The Good Girls Revolt (20 page)

Maureen came to New York in September and looked up her Berkeley schoolmate Trish Reilly at
Newsweek
. Trish asked whether she was interested in writing since the editors were desperately trying to hire women because of the lawsuit. Maureen had an interview with Rod Gander, and then spoke to Oz. “Oz said, ‘Well, I think if we’re going to hire women writers we’re just going to have to make a decision to hire them,’” she recalled. She was sent to Jack Kroll, the Arts editor, “because I came from the West Coast and they thought he would ‘get’ me.” Kroll said he would talk to Rod but added, “There’s no way you can be hired as a writer because there are a lot of women waiting in the wings to be hired.” Maureen told him about Oz’s remark to just start hiring women.

A few weeks later, Kroll invited Maureen to lunch at the Gloucester House on East Fiftieth Street, the editors’ favorite dining establishment for Saturday lunch. The expensive fish restaurant, staffed exclusively with black waiters, offered such
spécialités
as shrimp wrapped in bacon and French-fried zucchini strips stacked like Lincoln Logs. Over martinis, Kroll offered Maureen a job as a writer in the back of the book for $14,000 a year. She began in October 1972.

A month earlier, Linda Bird Francke, a contributing editor to
New York
magazine, was looking for a staff job when she got a call from Clay Felker, her boss. “He said, ‘You’ve got a job at
Newsweek,
’” she recalled. “I was startled. I subscribed to
Time
and had never even read
Newsweek,
let alone considered it a job prospect. But Clay was insistent. ‘Just call this number,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting to hear from you.’” Linda went to 444 Madison Avenue, bought a copy of
Newsweek
in the lobby, quickly looked it over, and proceeded upstairs to meet with Russ Watson. “Without any preamble, he offered me any one of four sections: Life & Leisure, Nation, Foreign, and one other,” she recalled. When she said that Life & Leisure sounded fun, he retorted, “No, no, that’s considered a women’s ghetto. You want to be on the front lines in Nation or Foreign, don’t you?” She reiterated that she preferred Life & Leisure, so he went on to discuss salary. “Well,” he said, “I’m authorized to offer you anything up to $19,000, so let’s make it simple and say $19,000. When can you start?” “And so,” said Linda, “I commenced on my totally unexpected and unsought job without anyone looking at a single clip. Maureen Orth came in the same way. We were all hired in an instant to offset the women’s suit.”

Kay Graham, meanwhile, was feeling under pressure. With blacks suing the
Washington Post,
the
Post
women pushing for change, and now a second lawsuit by the
Newsweek
women, she called in Joe Califano, the corporate attorney for the Washington Post Company. Joe was an old Washington hand, having served as special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson before joining the law firm of Edward Bennett Williams in 1971. “Kay said, ‘I want you to straighten this out,’” he recalled. “She wanted it settled, no question about that, but we didn’t want quotas. Nobody wanted quotas, certainly not Oz. I called Alan Finberg [
Newsweek’
s general counsel] and said, ‘Let me start by dealing directly with the women’s lawyer.’ That was Harriet Rabb.”

Joe wrote to Harriet requesting a meeting with her and the women’s committee on September 13, 1972. When we met, he had brought along a young associate, Rich Cooper, who seemed to object to every suggestion we had to move forward. In all our meetings that fall, Rich played bad cop and Joe, the avuncular good cop. Harriet was probably used to such legal maneuverings, and she had a few of her own. “I thought Harriet was a good lawyer,” Joe said. “However, I have a recollection of her saying, ‘I want you to listen to all these women to get you sensitized’—not something I appreciated her lecturing me about.”

On October 6, Joe wrote Harriet a letter saying the September meeting “encouraged our hope that we are reasonably close on a number of the issues.” But then he went on to shoot down almost every recommendation we made: a grievance procedure the women proposed was already provided in the Guild contract; he had investigated charges that back-of-the-book reporters were discriminated against as compared to bureau reporters, who did similar kinds of work, and concluded that “there is no substance to the suggestion”; and punitive enforcement provisions were not acceptable—instead management would provide detailed periodic reports for ensuring performance under the agreement. Joe ended the letter by stressing that it was in the interest of both
Newsweek
and the women to settle their differences amicably because “litigation is likely to be long, expensive and divisive.”

By this time, “goals and timetables” had become common legal tools in job discrimination cases, and Harriet recommended them in her letter back to Joe that same day. She proposed that by December 1973, one-third of the writers and one-third of the foreign and domestic reporters should be women. She stated that priority should be given to in-house women for writing positions and that a woman writer should be placed in each of the six editorial departments, including in the hard-news Nation, Foreign, and Business sections and not just in the feature-laden back of the book. The letter also stipulated that the percentage of male researchers should approximately equal the percentage of female writers on staff. There was a long section outlining procedures for recruiting and in-house tryouts. Finally, she insisted that one of the next three openings for senior editor should be filled by a woman.

That was the real sticking point. Mariana Gosnell, the Medicine reporter on our committee, pushed hard for a woman senior editor. “I remember saying that until they put a woman in the holy top bunch, they would have it in their heads that a woman couldn’t be a Wallenda,” she said. The editors refused, saying that the women couldn’t dictate who would be in management. We said we wouldn’t sign an agreement that didn’t include a woman in the meetings where the decisions were being made.

“I went into the negotiations knowing we were going to end up with goals and timetables,” Joe remembered. “In the beginning, Oz was not for that. He viewed goals and timetables as locking him into things he didn’t want to do. But then we got into this argument about having one or two women senior editors. I’m not sure whether Katharine was or wasn’t for them, but at some point I sat down with her and said, ‘If you want to settle this you’re going to have to do something like this. We’re going to make sure that everybody knows they have a real opportunity and it’s palpable, it’s there. The only issue is who’s going to get it and when.’” According to Joe, Kay’s view was, “if we’re going to do this, we want as much talent up in New York as possible so we can make the right pick.”

Joe called
Newsweek’
s Washington bureau chief, Mel Elfin, to find out whether any women on the magazine were qualified to be a senior editor. Mel recommended Liz Peer, who was working for him in the bureau. When she was in Paris in the mid-1960s, Liz had wanted to go to Vietnam, but
Newsweek
wouldn’t send a woman to cover a war. Instead she returned to the Washington bureau in 1969, where she covered the State Department, the White House, and the CIA. “I think Katharine may have known Liz,” Joe later said, “and I think she was more comfortable knowing that there was someone she knew who was capable of doing this, if she turned out to be the person. I was just surprised that Liz Peer was the only person outside New York that they thought worthy.” (For her part, Liz confided to a friend that she felt Kay Graham didn’t want her to be the first woman to succeed.)

Joe asked Oz to interview Liz Peer as a candidate for senior editor. “Mel had told Liz that it would cost, like, 25 percent more to live in New York than in Washington, and he told her, ‘You gotta get more money and you gotta get this and you gotta get that,’” Joe recalled. “In the course of the meeting with Oz, Liz asked about salary and Oz, who was in the middle of a difficult divorce and sick and tired of talking to women about money, made some snide remark. When I asked Elfin about getting Liz to New York, he said it wasn’t a good meeting. I think Oz was just very unhappy.”

Once Joe was assigned the
Newsweek
case, I found myself in an awkward position as a member of the women’s committee. My older brother, David, was a law partner of Joe’s at Williams, Connolly & Califano, so I didn’t discuss our case with him. But at one point I was so annoyed with Rich Cooper’s sarcastic remarks that I called David to ask about him. David said Rich really was a good guy, very smart, and then explained that he was just doing his job. Then David called me one day to tell me a story, laughing on the phone. Joe had come into his office complaining about the
Newsweek
negotiations. “These women are really tough,” David recalled him saying. “They don’t give an inch and your sister is one of the ringleaders. I don’t know what to do.” At this point David looked up from his desk and said simply, “Joe—surrender.”

The negotiations carried on through the spring of 1973. On May 21, Mariana Gosnell noted in her diary that we “just spent the day negotiating with the lawyers about our women’s agreement. It’s still being haggled over and they keep backtracking and driving us mad. Men are REALLY pigs”—short for “male chauvinist pigs,” the worst thing you could say about a man in those days. By June, Joe had finally convinced
Newsweek’
s management to accept goals and timetables for a female senior editor. “Katharine was fine so long as there was talent,” Joe recalled. “I think Oz took it reluctantly, but he took it because Katharine was aboard. His divorce had an enormous impact on him. It was a bitter, bitter fight, and whatever was going on with his wife was consuming him.”

On June 28, 1973, we announced that fifty
Newsweek
women had signed a second, twenty-two-page memorandum of understanding with management. We also withdrew our complaints with the EEOC and the New York State Division of Human Rights. The new memorandum stated that by December 31, 1974, approximately one-third of the magazine’s writers and domestic reporters would be female and by the end of 1975, one of every three people hired or transferred to the staff of foreign correspondents would be a woman. We gave management more than two years—until December 31, 1975—to appoint a female senior editor in charge of one of the six editorial sections of the magazine.

Newsweek
also committed to providing writing and reporting training programs for women, an arbitration procedure, and reports three times a year on the magazine’s affirmative actions. Editors now had to fill out forms on all the applicants for researcher, reporter, and writer vacancies, noting their age and gender, whether they had applied to or been approached by
Newsweek,
their experience and education, samples of their work, whether an interview was held and by whom, and the result: if rejected—why, if kept on file—why. The document, witnessed by Rich Cooper, was signed by Oz and Harriet and the six women on our committee: Connie Carroll, Merrill Sheils (McLoughlin), Margaret Montagno, Mariana Gosnell, Phyllis Malamud, and me.
Newsweek
paid Harriet $11,240 in costs and fees, payable to the Employment Rights Project at Columbia University.

According to Joe, Kay was pleased that it was settled. “She was sympathetic, but I had no sense of her being a feminist in any way at all during the
Newsweek
negotiations,” he said. “She really was a business woman and a publisher, but she had a sense of fairness. I don’t think she ever would have done anything she didn’t think was right.” We finally felt the system would change. One unnamed member of the women’s committee was quoted in the press release saying, “All of the women at
Newsweek
worked very hard to bring this about, and we feel it’s a great accomplishment, not only for us, but for other women in the media. The strength of this agreement—its specific goals, timetables and training programs—shows the strength of
Newsweek’
s commitment to equal employment for women. We think congratulations are due all around.”

Again, we didn’t ask for back pay. “It was a failure of will and imagination,” said Harriet, looking back. “It was either your judgment or ours that if we asked for money, they wouldn’t settle without litigation.” At the time, recalled Harriet, the
Newsweek
case was fairly straightforward. “You all didn’t have different job categories or salaries,” she said. “You were a homogeneous class. Guys had better opportunities but they looked like you in background and qualifications.”

Indeed, our case was relatively simple compared to Harriet’s discrimination suits against the
Reader’s Digest
in 1973 and the
New York Times
in 1974, both of which included women in different job categories and on the business side. The women at the
Reader’s Digest
“were treated worse,” said Harriet. “At the
Digest,
corporate was resistant because they felt they were good to women. There were women who worked in ‘Fulfillment,’ filling subscriptions—one of the least fulfilling jobs ever. In the morning, you could order dinner for two, three, or four people because Mother
Reader’s Digest
wouldn’t want you to go home without food, and women should feed their families well.” But when it came to giving the women higher pay or promotions, the
Digest
was not so concerned. “There were end-of-the-year reviews with two lists of names—the editors and the ladies, who were also editors—and the factors for promotion. ‘He’s a family man, we need to help. She’s a single woman, doesn’t need more.’”

At one point, the
Digest
even went after Harriet. The plaintiffs had asked her to talk to an open meeting of other female employees who might want to learn about their case and either join or support them. Some
Digest
loyalists taped her remarks and turned the tape over to the company’s lawyers. “The
Reader’s Digest
filed a sanction against me saying I had breached legal ethics by encouraging people to litigate, that I was ‘ambulance chasing’ to get clients,” Harriet explained. “It was scary because they were after my license. I wrapped myself in the flag and told the judge that management didn’t want people to tell them their rights and that’s what I did and I’m proud of it.” The judge dismissed the
Digest’
s motion from the bench. In the end, the
Digest
settled and 5,635 women plaintiffs got $1,375,000 in back pay—about $244 each.