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WGBH Boston in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic communications at the School of Communications with Boston University now presents the First Amendment and a free people. An examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s and now here is the director of the Institute for Democratic Communications, Dr. Bernard Rubin. Our topic tonight is what are the chances the opportunities for women in mass communications today. Obviously there is no freedom of speech or of the press or petition or assembly under the First Amendment. If about 50 percent of our people are discriminated against merely because of their sex. To discuss this question on a realistic basis I've invited three of the senior professors of the School of Public Communications journalism department who are not only women but who are very very professional and well-known people in their profession of journalism. Carolyn Lewis was a foreign correspondent for the United Press in Australia and a reporter for The Washington Post and for the Post-owned Newsweek TV and radio
stations. She's also been a national correspondent for Public Broadcasting in Washington DC. John Barrowman was director of a workshop, is director of a workshop for women in communication management that is planned for this spring has been reporter and editor for several newspapers and magazines including the Miami Herald, Miami News and other well-known magazines. Third guest is Carol Rivers who is a writer for The New York Times magazine and for Saturday Review among other magazines and for a number of well-known newspapers including The New York Times and others. She's a writer and has been a writer in residence at The Washington Star in the summer of 1976 and is an author of among other things a very fine book on growing up in the United States. I think I'll throw this question first to Joan Berman, and then ask for comment around the table. Joan, how tough has it been
to make it as a woman in the communications industry? My sense is that while women can come in on an entry level in in newspapers and magazines and in radio and TV, they're welcomed at that they're welcomed as reporters. But it's when they try to move up into a higher level of management into a position where they'll be managing others and making decisions that barriers come up. Newspapers, which , which is the organization that I'm most familiar with, are very conservative organizations, they are hierarchical, they have been built with men, by men, and for men, and it's been very very difficult as far as I can see for a woman to, to get into any kind of position where she is managing money or where she is managing other people. Is this a similar experience that you've had, uh, Carolyn Lewis? Yes. Bernie this is a great experience, um, one of our problems
is that in order to be successful in communications or any other field, a woman has to be tough and aggressive, just as a man has to be tough and aggressive. But somehow it's not accepted for a woman to be that way. And, um, on the other hand if you use what- what might be called a "soft" approach to get what you want, you're accused of using your feminine wiles. So you-you're, you have the horns of this dilemma, how are you going to approach your efforts to, ah, to have some control over your destiny and to have some power. Uh, I-I particularly have had trouble with that when I was working as a television reporter where you have to be really in control of men who are, cameramen, and how do you tell a man to do something and get him to accept that you're giving orders because that's the only way you can do that under the pressure of journalism. And there was always a great conflict and i- it meant that you got a reputation for being a tough, aggressive broad and that was not the kind of way to get ahead in the business. The same sort of thing that
that Joan is having and has had is, is how can you still be a woman and still be a successful woman, and I think we've all come across that. Carol Rivers? Yeah, and I think another thing that you run into, even today with, uh, after the women's movement and a lot of attention has been paid to discrimination against women, is to get people to think people to think it is a quote "serious problem". It has been considered and I still, by many male managers, considered, discrimination against women is considered trivial, and I can remember when I was a, a Washington correspondent and this was in the mid 60s, when women were not allowed to join the National Press Club, we couldn't be members. And of course the Press Club was where a lot of the illustrious people came when they spoke, was, would they come to the press club auditorium and speak so, we who wanted to cover the speeches had to go to a balcony. The balcony was, was very high, and the acoustics were terrible, and all the television and sound equipment was up there, and any male who wanted to come, PR men, businessmen, could come and sit on the floor and eat lunch. But women reporters
were not physically allowed on the floor. And it was very ironic I remember one day when Carl Rowan, who was a black man who was then director of USIA was giving a speech and he was talking about how in his boyhood, you know, all the black folks had to sit in the balconies and you know, I looked around, and there we were up in the balcony, um but you could not... And the interesting thing was was that nobody thought that was discrimination capital D in those days, and even we didn't think of it as an issue we thought it was a raw deal, um, so it's very hard to get, to go in and talk to a male manager and say, look this is really a problem, it is, should be na-nam- number one or number two on your list of priorities and not down about number 16. Carol, might I interject that Carol can I interject that I had similar experiences in Washington. I worked with The Washington Post which as you know has a woman publisher, Katharine Graham, and when I joined the Post it was in 1965, and I came, I had been a foreign correspondent, and I had political credentials but I was told that the only place for a woman reporter at that time was back at
the back of the bus, which is in the women's section, and I gulped and swallowed hard, and went back there and did all the social things, covered garden parties, and we were literally segregated. There was a, a glass wall around the women's section, we could see through that wall to where all the men were working and they were covering serious things like national politics and the city. Is this is a Freudian use of the word see-through? Well, [laughs] Possibly, that may be it, but- but what it does to you in terms of your own respect for yourself as a worker, is I think one of the, one of the most serious things you have to face. I was beginning to lose my belief in my capacity to be a good reporter because I was, I was forced to do what I saw as secondary reporting. I-I used to complain regularly that I was always interviewing the candidate's wife but never the candidate. And it was the kind of thing that really, really stayed with me for a long time, and it took a great many years to overcome that feeling of second class-ness, and it affects your work it- it, if your estimate of yourself is second class, then it affects your
work and it, it's a great uh, mental effort to overcome that, that kind of incapacity. But on the uh, question of, uh, level of work, uh, second class or first class, obviously there are some very talented women that all can look up to and all know on a national basis Eileen Shanahan, ?Marianne McClury?, whatever you think of Dorothy Schiff one way or another as a publisher, at least she has been a publisher, Pauline Frederick. My question is, uh and maybe I'll start again with Joan. Did you find yourself, um, at the start imitating or looking up to, or, uh involving yourself on the basis of the men of the press, or did you look up to, uh, start- startling women writers that you admired or did you just look up to good journalists without thinking about whether they were men or women? I'm not sure I remember looking up to anybody because I- I've never been, uh, too terrific at looking, looking- You weren't fascinated by Hemingway or anything of that nature. [Laughs] Uh, I-I think I
I've sort of gone along from day to day trying to do my best, and finding that, uh, newspapers have, have always been wanting to get involved in women's lives on a personal level and asking personal kinds of questions. You mentioned back in the beginning, I remember my very first job, uh, which was in Charlotte at the Charlotte Observer, which is a very fine paper. I had to promise the editor that I was not then engaged, nor had I any plans to be engaged, uh, before I would be hired, and I, I just can't imagine them asking a male reporter that kind of question, but, uh it's always been the kind of thing that, you know, we think ?with? women will get married and leave and where will we be after giving them all this training. I remember being asked to work under a different name other than my own for managerial reasons, and, uh in fact I think Carol made a very wise choice in always working under her own name, I worked under so many different names it would, it's been like almost like starting all over each time. Uh-
So this business of having impositions placed on you has been one of, the first hurdle, was that true in your case, too, Carol Rivers? Um, not so much impositions I think, as, as a sense of where I could go. I had, very, had the strong sense, and this was particularly true in Washington, where, you know, it was considered the Mecca of journalism, I could look around me and I could see there were no women bureau chiefs, there were no women in the Gridiron Club. Um, I--I could be accepted to a certain level and another thing that happened was that I didn't have an entry into what might be called the "old boy" system. I couldn't go to lunch at the Federal Club with the, because women weren't allowed into the Federal Club, or a number of these clubs. I couldn't take so-and-so to lunch, there was a certain male system, um, of friendships and certain places one went from which women were just simply excluded and which meant, uh, people will argue, "well, of course, that's just a social thing." It was not, it was business, a lot of stories were gotten, friendships were made, relationships established
at these kind of, of sort of quasi-social, uh-um meetings and luncheons that clearly I wasn't gonna have a line into, so that made it doubly difficult. One suspects, Carolyn Lewis, that it was even worse in Australia. Oh yes, they they still, and I have just come back from Australia and things have not changed. A woman's place is still in the home over there, if you can believe that. But I did, when I worked in Australia, I was, um, a foreign correspondent and I was working for an American organization, and I was much better treated, I felt, than, than when I returned to the United States. Some of the things that Carol was talking about jar my memory, and I found the limitations were within the organizations. Uh, at the Washington Post, which I, you know, everybody admires the Washington Post as a great organization. What they were doing was hiring young men fresh out of college to go in the city room and work on the national desk. And the women were told there was no way no place to go, w-we had gone about as far as we could go, that even if you did
break an enormously important political story, as I often did, and get it moved out to the front page, ah, you were told, "I'm sorry, you're a woman, there's just no place you can go on this newspaper." And, um, I might say that I regularly, I started to get so angry about it, that at the beginning of every month I would literally walk across the newsroom and march into Ben Bradley's office and he would duck and say, "here comes that woman again," you know, and, uh, finally I just had to leave the organization, I had to leave the Post. I did go into television and radio. Uh, I don't think it's very much better, in that newspaper, which is really very sad when you do have a woman publisher. I think, frankly, if I can speak frankly, I think she needs her consciousness raised in terms of women's opportunity, and the thing that, uh, Joan has talked about in particular, women not having chances in management and, and really being in top-level jobs, uh, this is where you can show your commitment. Yeah, and I think that one thing that happens, one of the real, um,
you don't have women, or any, or, or ?representative? sort of any minority group, women or blacks, uh, in top management. It's a question of perspectives: what gets covered and what doesn't. And one example, I think, is the question of, of daycare, which is a crucial social issue: how are children going to be cared for. How are people gonna to get off welfare if there isn't adequate childcare. That was considered almost a non-story, because it was not seen as something that men had to deal with or wrestle with. Um, nutrition, the consumerism kind of stories, which didn't surface until really, as stories, until after the '60s when a sort of a whole new mindset came about. Um, they were con-, they were written off because they had to do with areas of li- of life that women generally dealt with. So great, just like black ghettos weren't covered because white editors never had to look at them. That meant that you had a rather narrow spectrum, a lot of it political trivia, which occupied, y'know, the front pages, and
the rest of these kind of issues just didn't exist as far as the media were concerned. I might say a propos of that that, Joan, just very briefly that, um, a very dear friend of mine at the Post is Morty Mintz, who has, has done many of these stories long before they became fashionable, and he would certainly agree with you and then not- I mean, he's a man, but I mean he tried to get these consumer issues and these issues of pollution, and, and dangers in drugs. They were put in the Washington Post, but they were buried, and a lot of it, it's true, I think if there were more people like Mintz all those years ago in- in- in positions of power, sensitive to what was out there, we would have a better press all around. And one of our great problems is people in positions of power who don't want to, to deal with issues that are farther down the road. Well, it's, it's true that the whole trend in journalism today, I think, is towards what we call "soft news," and, which is where so-called women's pages have been all along, and really the whole, whole field of, of newspapers and magazines is catching up to where women have
been, in terms of getting away from, from the hard news, the daily, what-happened-today kind of thing and doing more background stories. Uh, it, that is that the one job in management that has traditionally been sort of held aside for women is the job of editor of the women's pages, and, uh, the trend has been in the last few years to give this job to a man, eh, so we find throughout the country right now, as far as I know, there is one woman managing editor of a newspaper, uh, and, uh, a sprinkling of of women editors of what's called Family Life section or Living Today sections, that kind of thing, because they, it's assumed that women are safe in a section like that, uh, you know. There are uh, opportunities for a few women. For example, Cathy ?McEwan? and Connie Chung, and others, and they do a good job, they don't get as much opportunity as they might, they don't get enough air time. But, uh, most
women, uh, whether they're just women or whether they're representing two minorities, perhaps black women, are being used on television as front people to, um, read, uh, the rip-and-read stuff, and be pretty faces on television. They're not token women, because they're appearing more and more on television, but they're not given anything to do. There is a top limit in broadcasting, Bernie. This is, this is really, uh, you still don't, there is no woman -- although perhaps Barbara Walters may get to that point -- there's no woman Eric Sevareid, for example. In other words, a woman is, now she's, it's okay for her to do daily journalism, but she's not doing the think type thing. Although, if we want to be honest, there's not too much think times- [Laughs] think stuff on the air, anyway, male or female, but, you don't, there is still the thought that you are, you are a pretty face, and you are sort of, you're gonna break the gray aura on the air of all these men in suits. Uh, I wanna say that, having spent
much of my time in broadcasting, one of the most disconcerting things is when you do think you're doing something intelligent and solid and serious, and you get a phone call or a letter from a viewer saying, "I like your hair up" or "I like your hair down" or "why don't you wear this dress or that dress," and you say, what am I doing here? Because you're dealing with this magic thing in television that it is somewhat showbiz. And, uh, I think that makes it very difficult for a woman to be taken seriously. Y'know, an' I think the images you put up with, having been told once by a, uh, executive of a television studio that I was not quite warm and loving enough. [Laughter] By the way, these are three of the most warm and loving people I've had on like the program. Yah, I kept saying ask my. my children. They'll tell you." Uh, but the issue, I mean that would never have arisen had I been a man. Y'know, the question of whether, is Mike -- y'know, you know, I'm thinking of Mike, Mike Wallace -- is he warm and loving. Um, the questions that they raise with women, a lot has to do with appearance. And
Carol and I were talking earlier that the first really homely woman on television is gonna be a coup. But the question of who can present the news, and often it is really a case of the, the people are more concerned with how pretty you look and what particular feminine qualities you [inaudible]. Yeah. How peculiar was, you know, by that I mean - how out of the ordinary was Dorothy Thompson in her day? In other words, was there anything there? Did they accept her because she was a tough, pugnacious reporter, or did they accept her because every profession that keeps everybody out needs somebody in to prove the rule? What was the secret of her success? You're much older than we are. (Laughter] No, I just read about her. But was it her relationships, with Sinclair Lewis, or what was it? Now we've always had talent, tremendous talent, whether you talk about Erika Young or whether you're talking about the woman who died the other day who wrote diaries, Anais Nun, at 74.
The talent is there. It doesn't have anything to do with being a woman. But Bernie, but you have to look at the numbers. I mean -- the numbers are insignificant -- yeah, I mean in other words, yeah, there's always the exception to prove the rule. But how many other talents have never had a break and never had an opportunity? And one of the things -- I'm not a person who lives very much with regrets, but I was trying to break into American television at a time when there were just no women on the air. And now, of course, when I'm somewhat older and they're still looking for 23-year-old chicks with no hips, which I will never be anymore [laugh] -- I never was, actually -- you know, that time that opportunity is past. And what, you know, you're saying to, to -- there certainly have always been a few that have made, it but I'm concerned about the many talents that are lost. That's a point I was making: that, that the outstanding women have found whatever access there was, and literature was one of the open points. But even those women, with very few exceptions, couldn't make it into the
daily journalism grind. Well, one of the problems is, as Carolyn mentioned, people taking women seriously and I think one of the problems is that up until very recently women haven't taken themselves seriously, and that they haven't valued what they could do on a, on a level with men, and they haven't been willing or able to put the time into self-training or ah, ah, into really preparing themselves. And then one of the problems connected with that is that they've had literally no role models to follow. Ah, Men have other men who are editors, who are publishers, who are major columnists. And for a woman, because of the lack of role models, it's been difficult to decide: "How can I be? Should I be like a man?" as Carolyn, said - hard-nosed. What about the wrong role models? For example, is/was Helen Gurley Brown the right role model or the wrong one? Yeah, it's an extremely difficult problem compounded by the fact that women, most women are not working in a vacuum. Many women are also dealing with the facts of,
of husbands and families and, uh, life at home, which are problems that most men don't have to deal with in the same way. Because no matter what one says about sharing work etc., the primary responsibility, it seems to me, always has been with the woman, with the wife and with the mother. She always has a double profession, really, if you want to carry on a family as she, as she wants to do and also do a profession. Well, sometimes you don't -- I didn't have a choice. I was divorced and had 2 children to bring up. And interestingly on that, Joan, my first, the job that I got on the Washington Post was on the night shift: I had to work from 4 to midnight and then get up the next morning and get the kids off to school. I never ever complained about that to the office because I felt that I did not want to have any special privileges. But I'm certain that I went around punchy half the time because I wasn't getting enough sleep and all the men did have a great advantage in that they'd had a night's sleep. And it is a di-
a difficult problem, which society does not help by having inadequate daycare centers, getting back to that sort of problem that... And another thing that I noticed very strongly was that very often, since it was very clear that there would be a few token slots - few women would be allowed to quote, "make it," unquote, the women who made it tended to be very protective of their spot and to see younger women coming up not as people they should help but as threats. And instead of developing the sort of network of, of contacts and helping, the established women would make their relationships with other men and would try to, in some cases, deliberately sabotage some of the younger women who they saw as threatening their positions. And I think that their perception that they had the slot and they could easily lose it was unfortunately an accurate one. Tell me, on the, on the "now-it-can-be-told" basis, all 3 of you have had tremendous outside experience -- and that makes you unusual as a trio and as
individuals -- are now in the academic world. On the now-it-can-be-told basis, openly and freely, how do you find the treatment that you get in the world of journalism within the academic world? Do you find the same shibboleths, the same problems, or do you prefer to pass? Did see the dirty smile we all have? [Laughter] That's, that's a toughie. But, but if you want to be truthful, you have to ask the tough ones as well as easy ones. It's exactly the same exactly, I would say. Exactly the same? Well, it's, it's, ah, let me make a division. Within the classroom I find no, no challenge, no difference as far as, y'know, male, female or Martian. Y'know, I can do anything I want to and I've never felt that a student has, has put me down or has treated me differently because I was a female professor. But it's outside the classroom and with other relationships within the academic community that one sometimes feels that one isn't quite up there with the rest of the boys. Well, I feel very deeply about this, representing the male gender
on this program, that that's what one of the purposes of the Institute is, is to, is to fight the discriminations that are not in every legal court case, but there. We've been talking a lot about the psychological, the sociological discriminations, which are just as pervasive as anything that you can touch and feel at a moment. So much of what you've been talking about is the environment. Sure. And I can give an example about academia, having just prepared a whole batch of papers for tenure, and I was told by a friend who jokingly said, "Don't give'em a lot of that women's garbage, give'em the serious stuff. Now this was, this was said kiddingly, but I knew precisely what he meant: that by an academic panel would judge things I had done on the women's movement and things I consider very serious issues, they would look at those and they would regard them in a certain way, but they would really think the stuff I'd done on technology in America and urban blacks was really serious. Whereas the material I'd done on women was not quite so serious. And I know that. And he knew that. And, you
know, I think that's the whole part of the syndrome of women not being taken seriously. And it's in academia as elsewhere. Could I raise also the question: since we've had affirmative action, one of the problems too is when you are hired, and I've had felt this to a great extent, I mean, everybody wants to feel that he or she is hired because that person is good, you're good at what you did and that you were chosen for that reason. But there is this spoken, and sometimes, uh, unspoken, and sometimes spoken attitude that you were hired because you were a woman. You are not very good at it but y'know, it's only that the university was looking for women and you kind of made it and you were hired and you were put on staff. Which again get, gets me back to that second-class feeling. And I would like to think that I was hired because I was good at what I could do. But there is this constant reminder from the males that you are only, you're only here because you're female, and we needed females because the federal government says we'd better get some. It's a very difficult problem. Well, would you give me their names, and uh...? [Laughter]
But it seems to me that, yes, you can be hired because you are a female but you keep your job because you're a professional. And now, in all 3 cases you are known for what you are doing, not for when you were hired. I know many of us are absolutely delighted that Boston University is in the forefront of hiring people because they're good people. Fifty percent of, approximately, of our students are young women, and this has been a change over the last 10 years. If we don't have a sufficient number of women that they can look to for advice, then where are they going to? We can't let another generation drift with the consequences to, as I said, to the First Amendment in the most literal sense. We have about a minute left. Would you like to sum up anything that, that you think the audience ought to know? What's interesting because it seems we have moved from where we were when I was first getting my job, when I got hired despite the fact that I was a woman, to now people are saying you got hired because you are a woman. Both of them making you somewhat, somewhat special. And I think we'll really have,
have reached the point we want to be when you are, you know, that's not, not even thought about. That's, that's not something you even have to talk about. Joan? I want to make a, ah, pitch, I guess, for something that I'm planning to do, which is to run a project for women who want to get into, women into communications management. Ah, I'm, I'm looking for women who are in newspapers and magazines and really want to go beyond the entry-level job, and, and want to give themselves a push to do it. Could we say, contact Joan Berman, Professor Joan Berman at the School of Public Communication of Boston University. I want to thank you very much for, for I think an outstanding contribution to the general discussion in the United States. I want to thank Carolyn Lewis, Carol Rivers and Joan Berman. This is Bernard Rubin saying good night. [Music] WGBH radio, in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic
Communications of the School of Communications at Boston University, has presented the First Amendment and a Free People: an Examination of Civil Liberties in the Media in the 1970s. This program was produced in the studios of WGBH Boston.
Series
The First Amendment
Episode
Women in Media
Producing Organization
WGBH Educational Foundation
Contributing Organization
WGBH (Boston, Massachusetts)
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Description
Episode Description
In this episode of The First Amendment and a Free People, Bernard Rubin hosts a discussion about women in the media. Rubin talks to three senior professors of the School of Public Communications Journalism Department, Carolyn Lewis, who has worked with the United Press, The Washington Post, and NewsWeek TV; Joan Berman, who has worked as reporter and editor with the Miami News; and Caryl Rivers, writer for The New York Times magazine and Saturday Review. The three journalists talk about their experiences as female journalists, the status and treatment of women in the newsroom, and advocacy for other women in the media.
Series Description
"The First Amendment is a weekly talk show hosted by Dr. Bernard Rubin, the director of the Institute for Democratic Communication at Boston University. Each episode features a conversation that examines civil liberties in the media in the 1970s. "
Genres
Talk Show
Topics
Social Issues
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Sound
Duration
00:29:27
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Credits
Guest: Rivers, Caryl
Guest: Lewis, Carolyn
Guest: Berman, Joan
Host: Rubin, Bernard
Producing Organization: WGBH Educational Foundation
Production Unit: Radio
AAPB Contributor Holdings
WGBH
Identifier: 77-0165-01-21-002 (WGBH Item ID)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Generation: Master
Duration: 00:28:45
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Citations
Chicago: “The First Amendment; Women in Media,” WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-22v41z5n.
MLA: “The First Amendment; Women in Media.” WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-22v41z5n>.
APA: The First Amendment; Women in Media. Boston, MA: WGBH, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-15-22v41z5n