The Good Girls Revolt

BETWEEN 1975 AND 1985, women pushed their way into every position on the magazine except top management. Liz Peer, who was promoted to Paris bureau chief at the end of 1975, was sent to cover the war in Somalia in 1977 as Newsweek’s first female war correspondent. Elaine Sciolino, hired as a researcher in the international edition in 1970, flew to Iran in February 1979, on the same plane as the Ayatollah Khomeini, where she covered the Iranian Revolution and then the hostage crisis. (She later became Paris bureau chief for the New York Times.) In December 1976, Eleanor Clift from the Atlanta bureau rode into Washington with Jimmy Carter as Newsweek’s White House correspondent, the first female news-magazine reporter to cover the president in the West Wing (not the first lady in the East Wing).

Phyllis Malamud was promoted to Boston bureau chief in 1977 and Mimi McLoughlin became one of the magazine’s star writers and editors. In the early 1980s, Mimi became the first female to edit the Business section and then National Affairs, the most important section on the magazine. Mimi had that natural newsmagazine talent: as a writer, she could synthesize pages of files on nuclear power and polish off a complicated and comprehensive cover story the next day; as an editor she had a nose for news and a keen ear for the language. She was also popular with her troops—tough when she needed to be but never leaving bruises—and we loved that she could drink any of the boys (including the “big boys”) under the table.

During the years of our lawsuits, Newsweek’s coverage of women was beginning to change, although an August 1971 cover story on Gloria Steinem (“The New Woman”), reported by three women and written by Dick Boeth, “a writing minority of one,” still carried the sexist subline, “A Liberated Woman Despite Beauty, Chic and Success.” A content analysis of the magazine between 1969 and 1975 by a student at the University of Missouri showed that the number of lines devoted to women or women’s issues nearly doubled in those six years, the greatest increases coming in the Sports and Business sections. Most sexist adjectives had been deleted, and when bylines were added in 1975, women writers and reporters were highly visible, especially in the Religion, Medicine, and Justice sections.

With more women reporting, writing, and editing, there were more diverse story ideas, more quotes from female experts, and fewer cheesecake photos in “Newsmakers.” As fatigue from Vietnam and Watergate took hold, the news focus began to shift inward and the back-of-the-book areas became more important. As we had predicted, women brought new ideas to the magazine. In my first few years as senior editor, I was averaging almost a cover a month in my five sections (News Media, Television, Life/Style, Religion, and Ideas), including “Who’s Raising the Kids?” “Living with Dying,” “How Men Are Changing,” and “Saving the Family,” the first newsmagazine special report on such family issues as stepfamilies, family therapy, and how the family is portrayed on TV.

Unfortunately, my family wasn’t saved. In November 1976, after nearly nine years of marriage, Jeff and I separated. The confidence I had gained on the job allowed me finally to deal with the problems in my marriage. We had tried everything, including couples counseling, but nothing seemed to work. One day, when I was telling my therapist that Jeff wasn’t giving me what I needed emotionally, my doctor simply asked, “Is he unwilling or unable?” That’s when I realized I had to leave. I felt very sad but also relieved. I think Jeff knew it was over, too, and he moved back to California soon afterward.

I became consumed with work and as luck would have it, that paid off professionally and personally. Not only did I flourish as an editor, but I also found the right man. Steve Shepard was hired at Newsweek as a senior editor in the Business section in May 1976. Steve had been a top writer at BusinessWeek and was on leave at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to direct the Walter Bagehot Fellowship, a mid-career business journalism program he had created with his friend Soma Golden from the New York Times. When he came to Newsweek in 1976, Steve was married, as was I, and we became friends, collaborating on several Newsweek covers and feature stories. Steve couldn’t help but notice the close camaraderie on the magazine. “Gosh, there’s so much sex at Newsweek,” he said to me shortly after he arrived. Assuming this was standard practice at most weeklies, I asked whether this wasn’t true at Business Week. “Not like this,” he replied.

From the beginning, everyone respected Steve and he was regarded as a “comer” at the magazine. In story meetings, he was smart, sensitive, and supportive of his writers and reporters. I admired how he was able to cut through all the posturing and get to the essence of the idea. But I also thought Steve was cute. A great dresser, with a tall, slim body to show off his English double-breasted suits, Steve sported aviator glasses and longish hair that curled around his neck. Although he had grown up in the Bronx, he was nothing like those “pushy Jewish guys” from New York my Jewish mother had warned me about. He was soft-spoken and had an impish sense of humor. We got along well. He gave me wise advice about my writers and stories, and when he had his doubts, I supported his move to edit the National Affairs section in early 1977.

And that’s where things stood when Steve’s marriage ended in June 1977. I had been single for almost a year, going out with various guys but not really involved with anyone. (I did have a few dates with Warren Beatty, which set the office chattering for months.) In September, Steve asked me out. Although I was very tempted, I thought that dating a colleague, even one on an equal level, wasn’t wise. We were in the same meetings every week and if things didn’t work out, it would be awkward. So I refused several times. Finally he stopped asking. Annoyed, he told me that if I ever wanted to go out with him, I would have to do the asking.

The following month, in October 1977, Steve had proposed a cover story on “Is America Turning Right?,” a prescient topic three years before Ronald Reagan was elected president. For the cover, he borrowed one of my writers, David Gelman, who could be eloquent on conceptual topics. The Friday night before the cover closed, I went down to the eleventh floor to see how David was doing. Unfortunately, the story wasn’t in great shape, but Steve assured me that they would fix it and it would be fine.

At home on Saturday, I felt bad for Steve and David. But sitting alone in my bachelorette sublet on East Sixty-Ninth Street, I realized that what I really felt was stupid. Here was this great guy at Newsweek whom I really liked, and I was crazy not to go out with him. On the pretense of finding out how the story came out, I called Steve at the office on Saturday around 5 P.M. He assured me that David had turned the cover around and it was about to go to the printers. “Well, to thank you for all your hard work, I’d like to take you out to dinner,” I said. There was a silence at the other end. Clearly he had other plans. Finally he said, “Okay, I can change some things and meet you for dinner.”

We met at La Goulue, a little French bistro on East Seventieth Street, right around the corner from my apartment. Steve had the usual Saturday night dinner that editors often ordered to celebrate the magazine’s closing: a martini, a big fat steak, french fries, and a glass of red wine. We chatted about the cover story and Reagan and all the Newsweek gossip. At dessert, I asked if he would like to share some profiteroles. Steve confessed that he had never had profiteroles, so we ordered some. I dug my spoon into the creamy pastry puff dripping with chocolate and offered him the first taste. Our eyes met and, as we say in Yiddish, it was bashert—destiny. We went back to my apartment after dinner, where I realized that not only did I like this man, I was falling in love with him. From then on we were a couple and to this day, we celebrate our first-date anniversary on the last Saturday night in October.

In the beginning, we kept our relationship secret. It helped that we worked on separate floors and reported to different Wallendas. Although as single senior editors there was no ethical issue, reporters are professional gossipmongers and we didn’t want to deal with the rumors. In February, we decided to go on vacation to Virgin Gorda and the only people we told were our two bosses. At dinner the first Friday night at Little Dix Bay, we toasted each other, thrilled that we were looking at the moonlit Caribbean rather than working at Newsweek until two in the morning. Just then, a waiter brought over a bottle of wine. We looked around the restaurant and didn’t recognize anyone. Bewildered, we finally saw the card. It read, “Enjoy! From all your friends at Newsweek.” The surprise had been staged by my Sports pal Pete Bonventre, whose brother worked at Little Dix. Those Newsweek reporters were good! Steve and I married in September 1979, and when I left on maternity leave in November 1980, I was given a big send-off at Top of the Week. It was another breakthrough—Newsweek’s first pregnant senior editor.

In the 1980s, Newsweek did better in hiring and promoting women than most media organizations, but progress was slow and painful. There were backtracks and broken promises, injustices and discrimination—and still no women were at the top. When I went on maternity leave, I told the editors to fill my senior editor slot, because I wanted to work part-time when I returned. But there were other candidates who could have risen up the masthead. Mimi McLoughlin, who had the talent and experience to become the first female assistant managing editor, left the magazine in 1986 when she and her husband, Mike Ruby, another Newsweek editor, departed for US News & World Report. In 1989, they became coeditors of US News, making Mimi the first woman to edit a national newsmagazine. Annalyn Swann, a music critic at Time, was hired at Newsweek as a writer in the Arts sections and took over as senior editor in 1983. At one point Kay Graham, a friend of Annalyn’s family, had encouraged her to think about becoming a Wallenda. But, Annalyn later recalled, in talking to Rick Smith, then the editor of Newsweek, “He told me that any Wallenda should be seasoned by front-of-the-book experience as well as back-of-the-book.”

After Dominique left in 1992, several women became AMEs, but none of them made it to the very top. Alexis Gelber, a former National Affairs editor and AME, was a strong contender, but she was married to Mark Whitaker, who became the editor of Newsweek in 1998, the first African American to lead a national news magazine. That put Alexis out of the running. Ann McDaniel, who ran Newsweek’s award-winning Monica Lewinsky coverage as Washington bureau chief—and held the title of managing editor—was a favored candidate, but she didn’t want to leave D.C. In 2001, Don Graham hired her as vice president of the Washington Post Company. Dorothy Kalins was hired in 2001 as Newsweek’s executive editor, the number-three position, but as an accomplished lifestyle editor and founder of Metropolitan Home, Saveur, and Garden Design magazines, she clearly would never become the top editor of a newsmagazine.

Every masthead is a snapshot of a moment in time: women do better at some times than at others. That’s natural, as long as progress flows as well as ebbs—and that usually depends on the person at the top. Some editors, such as Rick Smith and Maynard Parker, worked well with women and hired or promoted many of them. Others seemed to feel more comfortable with a circle of men. In 2008, Don Graham appointed Ann McDaniel to the newly created position of managing director of Newsweek Inc., overseeing both the business and editorial sides of the magazine. It was the second time, since Kay Graham, that Newsweek’s editor reported to a woman.

AND THAT’S WHERE things stood in October 2009, when Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison, and Sarah Ball persuaded their editor to let them write a story about young women in the workplace today. Since the piece was bound to be controversial, the editor, Marc Peyser, kept it under wraps until it was ready. “The three of us had so much fun working on the story,” said Jesse. “We felt like there were echoes of what you all had done forty years earlier—the secrecy of it and the sisterhoodness of it!” They decided not to put their names on an early version that went to the top editors. Instead, they bylined the story “the Dollies,” the patronizing name given the Nation researchers of old. “Marc was worried about repercussions and he thought it would be safer if we didn’t sign it, just for the first draft,” explained Jessica. “He thought it would make the editors think more about who—and how many people—were saying this. But his biggest concern was that they could hold it against us and if it never ran, it would hurt us.”

The women submitted the story to the editors right after Thanksgiving. Then they heard nothing. In January 2010, various editors responded with particular points and fixes they wanted made. The story went from 2,500 words to 6,000 words, then to 3,000 words and finally back to 2,000 words. When Peyser felt it was ready, he resubmitted it. That’s when Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, decided to recuse himself from overseeing the story. “That was a perfect, silent way of killing it,” explained Jessica, “because nobody would make any decisions without Meacham’s approval.”

For two months there was no word from the top, and the fortieth anniversary of our lawsuit was approaching in March. “At that point, I was physically ill, going from lethargic to depressed to angry,” said Jessica. “Jesse lost her voice, Sarah was crying, and we were a mess. We felt if this didn’t run we would have no faith in humanity.” As a reminder of the history of discrimination at Newsweek and the fortieth anniversary news peg, the three women pinned up copies of the 1970 “Women in Revolt” cover over their desks.

At one point, Newsweek’s general manager, Ann McDaniel, asked to see them. “She was coming from a management perspective,” recalled Jesse. “She wanted to see if we had legitimate complaints about the way we were treated, but we didn’t say anything. She talked about convening monthly lunches where we would talk about the women, but none of that happened. It was good to talk to her but it was unclear what her motives were.”

Then they met with Mark Miller, Newsweek’s editorial director, and begged him to run the cover. Miller asked whether the women had been personally discriminated against. “Our strategy was to be positive,” said Jesse. “We felt that the more we said we were discriminated against, the less [likely it was] they would run the piece. So we talked about how it’s not really about Newsweek, it’s bigger than Newsweek, it’s a cultural thing.” Marc Peyser was upset that the women hadn’t relayed their personal grievances. He called Miller and told him about the women’s experiences—and the piece got going.

The four-page story, “Are We There Yet?,” finally ran in the March 22, 2010 issue, almost forty years to the day that we had charged Newsweek with sex discrimination. Leading with our landmark suit, the women questioned how much had actually changed for women since 1970, not only at the magazine but in the workplace in general. They cited statistics showing that full-time working women who haven’t had children still make seventy-seven cents on the male dollar and that in their first job out of business school, female MBAs make $4,600 less per year than male MBAs. In the media, they wrote, “female bylines at major magazines are still outnumbered by seven to one; women are just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and less than a quarter of law partners and politicians.”

They also wrote about Newsweek. In 1970, women made up 25 percent of the editorial masthead; forty years later that number was 39 percent. (Overall, they pointed out, 49 percent of the entire company was female.) But perhaps the most damning statistic they cited was that “men wrote all but six of Newsweek’s 49 cover stories last year—and two of those used the headline ‘The Thinking Man’” (“The Thinking Man’s Guide to Populist Rage,” for example). Then, to cover their tracks, they wrote,: “We should add that we are proud to work at Newsweek. (Really, boss, we are!) We write about our magazine not because we feel it’s worse here, but because Newsweek was once ground zero for a movement that was supposed to break at least one glass ceiling.” The women explained how “somewhere along the road to equality, young women like us lost their voices. So when we marched into the workforce and the fog of subtle gender discrimination, it was baffling and alien. Without a movement behind us, we had neither the language to describe it nor the confidence to call it what it was.” Recognizing that sexism still exists, they said, “is one of the challenges of the new generation.”

The response inside Newsweek was overwhelmingly positive from the young female and male staffers. “One woman said, ‘I can’t believe you guys did this—I truly thought there was no chance in hell it would see the light of day,’” recalled Jessica. “The only negative response we got was hearing that the middle-aged editors thought we were very entitled, that we were just complaining and didn’t appreciate what we had. But it sparked a lot of conversation among the young women in the building.” After the story came out, several women got promotions and there were more covers about women, written by women. Jon Meacham never spoke to the women about the story.

Five months later, in August 2010, the Washington Post Company sold Newsweek for $1 plus its liabilities to ninety-two-year-old audio pioneer Sidney Harman. The magazine had been hemorrhaging revenue and readership for years, but Harman thought it had value and he had the money to invest in it. After a very public search for a new editor, Harman made news again. In November 2010, he announced that Tina Brown, the first female editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, would become editor-in-chief of Newsweek in a joint venture with her website, the Daily Beast. It happened almost by accident, but forty years after forty-six terrified young women sued Newsweek for sex discrimination, there was finally a female name at the very top of the magazine’s masthead. Tina tipped her hat to us in her press interviews. “A merger has created what the lawsuit couldn’t,” she told National Public Radio. In her first editor’s letter, she said she was “honored to be the first female editor of Newsweek,” but unaware of the behind-the-scenes details of our lawsuit, she also wrote, “I’m both humbled and grateful to know that the trail was blazed long ago, and that Kay Graham blazed it. This issue is dedicated to her memory and inspired by her example.”

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.”