The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich Page A

conference in his eleventh-floor office. After the story line-up was set, the writers sent queries to the bureaus asking for on-the-ground reporting. The color-coded files arrived on Thursday and Friday: blue from the international bureaus, green from Washington, and pink from the domestic correspondents. Then the creative rituals and angst would kick in. Pacing the halls in their socks or rocking in their chairs, the writers would cull the information from our reports and the rainbow-colored files and weave it all into a smart, colorful analysis or description of the week’s events. Harry Waters, my boss, would pepper me for the right word or phrase, nervously asking, “How does this sound?” or “Listen to this.” Paul Zimmerman, a movie critic, was called “the talking blue” because he proudly read aloud to any passerby the blue-inked mimeographs of his latest review. The entire magazine was written and edited in forty-eight hours, culminating in Friday nights that lasted until one or two in the morning because the Wallendas would take a two-hour, martini-soaked dinner break at Giambelli’s across the street.
    Describing the weekly routine, Carole Wicker, a researcher at Time, wrote a typically sexualized, over-the-top piece for Cosmopolitan magazine titled “Limousine to Nowhere . . . if You’re a Girl at a News Magazine.” In it she quoted an unnamed Newsweek staffer on what it was like to be a researcher: “It’s a mini-marriage, between researcher and writer, with the orgasm coming at the end of the week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, everything goes easy. By Thursday, the pitch is higher. Friday afternoon you’re flying, and by Friday midnight you go over the top.” “What she’s saying,” explained Wicker in the piece, “is that the researcher is drawn into the writer’s pattern, inch by inch, pressure by pressure, until she’s lost her own being and becomes an extension of her boss.”
    That didn’t describe most of us but there was definitely a caste system at Newsweek . “For every man there was an inferior woman, for every writer there was a checker,” said Nora Ephron. “They were the artists and we were the drones. But what is interesting is how institutionally sexist it was without necessarily being personally sexist. To me, it wasn’t oppressive. They were just going to try to sleep with you—and if you wanted to, you could. But no one was going to fire you for not sleeping with them.”
    By the mid-’60s when the sexual revolution was in full swing, the magazine was a cauldron of hormonal activity. Protected by the Pill, women felt as sexually entitled as the men, and our short skirts and sometimes braless tops only added to the boil. Mix in a schedule culminating in long days and nights, and it ignited countless affairs between the writers and editors and the researchers. For the most part, the office flings were friendly and consensual, and a few turned into marriages. “The way we related to men was through sexual bantering,” recalled Trish Reilly, a former researcher in the back of the book. “It was the way a compliment was made at Newsweek .” “Flirting was part of the game,” said Lucy Howard, “and you knew how to handle it. You had to be charming and witty and not cringe at their dirty jokes. It was a Mad Men kind of atmosphere.”
    There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in. When she was visiting one time in New York, Liz Peer sat in on a story meeting. “The dialogue was eighth grade boys’ locker room,” she told a reporter at the Village Voice . “To see the powerful decision-makers of a national magazine talking about tits and asses and farts! I thought, I’m working for these clowns .” Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the Newsweek of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the