Pat Lynden, one of the original Newsweek organizers, reflects on her time
Women of my generation had very little confidence in their ability to function independently and professionally. We at Newsweek had gone to top colleges, had significant academic achievements, but those simply increased our ornamental value as future wives whose destinies would end with motherhood. We were the last of the post-Victorians: there was a premium on virginity (observed mostly in the breach, it seemed), and a great many rules of behavior that a girl had to follow to be considered a lady— very important. At Newsweek, thin 20-something women armored themselves in girdles, wore seamed stockings to show that their legs were not *really* bare, wore gloves on the street even if it was hot, and skirts—never pants (they came later). Then came the sexual revolution (and pants), followed by the women’s movement, and our world was suddenly upended. That was definitely a relief, maybe a little scary, and the upshot was that we women decided the time had come to ask for more from our bosses.
Almost all of us were researchers at Newsweek, a job that no longer exists. Like the helpmates we were raised to be, we hung around for long hours, waiting for male writers to finish their stories, and then we fact checked them. We also answered their phones, kept their pencils sharp, their coffee cups full and endured their sometimes bad behavior quietly. We had been told at our hiring that we couldn’t write for the magazine, or, by implication, become correspondents or editors. But, as the man who hired me said brightly, research was a “really good job for a woman.”
And it was a good job—always interesting, and, in spite of Newsweek’s refusal to hire women writers, we women learned the craft of journalism—partly by osmosis, partly by extensive reporting which we were allowed to do. But by the winter of 1969-70, nine of us, emboldened by the feminist movement, as well as our collective anger with the magazine, were meeting regularly to figure out how to break through the caste system. We decided we needed a lawyer and found the perfect one: a fiery, very pregnant, Eleanor Holmes Norton, then of the American Civil Liberties Union, now a congresswoman from Washington DC. Eleanor was our guide, our coach and our scold, once yelling at us in exasperation, “White glove ladies! Take off those white gloves!” By the time March 1970 came around, 46 of us and Eleanor were ready, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Sadly, history didn’t play out as we hoped it would. The working world has always been a men’s club, and now, once again, it has stopped letting women in. In many ways, this generation of women find themselves in the same predicament we were in, but without the support the women’s movement gave us. It’s encouraging to see their enviable self-confidence, which spurred the Newsweek women to write that first rate story in the first place. What remains to be seen is whether that article sparks a national conversation.
(Photo: The New York Daily News, circa March 16, 1970. “Newshens,” really?!)
