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Lynn Povich - The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

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The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace
Author:
Lynn Povich
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PublicAffairs
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Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2012
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It was the 1960sa time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the Help Wanted ads were segregated by gender and the Mad Men office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination.

Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the Swinging Sixties. Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch jobfor a girlat an exciting place.

But it was a dead end. Women researchers sometimes became reporters, rarely writers, and never editors. Any aspiring female journalist was told, If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else.

On March 16, 1970, the day Newsweek published a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement entitled Women in Revolt, forty-six Newsweek women charged the magazine with discrimination in hiring and promotion. It was the first female class action lawsuitthe first by women journalistsand it inspired other women in the media to quickly follow suit.

Lynn Povich was one of the ringleaders. In The Good Girls Revolt, she evocatively tells the story of this dramatic turning point through the lives of several participants. With warmth, humor, and perspective, she shows how personal experiences and cultural shifts led a group of well-mannered, largely apolitical women, raised in the 1940s and 1950s, to challenge their bossesand what happened after they did. For many, filing the suit was a radicalizing act that empowered them to find themselves and fight back. Others lost their way amid opportunities, pressures, discouragements, and hostilities they werent prepared to navigate.

The Good Girls Revolt also explores why changes in the law didnt solve everything. Through the lives of young female journalists at Newsweek today, Lynn Povich shows what hasand hasntchanged in the workplace.

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Table of Contents

For Steve, Sarah, and Ned
and for the Newsweek women

PROLOGUE

WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?

JESSICA BENNETT GREW UP in the era of Girl Power. It was the 1980s, when young women were told there was no limit to what they could accomplish. The daughter of a Seattle attorney, Jessica regularly attended Take Your Daughter to Work Day with her dad and was the academic star in her family, excelling over her younger brothers and male peers. In high school, she was a member of Junior Statesmen of America, a principal in the school orchestra, and a varsity soccer player. Jessica was accepted to the University of Southern California, her first choice, but transferred after freshman year to Boston University because it had a stronger journalism program. When the Boston Globe offered a single internship to a BU student, she was the recipient.

Then Jessica got a job at Newsweek and suddenly encountered obstacles she couldnt explain. She had started as an intern on the magazine in January 2006 and was about to be hired when three guys showed up for summer internships. At the end of the summer, the men were offered jobs but Jessica wasnt, even though she was given one of their stories to rewrite. Despite the fact that she was writing three times a week on Newsweeks website, her internship kept getting extended. Even after she was hired in January 2007, Jessica had to battle to get her articles published, while guys with the same or less experience were getting better assignments and faster promotions. Initially I didnt identify it as a gender issue, she recalled. But several of us women had been feeling like we werent doing a good job or accomplishing what we wanted to. We didnt feel like we were being heard.

Being female was not something that ever held Jessica back. I was used to getting everything I wanted and working hard for it, said the twenty-eight-year-old writer at Newsweek.com, so my feeling was, why do I need feminism? Why do I need to take a womens studies course? And, of course, there was the stereotype of the feministthe angry, man-hating, granola-crunching, combat-boot-wearing woman. I dont know that I consciously thought that, but I think a lot of young women do. I went to public school in the inner city, so issues of racial justice were more interesting to me than gender because, frankly, gender wasnt really an issue.

Her best friend at Newsweek, Jesse Ellison, was also frustrated. She had recently discovered that the guy who replaced her in her previous job was given a significantly higher salary. She was doing well as the number two to the editor of Scope, the opening section of the magazine that featured inside scoops and breaking news. But that summer, a half-dozen college-age dudes had come in as summer interns and suddenly the department turned into a frat house. Guys were high-fiving, turning the TV from CNN to ESPN, constantly invading her cubicle, and asking her, as if she were their mother, whether they should microwave their lunches. They were also getting assigned stories while she had to pitch all her ideas. Since a new boss had taken over, Jesse felt as if she had been demoted. She didnt know what to do.

Jesse, thirty, sought the advice of a trusted editor who had been a mentor to her. He told her, Youre senior to themshame them. Then he said, The problem is that youre so pretty you need to figure out a way to use your sexuality to your advantage, she recalled, still incredulous about the remark. Even though I think he was just being an idiot for saying thisbecause he had really fought for mehearing that changed my perception of the previous six months. I was like, Wait a minute! Were you being an advocate for me because you think Im pretty and you want me in your office? And, more important, is this what other people in the office think? Not that Im actually talented, but this is about something else? It really screwed with my head.

Jesse had grown up in a conservative town outside Portland, Maine. Her mother, a former hippie who was divorced, had started a small baby-accessories business. During the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings, Jesse was the only one in her eighth-grade class to support Anita Hill. She went to a coed boarding school, where she was valedictorian of her class, and then to Barnard, an all-womens college, where she graduated cum laude. She, too, never took a womens studies course. I just felt like I didnt need it, she said. Feminism was a givenit was Barnard! After a brief job at a nonprofit, she enrolled part-time in Columbia Universitys Graduate School of Journalism. She also got an internship on the foreign language editions of Newsweek and was hired full-time when she graduated with her masters degree in June 2008. But now, a year later, she, too, was struggling to move ahead at Newsweek. What was the problem?

It wasnt like I believed that sexism didnt exist, said Jesse. It was just that it didnt occur to me that what was happening at work was sexism. Maybe its because we are a highly individualized culture now and I had always done really well. So I just assumed that everything that was happening was on the basis of merit. I grew up reading Newsweek and I had tremendous respect for it. I felt like, Im in this world of real thinkers and writers and I have to prove myself. The fact that I wasnt being given assignments was simply an indication that they didnt think I was good enough yet. It didnt occur to me that it was about anything else. For the first time in my life, I was feeling inadequate and insecure.

Jessica Bennett felt the same way. Maybe its a female tendency to turn inward and blame yourself, but I never thought about sexism, she said. We had gotten to the workforce and then something suddenly changed and we didnt know what it was. After all, we had always accomplished everything we had set out to do, so naturally we would think we were doing something wrongnot that there was something wrong. It was us, not it.

What was the problem? After all, women composed nearly 40 percent of the Newsweek masthead in 2009. It wasnt like the old days, when there was a ghetto of women in the research department from which they couldnt get promoted. In fact, there were no longer researchers on the magazine, except in the library. Young editorial employees now started as researcher-reporters. There were women writers at Newsweek, several female columnists and senior editors, and at least two women in top management. Ann McDaniel, a former Newsweek reporter and top editor, was now the managing director of the magazine in charge of both the business and editorial sidesa first. So it couldnt be that old thing called discrimination that was inhibiting their progress. The fight for equality had been won. Women could do anything now at Newsweek and elsewhere. Hadnt Maria Shrivers report on American women just come out in October 2009, declaring, The battle of the sexes is over?

Jesse and Jessica stewed about the situation, discussing it with other Newsweek women and friends outside the magazine, who, it turned out, were also feeling discouraged in their careers. It felt so good just talking to each other, recalled Jesse. It was like, Oh my God, Im so sick of feeling silent and scared. Its not fair and we should say something. That impulse was great; knowing that Im not alone was empowering.

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