The Good Girls Revolt (25 page)

Today many women hold senior writing, editing, and producing positions at news organizations but very few women have made it to the top. The
New York Times
has the best record of women running both the business and editorial sides of the paper. Janet Robinson was president and CEO of the New York Times Company from 2004 until 2012; in June 2011, Jill Abramson was appointed executive editor, the paper’s highest editorial position, which she still holds. The
Washington Post
has a female publisher, Katharine Weymouth, Kay Graham’s granddaughter; Gracia Martore is president and CEO of Gannett, which owns eighty-two daily newspapers including
USA Today
; and Mary Junck is chairman, president, and CEO of Lee Enterprises, which publishes fifty-four daily newspapers in twenty-three states. On the editorial side, the Associated Press elected Kathleen Carroll executive editor in 2002, its highest editorial position; Debra Adams Simmons, an African American, was named editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
in June 2010; and women are running smaller newspapers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Roanoke, Virginia, and Davenport, Iowa. But whereas several major dailies, such as the
Chicago Tribune,
the
Oregonian,
the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
the
Des Moines Register
and the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
in Minnesota, all had women editors in the past, none of them has women at the top today.
Time
magazine has never had a female managing editor, its top position, nor has a woman ever headed the network news operations of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News network.

It’s hard to believe that two generations later there are still so few females in the executive suite. Who would have thought it would take so long? We believed the lack of advancement was merely a pipeline problem: once there were enough women in the workforce, they would naturally advance—all the way to the top. We didn’t realize how hard it would be to change attitudes and stereotypes. There still are not enough stories on women’s issues, not enough women quoted as sources, and not enough women editorial writers and commentators. Perhaps most important for women’s advancement, there still is no private or public support for working families, who rely primarily on mothers to care for the children. According to the 2011 Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media, conducted by the International Women’s Media Foundation, the regions with the most women at the top of their news organizations are those with the best support system for parents: the Scandinavian countries, Europe, and Eastern Europe.

Oz Elliott once said that the two most important things that happened in the twentieth century were civil rights and women’s rights. As in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement didn’t solve all the problems, but our actions at
Newsweek
continue to have an impact. “Finding out about the lawsuit and writing the story was a real turning point for me,” said Jesse Ellison, who is a staff writer and articles editor at
Newsweek
and the
Daily Beast
. “It was hugely empowering and put a finger on what we were feeling—tremendous self-doubt. Once I understood that things aren’t just my problem, they’re
a
problem, it made me bolder, more willing to push for my stories and realize that I am as smart as the dude sitting next to me.” Jesse found that in working on the
Newsweek
story, “there was an element of personal growth in our own journey and how that compared to—and was reflected in—learning about your journey. As we kept rewriting the
Newsweek
piece, it made the story more effective and strengthened my voice.”

For Jessica Bennett, now executive editor of Tumblr and a contributing editor at
Newsweek
and the
Daily Beast,
“It was our modern ‘click!’ moment,” she explained. “Now I see almost everything through a gender lens. I’m writing a lot about women’s issues. Part of me doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the women’s writer, but I am naturally drawn to these stories in ways I never was before.” Learning the history of our lawsuit, she said, was a “sub-education—it’s become so useful to me, thinking about stories, knowing the background and how things evolved. It’s enabled me to understand what’s changed and what hasn’t.”

Sarah Ball didn’t consider herself a feminist before she started working on the
Newsweek
story. “I’m just young enough not to have ever been in a situation before
Newsweek
where there were more men than women,” she said. “I only knew ‘feminism’ as a denigrating term. Doing the story, it was fascinating to dive back to its beginnings and understand how feminism was—and is—such a necessary term to use and to espouse. I’m now aware that we didn’t just get this one day. There were a lot of women who got this for us and I’m glad I will never be ignorant of what came before.”

Sarah was particularly moved by a fortieth reunion of the original
Newsweek
plaintiffs at my home in June 2010. “I’m so grateful that I can put a face to the people I owe this incredible debt,” she told me. “I had so many meaningful conversations that night with very smart, educated women who have a lot of history and a lot of experience. There was something about the way that experience resonated with you all—it was so important a cause, so much bigger than yourselves, and so selfless risking the job you already had rather than just protesting from outside. I don’t know if anything would make women coalesce like that today. It made me feel very jealous, as if our generation missed out on something.”

Jesse and Jessica acknowledge they also feel a bond with us, although we are old enough to be their mothers. “There was a sense of a
Newsweek
culture that hadn’t really changed—even to calling the editors the Wallendas—so we could share these stories from forty years apart,” said Jessica. “We have a great feeling for the women who came before us, who were proud of what we were doing and were supporting us in our fight. I used to keep the ‘Women in Revolt’ cover over my desk and it still gives me chills when I see it. It was an honor to be associated with it.”

The women’s movement is an incomplete revolution. Many issues remain unsolved for this generation, including the continuing stereotyping of women, the increasing sexualization of society, and the infighting that still exists in the women’s movement. After the
Newsweek
piece was published in March 2010, the feminist blog
Jezebel
attacked the young women for a narcissistic “focus on your magazine and its past covers, and your childhood, and your issues with the F-word.” It also excoriated them for not including women of color in their story. “If the actual staff of
Newsweek
doesn’t include much in the way of diversity,”
Jezebel
opined, “isn’t it time to utilize those reporting skills of which the traditional media is supposed to be the last guardians?”

Stunned by the criticism from their fellow feminists, Jessica and Jesse answered
Jezebel
in a blog they had started called
The Myth of Equality.
They pointed out that the women they interviewed for the piece were either directly involved in the suit, wrote about it, or had recent books, articles, or studies related to women in the media and in the workplace. “We should also note—and this was one of many things that didn’t make it into the final piece—that the women of color at
Newsweek
didn’t sign onto the suit in 1970, for various reasons,” they wrote. The
Jezebel
experience cut deep. “You can argue about sexism,” said Jesse, “but in the feminist blogosphere, there’s a strange infighting that happens that’s destructive. When
Jezebel
attacked us, I felt like I lost a best friend. Nobody can be feminist enough. I see so much of that on these sites. Feminism takes on an exclusionary sensibility and competitiveness.”

This year, the political attacks on reproductive rights have begun to galvanize this generation. “Just as we grew up being told we could ‘do anything we put our mind to,’ we took having freedom over our bodies for granted,” said Jessica. “Plan B [the morning-after pill] has been around since I was a teenager, available over the counter. I’m sure the Right would like to argue this made me a bigger slut—it didn’t—but it did make me assume that these kinds of rights would always be available to me. So here we are, suddenly having to fight for something we never had to think much about.”

As they see their friends having babies, these young women also worry about how to balance work and family. “The idea of being able to ‘have it all’ is still prevalent,” said Sarah Ball, who left
Newsweek
in the fall of 2010 to work for
Vanityfair.com
. “It’s become easier because you can work remotely, but it still eats at your core. It’s what a lot of my friends talk about.” Free and accessible child care has always been a fundamental demand of the women’s movement, but the legislative efforts to pass such measures have failed. “Everything that our generation asked for as feminists was getting the identical things of what boys had—access to the Ivy League or professional schools or corporate America,” said psychiatrist Anna Fels. “Women now are up against a much deeper structural problem. The workplace is designed around the male life cycle and there is no allowance for children and family. There’s a fragile new cultural ideal—that both the husband and wife work. But when these families are under the real pressure of having a baby or two, there’s a collapse back to old cultural norms and these young parents go back to the default tradition.”

While women are increasingly taking on leadership positions in what are considered “caretaking” professions—medicine, social work, teaching, and even politics—in other professions, such as business and law, said Fels, “there’s still a huge backlash against women who are openly ambitious and there are fewer women at the top. The data show that once you’re a mother you’re written off in terms of a career. Some of it is prejudice and some of it is reality. If husbands don’t change their roles, if family structure doesn’t change, and if corporate attitude toward families doesn’t change, then women are in a lose-lose situation.”

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg agreed. “We reward men every step of the way—for being leaders, for being assertive, for taking risks, for being competitive,” she said in 2012 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And we teach women as young as four—lay back, be communal. Until we change that at a personal level, we need to say there’s an ambition gap. We need our boys to be as ambitious to contribute in the home and we need our girls to be as ambitious to achieve in the workforce.”

Jessica, Jesse, Sarah, and many of their friends are already working on these problems. “Five years ago we didn’t really talk about women’s issues,” said Jessica. “Only when we got to the workforce did we start to care about gender issues. Now a lot of young women are realizing sexism still exists. They’re writing about it and starting blogs about it. I think something’s happening.”

This recognition of sexism in the workplace perhaps explains why this young generation loves
Mad Men
. My generation identifies with the sexualized office culture, the subjugation of women, the 1960s clothes, and the scotch-soaked parties. That was our life. I always thought that younger women viewed the TV series simply as a historic costume drama. But they understand that the most compelling part of the show takes place in the office and they relate to that. They see how Peggy, the talented, ambitious secretary who becomes the first female copywriter, and Joan, the smart, voluptuous office manager, battle sexism at work. “Peggy’s having this feminist awakening,” said Jessica, “and many of the things she talks about are things women still debate.”

In 1970, we challenged the system and changed the conversation in the news media. For the women who participated in the lawsuits, the struggle rerouted our lives, emboldened us, and gave many of us opportunities we never would have had. It made
Newsweek
a better place to work and a better magazine. Like us, today’s young women are challenging assumptions and fighting their own, more complicated battles in the workplace. They, too, are having a feminist awakening. We are standing in their corner and rooting for their success. For we now see that as with
Mad Men,
our history isn’t just history. It has become a legacy for the young women who followed us.

EPILOGUE:

WHERE THEY ARE NOW

I
T HAS BEEN FORTY-TWO YEARS since we became the first women in the media to sue for sex discrimination and the first female class action suit. All of us are proud of the historic role we played but the effect of the lawsuit on our lives has been mixed. For some women, it opened doors and offered career choices they never would have imagined. For others, it remains the high point of their professional lives. For a few, it’s a bitter reminder of regrets and never-realized ambitions. But for all of us, now in our sixties and seventies, it was an experience that changed our perspectives about ourselves, about men and women—and womanhood—and about justice and ambition.

Judy Gingold.
As with many of the women on the front lines of a legal complaint, the mainspring of our movement never fully benefited from her courageous act or her enormous talent. Judy’s last job at
Newsweek
was editor of the “My Turn” section, shepherding essays from prominent experts and everyday readers. In 1982, she left the magazine to move to Los Angeles with her husband, David Freeman, a screenwriter. In LA, Judy did some book reviews for the
Los Angeles Times
and freelance pieces for the
Wall Street Journal
. She continued her interest in feminism as a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Women and Men in Society at the University of Southern California, where Betty Friedan led a feminist think tank, and at the Center for the Study of Women at the University of California at Los Angeles.