The Good Girls Revolt (9 page)

Lucy was particularly offended by the treatment of her friend Pat Lynden, a fellow researcher in the Nation section. Pat had been reporting on New York Mayor John Lindsay, who was hoping for a slot on the Republican presidential ticket in 1968. But just before the Republican convention in Miami that summer, Pat was told that she wasn’t going. Instead, a young male reporter would take her place—and by the way, would she please turn over her notes to him? “That made me really angry,” said Lucy. “The summer in Berkeley had really changed my view of
Newsweek.
I don’t think I was capable of initiating the suit, but when I saw what happened to Pat, that galvanized me.” Margaret also felt aggrieved on behalf of both Judy and Pat. “For Judy to come back from a Marshall and be offered a job running copy—that was mind-boggling,” she recalled. “Judy was very angry at that point. Pat was someone who did want to be a journalist and had done a lot of reporting work in New York, and then to have to turn over everything to a guy—that was unfair.”

Lucy and Margaret suggested that they bring in Pat, who was everything they weren’t—ambitious and combative. Pat had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, where she had worked on the
Daily Cal
and won awards for her reporting. In January 1962, on her way to Europe, she fell in love with New York and landed a job on the
Newsweek
mail desk. After she became a Nation researcher, she wrote several freelance pieces, including cover stories for the
New York Times Magazine
and for the
Atlantic
.

A fearless reporter—the kind who was assigned to cover the riots in Newark—Pat had an unusual background. She was a “red-diaper baby,” the epithet given to children of American Communists or Communist sympathizers. Her uncle was Archie Brown, the trade union director of the Communist Party in California. Her father, an official of the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union, had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. There was a profile relief, in hammered copper, of Joseph Stalin over her grandmother’s china cabinet. “I wasn’t sure whether it portrayed the Soviet leader or my Russian-born Jewish grandfather as a young man,” Pat wrote in an article for
New York Woman
magazine. “I never asked, I suppose, because to me my grandfather and the USSR were one and the same.” During the 1950s, Pat and her family became untouchables, she wrote, “partly through our own choice—we had been raised to reject much that capitalism had wrought—but in large measure it was because during the depressing postwar decade of the blacklists . . . doors were closed to us as well as our parents.”

That left a powerful impression on Pat. “On the positive side of this Leftist heritage,” she wrote in
New York Woman,
“is the pride in a political tradition that stands for egalitarianism, the rights of minorities, economic justice . . . and civil liberties. But ours is also a subculture that will always feel vulnerable to the powers that be; we will always believe that we are irrevocably outsiders. We often wonder when the government will, once again, need political scapegoats and choose us. As a consequence, we have very little faith in, or regard for, duly constituted authority. We also know that friends are often friends only to a point.” Still, Pat was no fan of the Communist Party either—giving her a healthy skepticism about everything. “I was aware of a lot of the bullshit on the Left—the hypocrisy and the philandering and the mistreatment of wives,” she later told me. “I kept myself on the sidelines.”

In 1965, Pat met Allen Gore, a lieutenant of detectives in the police department’s Pickpocket and Confidence Division (they would later marry). Two years later, Allen got Pat entrée to the Gypsy subculture for a cover story in
The Atlantic
. But when she showed a draft of the story to Ed Kosner, a friend in Nation, he said, “‘You’re a good reporter but you’re not such a good writer,’” she recalled. “I was devastated.” After the Lindsay assignment was taken away from her in the summer of 1968, she said, “my confidence began to flag and I left.” She worked for a columnist for a while and went back to San Francisco to do some reporting. She returned in late 1969 when
Newsweek
offered her a job in the New York bureau. Shortly after that, Lucy and Margaret approached Pat in the
Newsweek
ladies’ room. “I thought about it for two hours and said, ‘Yes, I’ll join you,’” Pat recalled. “Then a week or two went by and we didn’t know what to do. Who else do we know? Who can we trust? Women just didn’t trust each other. We didn’t talk about our salaries. We fought over the bones like crazy. We competed with each other instead of saying, ‘We’re not the enemy.’”

It was around that time, in October 1969, that Judy suggested I join the group. She had transferred from Nation to the Education section the year before and had just been promoted to head researcher in the back of the book. We were sharing a small inside office on the twelfth floor and had become best friends, but approaching me was tricky. My father was a good friend of Kay Graham’s and he was working at the
Post
when her father, Eugene Meyer, bought the paper in 1933. In the spring of 1965, as I was finishing up at Vassar, he had asked Kay Graham to set up a job interview for me at
Newsweek,
which she had graciously arranged. But there were no job openings in Paris at the time.

My father was a well-known journalist in Washington and the sports world, widely admired for his integrity, his fairness, and his graceful writing. He was also an Orthodox Jew from Bar Harbor, Maine, the summer playground of the wealthy “rusticators”—the Astors, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies. Every June, they journeyed to Mt. Desert Island on their private railroad cars to spend three months at their “cottages,” more often fifty-room mansions with stables and servants’ quarters. Dad’s father had come from Lithuania to Boston in 1878 at age twelve with his father. They had peddled north, with packs on their back, to Bar Harbor, where they opened a furniture shop on Main Street and lived above the store. The seventh of nine children, Dad caddied at the tony Kebo Valley Golf Club, where one of his clients was Edward B. McLean, owner of the
Washington Post
(his wife, Evalyn, was the owner of the Hope Diamond). Mr. McLean offered Dad a job at his paper if he would continue to caddy for him at his private golf course off Wisconsin Avenue in Washington. So in 1922, at seventeen, Shirley (not an unusual male name in Maine) started as a police reporter at the
Washington Post
before he went to cover sports for $5 more a week.

My mother, Ethyl Friedman Povich, was born in Radom, Poland. Her father, a tailor, had emigrated to Washington with fellow landsmen in the early twentieth century. In 1912, he brought his wife and children—my three-year-old mother and her six brothers and sisters—to live with him (another son would be born in the United States). After meeting on a blind date and marrying two years later, my parents lived the high life, traveling to New York and Florida and clubbing with the other sportswriters and their wives (their honeymoon was at the Washington Senators’ spring training camp in Biloxi, Mississippi). But after they had children, and with Dad constantly on the road, Mom became our anchor at home, providing a sweet, warm presence for us.

Sports was the lingua franca at home, especially with two older brothers. Every February, we moved to Orlando, Florida, where the Washington Senators held spring training and where we went to school when we were young. While my brothers were living out their dreams as batboys, I rooted from the bleachers. Since girls weren’t allowed in the clubhouse, Dad always arranged for Mickey Vernon or Eddie Yost to play catch with me after the game. Needless to say, I became a big sports fan and understood the finer points of baseball. One of my proudest achievements was when my father used my scorecard at a Senators game to write his column.

Although I played team sports, I didn’t want to compete in that arena, so I chose to become a dancer. I was a serious ballet student until, at thirteen, my teacher recommended that I go to the School of American Ballet in New York City. The idea of moving to New York, and not going to college, was out of the question for my family and me—a bridge too far. I switched to modern dance and became part of a performance troupe founded by Erika Thimey, a German émigré who, along with Ruth St. Denis, brought a spiritual dimension to modern dance.

Given the strong personalities of my father and brothers, our house was infused with testosterone. The good part was that I felt comfortable around men and sports, something that helped me later in my career. But at the same time, our house revolved around the guys. I know it bothered my mother (she used to call us “motherless children,” since everyone referred to us as “Shirley’s kids”), and she took out her frustrations on me, often by being critical. I chafed under her, but I, too, was annoyed that many people didn’t even know that Shirley Povich also had a daughter.

At home, the boys ruled. My parents sent my brothers to summer camp each year and, after elementary school, to Landon, an all-boys private school. I went to camp just one summer and continued in public school. After the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in
Brown v. Board of Education,
which declared that separate but equal schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional, my junior high school went from being 90 percent white to about 60 percent black. The problem was not the kids, as I remember it. In fact, the gangs in my school were mostly white and my best friend was black. The administration just couldn’t deal with the racial tensions or the influx of new students. After graduating from the ninth grade at Paul Junior High School in 1958, I went to Sidwell Friends, a private, coed Quaker school across town.

At Friends, I was one of three new students in a class of fifty-three, most of whom had been there since kindergarten. Friends wasn’t a fancy school then—the most famous students were children of diplomats, not media stars—and it instilled in us the Quaker values of peace, simplicity, and social justice. I appreciated the silent contemplation of the weekly meetings for worship as well as Friends’ first-class education, which helped me get into Vassar.

Still, I shied away from writing. I admired my father’s talent and read his column eagerly (he wrote six days a week), but how could I measure up? I once gave an eighth-grade paper to my father to look over. He was a witty and elegant writer and cared deeply about his craft. With the best intentions and wanting me to be a good writer, he criticized my story in what he thought was a constructive way. But to me, it was devastating. I had failed the test; I couldn’t play in his league. I never again showed him anything I had written.

I was expected to do well in school, but it was never explained to me that I might have to earn a living. Nor did I realize that I would have to develop my own professional skills and talents. My family’s expectation—and mine—was that I would work until I married and had children, like my mother had. But seeing my father out in the world and meeting interesting people certainly appealed to me more than being a housewife. And although it hadn’t occurred to me to follow in his footsteps, here I was doing just that.

When Judy confided in me in the fall of 1969, it was complicated for another reason: I was no longer a researcher. My boss, Harry Waters, had suggested that I be promoted to junior writer, and I was in March 1969. “You never voiced much ambition and I don’t remember your pushing to get ahead,” Harry recalled. “But I thought from your files that you should be a reporter and writer.” Still, Judy knew I would be sympathetic to the idea of a lawsuit. In 1969, I had begun covering the gay-rights and the women’s lib movements, which was expanding my worldview. I interviewed the radical Redstockings, who insisted on talking only to female reporters, and covered the first Congress to Unite Women, where the Daughters of Bilitis were dropped as a sponsor because Betty Friedan feared that lesbian associations would threaten the new women’s movement. I would return to the office fired up by these encounters and Judy and I would talk excitedly about them. That fall, I had suggested a six-column story on women’s lib. I was sent to Chicago and Boston to do the reporting because there were no women in the bureaus. My senior editor had moved to another department and Dwight Martin, the fill-in editor, thought I was “too close to the material.” He asked a guy to rewrite the piece but the story kept getting delayed and never ran. Then Judy told me about the EEOC.

I must admit I wasn’t the first woman to “get it,” nor was I particularly angry, although I came to value those who were. People like Judy and Pat who were angry pushed the rest of us to make it happen. But my consciousness was getting raised and the blinders were beginning to fall. We
were
competing against one another and now I, too, began to question why there was just one slot for a woman and, more important, why we were willing to go along with the system. I had been lucky enough to break through the ranks, but even if I hadn’t personally been held back, I knew too many women who had. I signed on.

CHAPTER 5

“You Gotta Take Off Your White Gloves, Ladies”

F
OR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, we were skulking around the office like spies, waiting for the right opportunity to pounce on our next recruit. Our strategy was to bring in women one by one, keeping things as secret as possible until we knew what we were going to do. The
Newsweek
ladies’ room was a favorite ambush spot. Peering under the stalls to make sure no one else was there, we would start a casual conversation at the sink about how bad things were. “I would say, ‘Oh God, I have to research a story by some male writer and I’m sure I could write it better myself,’” recalled Lucy Howard. “If the woman agreed, then I would tell her some of us had been thinking about what we could do to change this—and slowly bring her in.”