The Good Girls Revolt Read Online Free PDF Page A

especially for us and from which we rarely got promoted. Not only was research and fact-checking considered women’s work, but it was assumed that we didn’t have the talent or capability to go beyond it.
    That infamous “tradition” began in 1923, when Henry Luce and Brit Hadden founded Time, The Weekly News-Magazine. Positioning their publication between the daily newspapers, which printed everything, and the weekly reviews, which were filled with lengthy commentary, these two young Yalies decided to create a conservative, compartmentalized digest of the week’s news that could be consumed in less than an hour. But although Time would give both sides of the issues, it would, they said in their prospective, clearly indicate “which side it believes to have the stronger position.” In the beginning, the magazine was written by a small group of their Ivy League friends, who distilled stories from newspapers and wrote them, echoing Hadden’s beloved Iliad, in a hyphenated news-speak (“fleet-footed Achilles”) and a backward-running sentence structure (“Up to the White House portico rolled a borrowed automobile”). Time didn’t hire “stringer correspondents” until the 1930s, when the magazine decided to add original reporting.
    But from the very beginning, the editorial staff included “girls” known as “checkers,” who verified names, dates, and facts. Thus was created a unique group-journalism model, which, unlike newspapers, separated all the editorial functions: the reporters sent in long, colorful files from the field; the writers compiled the information and wrote the story in the omniscient, Lucean Voice of God; and the researchers checked the facts. Only “lady assistants” were hired as fact checkers, which, according to Oz Elliott, who worked at Time for six and a half years, was a “liberating thing for young fledgling women out of college because they could get into publishing without being stenographers or secretaries.”
    Years later, the honorific of “checker” was upgraded to “researcher.” At Time’ s twentieth anniversary dinner in 1943, Luce explained that although “the word ‘researcher’ is now a nation-wide symbol of serious endeavor,” the title was originally conceived when he and Hadden were doing some “research” for a drinking club called the Yale Professors. “Little did we realize,” he said, “that in our private jest we were inaugurating a modern female priesthood, the veritable vestal virgins whom levitous writers cajole in vain, and managing editors learn humbly to appease.”
    When News-Week began in 1933, it copied Time’ s “tradition” of separating editorial functions. But at Newsweek (which joined its name in 1937 when it merged with the weekly journal Today ), women didn’t even start as researchers; we were hired two rungs below that—on the mail desk. At Time, office boys delivered the mail and relevant newspaper clippings. But at Newsweek only girls with college degrees—and we were called “girls” then—were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to “clippers,” another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn’t smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out relevant articles with razor-edged “rip sticks,” and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. “Being a clipper was a horrible job,” said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, “and to make matters worse, I was good at it.”
    We were all good at it—that was our mind-set. We were willing to start at the bottom if it led to something better, and in most cases, it did: to the glorified position of researcher. Working side by side with the writers, we were now part of the news process, patrolling the AP and UPI