The Good Girls' Revolt

We've made progress since 1970, but how much.  40 years after female "researches" sued Newsweek for employment discrimination, the hard sexism of job restrictions (Seven Sisters educated women with reporting experience stuck in jobs as fact checkers for Ivy League men with no experience) was replaced with the soft sexism of frat boy patter. In 2010, three young Newsweek reporters, Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison,and Sarah Bell were fed up with having to fight for what was handed to their male colleagues, and putting up with broism on top of it. so they wrote about their experiences for Newsweek, and while researching, found out that 40 years earlier, 46 women sued the magazine for workplace discrimination.

Lynne Povich was one of those women. Although her father was a reporter (Shirly Povich, legendary sports columnist for the Washington Post), she'd never thought about being a writer.  She just wanted to live in France, and a secretarial job with Newsweek's Paris bureau was how she could achieve that. After two years, she landed in New York City,, where women (some of them later famous, including Nora Ephron and Jane Bryant Quinn) collected clippings and checked facts for men who got bylines. It was tradition, and by 19645 it was illegal.

Led by Judy Gingold, Margaret Montague, and Lucy Howard, the group grew through ladies' room conversations and lunches at The Women's Exchange. On the day Newsweek published a cover story (written by an external writer because Povich was one of only two women writers, and neither had the experience for a cover story) on the women's movement, the 46 women filed their suit. ACLU attorney Eleanor Holmes Norton negotiated a settlement, but two years later, all that had happened was there were men in the research department and a few women and been set up to fail in their trials as writers.  Since Holmes Norton was now on the New York Human Rights Division, the women turned to Harrie Rabb and the employment clinic at Columbia University. This time, they won lasting concessions which led to, among other things, Povich becoming the first female editor at Newsweek and Eleanor Clift the first woman to cover the White House for a major news organization.  Not all of the women became writers or remained in the media, but those who did (and those who didn't) opened the door a crack.