‘Good Girls Revolt’: The Legacy of a Newsweek Lawsuit
Updated | Fifty years ago, a man would have written this piece. I might have done research or helped report it, but a man would have written the words. While his career advanced, I might have been told to go somewhere else if I wanted to write, because “women don’t write at Newsweek.” This was the “tradition” for decades, until 46 women sued the magazine for gender discrimination in 1970.
Some women “came in with that consciousness. From the beginning they knew that this was not the way women should be in the world,” says Lynn Povich, one of the female staffers who filed the complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and fought for change. For the most part, though, “the men didn’t get it and the women didn’t get it.”
Povich’s 2012 book, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, inspired the new Amazon series Good Girls Revolt. The pilot was released for Amazon’s “pilot season” last November. The full first season is due on October 28.
