of our induction and talked about the way we referred to women in the newspaper, joking that the headline the
Post
’s copy desk might put on the story of my membership in this organization would be “Newsmen’s Frat Taps Working Grandma.”

Indeed, only the week before, Ben had agreed to several requests made by a committee of concerned women reporters at the
Post
and had sent a memo around the newsroom on unconscious bias creeping into news articles. He cautioned that “Words like ‘divorcée,’ ‘grandmother,’ ‘blonde’ (or ‘brunette’), or ‘housewife’ should be avoided in all stories” where corresponding words wouldn’t be used if a man were involved. His memo continued:

Feelings about women’s issues had slowly gathered steam, and by the early 1970s they exploded. Women in professional situations began to assert themselves through lawsuits in behalf of equal opportunity. In March of 1970, forty-six women at
Newsweek
filed a complaint with the EEOC claiming discrimination. Not coincidentally, it was the same day that
Newsweek
’s first cover story on the women’s movement, titled “Women in Revolt,” appeared. I’m sure the frustration of these women was fueled by the fact that there was only one woman writer at
Newsweek
at the time and she was judged too junior for the assignment, so a free-lancer, Helen Dudar,
the wife of one of
Newsweek
’s writers, Peter Goldman, was hired to write the cover.

I was away at the time and got a phone call from Fritz Beebe and Oz Elliott together, telling me about the complaint. “Which side am I supposed to be on?” I asked—to which Fritz quickly responded, “This is serious. It isn’t a joke.” I hadn’t thought it was a joke, nor had I meant my question to be. We then went on to discuss what legal response to take, since the women had hired Eleanor Holmes Norton to represent them.

When I got home and was more involved in the action, I think I became too embattled as someone who was part of management. As the situation grew tenser, fueled by the litigation, I wrote a reader defensively, “I agree that the tradition of newsweeklies has tended to appear to discriminate against women. We were making plans to expand opportunities for women—and are continuing to do so. I think we could have done so better and more easily had the group at
Newsweek
discussed this with us before they filed their legal complaint.” Of course, I can see in hindsight that they probably had discussed the issues repeatedly with people at a lower level and unbeknownst to me. Eventually we started to remedy the situation—but not enough. By August 1970, we reached a memorandum of understanding, but two years later we had a whole new round when the editors were accused of not living up to the understanding. This time we were more successful. I don’t believe it was bad faith that made us fail the first time but lack of understanding.

The
Post
, too, was sued. In 1972, after earlier complaints had gone largely unnoticed—and little action taken—fifty-nine women at the paper, clearly dissatisfied with management’s response, signed a letter that they sent me, Ben, Phil Geyelin, and Howard Simons. The memo let the company’s own statistics speak for themselves in terms of our stated policy at the
Post
“to make the equality and dignity of women completely and instinctively meaningful.” The women noted that the
Post
had actually gone backwards from the time that policy statement had been issued two years previously. Since the new “Style” section had replaced the old women’s pages, women had lost four jobs. Besides me, Meg was the only woman in upper management at the paper.

At one point during all this, Ben appointed a committee in the newsroom to report to him on what to do about equal employment. He endorsed the committee’s report, recommending the creation of several new jobs for women and for blacks, who were experiencing a similar yet different bias. I responded rather stodgily but not unreasonably, saying it all needed greater care:

Whatever we decided to do, I felt we should commit an equivalent effort to the business side of the paper, where I thought even more remediation was needed than in the city room. We wound up asking Elsie Carper, who had put forth the idea of a petition instead of a lawsuit earlier in the year, to become head of personnel to hire more women and more blacks, and she made a big impact on the paper with her hires.

Like all business and editorial companies, in fact all white- and maledominated institutions, we had a lot to learn in this period. At both the
Post
and
Newsweek
there was a great deal right and a great deal wrong about some of our procedures and some of our responses to the issues. Prior to the late 1960s, our intention had been good but our accomplishments only so-so. Phil had encouraged black recruiting and he had hired a black reporter, but no system of goals and how to achieve them was ever put in place. When the 1970s brought infusions of blacks and women, neither the
Post
nor
Newsweek
at first dealt with the new employees with much sensitivity, understanding, or skill, but this was also true of almost every organization in mainstream America. Adding to the problem was that our beginning efforts to hire “qualified” women and minorities were carried out inadequately. When saddled with inadequate talent or failures whether women or blacks, we didn’t know either how to work with them to bring them along or how to let them go.

Eventually things improved dramatically at both places, but without the suits and without the laws adopted by the country, this would have happened even more slowly. My own reactions to these suits were mixed: I felt that some were unfair and some were not. But you always get pushed when things become confrontational, and that is often to the good. Ironically, at both publications we were doing better vis-à-vis women and blacks than were most other papers and magazines, where there weren’t even enough women or minorities to confront the management.

Throughout all the turmoil over women’s and other minorities’ issues, Meg was my valued adviser. In the middle of the suits and EEOC complaints and various battles, she wrote me a stunning memo speaking against the idea of quotas: