The Good Girls Revolt Quotes

“We were women in transition, raised in one era and coming of age in another, very different time...here we were, entering the workplace in the 1960s questioning--and often rejecting--many of the values we had been taught. We were the polite, perfectionist "good girls," who never showed our drive or our desires around men. Now we were becoming mad women, discovering and confronting our own ambitions, a quality praised in men but stigmatized--still--in women.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“I quickly realized that I enjoyed editing more than writing. I felt more suited to it and it fit my nurturing personality. I had lots of ideas and a strong sense of structure, and I enjoyed working with talented writers, relishing the give-and-take in making their work better.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“What led to our revolt? Why did our generation suddenly realize that our place in society was changing--and had to change? In part, we were carried by the social and political currents of our time...But even with the social winds in our sails and the women's movement behind us, each of us had to overcome deeply held values and traditional social strictures. The struggle was personally painful and professionally scary. What would happen to us? Would we win our case? Would we change the magazine? Or would we be punished? Who would succeed and who would not? And if our revolt failed, were our careers over--or were they over anyway? We knew that filing the suit legally protected us from being fired, but we didn't trust the editors not to find some way to do us in.

Whatever happened, the immediate result is that it put us all on the line. "The night after the press conference I realized there was no turning back," said Lucy Howard. "Once I stepped up and said I wanted to be a writer, it was over. I wanted to change Newsweek, but everything was going to change.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“For every man there was an inferior woman, for every writer there was a checker," said Nora Ephron. "they were the artists and we were the drones.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Recognizing that sexism still exists, they said, “is one of the challenges of the new generation.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Trish had qualms about joining the women and talked it over with Mary Pleshette. "I don't know about this whole business of women being in men's jobs," she confessed to Mary. "I like the differences between men and women and I think we should keep them." Mary asked her which differences she was afraid of losing. Trish didn't answer for a long time. "Oh well," she finally said, "we'll still be women--we'll just have better jobs.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Being female was not something that ever held Jessica back. “I was used to getting everything I wanted and working hard for it,” said the twenty-eight-year-old writer at Newsweek.com, “so my feeling was, why do I need feminism?”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Free and accessible child care has always been a fundamental demand of the women’s movement, but the legislative efforts to pass such measures have failed. “Everything that our generation asked for as feminists was getting the identical things of what boys had—access to the Ivy League or professional schools or corporate America,” said psychiatrist Anna Fels. “Women now are up against a much deeper structural problem. The workplace is designed around the male life cycle and there is no allowance for children and family. There’s a fragile new cultural ideal—that both the husband and wife work. But when these families are under the real pressure of having a baby or two, there’s a collapse back to old cultural norms and these young parents go back to the default tradition.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“the women questioned how much had actually changed for women since 1970, not only at the magazine but in the workplace in general. They cited statistics showing that full-time working women who haven’t had children still make seventy-seven cents on the male dollar and that in their first job out of business school, female MBAs make $4,600 less per year than male MBAs.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“The women who fought those fights were not the ones who got the rewards. People like me, who came right behind them, got the good jobs and promotions. I know many of the heroines of those battles and they aren’t bitter. They’re still very ticked off at their former employers, but they’re very happy and proud of the women who came after and got the opportunities that rightfully should have been theirs. To me that’s the definition of a great heart.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“We have learned that the enemy is us—our own lack of self-confidence,”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Part of what is involved in participating in cultural change is violating what you were raised to believe was sacrosanct,” she said. “It is getting yourself to accept a different set of values and relinquish old ones.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“We don’t raise our daughters to be as ambitious as our sons,” she said. One reason, she noted, was that “success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. As a man gets more powerful and successful, he is better liked. As a woman gets more powerful and successful, she is less liked.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“I was a good girl," she said. "I learned something about the world and found the courage not to be a good girl.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“The workplace is designed around the male life cycle and there is no allowance for children and family. There’s a fragile new cultural ideal—that both the husband and wife work.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Perhaps most important for women’s advancement, there still is no private or public support for working families, who rely primarily on mothers to care for the children.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Mike Ruby, a writer in the magazine’s Business section, used to call Newsweek writing f—k-style journalism: Flash (the lead), Understanding (the billboard—why is this story important), Clarification (tell the details of the story), and Kicker (bringing it all together with a clever ending).”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Newsweek never hired women as writers and only one or two female staffers were promoted to that rank no matter how talented they were...Any aspiring journalist who was interviewed for a job was told, "If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else--women don't write at Newsweek.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“...at Newsweek only girls with college degrees--and we were called "girls" then--were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to "clippers," another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn't smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out releveant articles with razor-edged "rip sticks," and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. "Being a clipper was a horrible job," said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, "and to make matters worse, I was good at it.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“In early 1970, Newsweek's editors decided that the new women's liberation movement deserved a cover story. There was one problem, however: there were no women to write the piece.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“It has always been easy to dismiss substance out of dislike for style.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“It’s not over,” she said, “and it’s never going to be over—the realization that people always have to have somebody who’s the other, that justice is so hard to come by, that fairness is so hard to come by. You hope that it will get better, and it does get better. But backsliding is so much easier than forward progress and there always has to be somebody who’s willing to step forward.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“It’s hard to believe that two generations later there are still so few females in the executive suite. Who would have thought it would take so long? We believed the lack of advancement was merely a pipeline problem: once there were enough women in the workforce, they would naturally advance—all the way to the top. We didn’t realize how hard it would be to change attitudes and stereotypes.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“But many of the injustices that young women face today are the same ones we fought against forty years ago. The discrimination may be subtler, but sexist attitudes still exist. Jessica, Jesse, and Sarah, and”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Even today, she told me, as women have developed skills and expertise, they are “subtly discouraged from pursuing their goals by a pervasive lack of recognition for their accomplishments.” Women fear that seeking recognition will expose them to attacks on everything from their popularity to their femininity. But recognition in all its forms—admiration from peers, mentoring, institutional rewards, and societal approval—is something that makes us better at what we do, Fels explained, and without it “people get demoralized and ambitions erode.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Only when we got to the workforce did we start to care about gender issues. Now a lot of young women are realizing sexism still exists”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg agreed. “We reward men every step of the way—for being leaders, for being assertive, for taking risks, for being competitive,” she said in 2012 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And we teach women as young as four—lay back, be communal. Until we change that at a personal level, we need to say there’s an ambition gap. We need our boys to be as ambitious to contribute in the home and we need our girls to be as ambitious to achieve in the workforce.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“In 1971, Congress had approved the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have provided child care on a sliding fee scale to working parents as a matter of right. However, President Richard Nixon vetoed it, saying it would commit “the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to childrearing over against [sic] the family-centered approach.” At the same time, the mainstream media were spreading the feminist message in the public arena.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“when it came to giving the women higher pay or promotions, the Digest was not so concerned. “There were end-of-the-year reviews with two lists of names—the editors and the ladies, who were also editors—and the factors for promotion. ‘He’s a family man, we need to help. She’s a single woman, doesn’t need more.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

“In December 1969, Susan wrote a freelance piece for Playboy on women’s lib, but it never ran—Hugh Hefner spiked it. Hef’s memo as to why he didn’t like the piece was later leaked to the press by a Playboy secretary (who was promptly fired) and it became a cause célèbre. “What I want,” Hef said, “is a devastating piece that takes militants apart.... What I’m interested in is the highly irrational, kooky trend that feminism has taken. These chicks are our natural enemy.... It is time to do battle with them.... All of the most basic premises of the extreme form of the new feminism [are] unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”
― Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace