Good Girls Revolt — When Men Were “Mad” and Women Were Researchers

It’s hard to believe, watching now.  Even more than Mad Men, Amazon’s Good Girls’ Revolt is all too familiar.  The story of the women of Newsweek and their battle for equality in the newsroom, it’s a heartbreaker, and it’s not because of the huge moments of oppression or betrayal, although they are present. (Through some creative reporting, a young researcher discovers what really happened at the 1969 Altamont Festival that “killed the 60’s.”   But the rewrite assignment – and the credit – goes to a guy who never left the building. “That’s how we do things here. We have a process.  Men are the reporters – you girls are the researchers.”)  The researcher on this story  loves the thrill of reporting so much she surrenders everything she’s learned, even though she’ll never get credit for it in the office, much less in print.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.  

Implicit, explicit and intractable power all in male hands, all the time, permeates every moment of Good Girls Revolt’s pilot episode.  We know where their pending revolution is coming from.

Even more frequent than the “big stuff” were the small assumptions, dismissals, insults and slights that eat away, day by day, at confidence and ambition and hope.

• Four women in a hallway conversation greeted by the boss: “Hello, my little coven.”
• The Managing Editor sending his best researcher, who keeps her reporter partner (and lover) safe and “his” stories on the cover, for coffee.  “Black, two sugars, right?”
• “Sweetie,” “honey,” “cutie.”
• A husband who “gives his wife a year” to write a novel before moving her to Connecticut to raise babies, but then puts a hole in her diaphragm so she’ll be pregnant before that year ends.
• Three guys hungrily ogling a smart, but lovely women as she tries unsuccessfully to make it through the newsroom without incident.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.

For me it was a very sweet 60 Minutes producer sitting next to a very pregnant me in the newsroom and urging me not to come back to work – to stay home like his wife did.  Or the executive who called with sympathy for my miscarriage and told me that, pregnant woman that I’d been, I shouldn’t have been working so hard – as if I was my fault.  (His assistant asked me if I’d even wanted the baby at all.)

In addition to newsroom battles, this introductory episode takes us to a “consciousness raising” meeting, led by a pregnant “Eleanor Holmes Norton” and featuring, like a 12-step program, the telling of individual stories of humiliation, discrimination and sexual harassment.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.

In my own community, oppressive sexual relationships between researcher and producer weren’t frequent, but they weren’t rare, either.  They almost never ended well.  One correspondent told me at a bureau Christmas party “I’d really love to sleep with you.  Really.  But I never dip my pen in the company inkwell.”  He thought I’d be impressed.

We need this show – and so do our daughters and nieces and sons and nephews and husbands and young friends.  Here’s how Buzzfeed’s Ann Helen Peterson  ends her piece on the show:

Good Girls Revolt may be about a bunch of accidental revolutionaries. Its politics may be embroidered with melodrama, and romance, and fixation on clothes. But, then again, so is life. And that doesn’t make the show, or the work of the women behind the scenes, any less feminist — or necessary.

As [production designer Jeannine] Oppewall says, “Sometimes I look at my nieces, who don’t quite yet see the amount of work it took for us to pull this off, and I’m like, ‘You better have a look at the past, because if you’re not vigilant, the past can always be your future.’ You gotta babysit it and talk about it and push it and make it seem like this is absolutely the way it should be.”