The Good Girls Revolt Read Online Free PDF Page B

and china, all catered by the ritzy Tower Suite restaurant on the forty-eighth floor of the Time-Life building. While the men at Newsweek drank their Scotch and bourbon from bottles hidden in their bottom desk drawers on Friday nights (and many other nights as well), the senior editors at Time set up a full bar for their staffers in their offices or antechambers.
    Still, working at Newsweek was a dream job and I felt lucky to have landed there. Like many of my colleagues, I was a graduate of one of the Seven Sisters schools, which in the early ’60s were still mired in the ’50s. Vassar College, when I arrived in 1961, was politically apathetic and boy-obsessed. Student clubs had been abolished and even the campus newspaper, the Misc . (short for Miscellaneous ), had ceased publication my freshman year. Every weekend the campus emptied out as girls boarded buses to Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and other nearby men’s schools. Other than having female professors and a safe environment where women could be the first to raise their hands—and be heard—there was little left of the founder’s feminist legacy when I got there. Women were praised for their intelligence and commended for their capabilities but certainly not encouraged to have careers.
    I majored in modern European history but became enthralled by my French professor, Olga Bernal. She would invite her favorite students to her apartment, where we would drink white wine and talk about life, love, and French literature (I was taking her course on avant-garde French writers). It was what I had pictured life at a small college would be like and by junior year, I had a passion if not yet an ambition: I would go to Paris. Since my history degree wouldn’t get me a job, my only hope for employment was to be hired as a secretary. I was a fast typist, earning extra money by typing college papers, but I didn’t know shorthand. I scoured the local ads and found a course at a nearby high school. My last semester at Vassar, as I was writing my thesis on France between the wars, I spent my evenings walking to Dutchess County Community College to learn Stenoscript.
    Although I had taken French through high school and college, I applied only to US companies in Paris, including Pan Am, TWA, the USIA (the government information agency), Time, and Newsweek . At Newsweek , the chief of correspondents offered me a job in New York but I turned it down, determined to go abroad. At his suggestion, I wrote to Newsweek’ s Paris bureau chief, Joel Blocker, who, unfortunately, had no vacancies. So I planned to go to Paris anyway and find a job when, just before my final exams in May, Blocker sent a telegram to my father, a celebrated sports columnist at the Washington Post : UNFORESEEN OPENING STAFF, NOW ALMOST CERTAIN JOB POSSIBILITY FOR LYNN IN PARIS BUREAU.... PLEASE ONPASS TO LYNN AND ADVISE SOONEST WHEN SHE ARRIVING AND ABLE BEGIN WORK. It turned out that Blocker’s secretary had suddenly quit. Thank God for Stenoscript.
    In June 1965, I packed two suitcases and left for Paris. For over a year, I worked in the Newsweek bureau as a secretary, photo researcher, occasional reporter, and telex operator. After the correspondents had written their stories, I would stay at night to type them—on a French keyboard—into the telex machine, which transmitted them to New York. Typing the files was a good lesson on how to report and write, even if it was a lonely one. Each night as he was leaving the bureau, the staff photographer would look at me, alone in the office, and say with a smile, “Good luck in your chosen profession.”
    Newsweek’ s Paris bureau was on the third floor of the International Herald Tribune building at 21 Rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Elysée. In addition to the bureau chief and his French secretary, Jacqueline Duhau, who befriended me, the office housed three correspondents and the magazine’s senior foreign correspondent, Arnaud de Borchgrave, a perennially