The Good Girls Revolt (13 page)

Not everyone was espousing a new order, however. As in many organizations, it was middle management that was most resistant to change—in our case, some of the senior editors who ran the six editorial sections of the magazine. With the exception of my boss, Shew Hagerty, and Ed Diamond, none of the other senior editors had promoted a researcher to writer, nor had they hired a woman as a writer. In her memoir, Susan Brownmiller described being called into
Newsweek
several weeks after the press conference to meet with the Wallendas. They inquired whether she would be interested in coming back to the magazine as a writer, but she declined
.
“My idea of a cold-sweat nightmare was eighty-five lines for Nation on a Friday night—it still is,” she wrote. Afterward, she was pulled aside by Lester Bernstein, her former boss when he was the senior editor of Nation. “When you worked here, Susan, did you have ambition?” he asked. As she noted in her book, “For two years not a week had gone by without my asking if I could ‘do more.’ He hadn’t noticed.”

After we announced our lawsuit, Oz sent a memo to the women Monday afternoon. Saying that he was “naturally dismayed at your evident unhappiness,” he called for a meeting the next day at Top of the Week, the elegant penthouse of the
Newsweek
building where visiting dignitaries were entertained. Designed by I. M. Pei, Top of the Week had a sumptuous beige salon with luxurious couches and chairs, large and small dining rooms, and a kitchen. Before our Tuesday meeting with Oz, Eleanor had instructed us not to say a word until she got there, because she didn’t want us to incriminate ourselves.

Oz had arranged rows of folding chairs for the women facing one of the soft suede couches where he had placed himself and Kermit. “Big mistake,” Oz later told me. “The sofa was about a foot and a half lower than the chairs and now Kermit and I are looking up at forty-seven women—our knees under our chins. I said, ‘I’d like to say a few words before we start,’ and this cold voice from the back of the room says, ‘Sorry, Oz, we’re not going to do anything until our lawyer gets here.’ Oops, I thought, this is going to be a heavy session.” We sat there awkwardly for a few minutes until Eleanor finally arrived. “In comes this very angry, very articulate, very smart, very pregnant, very black Eleanor Holmes Norton,” Oz said. “I welcomed her and said, ‘Please take a seat. I just want to say a few words to the women before we get started,’ and she said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Elliott, but this is
our
meeting—
we
will do the talking.’ She had me splattered on the wall. Boy, she was tough. How much of that explosive nature was affected and how much was just sheer anger I don’t know. I think a lot of it was playacting, but she was sharp.”

The editors, who had supported the struggle for civil rights, were completely baffled by this pregnant black woman who questioned their commitment to equality. But they were also horrified that the women had, as they said, “hung out their dirty laundry in public.” Eleanor had warned us that Oz would immediately ask why we hadn’t come to him first with our dissatisfactions. Right on cue, that was his first question and we could barely stifle our giggles. “I was surprised by the anger of the women,” Oz later told me. “But when I look back I’m only surprised that the women didn’t wake up earlier.”

Shamed and chagrined, Oz immediately agreed to enter into negotiations. He and Kermit, along with Grant Tompkins,
Newsweek’
s head of personnel, and Rod Gander, the chief of correspondents, represented management; Eleanor and ten representatives selected by the women composed the negotiating team (I was one of them). For several weeks we met in Oz’s eleventh floor office, a den-like room with bookshelves, a large wooden desk, a green patterned sofa, and matching green drapes. We had asked that as the proprietor of the magazine and one of the few female media owners Kay Graham attend the negotiations. But she declined, saying that the editors who ran the magazine would deal with the matter. “Kay was concerned, obviously,” Oz told me, “but she never said, ‘You’ve got to settle this Goddamn thing’ or ‘Screw them.’ She never got involved.”

As she wrote in her remarkably candid, 1997 Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography,
Personal History,
Katharine Graham said that when she first took over the Washington Post Company, she felt inadequate as a company boss and a “pretender to the throne.” A smart, talented young woman who had been a reporter for the
San Francisco News,
Kay had stopped working after she married Phil Graham. But after he committed suicide in 1963, she courageously stepped in to keep the paper in the family. Kay was immediately elected president of the Washington Post Company. Assuming she would be a silent partner, she was terrified. “I didn’t understand the immensity of what lay before me,” she later wrote, “how frightened I would be by much of it, how tough it was going to be and how many anxious hours and days I would spend for a long, long time.” Six years later, she became publisher of the
Post,
a title both her father and her husband had held, but she was still riddled with feelings of inadequacy. “In the world today, men are more able than women at executive work and in certain situations,” she told
Women’s Wear Daily
in 1969. “I think a man would be better at this job I’m in than a woman.”

Although Kay never commented publicly on our lawsuit, it was clear that she wasn’t happy about it. A week after we filed charges in March 1970, in another interview with
Women’s
’s
Wear Daily,
she was asked about the feminists at
Newsweek
. Kay replied that she encouraged her employees to speak their minds because people perform best when they have their say. Then she added, “Sometimes when I go home at the end of the day, I think they all have too damn much freedom to speak up.”

One day in April, as we were meeting with management, Kay was spotted in her
Newsweek
office at the other end of the eleventh floor. When Eleanor heard this, she stopped the proceedings. “I understand Mrs. Graham is in the building,” she said, “and I want her to come to this meeting. We will not continue these discussions until she comes.” Kermit dutifully wandered off to find her and came back dragging a clearly uncomfortable Kay Graham, who sat down, tightly wrapping her legs around each other like a pretzel.

The topic that day was how women were excluded from meeting visiting dignitaries who came to the magazine. We were talking about Val Gerry, a researcher in the Foreign section who also reported on the United Nations. When a UN official came to
Newsweek
for lunch, Val had not been invited. Kay offered a response and to this day, nearly every woman remembers her words. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know why anyone would want to go to those lunches anyway. You know they’re really very boring, and by the time you invite the four Wallendas, the Foreign editor, and the head of the UN and his entourage, there’s really no place left at the table.” We were flabbergasted. Clearly Kay was not a “sister.” “When Kay said those lunches were so boring,” said one researcher later, “it might have been boring to her because she had been involved in these kind of events her whole life!” After the meeting, Eleanor remarked that it was a good thing that Kay hadn’t been in the negotiations after all.

Before the next meeting, Eleanor asked us whether there was anything in particular we wanted to ask for in the negotiations. We said that since the chief of correspondents was a senior editor, we felt that the longtime head of researchers, Olga Barbi, should also be promoted to that title. Positive that the men would go for it since they liked Olga and she had the power to hire and fire, Eleanor confidently made her pitch. The men rejected it outright, saying we were trying to elevate research and that Olga didn’t do senior-editor kind of work. Afterward, Eleanor was furious that we had been so tactically stupid and excoriated us to never again ask for something when we weren’t sure of the outcome.

But Eleanor held the editors’ feet to the fire. At one meeting, Oz was explaining that hiring women writers was difficult because there were only so many slots open when he said, “You know, we’ve made a commitment on this magazine to get black writers, too.” Eleanor immediately fired back, “All you’re telling me, Mr. Elliott, is that now you’ve got
two
problems!”

Our negotiations moved rapidly, partly because Eleanor was pregnant and partly, although we didn’t know it, because she had been approached by Mayor John Lindsay to be chair of New York City’s Commission on Human Rights. The job was to begin April 15, a month after we filed our suit. (Many of us attended her swearing-in at the Blue Room of City Hall.) Luckily, most of the terms had been hammered out by mid-April. We had negotiated a memorandum of understanding, which stated that
Newsweek
was committed to “substantial rather than token changes.” In the memorandum, the women agreed to accept management’s “good faith” to “affirmatively seek out women”—including employees—for reporting and writing tryouts and positions; to integrate the research category with men; and to “identify women employees who are qualified” as possible senior editors. The agreement also stipulated that
Newsweek
would invite women to join editorial lunches, panels, campus speaker programs, and other public functions. To monitor the magazine’s progress, management agreed to meet with our representatives every two months.

The language we settled for in the memorandum was vague. Quotas were illegal and although “goals and timetables” had been established as a method of relief in some legal cases, we didn’t use them. Before he died in 2007, Rod Gander told me that Eleanor hadn’t pushed for numbers because, “being pregnant, I think she was happy to get the thing done.” Eleanor later admitted that she had to “turn this case around—I didn’t get into depositions because I was trying to settle the case without going further.” But she insisted that as far as setting goals and timetables, “it was not at all clear that the precedents had developed. All of the cases at that time had come out of the Deep South, where working-class black men were deliberately put into situations where they couldn’t use the facilities but they could do the work. So the use of numbers had come out of harshly negative discrimination. I don’t think we would have opened up numbers in this case.”

We picked a historic date for signing the memorandum: August 26, 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. To celebrate women’s right to vote—and to launch a new crusade for women’s rights—Betty Friedan had called for a nationwide “Women’s Strike for Equality” that day. Designed to appeal to both the older, liberal branch of the movement and the younger, more radical factions, the demonstrations were organized around three demands: equal opportunity in education and employment, free abortion on demand, and a network of twenty-four-hour, free child-care services. Women in more than forty cities and around the world participated.

The event was scheduled for 5 P.M. in New York, so that working women could attend, and many of us did. Reports said that between 25,000 and 50,000 women marched down Fifth Avenue, spilling over from the police-approved single lane to fill the street curb to curb. Carrying hand-lettered signs that read FIGHT SEXISM, WHISTLE AT TRUCK DRIVERS, and EVE WAS FRAMED, the women gathered for a rally in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. Betty Friedan was joined on the platform by congressional candidate Bella Abzug, writers Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett, and our own Eleanor Holmes Norton. “Sex, like color, is a meaningless criterion and an oppression criterion when it is made a condition for a job,” Eleanor told the crowd. Friedan ended the rally with a plea for unity. “We have learned that the enemy is us—our own lack of self-confidence,” she said. “We know that the enemy is not men. Man as a class is not the enemy. Man is the fellow victim of the kind of inequality between the sexes that is part of this country’s current torment and that is perpetrating violence all over the world.”

But some men still didn’t get it. Describing the event on the ABC evening news that night, anchor Howard K. Smith introduced his report by saying, “Three things have been difficult to tame: the ocean, fools, and women. We may soon be able to tame the ocean, but fools and women will take a little longer.” In fact, it was the largest protest for women’s rights since the Suffragettes, and it solidified Friedan’s nascent National Organization for Women (NOW) and a scattering of women’s lib groups into a national political movement.

When sixteen of us gathered in Kay Graham’s eleventh-floor office on that Wednesday morning to sign the agreement, our spirits were high. We now numbered sixty plaintiffs, as more women from research, Letters, and Photo had joined the suit. Sitting at her conference table, the
Newsweek
managers—Osborn Elliott, Kermit Lansner, Rod Gander, and personnel chief Roger Borgeson—signed the 1,500-word document. Then they circulated it around the table to the women from the negotiating committee: Judy Gingold, Merrill Sheils (McLoughlin), Fay Willey, Madeleine Edmonson, Lucy Howard, Pat Lynden, Phyllis Malamud, Mariana Gosnell, Mary Pleshette, and me. Eleanor returned for the signing to join Mel Wulf, from the ACLU, and Kay Graham at the table. Kay said she was pleased that the signing had taken place on such a historic day and Oz congratulated everyone, adding, “I am sure that this agreement will contribute significantly to our editorial excellence.”

As we toasted one another with wine afterward, we tried not to lord it over the editors but we couldn’t conceal our triumph. We’d done it! We had forced management to at least acknowledge their prejudices and to promise to change their ways. We were still worried about what would happen to us and whether the editors would actually carry out Oz’s orders, but we were hoping for the best. In a
New York Times
story about the agreement, titled “
Newsweek
Agrees to Speed Promotion of Women,” I am quoted as saying, “We are very pleased with the progress so far,” adding, “We feel a lot better now about things at
Newsweek
.”