The Good Girls Revolt (19 page)

Dick Boeth, one of the most creative writers on the magazine, had his own method of teaching and in his course he wrote a hilarious spoof of the
Newsweek
style. To explain the various ways one could start a
Newsweek
story, he enshrined “The Wonderful World of Ledes” (purposely misspelled to distinguish it from other pronunciations of “lead”). Some of the best were:

• Action—little picture: “Henry Kissinger had not even finished shaving the stubble from his girlfriend’s chin early one morning last week when his tubside hotline to the White House began beeping insistently. At the other end was President Richard Nixon himself and his voice was grim. ‘Hank,’ the President said, ‘hold onto your Barbasol. We’re moving seven divisions into the Dominican Republic before lunchtime.’”

• Historical: “Not since the Roman proconsul Fabian Cunctator marched steadily backwards for two years before invading elephants of Hannibal has a commander-in-chief sought victory in retreat with the stubborn insistence of President Richard Nixon. But last week the harassed President tired of the waiting game. Without informing anyone but the White House telephone operator, who had to make the necessary calls, Mr. Nixon dispatched seven crack divisions of Marines in a dramatic amphibious invasion—aimed not at enemy strongholds in Vietnam but at the undefended beaches of the Dominican Republic.”

• Anecdotal: “One February afternoon early in his Administration, Richard Nixon was bobbing around on a rubber duck in the lagoon fronting on his house in Key Biscayne, Fla. ‘You know,’ the President said reflectively to C.R. (Bebe) Rebozo, who was paddling nearby, ‘they all think I came down here to make points for the Southern strategy. What all those pundits don’t realize is that a guy will do almost anything to get away from those Washington winters.’ Last week the President’s search for sun took on new and potentially explosive international dimensions, as Mr. Nixon ordered seven divisions of U.S. Marines ashore in the Dominican Republic in a wholly unexpected dawn invasion.”

• General lede: “With only three weeks to go until Election Day, Richard Nixon seemed to be a President with all his options foreclosed. Saigon, Manila and Honolulu had fallen in successive weeks to ‘Un-American elements,’ the most recent Gallup poll had reflected a new if razor thin edge for George McGovern, and Pat Nixon had filed for a legal separation. In a bold (some say reckless) attempt to recoup his political fortunes, the President last week dispatched seven Marine divisions to seize control of the Dominican Republic.”

Yes, it was definitely newsmagazine formula, but when done well it could be brilliant.

CHAPTER 9

“Joe—Surrender”

W
HILE WE WERE GEARING UP for a second lawsuit, the women at the
Washington Post
were getting restless. Several years earlier they had complained about discrimination, including the lack of women in decision-making positions. That prompted Ben Bradlee, the paper’s executive editor, to issue a directive in June 1970 underscoring the “equality and dignity of women.” Promising to “use all our resources to combat discrimination against women,” Bradlee decreed that words such as “divorcee, grandmother, blonde (or brunette) or housewife should be avoided in all stories where, if a man were involved, the words divorcee, grandfather, blonde or householder would be inapplicable. In other words, they should be avoided. Words like vivacious, pert, dimpled or cute have long since become clichés and are droppable on that account alone.”

Two years later, on April 12, 1972, fifty-nine women at the
Post
sent a letter to Bradlee and Katharine Graham, among others, noting that women were losing ground at the paper. According to their statistics, women made up 15 percent of the
Post’
s staff in June 1970; in March 1972, they made up only 13 percent of the staff. There were no women assistant managing editors, news desk editors, or editors in the Financial, Sports, and Outlook sections, nor were there any female foreign correspondents or sports reporters. This time the
Post’
s management responded with specific goals and actions. Among other things, Bradlee promised “to increase substantially, and as fast as possible, the number of women on the newspaper, especially in top and middle management.” He also insisted that “there is and shall be no discrimination in the assignment of women to breaking stories involving action and/or violence.” The
Post
immediately established an internal equal employment opportunity committee and instituted a monthly status report on the employment of women and blacks. (The
Post
women ended up filing charges of discrimination two years later with the EEOC, which ruled in their favor.)

Also in April 1972, a group of black reporters at the
Post
called the Metro Seven filed a complaint with the EEOC charging the paper with racial discrimination in promotion and hiring, especially with regard to the lack of black editors. Bradlee and managing editor Howard Simons quickly negotiated a deal, hiring, among others, Dorothy Gilliam, a former
Post
writer whom they promoted to assistant editor. Gilliam was the first black editor of the reconfigured Style section. “It was shortly after [the Metro Seven settlement] that I was sought out,” said Gilliam. “I can’t help but think there was some connection.”

Meanwhile, Kay Graham had undergone her own form of consciousness-raising. As one of only two women publishers of a major newspaper (the other was Dorothy Schiff of the
New York Post
), Kay was feeling isolated in the professional world, worried, as she wrote, that she would “appear stupid or ignorant when she was the only woman in a room full of men.” Her close friend at the
Post
was Meg Greenfield, the deputy editor of the editorial page, who had achieved her success before the women’s movement. (In her early days at the
Post,
Meg had a sign on her office door that read, IF LIBERATED, I WILL NOT SERVE.) But Meg, like Kay, was often the only woman in the room and together they decided to “think through” how they felt about women’s lib. They started by reading books, among them
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir.

Then Kay met Gloria Steinem. Gloria had been writing a political column for Clay Felker at
New York
magazine when she began thinking about starting a feminist magazine (the first issue of
Ms.
magazine appeared as an insert in
New York
in December 1971). When Gloria was seeking an investor for her start-up, Felker introduced her to Kay. “She told me that if they put up money, they—the
Post
—would have to own it,” Gloria told me later. But Kay gave her $20,000 in seed money and asked Gloria to talk to her about the new feminism. At the time, Kay wrote, “I couldn’t understand militancy and disliked the kind of bra-burning symbolism that appeared to me like man-hating.” But 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.” Around that time, Kay even asked her longtime executive assistant, Liz Hylton, who came from West Virginia, to please stop saying “yes, ma’am.”

One day, Kay asked Gloria to come to lunch at the
Post
. “She wasn’t being taken seriously by the men she employed,” Gloria recalled. “She had invited Joe Alsop to lunch and asked me to explain this to him while she was sitting right there! I was trying to do Feminism 101 and be reasonable and persuasive about women’s issues in general. It was as if she was calling me in to argue with someone she didn’t want to argue with.” Among the things they discussed was the fact that the
Post
wouldn’t hire newsgirls to throw the paper on people’s porches in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “After the lunch,” said Gloria, “Kay told me that she had gotten so mad at some employee who told her they couldn’t have newsgirls, she threw an ashtray at him. I was impressed because she was usually so reserved.”

Kay also had Gloria talk to Oz Elliott about the
Newsweek
women. “I remember meeting Gloria in Kay’s office and she was very helpful to me,” he told me. “I was impressed with how constructive she was in suggesting how management should deal with the situation.” When Kay discussed
Newsweek
with Gloria, however, “all I remember was trying to talk her out of being angry at Eleanor Holmes Norton,” Gloria said. “Kay never really forgave Eleanor. She felt wrongly accused—her world had been wrongly accused—and Kay felt Eleanor crossed the line. She felt
Newsweek
was unfairly targeted, but separate from that was Eleanor and her style.” Later on, when Gloria found herself on the opposite side of Eleanor on an issue, “I could see what Kay meant,” she said. “Eleanor is scary, very scary. She’s tough—and she should be.”

I, too, felt Kay’s disapproval—or perhaps it was disappointment. Because of my father, she probably felt that I was part of the
Post
family, which I felt as well. After all, she was responsible for my entrée to
Newsweek
and now I was the apostate suing her magazine. Many years later, when she was making a speech at
Newsweek
and recounting the history of the women’s lawsuit, she stopped and said, “and some of the suers are in this room!”—and pointed to me. Whatever the reason, I thought she never forgave me for being disloyal and I felt a coolness in our interactions after the suit. It wasn’t overt. She was always gracious to me, and from time to time she would ask me to come to her office to tell her how things were going with the women’s movement at
Newsweek.
Over the years, I grew to admire Kay’s courage, especially during Watergate, and as she became more confident, her sense of humor became more evident. At a
Newsweek
sales conference in Puerto Rico one year, Kay came out to walk with some of us on the beach. It had been a cloudy day, but when she appeared the sun suddenly came out. Kay looked up at the sky, opened her arms, and said mischievously, “Now you know why they call me the most powerful woman in Washington.”

Primarily, however, I was concerned about my father’s feelings since I now found myself in the unusual position of suing his boss. Dad loved and respected the Grahams and had a special fondness for Kay. When I called him after we filed the first complaint, he listened and never questioned or criticized my actions. At the same time, I knew he was worried about how Kay would feel. “He was nervous,” recalled my brother Maury. “He didn’t want anything that was untoward to happen to the
Post
and to Kay in particular.” If he ever spoke to Kay—or she to him—about my role in the suit, he never told me. But I know he felt torn by his loyalty to her and his love for me. In 1974, Kay gave my father a gala dinner dance to celebrate his fifty years at the
Washington Post.
Before I flew down to Washington for the event, my father phoned me and gently asked whether I was planning to shake Kay’s hand on the reception line, clearly wanting to avoid an embarrassing incident. “Of course,” I said. “I’m not angry at her personally, just at the men who run her magazine.” I think he was relieved, and it turned out to be a warm, wonderful evening.

Meanwhile, our negotiations with management were leading nowhere. After the March 1972 straw vote, the women met again and formally voted to once again take legal action, this time in two jurisdictions. On May 16, 1972, we announced that fifty-one women had filed a second complaint against
Newsweek
with the EEOC “because sex discrimination at the magazine remains essentially unchanged.” Two weeks later, Margaret Montagno was the lead plaintiff on a complaint filed with the New York State Division of Human Rights “on her own behalf and behalf of the 50 or more female employees similarly situated.” In a half-page, single-spaced paragraph, enumerating all the ways the magazine discriminated against women, Margaret charged
Newsweek
with unlawful discriminatory practice, ending the complaint saying, “Because I am a woman I believe I have no chance to become a senior editor or part of top management at
Newsweek.
Because I am a woman I believe I have very little chance to become a writer, bureau chief or reporter at
Newsweek
. I believe that to be a woman at
Newsweek
is to accept a permanent position in those lower paying and/or less prestigious jobs restricted to or predominantly held by women.”

At the end of June 1972, Oz Elliott returned as editor-in-chief of
Newsweek
after serving on the business side. “I was astonished no progress had been made,” he told me years later, “and I was surprised by the anger of the women. They were angrier than they had been two years before. One of the first things I did was to put the women’s issues at the top of my list.”

Oz immediately hired Shana Alexander as the first female columnist in the history of
Newsweek.
Shana had been the “first” in several publications: the first female staff writer and columnist for
Life
magazine and the first female editor of
McCall’s
. But she quit
McCall’s
in 1971, saying that it was a token job in a sexist environment. (Shana left
Newsweek
in 1974 and was replaced as a columnist by Meg Greenfield of the
Washington Post
.) As a concession to the women inside
Newsweek,
Oz also promoted Olga Barbi, the chief of research, to senior editor. The women were pleased for Olga but it didn’t satisfy our demands to have a woman editing one of the major sections in the magazine. (On the business side, my friend Valerie Salembier was appointed
Newsweek’
s first female ad sales representative in May 1972.)

Then there was silence. Between May and September 1972, we had no meetings with
Newsweek’
s management. That summer, while the
Newsweek
women were being “trained” at the Famous Writers School, women from outside the magazine were being hired as writers without any trouble, and some without much experience. In July 1972, at the Democratic convention in Miami, Oz met Maureen Orth, a member of a guerrilla TV collective from San Francisco called TVTV. Maureen had graduated from Berkeley with a political science degree, had served in the Peace Corps in Colombia, and earned a master’s degree in journalism at UCLA with an emphasis on documentary film. In 1971, she was pitching a story to
New York
magazine on the Cockettes, a group of celebrated hippie drag queens from San Francisco who came to New York where they were a big flop. “Clay Felker [the editor of
New York
] told me he’d pay me $500 and then have Rex Reed put his own lead on it and cut me out completely,” she recalled. “I refused and gave it to the
Village Voice
.” The story, one of a dozen she had written, ran on the front page.