In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (26 page)

Mary Catherine Kilday’s women’s rights committee at station WRC in Washington was making no headway as management kept spouting the same old defenses—“What do you mean, discrimination? No woman has ever applied to be an engineer.” Steeped in politics since childhood—her father, Paul Joseph Kilday, represented his Texas district in Congress for twenty-three years—Mary Catherine had fallen in love with the business side of broadcasting. She had joined WRC, an
NBC station, as a secretary, hoping to break into sales.

“They actually told me,” Kilday remembers, “ ‘How could you take a time-buyer to lunch? It would embarrass NBC to have a woman pick up the check.’ ” After ten years of persistence, Kilday had progressed to Community Affairs, a soft slot in management that was not on a career track.

Kilday had decided that the women of WRC should have an event of their own on August 26, 1970, to celebrate the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She approached Alison Owings in the cafeteria line one day. “Alison was the only woman in the documentary unit at the level of associate producer. I didn’t know her very well, but somehow I knew she’d be simpatico to women’s rights.”

A whimsical, offbeat writer from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Owings was very sympathetic to women’s rights. The new allies invited twelve of their coworkers to Mary Catherine’s house for a lunchtime meeting.

Formed on the spot, the high-spirited women’s committee did a survey and job count: WRC had no female announcers, no women in sales, no women on its film and videotape crews, no women engineers, no women directors, and only three tokens representing on-air talent. Armed with their statistics, Kilday and Owings circulated a modest “I am concerned” statement directed at management to every woman in the office. The three on-air tokens—Cassie Mackin, a gifted TV reporter, Betty Groebli, a daytime radio host, and Marilyn Robinson, a newly hired black reporter—were quick to sign.

“We got about one-third of the ninety women, including a lot of secretaries,” Kilday recalls. “One person, an assistant in radio, became
the group fink—isn’t that typical? She used the leverage to deal with management on her own. I’m still angry when I think about it. Anyway, the rest of us confidently made our little pitch to management in a conference room on August 26. We expected they’d say ‘Gee, yeah, something is wrong here, let’s see what we can do about it.’ We were really that innocent.”

“We’ll study the matter and get back to you,” the general manager of the station said politely.

“We never should have given you the vote in the first place,” another veep hee-hawed from the back of the room.

WRC’s women were stunned. They had gotten a brush-off. The group fink was promoted to radio producer.

Two young feminists barely out of law school, Nancy Stanley and Susan Deller Ross, told Kilday bluntly that the WRC women would never get anywhere unless they filed federal charges. The best person to handle the case, they said, was Gladys Kessler.

Kessler, whose quick response to Judy Ginggold had triggered the
Newsweek
women’s rebellion, had become a partner in a public interest law firm and was happy to take the broadcast case. Working with Ross and Stanley, she drew up three separate discrimination charges: for the EEOC, for the Federal Communications Commission, and for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, the last a long shot worth pursuing because NBC’s parent company, RCA, held government contracts.

“Filing charges was a big step,” Kessler, now a federal judge, affirms. “The WRC women had hopes for advancement in a highprofile profession. They knew they might be jeopardizing their future.”

March 2, 1971, was their D-Day. Barred by management from meeting in a station conference room, Mary Catherine Kilday rallied her troops via interdepartmental mail for an emergency lunch-hour session at the nearby Presbyterian Center. After listening to Kessler explain the ramifications, twenty-five women stepped forward to sign the complaints. Kilday and Alison Owings raced to the federal agencies with the documents while Bernice Sandler of the Women’s Equity Action League and some NOW volunteers fanned out to deliver press releases,
thoughtfully prepared in advance, to every media outlet in the city.

“I got back to the station,” remembers Kilday, “and the phones started ringing—CBC, ABC,
The Washington Post
, the
Star
,
The Wall Street Journal
, our own news department. That night everybody came over to my house and we had TVs set up all around. It was a panic. Of course the newscasters all reported that NBC had no comment.”

The complaint to the FCC was rejected; the Office of Federal Contract Compliance was silent. But after eight months of study the EEOC ruled that station WRC had indeed practiced discrimination. The ruling galvanized Marilyn Schultz, a production assistant with
NBC Nightly News
in New York, who set out to organize the network’s women at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Schultz, from Indiana, had started at NBC as a “guidette” after getting a degree in broadcast journalism.

Borrowing a tactic that had worked for Kilday, Schultz made use of NBC’s interdepartmental mail. “A hundred women, mostly secretaries, came to our first meeting,” she relates. “It was huge. We were shocked.” The ringleaders initiated their protest on National Secretaries Day, when by company policy NBC’s personnel department presented every female employee, regardless of her occupation, with a single red rose. That year several hundred NBC women placed their roses in office envelopes and routed them back to Personnel. Marilyn and some others scrawled “Bullshit” on theirs.

“We were angry about everything,” Schultz recalls. “We wanted promotions, equal pay, access to technical jobs. We criticized the network’s programming content, we monitored the language of the news broadcasts. We demanded a place to hold our meetings and were furious when they wouldn’t let us put up signs in the bathrooms. We met with the personnel department for a long, long time. God, those were dreadful meetings. They’d say ‘Oh, we’ll get back to you next week,’ and so we’d go back the next week and it would just drag on and on.” Growing more sophisticated, the women created a slide show presentation, with facts and figures, for NBC’s corporate executives. The executives countered with a slide show presentation of their own.

At an impasse, the women sought out my old friend Jan Goodman, just graduated from NYU law school and, with Nancy Stanley and Susan Deller Ross, a founder of the first women’s law firm in the country. Goodman pushed her clients to file a class action suit in court. Fearful of the drastic adversarial step, only sixteen NBC employees were willing to sign on as plaintiffs. They received a big boost when the EEOC joined the case. It took seven years before NBC settled, distributing two million dollars in compensatory back pay to more than one thousand employees. News of the affirmative action settlement made the front page of
The New York Times
.

By 1971 the national media were no longer simply engaged in reporting a story. Newsrooms were being impacted directly by Women’s Liberation, and the demands for a new order were reaching into the journalists’ personal, as well as their professional, lives. If the movement’s disputes with the left were too abstruse for public consumption, if its desire to function without leaders was unfathomable and erratic, its radical analysis that men were the core of the problem rang loud and clear.

The stage was set for an uninhibited six-foot Australian who strode into view with a thrusting jaw, high cheekbones, and trendy designer costumes. Her name was Germaine
Greer and she arrived from London bearing
The Female Eunuch
, a romping success in her adopted country due in no small part to the author’s virtuoso talent for self-promotion. Greer had an uncanny knack in her public appearances for switching from erudition to raunchy wit while she crossed a bare leg and adjusted her stole.

Germaine was an improbable, self-made creation, a woman with a steel-trap mind and a self-professed lust who spun curious appellations for herself such as “Supergroupie” and “Intellectual Superwhore.” A decade earlier she had migrated from Melbourne to Sydney in search of kindred spirits among the Push, a small counterculture movement devoted to libertarian sex, anarchist politics, and hoisting a glass at dockside pubs. Almost immediately she became one of the Push’s leading female figures, admired for her quick mind and eccentric exhibitionism.
“The thing about Germaine,” a young Push woman once remarked, “is that she never menstruates. She hemorrhages once a month and gives you a drip-by-drip description.”

It was a cardinal tenet among the Push to eschew careers and ambition, but Germaine left Australia for England in 1964 to pursue a doctorate in Shakespeare’s early comedies at Cambridge. The university drama society voted her Actress of the Year. With the doctorate under her belt, she took a teaching job at Warwick, a provincial university within striking distance of London, and became a star contributor to
Oz
, a raucous journal of rock music, satire, and freewheeling sexuality started by one of her countrymen. Her piece “In Bed with the English” created a big stir. Television appearances followed. She had a go at helping to start
Suck
, a journal as short-lived and sexually explicit as its name. Tom Wolfe, the novelist and caustic social observer, had a memorable dinner with Greer during her
Suck
phase. As he recollected, she had “a tremendous curly electric hairdo and the most outrageous Naugahyde mouth I had ever heard on a woman.” When the conversation palled in the King’s Road restaurant, Germaine lit a match and set fire to her hair. Wolfe recalls that solicitous waiters rushed over with napkins to beat out the flames while she grinned.

Greer’s wacky exuberance made a fan of Sonny Mehta, the head of a new paperback imprint in London, who shrewdly assessed that her firecracker mind and offbeat exhibitionism could be profitably harnessed. He offered her a contract to write a book that would illuminate the growing mood of Women’s Liberation. Keeping aloof from the small British women’s movement—too square, Marxist, and dowdy from her anarchist-libertarian perspective—she vacuumed up facts and quotations and let it rip.

McGraw-Hill picked up the American rights to
The Female Eunuch
and planned for an April 1971 publication. In a clever stroke, editor Robert Stewart sent a copy of the British edition to Norman Mailer, who happened to be at work on
The Prisoner of Sex
, a windy broadside intended to demolish Kate Millett and the entire feminist movement. (Among the many choice Mailerisms in
Prisoner
, my favorite remains “the women were writing like very tough faggots.”) Slipping a few
choice lines from Greer into his humongous diatribe, which first appeared in
Harper’s
magazine, Mailer delivered the news that here was a liberated lady a fellow could admire.

Next Mailer proposed a fund-raising benefit for the Theatre for Ideas, an intellectuals’ public forum. He volunteered to chair a debate between Millett and Greer, two radically different voices of Women’s Liberation.

Kate prudently turned down the invitation, but Germaine grabbed at the chance and took aim at Kate by declaring that Mailer was
not
the enemy. She put out the word that she rather looked forward to a tumble with Norman. The Town Hall evening, a circus beyond
anyone’s expectations, became the linchpin of Greer’s triumphal American tour, which reaped a week as guest host on Dick Cavett among other publicity bonanzas.

The Town Hall evening starring Greer and Mailer was filmed by D.A. Pennebaker. I didn’t go, but I saw the movie. It was memorable mainly for a piece of excess in the presence of reporters and cameras that was typical of that volatile time. Jill Johnston, a dance critic for
The Village Voice
and a pioneer in performance art, had attracted a devoted following through her stream-of-consciousness musings without punctuation. More recently she had come out in print, turning her weekly column into a lesbian forum. Johnston had been invited to represent the lesbian point of view at Town Hall. Knowing she was up against some practiced spotlight hogs, she choreographed a surprise. Two women friends leaped on stage to join her in a simulated group grope, prompting Mailer to bark, “Cut it out, Jill. Be a team player. Be a lady.”