An important record of the history of women in journalism. I was saddened and maddened by it. ( )

This title isn't new but after reading a history of the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux I had become more intrigued about the large players in traditional publishing, and news magazines are among them. This is Lynn Povich's take, where she was among a large group of women that found their careers stagnate while their male colleagues got plumb assignments and climbed the ladder. She connects this story to a newer generation of women at Newsweek that ended up doing much the same thing decades later, as they found the 21st century hadn't changed the work environment for the better. There is also an impressive who's who of people involved or impacted by that original lawsuit. My favorite title of this quarter, no contest. ( )

An interesting book about what was happening in the 70s while I was in high school and I didn't realize it! The problems faced by these women who were so clearly suffering from discrimination was very interesting. How they dealt with it and the problems that came up that seemed to be unique to women (having a baby, husband has a job somewhere else) really brought home how hard it is even today. I didn't care for the writing so much, which is why I only gave it 3 stars, but the history is fascinating. ( )

It's great to hear the stories of women and men who were involved in early modern civil rights. I owe these women so much.

and yes, the author doesn't seem to get intersectionality. But I think what this tory shows is that one doesn't have to be perfect and that activism is a learning process.

I found the writing style to be fine. My only issue is that the years seen to jump around a bit, and it's not always clear who's what where when. there's also a lot of detail, but I like that. every person is a person. ( )

This book requires us to hop into the Wayback Machine. Believe it or not, in the 1960s weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek had very definite ideas on the proper place for women: the research department. (Another "believe it or not" factoid is that weekly newsmagazines were a big deal back then, which seems preposterous nowadays, but I digress.) Women were allowed to fact-check the writing that the big boys did, and sometimes they could even do some reporting (that is to say, researching facts and people and perhaps conducting interviews; all that information would then be handed over to the man who would actually write the article). Sexism, of course, is nothing new. But I think it's easy to forget how unthinkingly it was accepted, by both men and women, until the rise of Second Wave Feminism opened some eyes.

The author of The Good Girls Revolt was one of those researcher-reporters at Newsweek. Even after some of her female colleagues starting meeting and talking about what they could do to convince the magazine's publisher to give women a chance to write, she was conflicted. She had gotten the job through connections of her famous father, Shirley Povich, a legendary sportswriter for the Washington Post, which also owned Newsweek . (She's also the sister of the perhaps more famous but less respected Maury Povich, trashy TV talk show host, but he's barely mentioned.) Eventually she signed on, and the group of women hired a lawyer and confronted Newsweek management. Their first attempt in 1970 failed when management agreed to their demands and then just ... didn't do any of the things they promised. It took a second complaint and lawsuit in 1974 before changes were reluctantly made.

I was a little too young to remember this happening (I was 10 when they filed their second lawsuit) but it wasn't many years after that I realized I wanted to be a journalist, and a sportswriter to boot. Female sportswriters were thin on the ground in those days and it was a legitimate question whether that was even a practical career goal to have. All through junior high and high school I scoured every newspaper and magazine that I read, looking for female names in the bylines to reassure me that my dream was possible. Many of those names might not have been there for me to find without the actions taken by the "good girls" at Newsweek and others at other publications who followed in their footsteps.

The author researched, reported, and eventually wrote for Newsweek for many years, and it shows in the writing here. This is not poetry in prose form. It is written like a really long newsmagazine article (one of the fascinating parts of the book for me was Povich's detailing of the rigid "newsmagazine" style of writing and how challenging it could be to even good writers). But it's clear and well-organized, and it covers the topic really well. The final section revisits the key figures on both sides to see how the action affected them personally and professionally. It was not all sunshine and lollipops even for the women who ended up on the right side of history.

The only downside to reading this book is realizing that we've come a long way, baby, but we've sure got a long way to go. Women in 2017 can be acclaimed writers and reporters at magazines and newspapers and television stations — and face unimaginable vitriol online, including threats of death and sexual violence; criticisms that don't get leveled at their male counterparts. Still, they persevere, as the good girls of Newsweek did, and I salute them. ( )