The Good Girls Revolt (28 page)

In 1991, after twenty-five years at
Newsweek,
I left to become editor-in-chief of
Working Woman,
a monthly magazine started in the mid-1970s when women were flooding into the workforce. I loved having my own magazine, especially one geared to professional and business women, but it was severely underfinanced (it closed in 2001). In 1996, I took a job as East Coast managing editor/senior executive producer of
MSNBC.com
, a new Internet–cable TV news venture created by Microsoft and NBC. Working in New York, my team was responsible for creating the Internet content for NBC News and MSNBC cable programs and personalities. It was exciting to be in this new world of digital journalism and I learned a lot. But since broadband—so critical for NBC’s video—wouldn’t happen as quickly as we had hoped, I started to get restless. After a brush with breast cancer (I’m fine), I decided to leave
MSNBC.com
in March 2001. Since then I have freelanced, tutored in a public school, and been active on the boards of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and the International Women’s Media Foundation, which supports women journalists around the world.

My husband, Steve Shepard, left
Newsweek
in 1981 to become editor of
Saturday Review,
a weekly literary magazine with a distinguished history. But it was on its last legs and folded a year later. Steve was wooed back to
Business Week
as executive editor and became editor-in-chief in 1984, a position he held for twenty years. In 2004 Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of the City University of New York, asked him to create a new Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. As a product of public schools in New York and a graduate of City College, Steve was thrilled to design the only publicly funded graduate school of journalism in the entire Northeast and he has been the founding dean ever since. We have been blissfully—and blessedly—married for more than thirty-three years.

My father, who died in 1998, continues to have an enormous influence in my life. He suffered from a damaged heart valve but was writing up to the very end, at nearly ninety-three. The day before he died, on June 4, 1998, he wrote his last column, which was published alongside his obituary. His seventy-five-year writing career provided a front-row seat to the most awe-inspiring sports moments of the twentieth century, yet his columns had never been collected. In early 2003, my brothers and I decided to edit a collection of his sports columns, along with George Solomon, former sports editor of the
Washington Post
who had worked with Dad for twenty-five years.
All Those Mornings . . . At the Post
was published by PublicAffairs in 2005, on what would have been my father’s hundredth birthday.

I was fortunate to be working and without children when the women’s movement came along. If it hadn’t been for the lawsuit, I never would have become a senior editor at
Newsweek,
a thrilling job that taught me so much about the world, about managing people, and about myself. I am forever grateful to the women who pushed us, the lawyers who represented us and the men who supported us. The lawsuit not only changed my life, it changed my thinking about women: about how we are raised, how we realize our ambitions, how we balance the demands of a career while raising a family. It also set a path for me for the rest of my life: to help other women. In telling our history, I hope our daughters come to understand that sisterhood is powerful, that good girls can revolt, and that change can—and must—happen.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W
HEN I LEFT
NEWSWEEK
in 1991 after twenty-five years, I took home the documents surrounding our 1970 lawsuit. By then, no one seemed interested. I was going to send them to the women’s archives at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, which had requested the material, but I got sidetracked. In 2006, when I finally had time, I realized that to make sense of the papers I had to write a narrative. I started contacting the women involved. When the history grew to 30,000 words, I knew this was a story that should be told.

Interviewing people about what happened forty years ago, however, was a challenge. My own memory proved inaccurate in several instances and other people’s recollections contradicted one another. I have tried my best to reconstruct what happened using documents, interviews, and research. However people remember it, I am hoping that, as T.S. Eliot said, “the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I interviewed over forty people who were at
Newsweek
at the time, including, just before he died, Oz Elliott. All of them contributed facets of the story and I deeply appreciate their help. But this tale could not have been told without the testimony and insight of Judy Gingold, Lucy Howard, Peter Goldman, Pat Lynden, Margaret Montagno, Trish Reilly, Mary Pleshette Willis, Harry Waters, Mariana Gosnell, Franny Heller Zorn, Betsy Carter, Phyllis Malamud, and Elisabeth Coleman. I am indebted to them for their time and their support. I also want to thank our two inspiring lawyers, Eleanor Holmes Norton in the first lawsuit, and Harriet Rabb, whose files on the second lawsuit were invaluable.

In capturing what
Newsweek
was like in the early sixties, I relied on the vivid memories of Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Nora Ephron. Gloria Steinem, Betsy Wade, Anna Quindlen, and Gail Collins provided essential information on the tenor of the times.

When I started reporting, I didn’t know Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison, and Sarah Ball, three young women working at
Newsweek
. I am so grateful to them for keeping our story alive. I am also proud that they now call themselves feminists and are passionately carrying on the fight for women’s rights. At
Newsweek/Daily Beast
, Sam Register, director of the library, and photo editor Beth Johnson were especially helpful.

I want to thank my friend Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs, who was an early supporter of the project, and PublicAffairs’ publisher, Susan Weinberg, and senior editor and marketing director, Lisa Kaufman, who were enthusiastic about the book from the very beginning. I am particularly indebted to Lisa, my editor, for her sage advice and suggestions in helping me shape the story. Managing editor Melissa Raymond kept me on track, and assistant director of publicity Tessa Shanks provided creative and expert guidance. My lawyer, Jan Constantine, general counsel at the Authors Guild, shepherded me through the contract and made smart recommendations.

Throughout this project, I was encouraged by many close friends. I am especially grateful to Jack Willis, Sarah Duffy Edwards, Rosemary Ellis, Polly McCall, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin who urged me to keep going whenever I got stuck.

I could not have written this book without the loving support of my husband, Steve Shepard, a brilliant editor who makes everything in my life better. As I was laboring with my book, Steve began to write a memoir of his life in journalism, from
Newsweek
and
BusinessWeek
to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. It’s called
Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital
. As luck would have it, our books are being published in the same month.

Our children, Sarah and Ned, bring joy and meaning to my life every day. May this story inspire them to speak up and make a difference.

NOTE ON SOURCES

M
OST OF THE INFORMATION in this book comes from my interviews, original documents or copies of documents, and books, which are listed in the bibliography. All other sources are cited by chapter.

All quotations from Susan Brownmiller are from her book
In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution
(New York: Dial Press, 1999)
.

Here, in alphabetical order, are the people I interviewed:

Leandra Hennemann Abbott, Sarah Ball, Jessica Bennett, Helaine Blumenfeld, Susan Braudy, Kevin Buckley, Joe Califano, Diane Camper, Betsy Carter, Susan Cheever, Phyllis Malamud Clark, Margaret Montagno Clay, Eleanor Clift, Elisabeth Coleman, Kate Coleman, Gail Collins, George Cooper, Madlyn Millimet Deming, Dorinda Elliott, Inger Elliott, Osborn Elliott, Jesse Ellison, Nora Ephron, Karla Spurlock Evans, Anna Fels, Joe Ferrer, Penny Ferrer, Susan Fraker, Linda Bird Francke, Rod Gander, Judy Gingold, Peter Goldman, Ellen Goodman, Mariana Gosnell, Trish Hall, Lucy Howard, Liz Hylton, Margo Jefferson, Vajra (Alison) Kilgour, Ed Kosner, Lynn Langway, Grace Lichtenstein, Diana Elliott Lidovsky, Pat Lynden, Ann Ray Martin, Merrill McLoughlin, Joe Morgenstern, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Barbara Bright Novovitch, Maureen Orth, Anna Quindlen, Jane Bryant Quinn, Harriet Rabb, Noel Ragsdale, Trish Reilly, Elaine Sciolino, Jeanie Seligmann, Steve Shepard, Sunde Smith, Ray Sokolov, Nancy Stadtman, Gloria Steinem, Annalyn Swan, Rich Thomas, Jeanne Voltz, Betsy Wade, Harry Waters, Fay Willey, Mary Pleshette Willis, Diane Zimmerman, Franny Heller Zorn.

PROLOGUE: WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?

CHAPTER 1 “EDITORS FILE STORY: GIRLS FILE COMPLAINT”

The description and quotes about the
Ladies’ Home Journal
sit-in are from Brownmiller,
In Our Time,
83–92.