The Good Girls Revolt (27 page)

Elisabeth (Lala) Coleman.
Lala had been a reporter in
Newsweek’
s San Francisco bureau for three years when she was hired away by KQED-TV in 1973. The following year she went to work for ABC News before becoming press secretary to California Governor Jerry Brown in 1976. She resigned in 1978, when she married Rock Brynner, Yul Brynner’s son. Lala came back to New York, got divorced, and started working for a media communications firm. She joined American Express in 1990, rising to vice president of international public affairs and communications before retiring in 2004. She is currently writing a memoir.

“The
Newsweek
lawsuit played a huge role in my life,” said Lala. “I was immediately dispatched to a bureau and then given the first bureau reporter opening. If we had not filed, others probably would have, but I suspect they would not have been as successful as we were.”

Phyllis Malamud, Jeanie Seligmann,
and
Mariana Gosnell
were
Newsweek
lifers. Phyllis was promoted from New York reporter to Boston bureau chief in 1977 and returned to New York in 1983, where she became editor of the “My Turn” section. In 1986, at the age of forty-eight, Phyllis married
Newsweek’
s longtime Medicine editor, Matt Clark. She and Matt took a buyout in 1988 and have since retired. “The suit was helpful in getting me the Boston bureau chief position,” said Phyllis, “and that was helpful in terms of establishing myself as a manager.”

Jeanie Seligmann worked at
Newsweek
for twenty-eight years. After being promoted to writer in 1971, she became editor of the Letters section in 1999 and took a buyout in 2002, retiring at fifty-seven. She never married. “Without the women’s suit, I don’t think I would have had the gumption to push for a tryout,” said Jeanie. “I was much more of a follower than a leader. I guess my consciousness got raised.”

Mariana Gosnell left
Newsweek
in 1988, after twenty-six years. “I often thought about leaving but I couldn’t figure out a better job,” she said. On her off-hours, Mariana got a pilot’s license and in 1961, she bought a single-engine airplane. At one point, she took a three-month leave of absence and flew solo across the country. In 1994, when she was sixty-two, Mariana published a book about her bird’s-eye journey in her plane,
Zero Three Bravo
. In 2007, she wrote another called
Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of This Astonishing Substance,
which the
New York Times
reviewed and pronounced “remarkable.” “I wasted too many years at
Newsweek,
” said Mariana, who had a long-term relationship but never married. “It was a lack of knowing one’s possibilities and a lack of belief in your capabilities. Doing the flying book gave me more of a sense of accomplishment, but the reporting at
Newsweek
determined a lot about how I write.” Sadly, Mariana died unexpectedly in March 2012.

Eleanor Clift.
One of Washington’s most respected reporters and commentators, Eleanor credits the
Newsweek
women’s suit with giving her the first boost. “It was this great unseen hand in New York that gave me the entrée to ask for a reporting internship,” she recalled. In 1970, Eleanor was the Girl Friday in the Atlanta bureau. After her reporting internship in the summer of 1971, she was promoted to correspondent in Atlanta and started covering Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Her big scoop was getting Hamilton Jordan’s game plan for how Carter could win the presidency. In 1976, Eleanor followed Carter to Washington as
Newsweek’
s White House correspondent. She left
Newsweek
briefly in 1985 to go to the
Los Angeles Times
but returned to the Washington bureau thirteen months later. She covered Capitol Hill and then the White House again from 1992 to 1994. Eleanor is currently a contributing editor at
Newsweek
and a regular on the syndicated TV show
The McLaughlin Group
.

Married to Brooks Clift (Montgomery Clift’s brother) from 1964 until their divorce in 1981, Eleanor has three sons. In 1989, she married fellow journalist Tom Brazaitis, who died of kidney cancer in 2005 at the age of sixty-four. Three years later, she wrote
Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics,
which weaves the experience of Tom’s death with the events surrounding the Terri Schiavo case during a two-week period in March 2005.

When she first heard about the women’s suit, Eleanor recalled, “I thought there was a lot of anger at
Newsweek
on the part of the men and the women. But in the end, I think it changed the chemistry of the magazine and how we looked at gender. It wasn’t about ego—this was before bylines. It was about women wanting to be in the game and it was a group effort.”

Jane Bryant Quinn.
Jane was the only woman to hold positions at opposite ends of the
Newsweek
masthead. After leaving the
Newsweek
clip desk “with great pleasure” in 1962, she went to
Look
magazine and then was hired by McGraw-Hill to cofound a personal finance newsletter for
Business Week
magazine. She was listed on the masthead as J. B. Quinn, “because women weren’t thought to know anything about personal finance.” A young mother in need of a job, she reluctantly agreed to the byline, but “I compensated by listing my entire staff—male and female—by their initials, too.” Six years later, when she became the newsletter’s publisher, she switched the masthead to full names.

In 1974, Jane started writing a personal-finance column for the
Washington Post
syndicate and in 1979, she was hired back at
Newsweek
as the magazine’s first female business columnist, alongside economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. “To come back to
Newsweek
as a respected columnist was a wonderful feeling,” said Jane. “I always loved
Newsweek,
but I was angry and sorry there had not been a place for me there.”

In addition to
Newsweek
, Jane wrote for many publications and authored several books. She married again, had another child, and after her husband died, remarried in 2008. In 2009, Jane and her husband, Carll Tucker, started Main Street Connect, an online community news company. “Although I wasn’t active in the women’s movement,” she said, “I was—and am—proud to declare myself a feminist. I love and respect all those rude and noisy women whose protests—even the silly protests—achieved so much for women’s freedom and choice. It wouldn’t have happened if the movement had been left to polite girls like me, who said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and imagined we could advance, in a man’s world, on merit alone. We and our daughters and our granddaughters are all standing on the shoulders of those tough and insistent personalities who wouldn’t be appeased. Equality is never given, it is taken—and they took it for all of us.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton.
Still a firebrand, Eleanor Holmes Norton continues to fight for civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of the residents of Washington, D.C. After representing the
Newsweek
women in their first lawsuit, Eleanor became head of the New York City Human Rights Commission in 1970, where she held the first hearings in the country on discrimination against women. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the first woman to hold that position. Eleanor returned to her hometown and in 1990 was elected a delegate to Congress for the District of Columbia. In her position she serves and votes on committees but is not permitted to vote on the final passage of legislation. In 1993, Eleanor divorced her husband after an income-tax scandal. She continues to serve in Congress and as a tenured professor of law at Georgetown University.

Looking back on her first meeting with the
Newsweek
editors, Eleanor said, “they were so awkward and didn’t know how to deal with you, the women, or with me. Oz became a good friend and so did Katharine Graham, but here they were, the pillars of progressive America being confronted with a discrimination suit—how embarrassing.” One thing Eleanor regrets is not speaking to the black researchers about joining our suit. “I would have convinced them, I know I would have,” she said. “At that time, it was very hard to go behind you all, but I’m sure they would have all been with you today.”

Eleanor still regards our lawsuit as a seminal case for women. “This was a case that some would say that you could not win because there was no precedent,” she explained. “But discrimination is discrimination and your case paralleled any case in which there were qualified blacks at the bottom and whites at top. I didn’t understand why this should be any different.”

Harriet Rabb.
After the
Newsweek
case, Harriet became the go-to lawyer for sex discrimination lawsuits. She represented the women at the
Reader’s Digest
in 1973 and those at the
New York Times
in 1974. Harriet continued as director of the Employment Rights Project at Columbia Law School until 1978, where she also served as a professor, director of clinical education, assistant dean for urban affairs—the first woman dean—and vice dean. In 1977, when Joe Califano was appointed secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration, he called up his old
Newsweek
adversary and asked whether Harriet would be interested in working for him. She declined, but the offer came around again. In 1993, Donna Shalala, the new secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration, hired Harriet as her general counsel. Harriet returned to New York in 2000 and is the vice president and general counsel of Rockefeller University.

“Look at what we took on,” said Harriet. “The
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
—it doesn’t get any tougher than that. What you all did gave other people the courage to do it as well. The
Newsweek
women were not waiting for God to descend and fix it for all of us. A pool of New York journalists rising up made a picture for every woman in other papers around the country.”

Harriet believes not only that our case was important, but that it continues to be relevant. “It’s not over,” she said, “and it’s never going to be over—the realization that people always have to have somebody who’s the other, that justice is so hard to come by, that fairness is so hard to come by. You hope that it will get better, and it does get better. But backsliding is so much easier than forward progress and there always has to be somebody who’s willing to step forward. You provided the role models. You all had options. You could have personally had an easy row to hoe. But it just wasn’t who you all were. For you, it was the integrity of the case, to do the right thing. It’s not that there wasn’t courage involved. It took courage, but it was just some well of integrity and decency that says this isn’t right. And that’s at least as great a virtue as courage.”

Oz Elliott.
Although his first impulse was to justify the discrimination of women at
Newsweek
as “a newsmagazine tradition going back almost fifty years,” Oz turned out to be a quick and lasting convert to our cause. After we had negotiated our first memorandum of understanding in August 1970, Oz thought the mechanisms were in place for progress. When he returned to the editorial side in June 1972, just after we had sued, he made women’s advancement a priority. At that point, Oz was going through his own transition. He was getting divorced and had just started seeing Inger McCabe, who had been married to a
Newsweek
correspondent in the Far East. Inger was an independent woman—a talented photographer and entrepreneur who started a successful design business called China Seas. “Oz loved women,” said Inger, who married Oz in 1974. “He adored women and yet he didn’t pay enough attention to them. He wasn’t thinking!”

When Oz left the magazine in 1976 to become New York City’s first deputy mayor in charge of economic development, there was a big party at Top of the Week. As he recalled in his memoir, “The women of
Newsweek
who had fought so strenuously for their rights gave me a suitably sexist scrapbook chronicling their victory.” In 1977, Oz became dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, stepping down in 1986. He also chaired the Citizens Committee of New York, an organization he helped found in 1975 that encourages local volunteerism. He died of cancer in 2008.

To his credit, Oz was always honest about his role in
Newsweek’
s discrimination against women. When he became friendly with Ellen Goodman in later years, she recalled, “He was the first to say, ‘God, weren’t we awful? Can you believe that it was like that then? All those [talented women] who left, as well they should have—why did they ever stay?’ Oz would preempt the discussion but in my mind, there would still be this connection to the women whose careers were basically ended by that [discrimination]. People did something and it had terrible effects on other people. Then they changed and the world changed and Oz certainly changed. I was very fond of him.”

We all were. Just before he died, I asked him if there was anything he regretted. “Looking back,” he said, “I would have been more sensitive about what it was all about before the storm broke. And in retrospect, I’m sure I would have said something different than that it was a newsmagazine tradition!”

As for me,
I always say I am an affirmative-action baby and proud of it. After being promoted to
Newsweek’
s first female senior editor in September 1975, I worked in that job until I left on maternity leave in November 1980, when our daughter, Sarah, was born. When I returned six months later, I negotiated a three-day week to work on special projects. During that time, I packaged seven
Newsweek
cover stories into books, helped turn one of them into a CBS Reports television documentary, and launched
Newsweek on Campus
and
Newsweek on Health,
specialty magazines that were distributed on college campuses and in doctors’ offices. In 1982, Steve and I had our son, Ned, and two years later I returned full-time as a senior editor, often filling in as a Wallenda.