In my mind, what she said meant this: In feminism and in writing and in life, righteous indignation alone—divorced from action or a sense of the absurd—will not be cute for long. It will ripen, and it will rot. And who among us likes to clean up rot?
—The wonderful Sarah Ball, on what Nora Ephron told us. She put it better than anyone, it’s stuck with me since she wrote it, and it deserves a shout-out, even months after the fact.
(Source: jesseellison)
Nora Ephron’s first job was as a Newsweek “mail girl” in 1962. In her interview, she was asked why she wanted the job.
“I want to be a writer,” she told the woman.
“Women don’t write at Newsweek,” she was told.
“That was what it meant to be a girl then,” Ephron later told us.
(Photo via the NYT)
— The always brilliant and wry Nora Ephron, in a 1996 Wellesley Commencement Speech, which is worth reading in its entirety.
(Source: jessbennett)
Nora Ephron on the premiere of NBC’s The Playboy Club, in this week’s NEWSWEEK:
I worry (as someone who was an adult in the 1960s) that young people will see The Playboy Club and think that this is what life was like back then and that Hefner, as he also says in his weird, creepy voice-over, was in fact “changing the world, one Bunny at a time.”
So I would like to say this:
1. Trust me, no one wanted to be a Bunny.
2. A Bunny’s life was essentially that of an underpaid waitress forced to wear a tight costume.
3. Playboy did not change the world.
More: A history of the Playboy club (photos).
(Source: newsweek)
SALON: You write about your start in journalism, at Newsweek, in a “Mad Men” era when there was this incredible male hierarchy, and you were stuck in …
EPHRON: … the girls’ department.
SALON: The girls’ department. I think it’s an immensely confusing time for people who weren’t there, because at the same time, you did have women like Lillian Ross, whom you write about in another essay, who was a big star at the New Yorker.
EPHRON: Well, there were exceptions to the rule. And I think there were always exceptions to the rule, fewer and fewer as you go back in time. But it was so clear in my house that we were all going to end up being writers. And that my extremely powerful, albeit eventually fairly wacky, parents would be disappointed in us if we weren’t. And since our mother was a writer, you know, it all seemed like maybe this could be done, to me.
A friend of mine was a woman writer at Time — Josie Davis, who died very young — and you knew, therefore, that there weren’t going to be any other [women] writers at Time. There was going to be one at a place. And the result of that was that there was a tremendous amount of submerged competition among the handful of us that were climbing the greasy pole. Because you really did think, is she going to get it? Or am I? There was never any sense that there was room for all of you. It seems to me that a great deal of that is gone now.
Hm. But is it really? Read the full interview.
Ms. Blog
We Love: The Newsweek 3
(And we love being called the Newsweek 3!)
Salon
But part of pushing through the “the fog of subtle gender discrimination,” as they call it, means telling these stories publicly, to women and men. So, to this trio, I say: You go, women.
Daily Intel (NY Mag)
The young women who wrote this week’s piece are evidence that there are still women there like the youthful Ephron, who are willing to bet that they can be the exception to the rule.
Women’s Media Center
Unveiling a national magazine’s sexism—on its own pages, particularly—serves as an audacious and powerful weapon in a struggle that’s far from over.
ABC
Newsweek still wages gender war, 40 years later.
Mediaite
Kudos to Newsweek
Authentic Organizations
You’d think that feminists around the blogosphere would have rallied to the cause of the Newsweek 3. After all, advocacy requires courage, and courage requires social support. What you’ll find, instead, is a conversation about how the women and their advocacy is not good enough. You’ll read that these three women –white women, college-educated women, physically able women, English as first language women – can’t possibly represent “feminism”.
And Authentic Organizations again here
Will Newsweek respond to claims of sexism?
Being told that “women don’t write here,” via NYMag.
Nora Ephron, with notebook, covering Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 senate campaign for the New York Post. (Photo: Arty Pomerantz)
Read more: Excerpted From ‘My First New York,’ Nora Ephron, Ashley Dupré, and Others Share Their Early Days — New York Magazine
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