When the women rose up — and won

ON A MONDAY morning in March, 1970, Newsweek’s cover on ‘Women in Revolt’ hit the newsstands.

It was the first serious treatment of the women’s movement by a major news magazine. Ms magazine, the bible of the movement, would not be launched until the following year. But any satisfaction for the male editors was dispelled by a press conference that same morning by the women of Newsweek to announce they were suing the magazine for gender discrimination.

The fallout from that lawsuit, which the women won, chipped away at the “Mad Men” culture that had reigned for so long, bringing women into the conversation and changing the way Newsweek reported on an array of issues that would over the decades transform life as I had known it.

Attitudes about women were pretty primitive back then. Before becoming a reporter, I was a girl Friday in the Atlanta bureau; when Katharine Graham, Newsweek’s publisher, visited, we had to take her up the back stairs to the room we had reserved for lunch at the stodgy Commerce Club because women weren’t allowed. We laughed at the absurdity of it even as changing the system didn’t yet seem an option. In New York, Peter Goldman, the magazine’s premiere writer, remembers Mrs Graham talking about how, after her husband, Phil, died, she was thrust into the leadership of Newsweek and The Washington Post, and the lone woman on numerous corporate boards; when board members were polled on some company policy, he recalls her saying, they would go around the table and skip right over her.

The gender-discrimination suit against Newsweek opened the door for me to become a reporter at a time when the barriers were coming down for women, and the magazine, like the country, was catching up with half the population’s ambitions, talents, and skills. From where I stood, every step forward seemed like a small miracle.

I was a new White House correspondent in the spring of 1977 when Jody Powell, President Carter’s press secretary, tapped me on the shoulder in the press room and said the president wanted to see me. We were doing a cover on Rosalynn Carter, pegged to the president’s decision to send his wife to represent him on a visit to Latin America. There were cries of “Who elected her?” and Newsweek commissioned a poll to survey public opinion. As I entered the Oval Office, Carter exclaimed, “You’ve come to talk about my Eleanor.” It was clearly a play on Eleanor Roosevelt, the gold standard for first-lady activism, but it turns out Eleanor is also Rosalynn’s first name. Carter was ahead of his time in declaring his wife an equal partner, and he didn’t back down in the face of public pressure.

Consciousness raising was needed in the editorial offices of Newsweek, just as it was in Washington DC, and in the kitchens and bedrooms of Middle America. When Gloria Steinem, the avatar of the women’s movement, was featured on an August 1971 cover, the text called her “The New Woman: Liberated Despite Beauty, Chic, and Success” (emphasis mine). Mrs Graham, initially wary of feminism, gave Steinem $20,000 seed money to found Ms. magazine.

In 1975 bylines were added, giving writers recognition. In 1978, Lynn Povich — one of the women who spearheaded the Newsweek suit and who became Newsweek’s first female senior editor — suggested a cover on “How Men Are Changing” in a cover conference. The other editors mocked her, saying she must be having difficulty finding a date after her divorce. “I argued how can you change 50% of the population without affecting the other 50%?” She prevailed, and the cover drawing showed a man wearing an apron stirring a pot and looking down at a little girl holding a doll. Reflecting on the coverage in those days, Povich wonders, “Were we ahead of the times or just reflecting the times?” Either way, the times were changing.

Health stories flourished, many of them written by Jeanie Seligmann. Women’s issues were in the news — breast cancer, the pill — and she covered them, prompting a male friend to tell her, “Your beat is from the ovary to the thigh.” Seligmann did the first real story in a major magazine, in the early ’70s, on anorexia.

In 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro was nominated for vice president, I was on the floor of the Democratic convention, along with a lot of women. It was such a special moment; we all had tears in our eyes.

In 1992, the Year of the Woman, when a record number of women were elected to Congress, a congressman was quoted saying there were so many women on Capitol Hill, the place reminded him of a shopping mall. “I remember asking him, ‘Where do you shop?’” Democratic Rep Patricia Schroeder recalled, noting that women were still only 10% of the lawmakers.

Schroeder, always quick with a quip, found her words frequently featured on Newsweek’s Perspectives page in the ’80s. Calling President Reagan “the Teflon president” was one of her most memorable quotes. But when she ran for president in 1988, she couldn’t have been more serious. And when she ended her run, giving in to tears, she was criticised for reinforcing the stereotype of the emotional female.

For years , Schroeder kept a “crying folder” of all the men who were applauded for tearing up in public, saying if she ran again, “I should get Kleenex as my corporate sponsor.”

When Hillary Clinton came to Washington as first lady, covering the president’s wife was a hot beat. Here was a woman who epitomised the cultural battles of the ‘70s. She was as educated and ambitious as her husband. Hillary would bring the country health care, a goal that set her at odds with Congress and prompted the same cries of “Who elected her?” that had dogged Rosalynn Carter a generation earlier.

As Hillary’s reform efforts stalled , I was summoned to an off-the-record session with her in the West Wing.

She talked about how lawmakers wouldn’t “dare” vote against health coverage for all Americans. What if she didn’t prevail, I asked. With a wave of her arm, she said, “I can always travel.” And that’s what she did, declaring at the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, “Women’s rights are human rights.” After the 1994 election, a whole new breed of lawmakers had taken control in a backlash to the Clintons. The female members had cut their teeth in the pro-life movement, and did away with the once easy assumption that if you were a woman, you were pro-choice and liberal. But the women’s movement is not over. A majority of women (55% ) identified as a feminist in a Ms magazine exit poll in 2012. They know this is about power, and when it’s about power, you can never let up.

* Eleanor Clift is a contributor to Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

©2012 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC