Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Good Girls Revolt

Caution: I’ll use quotes and specific details, but they probably won’t ruin your experience if you read this before the book.

When I chose Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich as my first of 52 books by women I’m reading this year, I expected to learn a lot about my history as a woman in journalism. What I didn’t expect was a book that was very much about my present, too.

The book explores Povich’s experience working for and suing Newsweek magazine in 1971 along with several other women for the right to be hired, promoted, and compensated equally to their male coworkers. The lawsuit was the first of its kind and changed journalism and the magazine industry forever.

From the first pages, Povich describes the women of Newsweek feeling like they individually could never measure up to their male peers. It’s a feeling that’s all to0 familiar to me. While in graduate school for terrorism studies, I too felt that I could never measure up to my male counterparts- a feeling shared by several of my female classmates (about 20 percent of students in my year and program were women). But the truth is we could all keep up. Every one of us is good enough. It wasn’t until Newsweek’s female staff began sharing their frustrations that they realized the truth; they were systemically being kept from advancing at work because of their gender.

Perhaps the most difficult part of being in an institutionally sexist environment is the cultural gaslighting that convinces you that you personally are not good enough and that you’re not experiencing oppression. In my master’s program, this gaslighting looked like nice guys that treated me with respect and yet never seemed to take me that seriously when I spoke up in class. In the book, Nora Ephron explains that at Newsweek it was the same, “What’s interesting is how institutionally sexist it was without necessarily being personally sexist.” The gaslighting continued between the women themselves; the few women (about 10 percent of the total women in the program) who were succeeding, convinced the rest of us that we simply weren’t as qualified/skilled/smart as them. After all, if they could succeed, it must be our own failings and shortcomings that were holding us back. Often they were supportive, but occasionally when other women brought up their concerns with those who were successful, their frustrations would be met with denials that any sexism was happening.

As the Newsweek lawsuit continued, progress was marked by small concessions. Where no women had been promoted before, a few were beginning to get their due. And while it’s great that some women were starting to have successful careers beyond the research desk at Newsweek, it’s not enough that some women succeed. All women must feel that it is realistically possible for them to ascend to the highest levels if only they have the skills and willingness to work for it. This was the problem at Newsweek in the 1970s, and it was still the problem on my university campus when I graduated in 2014. We didn’t feel it was possible for us to succeed at the same levels as the men.

The Newsweek lawsuit happened over 40 years ago, and in an ironic twist it’s perhaps more relevant now than it ever was before. This fall, Amazon debuted a (fantastic) first season based on Good Girls Revolt (by the same name) and promptly cancelled it without involving any women in the decision- a violation of one of the major points of contention in the original lawsuit. Mariana Gosnell, one of the plaintiffs points out that, “ We said we wouldn’t sign an agreement that didn’t include a woman in the meetings where the decisions were being made,” and yet that’s exactly what happened with the decision to silence their story about fighting to create meaningful and lasting change in the workforce.

Excluding women either by making them feel silenced when they are included or by straight up keeping them out of boardrooms and away from important decisions is still all too common. In fact, if I were to summarize why I chose to change fields after devoting myself to graduate level studies and earned a degree, I would say that I grew tired of fighting for a place at the table I had already earned and could not imagine spending the rest of my life battling for the right to have a voice rather than using my knowledge and experience to make a positive impact on the world. It’s no small wonder that so many fields still have significantly fewer women than men when women know that they will have a far greater impact in an environment where they are allowed to thrive.

Next week I’ll be reading Stacy Schiff’s The Witches.