
On the one hand, as woman writing on the website youâre reading right now, I couldnât be more of a prime target for a television show about women at a newspaper in the 1960s and â70s rising up and saying âFuck you!â to all their oppressive male coworkers and bosses. On the other, thereâs something about how well-matched I am to the topic that prompted an eye-roll when I first heard the premise for Good Girls Revolt. The subject-matter was too familiar for me to find it inspiringâat least, at first.
Good Girls Revolt is a now-streaming Amazon pilot based off a book by a 2012 book by Lynn Povich called The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace. Itâs one of several shows that have cropped up in the past few years devoted to women in media and/or the womenâs movement during that time period, including Lena Dunhamâs Max, about âthe stirrings of second-wave feminism, as seen through the eyes of an ambitious magazine writer who stumbles her way into the womenâs movement,â and HBOâs series on the creation of Ms. magazine. Just this week, Olivia Munn announced she was developing anotherâthis one about âa young journalist who gets hired by an ambitious New York news programming chief as a publicity stunt to be one of the first female on-air sports reporters.â
Itâs easy to see why this particular time period has sparked such an interest: the success of Mad Men and its focus on gender roles has combined with a growing population of young women creators in Hollywood who are likely to find the stories of their motherâs generation increasingly interesting. And despite a recent disaster in The Newsroom, journalistsâlike doctors, lawyers and copsâare easy fodder for both large and small screens.
While Good Girls Revolt fictionalizes the newsroom it covers, changing Newsweek to a magazine called News of the Week, Povichâs book is as fact-based as it comes: she herself was one of the 46 women working at Newsweek who sued the magazine on April 26, 1970. In Povichâs words, itâs âthe story of how and why we became the first women in the media to sue for sex discrimination,â told via her memories, as well as interviews with her fellow plaintiffs and their colleagues.
That their work structure feels so old-fashioned is a testament to how successful the âgood girls revoltâ actually was. If you were a woman who worked at Newsweek (or at most publications in those days), you were a researcher who worked with a reporter, which meant you did a lot of the work for the reporter to craft into an article for which he would get all the credit. Combine that dynamic with an environment where everyone was sleeping with each other (or trying to) and you got a powder keg of drama and discriminatory practices. As Povich explains:
My boss, Harry Waters, told me when he came to the magazine in 1962, âit was a discreet orgy. When I interviewed for the job, my editor said to me, âThe best part of the job is that you get to screw the researcher.â âThat,â he went on, âreflected the position of women at the newsmagazines, both literally and figuratively. It reinforced in young women that thatâs their positionâitâs underneath. Thatâs as far as they can get.â
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The women secretly organized for months until they filed their lawsuit with now-Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, then at the ACLU. Once they filed, their male coworkers (and Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, who also oversaw Newsweek) were surprised, to put things very lightly. Still, the response wasnât all negative, though it would be an uphill battle to get promised promotions; Povich describes how one sympathetic editor, Osborn Elliott, came around to their plight.
âMy consciousness at the time was zero,â he admitted to me before he died in 2008. âHere we were busily carving out a new spot as a liberal magazine and right under our noses was this oppressive regimeâand no one had a second thought! It was pretty clear to me on that Monday that the women were right.â
Despite knowing that several famous feminists passed through NewsweekâNora Ephron, Susan Brownmillerâand feeling familiar with the way this decade pertains to media history, I barely remembered this lawsuit before reading Povichâs book. Nor did I remember the controversy she covers involving Jezebel, when journalists Sarah Ball, Jessica Bennett and Jesse Ellison at Newsweek struggled to get the anniversary of the lawsuit covered by their own publication in 2010.
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âItâs nice to see a full-throated embrace of feminism by the magazine that, among its many cycles in and out of the gender war, was responsible for one of Susan Faludiâs signature examples of the 1980s backlash against feminism,â Irin Carmon wrote on this website after the piece came out, before going on to point out that there are no women of color mentioned in the story, and that the entire piece reads as navel-gaze-y, a missed opportunity to discuss a wider variety of issues plaguing women today, as well as five years ago, as well as 45 too.
Itâs not that women of color werenât working at Newsweek in 1970, but that they decided not to join the suit against the magazine. Povich interviews two black women who worked at Newsweek, who explain they didnât feel that their concerns and experiences were the same as those of their white coworkers. At one point, Holmes Norton (who is black) is described as being frustrated with the hesitancy of the white women she is working with, yelling at them, âYou God damn middle-class womenâyou think you can just go to Daddy and ask for what you want?â
But otherwise, itâs true: black women are not the story in Povichâs book, nor are they the story in Newsweekâs followup. In an update on their blog The Equality Myth, and in Povichâs book, Ball, Bennett, and Ellison argue that Jezebelâs criticism was distracting:
âYou can argue about sexism,â said Jesse, âbut in the feminist blogosphere, thereâs a strange infighting that happens thatâs destructive. When Jezebel attacked us, I felt like I had lost a best friend. Nobody can be feminist enough. I see so much of that on these sites. Feminism takes on an exclusionary sensibility and competitiveness.â
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Noting that their piece had originally contained quotes from people of color, Ball, Bennett, and Ellison elaborate on the angle of the edit:
But for better or worse, Newsweek is a mainstream publication, writing for a mainstream audience, so we have to assume our readers arenât as entrenched in the inner workings of feminism as we, or some of our readers, are. In that sense, itâs only natural that we would use mainstream sourcesâmany of whom, yes, are white.
The problem of trying to appeal to a mainstream audience is a complaint that comes up in Good Girls Revolt, the show, if from an entirely different perspective. With Grace Gummer barely recognizable in a wig as Nora Ephron, Joy Bryant as Holmes Norton, and Anna Camp and Genevieve Angelson as researchers Jane and Patti (one more straight-laced, the other a burgeoning hippie), the show purports to show the struggle for womenâs equalityâbut in a fun way.
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âTheyâre reporters, weâre researchers. We report, investigate, and write files for the reporters; they do a pass on them, put their names of them, and then the stories go to press,â Patti explains to Nora about the researcher-reporter dynamic as she joins the newsroom on her first day, though itâs Nora who gets all the good lines.
âItâs like you guys are fighting over the lower bunk bed in jail: who gets to make the guys who are writing the story look better,â she says to Jane and Patti, as they battle over who gets to do research on a breaking story out of California involving a death at the 1969 Altamont Festival. (âI donât joke about writing or cooking,â Nora says at another point.)
The main fight of the pilot involves Jane and Patti hustling to get their bossesâwho wonât allow them to publish articles with anonymous sources: ah, those days!âto consider the words of a backup singer and a groupie valid. âThese are our man on the street interviews, except they happen to women with no clout,â Patti says, when a woman who goes by âJuicy Lucy,â who casts the penises of the rock stars she sleeps with in plaster, is rejected as a credible source. âNo one on the subway or in the entire state of Wisconsin can relate to her,â the dick editor, William âWickâ McFadden, played by Jim Belushi, says. âTheyâre not mainstream, honey.â
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Youâre supposed to see the obvious similarity between Patti and her sources. As Danielle, the backup singer who wonât let her name be used for fear of retribution from the bands she works with, explains, âIâm disposable. Iâm a backup singer. My job is to sweeten the bandâs sound. And I do that only as long as I look good and sound good to them. You dig it?â
At the end of the episode, Nora quits when she finds out that, though she wrote words praised by said dick editor, the reporter she works with is going to get the credit regardless. âWell, your name is all you have to journalism,â dick editor responds. âSo, good luck, Nora Ephron.â Itâs a joke, see: we know what happened to Nora and her name.

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The women have complicated relationships with their coworkers/boyfriends. Patti wonât give up her career aspirations for hers, Jane spends her life trying to please hers, and Cindyâs (played by Erin Darke) is poking holes in her diaphragm. But by the end of the episode, things have shifted: âSomehow everything feels different,â Cindy says after Nora invites them to a consciousness-raising circle hosted by Holmes Norton. âYou know, maybe things could change,â Patti responds.
Itâs so hokey itâs hard not to gag a bit. And yet, I didnât. Good Girls Revolt covers egregious levels sexism that I havenât seen or experienced firsthand in my life, but at times, Povichâs original source material felt uncomfortably true to modern diversity strugglesâenough to lift the show up from its cheesiness. For example, when she describes the troubles Newsweek had in reforming their hiring practices, it sounds familiar:
One of the major problems in recruiting women writers was that vacancies were not posted. The editors simply continued to recruit through their old-boy network. At one meeting, Oz admitted that the editors didnât have any âresourcesâ for finding writers; they just asked friends and colleagues in the business, obviously all male.
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Or on the frustrations they had with trying to get women promoted:
This was the problem we had anticipated in arguing for more women writers: the judgment of what is good reporting and good writing is purely subjective.
Or:
Management still seemed stumped about how to move forward, and at the December and January meetings, they asked us for constructive solutions.
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Povichâs story ends relatively happily; she tells of the strides their lawsuit had in getting women jobs in places like Readerâs Digest, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. Though, as longtime Times employee Gail Collins explains, it was more beneficial for some than others.
âI arrived in New York approximately one second after the women at places like the New York Times and Newsweek had filed lawsuits,â she recalled. âThe women who fought those fights were not the ones who got the rewards. People like me, who came right behind them, got the good jobs and the promotions.
Newsweek then is not Newsweek now, but the same issues have trickled over to newer publications. Today, employees benefit from transparency; you can easily count the diversity or lack thereof at your company and tell the world about it. And yet, when purported accountability is often seen as a stand-in for action, employees suffer too.
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Embarrassingly, I couldnât sleep after finishing just one episode of Good Girls Revolt. I couldnât help but obsess over how complacent Iâve been in assuming that expressing support for diversity at my own company would be roughly equivalent to standing up and demanding it. A conundrum from the â70s remains: if the purpose of this job is primarily to uplift the stories of people with smaller voices, how do you best go about doing it within your own job, and the industry at large? Do it the wrong way and you are criticized for not being diverse enough, within this your plea for diversity. Donât do it at all and youâre limiting the types of stories an editorial body will tell.
Povichâs book, and the pilot that came from it, are proof that speaking out leads to results, if not perfect ones. The Newsweek lawsuit had a tangible effect on the publicationâs slant: an analysis of Newsweek articles âbetween 1969 and 1975 by a student at the University of Missouri showed that the number of lines devoted to women or womenâs issues nearly doubled in those six years, the greatest increases coming in the Sports and Business sections.â If the lessons of 40 years ago are anything to go by, helping yourself and your coworkers can only help othersâso long as itâs not the only story you tell.
Contact the author at dries@jezebel.com.
Images via Amazon Video