Gendrification
The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times.
by Nan Robertson.
Random House. 274 pp. $22.00.
A journalist who has spent three decades of her life working at the New York Times, Nan Robertson was one of six women who in the mid-1970’s sued the paper for “broad patterns and practices of sex discrimination,” thus becoming a main character in what she calls “the single most important collective event in the history of women at the New York Times.” She is probably right about the significance of the event. Though the paper seems to have been an anxious-to-please affirmative-action employer even before the suit, after the mau-mauing it received in Boylan v. The New York Times (as the suit was titled), it emerged as the thoroughly race-and-gender obsessed institution it is today.
The plot goes roughly like this: in the early 70’s, several women in the New York headquarters of the paper began to chafe at what they would eventually label sex discrimination, although Robertson is a little vague about what that means, especially as the core women plaintiffs all seem to have enjoyed relatively smooth and fast ascents. At the time of the filing, for example, Robertson had recently been dispatched to Paris to take on “the most challenging assignment of [her] career.” Betsy Wade Boylan was the highest-paid copy editor on the newsroom floor. Grace Glueck, an arts columnist, had turned down a promotion to assistant metropolitan editor in charge of cultural news after fifteen months on the job—demanding of the newsroom, “Who do I have to f—to get out of this?”
But chafe they did, and to remedy the situation they began to do things like sending memos of complaint and a petition to the publisher. To each of these gauntlets the Times management seems to have reacted swiftly, sympathetically, and accommodatingly. But this too was evidently unsatisfactory, and in 1973 the Women’s Caucus, as the little group called itself, decided to hire a lawyer. The one they chose, Harriet Rabb, had already handled a class-action suit on behalf of women at Newsweek magazine—during this same period, sex-discrimination suits or Equal Employment Opportunity complaints were also being filed at Time, the Reader’s Digest, the Washington Post, Newsday, the Associated Press, and NBC—and she ridiculed the caucus members for their overly ladylike bargaining tactics. “Don’t think of this company as the liberal New York Times, think of it as the Georgia Power company,” she urged them. “They don’t treat their women any differently.”
In November 1974, the caucus filed suit, charging the Times with “discrimination against women on the basis of their sex in recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, and conditions of employment.” Soon, the plaintiffs found themselves in the purgatory of litigation. To justify differences in salary and promotion, the Times was required to open personnel files, air personal memos, and make franker and franker appraisals of employees’ talents. After four years of this—with the rhetoric getting nastier and nastier and with relationships between editors and writers who had worked together for years becoming more and more strained—both sides agreed to settle out of court to avoid a trial and any further blackening of reputations.
The terms included a settlement of $350,000 for (depending on which side you were on) “back pay” or “annuities.” Most importantly, it provided for an even more assiduous, court-monitored affirmative-action hiring plan. The company agreed to try to appoint one woman for every eight men in its top corporate positions and to try to hire one woman for every four men in the newspaper’s editorial and business departments.
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Robertson’s book is much more than a rehearsal (and a rather sour and tractlike one at that) of legal history. In fact, the best parts are the padding, consisting of spirited profiles of women at the Times that incidentially provide a nice picture of daily newspaper life and types.
Exhaustively researched from diaries, interviews, and archives, these profiles build affection for the women of the Times, many of whom will appear later in the legal drama. But what the profiles are also supposed to do, and what they do not do, is convince the reader that a sex-discrimination suit was a burning necessity. Try as Robertson does to build a picture of a pattern of discrimination, what really comes through is how sexy a place the Times was and—especially—what a good time everybody had when women first began sifting in numbers into its all-male newsrooms. As one reporter recalled her first day:
The city room lay in front of me as I entered a masculine domain. I found myself the lone female in a sea of male reporters. . . . I hardly dared savor the glory. All those men. . . . Suddenly I was placed in equal position with a man in a profession I believed hallowed. I also dared the fleeting thought that among all these masculine forms perhaps I would find a husband.
“The masculine forms,” Robertson writes, “straightened from their habitual slouches, electrified” at the sight of her.
This is hardly to say that men did not resist women’s entry to the newspaper field. But there were a variety of reasons for the resistance. One of the impulses was protective. Old-style newspaper work was physically grueling, undignified, and in some ways defeminizing. It involved standing out in the rain, chasing people down the street, hanging out with policemen and criminals.
And there was the status question. Before 1965 or thereabouts, journalism was seen as a sleazy, dishonest profession—and many of the men liked it that way. It was a place where boys could be boys. The influx of women happened at about the same time that the Woodwards and Bernsteins came bounding in, at about the same time that journalism began to be professionalized, cleaned up. Thus, the resistance to women may have been less to women per se than to the arrival of a cleaner, more respectable type of journalist.
In fact, it is possible to see from Robertson’s own account that the main feeling in the newly integrated workplace, on the part of men and women alike, was less outright resistance than ambivalence, tinged with sexual excitement. On Betsy Wade Boylan’s first day on the copy desk, someone in the “sea of men” removed the spittoons from the floor and—in an attempt at welcome—put a ruffle around her paste pot. The men she worked with fell into three categories, Boylan later recalled. There were those who muttered, “The place is getting to be a bloody tea party, not like the old days.” A second group was “too kind”: she could not “struggle twenty seconds with a headline before someone would present her with his version, all done up with alternate word choices.” The third “just toiled away and ignored her,” though every once in a while someone would tell a clean joke “to make [her] feel less like a temperance worker at a brewery picnic.”
What does all this have to do with the rash of sex-discrimination suits of the 70’s? At the Times and elsewhere, men and women found themselves squashed close together in a highly charged environment. The relationships, the feelings about the place and about one’s work grew very intense. The Times in particular was a way of life, not just a place to pick up a paycheck. It is impossible not to see in the mass of details that Robertson has collected that the women of the early 70’s caught themselves falling in love with their work, with their co-workers, with their bosses. Barriers had to be erected. Encouraged by the rhetoric of the time, they decided that they had “been had.”
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The ugliness of the ensuing legal fight—which both sides often refer to as “like a divorce”—ensured that things at the Times would never be the same again. But instead of geting easier, relations seem if anything to have gotten worse. The level of sheer testiness at the paper today is exemplified by the woman senior editor who reported to Robertson that she and her colleagues have been “keeping track of the number of times they had been interrupted” by men at meetings. (Executive Editor Max Frankel, when apprised of their “findings,” at first “reacted with incredulity and then promised to do better.”) Another complained to Robertson that “managerial meetings on the news floor at the Times had given her anxiety attacks and sent her into therapy.” Perceived slights proliferate, and in general the Times is well on its way to the brave new world of “gender bias awareness,” in which the more subtle varieties of alleged sexism are identified and purged.
As an institution, meanwhile, the Times has continued on its course of steady appeasement. In the area of hiring, the paper’s new publisher, forty-one-year-old Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., told Robertson that in his regime “managers would be judged more and more on the effectiveness with which they hired and encouraged a diverse work force.” As I learned recently from speaking to a representative of the Times, the paper’s policy has in fact “evolved into something that’s more aggressive than a simple quota approach. In every single case we try to make sure that we look at females and minorities for every position in the news department.” The seriousness with which this policy is taken, according to the spokesman, is reflected in the fact that “in the last twelve months 53 percent of the new hires in the news department have been women and minorities. We’re on track with our goals, at least in the last year.” Were managers who failed to find female or minority hires penalized? I asked. Was this failure the kind of thing that would be mentioned in a yearly review or a personnel file? At this the spokesman seemed to get offended. “We don’t need sanctions,” I was told. “This is something we enthusiastically embrace.”
No doubt they do. And no doubt, too, women at the Times are sincere in their belief that (in the words of one of Robertson’s informants) “we are drowned out, not listened to, . . . dismissed, passed over.” Thus do affirmative-action regimes make monkeys of us all. The only question is, what else did anyone expect?
