{"id":3559,"date":"2015-11-08T16:36:03","date_gmt":"2015-11-08T23:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=3559"},"modified":"2015-11-08T16:36:03","modified_gmt":"2015-11-08T23:36:03","slug":"good-girls-revolt-when-men-were-mad-and-women-were-researchers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/08\/good-girls-revolt-when-men-were-mad-and-women-were-researchers\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Girls Revolt &#8212; When Men Were &#8220;Mad&#8221; and Women Were Researchers"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_3560\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3560\" style=\"width: 620px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Good-Girls-Revolt-Amazon-Pilot.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-3560 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Good-Girls-Revolt-Amazon-Pilot.jpg?resize=620%2C429&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Good-Girls-Revolt-Amazon-Pilot\" width=\"620\" height=\"429\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Good-Girls-Revolt-Amazon-Pilot.jpg?w=620&amp;ssl=1 620w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Good-Girls-Revolt-Amazon-Pilot.jpg?resize=300%2C208&amp;ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3560\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Three &#8220;good girls&#8221; at Newsweek talking with brief hire Nora Ephron, who left her researcher role for &#8220;someplace I can write.&#8221;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to believe, watching now. \u00a0Even more than <a href=\"http:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-Oa\" target=\"_blank\">Mad Men<\/a>, Amazon&#8217;s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt4687892\/\" target=\"_blank\">Good Girls&#8217; Revolt<\/a>\u00a0is all too familiar. \u00a0The story of the women of Newsweek\u00a0and their battle\u00a0for equality in the newsroom, it&#8217;s a heartbreaker, and it&#8217;s not because of the huge moments of oppression or betrayal, although they are present. (Through some creative\u00a0reporting, a\u00a0young researcher discovers what <em>really<\/em> happened at the 1969\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.history.com\/this-day-in-history\/the-altamont-festival-brings-the-1960s-to-a-violent-end\" target=\"_blank\">Altamont Festival<\/a>\u00a0that &#8220;killed the 60&#8217;s.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 But the rewrite assignment &#8211; and the credit &#8211; goes to a\u00a0guy who never left the building. &#8220;That&#8217;s how we do things here. We have a process. \u00a0Men are the reporters &#8211; you\u00a0girls are the researchers.&#8221;) \u00a0The researcher on this story \u00a0loves the thrill of reporting so much she surrenders everything she&#8217;s learned,\u00a0even though she&#8217;ll never get credit for it in the office, much less in print.<\/p>\n<p><em>Sadly, many of\u00a0us remember;\u00a0it happened to us. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Implicit, explicit and intractable power all in male hands, all the time, permeates\u00a0every moment of\u00a0Good Girls Revolt&#8217;s pilot episode. \u00a0We know where their pending revolution is coming from.<\/p>\n<p>Even\u00a0more frequent than the &#8220;big stuff&#8221; were\u00a0the small assumptions, dismissals, insults and slights that eat away, day by day, at confidence and ambition and hope.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Four women in a hallway conversation greeted by the boss: &#8220;Hello, my little coven.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>The\u00a0Managing Editor sending his best researcher, who keeps her reporter partner (and lover) safe and &#8220;his&#8221; stories on the cover, for coffee. \u00a0&#8220;Black, two sugars, right?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Sweetie,&#8221; &#8220;honey,&#8221; &#8220;cutie.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>A husband who &#8220;gives his wife a year&#8221;\u00a0to write a novel before moving her\u00a0to Connecticut to raise babies, but then puts a hole in her diaphragm so she&#8217;ll be\u00a0pregnant\u00a0before that year ends.<\/li>\n<li>Three guys hungrily ogling a smart, but lovely women as she tries unsuccessfully to make it\u00a0through the newsroom without incident.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Sadly, many of us remember;\u00a0it happened to us.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; to stay home like his wife did. \u00a0Or the executive who called with sympathy for my miscarriage and told me that, pregnant woman that I&#8217;d been, I shouldn&#8217;t have been working so hard &#8211; as if I\u00a0was my fault. \u00a0(His assistant asked me if I&#8217;d even wanted the baby at all.)<\/p>\n<p>In addition to newsroom battles, this introductory episode takes us to a &#8220;consciousness raising&#8221; meeting, led by a pregnant &#8220;Eleanor Holmes Norton&#8221; and featuring, like a 12-step program,\u00a0the telling of individual stories of humiliation, discrimination and sexual harassment.<\/p>\n<p><em>Sadly, many of us remember;\u00a0it happened to us.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In my own community, oppressive sexual relationships between researcher and producer weren&#8217;t frequent, but they weren&#8217;t rare, either. \u00a0They almost never ended well. \u00a0One correspondent told me at a bureau Christmas party &#8220;I&#8217;d really love to sleep with you. \u00a0Really. \u00a0But I never dip my pen in the company inkwell.&#8221; \u00a0He thought I&#8217;d be impressed.<\/p>\n<p>We need this show &#8211; and so do our daughters and nieces and sons and nephews and husbands and young friends. \u00a0Here&#8217;s how\u00a0Buzzfeed&#8217;s Ann Helen Peterson \u00a0ends <a href=\"http:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com\/annehelenpetersen\/the-good-girls-revolt-amazon-pilot#.dsBl61bxmG\" target=\"_blank\">her\u00a0piece on the show<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Good Girls Revolt<\/i> 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\u2019t make the show, or the work of the women behind the scenes, any less feminist \u2014 or necessary.<\/p>\n<p>As [production designer Jeannine] Oppewall says, \u201cSometimes I look at my nieces, who don\u2019t quite yet see the amount of work it took for us to pull this off, and I\u2019m like, \u2018You better have a look at the past, because if you\u2019re not vigilant, the past can always be your future.\u2019 You gotta babysit it and talk about it and push it and make it seem like this is absolutely the way it should be.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s hard to believe, watching now. \u00a0Even more than Mad Men, Amazon&#8217;s\u00a0Good Girls&#8217; Revolt\u00a0is all too familiar. \u00a0The story of the women of Newsweek\u00a0and their battle\u00a0for equality in the newsroom, it&#8217;s a heartbreaker, and it&#8217;s not because of the huge moments of oppression or betrayal, although they are present. (Through some creative\u00a0reporting, a\u00a0young researcher discovers &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/08\/good-girls-revolt-when-men-were-mad-and-women-were-researchers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Good Girls Revolt &#8212; When Men Were &#8220;Mad&#8221; and Women Were Researchers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,6,27,1917,9,97,29],"tags":[3492,3489,3488,3485,229,3421,3486,3487,3491,3490,3493,729,470,3494,624],"class_list":["post-3559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-nablopomo","category-politics","category-television","category-women","tag-altamont","tag-amazon-prime","tag-consciousness-raising","tag-good-girls-revolt","tag-mad-men","tag-nablopomo","tag-newsweek","tag-nora-ephron","tag-reporter","tag-researcher","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-womens-movement","tag-womens-rights","tag-working-mother","tag-writer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-Vp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3559"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3571,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3559\/revisions\/3571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}