The Good Girls Revolt (21 page)

In the case of the
New York Times,
said Harriet, “management really took off on the women and trashed them, unlike
Newsweek’
s management, which didn’t fight ugly. The
Times
women were angrier than the
Newsweek
women, in part because they were older and because many of them came out of the labor union movement. They also had seen their salaries because the union saw salaries, and there’s nothing like money to make you angry.”

The
Times
women began organizing in 1972, right after we filed our second suit in May. “Grace [Lichtenstein, a young
Times
reporter] kept saying, ‘What are we doing sitting around like this when the
Newsweek
women are stirring things up?’” recalled Betsy Wade Boylan, the named plaintiff on
Elizabeth Boylan v. The New York Times Company.
In the spring of 1973, six
Times
women hired Harriet to represent them and in November 1974, filed a class action lawsuit. Management was furious. At one point, according to Harriet, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, publisher of the
New York Times
and a former trustee of Columbia University
,
called Michael Sovern, then dean of Columbia Law School, and asked whether he thought that what Harriet was doing with these cases in her law clinic was legitimate. “He led Michael to believe that he really wanted to stop the lawsuit, that he thought it was unfair,” recalled Harriet. “Michael refused, and didn’t tell me about it until the case was over.”

Four years later, as the
Times
women were preparing for a September 1978 court date, a machinists union strike hit all three New York daily newspapers in August. The
Times
settled the suit in October, though the strike didn’t end until November. The case had gotten so poisonous that going to court probably would have damaged not only the paper but also the women. Still, said Harriet, “I think they settled because if their defense was that the women weren’t promoted because they weren’t any good, then these were the same women—Nan Robertson, Marilyn Bender, Eileen Shanahan, Grace Glueck—whose bylines were in the paper.” The
Times
ended up paying $350,000 to settle the suit, $233,500 of which went to back pay for the 550 women and $15,000 was divided among the plaintiffs and women who had testified in depositions. Employees with twenty or more years of service were given $1,000 with the others paid on a sliding scale down.

Afterward, several of the original editorial plaintiffs saw their careers stall—or worse. “We did a brave and a noisy thing and we knew it wasn’t going to be for us,” said Betsy Wade. Eileen Shanahan, a top financial reporter in the Washington bureau, left the
Times
in 1977, before the settlement. “I had repeatedly asked for editing jobs and couldn’t get them,” she later said. “That’s one of the reasons I left. The other was knowing what retaliation was going to come from the suit.” (Ironically, Shanahan went to work as the assistant secretary for public affairs officer for Joe Califano, who had become the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration). Grace Glueck, a gifted writer whose stories often ended up leading the culture page, was never made a top arts critic, while Joan Cook, a talented reporter, editor, and ideas person, was relegated to day rewrite, a backwater of the news department.

When she began organizing the women in 1972, Betsy Wade had been in a high-ranking position as head of the foreign copy desk. Getting nowhere, she took a position during the litigation as assistant travel editor so that she would be in a protected Guild job. She ended her career at the
Times
writing the “Practical Traveler” column, a secure but going-nowhere job. “I was sidelined because I was a woman,” she recalled, “and I wasn’t going to be promoted to the jobs that the people I trained were going to be promoted to.”

“We were born ten years too early,” said Grace Lichtenstein. “If I were born ten years later, I would have been a sportswriter. If Betsy were born twenty years later, she would have been managing editor or executive editor and certainly foreign editor.” Although she felt disheartened by how little credit they got from young journalists “who don’t understand all the opportunities that have opened up for them,” said Grace. “We changed the way the
New York Times
looks at news.” For Betsy Wade, the lawsuit “was the most important thing I did in my life.” But she insisted it also had a broader impact. “It was important at the
Times
but it was even more important for the great newspapers out there,” she said. “That’s why the women at
Newsweek
were so important, because they were so early and people said, ‘Holy Hosanna.’ The
Newsweek
suit created a mold that showed that it could be done.”

Anna Quindlen, who was hired at the
New York Times
at the age of twenty-four, considers herself one of the beneficiaries of the lawsuit. “I was convinced that I was hired because I was a whiz journalist,” she said. “But I was hired there because of six courageous women who brought the women’s suit. They weren’t going to get a lot out of it, but I did. I call it the gift that keeps on giving. I was editor of the metropolitan section at twenty-nine and an op-ed columnist at thirty-three.” Quindlen left the
Times
in 1995 to write novels, very successfully, and then went to
Newsweek
as a columnist in 1999, a position she held until 2009. “So you could say I was also the beneficiary of the
Newsweek
suit in taking over Meg Greenfield’s spot on the back page.”

At the
New York Times
, said Anna, “The women’s suit changed the paper a lot! The content changed. Look at my ‘Life in the 30s’ column [which she wrote in the mid-eighties]. That was a direct result of the women’s suit. One letter to my column said, ‘I never thought the
New York Times
would write about what I was thinking about.’ We understood the readers—a population that male editors had never known about.” She also said the lawsuit changed who ran the paper. “Now we have women on the masthead,” she added. “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see a woman on the
New York Times
masthead.”

Gail Collins, the former editorial page editor of the
New York Times
and now an op-ed columnist and best-selling author, also credits the pioneering women. I first met Gail in 1973 when she invited me to speak to women journalists in Connecticut about our lawsuit. Gail was running the Connecticut News Service, which she had started in 1972 after covering the state legislature for the weekly
Fair Press
. “The idea of inviting you was not in the context of a suit,” remembered Gail. “It was rather getting you to inspire everyone.” But according to Trish Hall, the current op-ed editor at the
New York Times
who was then at the
New Haven Journal-Courier,
after my talk the women decided to sue. On October 4, 1974, fifteen women filed sex discrimination charges with the EEOC against the New Haven Register Publishing Company.

Gail was not part of that suit, but she extols all the women who put their jobs on the line. “I arrived in New York approximately one second after the women at places like the
New York Times
and
Newsweek
had filed lawsuits,” she recalled. “The women who fought those fights were not the ones who got the rewards. People like me, who came right behind them, got the good jobs and promotions. I know many of the heroines of those battles and they aren’t bitter. They’re still very ticked off at their former employers, but they’re very happy and proud of the women who came after and got the opportunities that rightfully should have been theirs. To me that’s the definition of a great heart.”

CHAPTER 10

The Barricades Fell

W
OMEN’S PROGRESS TOOK a dramatic leap in the 1970s when Congress, the courts, and the media began responding to feminist demands. Between 1971 and 1974, Congress extended employment benefits to married women working in the federal government, prohibited sex discrimination in Social Security and other pension programs, and proscribed creditors from discriminating against women (until then, women couldn’t get credit—or credit cards—in their own name). In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act banned sex discrimination in education programs and activities, giving women equal access to advanced math and science courses, medical and vocational schools, residential facilities, and in 1975, college sports. When twenty-nine-year-old Billie Jean King, who had been campaigning for equal prize money for women athletes, defeated fifty-nine-year-old tennis champion Bobby Riggs in three straight sets in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes,” she legitimized women’s professional sports and inspired female athletes everywhere.

Politically, feminists were beginning to enter the national arena and their agenda was shaped around issues affecting women’s lives. In 1964, Patsy Mink (D-HI) was the first Asian American elected to Congress, and in 1968 Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) became the first African American woman representative. They were followed by social activist Bella Abzug (D-NY) in 1970, civil rights leader Barbara Jordan (D-TX) in 1972, and a thirty-one-year-old lawyer named Pat Schroeder (D-CO) in 1973. Chisholm, Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, among others, founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 to increase the participation of women in political and public life. Two years later, the National Black Feminist Organization was formed. Its “statement of purpose” declared that

the distorted male-dominated media image of the Women’s Liberation Movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of this movement to Third World women, especially black women. The Movement has been characterized as the exclusive property of so-called white middle-class women and any black women seen involved in this movement have been seen as selling out, dividing the race, and an assortment of nonsensical epithets. Black feminists resent these charges and have therefore established The National Black Feminist Organization, in order to address ourselves to the particular and specific needs of the larger, but almost cast-aside half of the black race in Amerikkka, the black woman.

Meanwhile, sex discrimination suits were proliferating, including one against the giant telephone company AT&T. The largest employer of women, the Bell System (of which AT&T was a part) classified jobs by gender, prevented women from serving as line workers, and denied women the promotions it offered to men. The suit was settled out of court in 1972, when AT&T agreed to a multimillion-dollar payment to workers and promised to end the company’s discriminatory practices.

In 1971, a young feminist attorney named Ruth Bader Ginsburg successfully argued before the US Supreme Court that an Idaho law giving preference to men as executors of estates was unconstitutional. That decision was the first time the court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause protected women’s rights, which over the next thirty years was used to strike down many laws discriminating against women and men. In 1973, as a result of
Roe v. Wade,
the Supreme Court established that a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion, with certain qualifications, was a fundamental liberty under the US Constitution.

But there were several significant defeats. The Equal Rights Amendment, which passed Congress in 1972, failed to get ratification from enough states to become law. In 1971, Congress had approved the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have provided child care on a sliding fee scale to working parents as a matter of right. However, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, saying it would commit “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to childrearing over against [
sic
] the family-centered approach.”

At the same time, the mainstream media were spreading the feminist message in the public arena. By the end of 1971, stories on the new women’s movement had appeared on the covers of
Time, Newsweek,
the
New York Times Magazine, Look, Life,
the
Atlantic,
and the
Saturday Review
. There was also a spate of “first” stories in the media—the “first woman” firefighter, police officer, stock broker, auto mechanic, telephone installer, you name it. The exploding coverage of the feminist movement not only was changing old institutions, but it also was creating new ones. Feminist bookstores, magazines, coffee shops, and health care clinics were springing up, bringing women’s previously private issues into the public domain.

Distrusting the coverage of the women’s movement in the mass media, feminists focused their press on their own experiences and testimonies. Beginning in 1968, publications calling for social change—liberation or revolution rather than just equality—began to proliferate, including the
Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement
out of Chicago,
No More Fun and Games
in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Lilith
in Seattle, and
Notes from the First Year
in New York (which published Anne Koedt’s famous 1970 essay on “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”). In all, more than five hundred feminist periodicals were published between 1968 and 1973.

Ms.
magazine, which began publication in 1972, had a major impact on the media as the first mainstream publication written, edited, owned, and operated by women. It featured cover stories on domestic violence and sexual harassment, commissioned a national study on date rape, and publicized such issues as sex trafficking and the sexist portrayal of women in advertising. In 1973, a group of women in Boston who had been studying their own anatomy and sexuality published
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
which revolutionized how the world looked at women’s health and popularized the radical notion that women’s bodies were as worthy of research as men’s.