Personal History (78 page)

I seemed to be carrying inadequacy as baggage. When I thought about my uncertainty and nervousness, a scene from the first musical comedy I’d ever seen,
The Vagabond King
, kept recurring to me. There is a moment when the suddenly enthroned vagabond, appearing for the first time in royal robes, slowly and anxiously descends the great stairs, tensely eyeing on both sides the rows of archers with their drawn bows and inscrutable faces. I still felt like a pretender to the throne, very much on trial. I felt I was always taking an exam and would fail if I missed a single answer; a direct question about something like
Newsweek
’s newsstand circulation would flummox me completely.

What most got in the way of my doing the kind of job I wanted to do was my insecurity. Partly this arose from my particular experience, but to the extent that it stemmed from the narrow way women’s roles were defined, it was a trait shared by most women in my generation. We had been brought up to believe that our roles were to be wives and mothers, educated to think that we were put on earth to make men happy and comfortable and to do the same for our children.

I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were
intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children. Once married, we were confined to running houses, providing a smooth atmosphere, dealing with children, supporting our husbands. Pretty soon this kind of thinking—indeed, this kind of life—took its toll: most of us
became
somehow inferior. We grew less able to keep up with what was happening in the world. In a group we remained largely silent, unable to participate in conversations and discussions. Unfortunately, this incapacity often produced in women—as it did in me—a diffuse way of talking, an inability to be concise, a tendency to ramble, to start at the end and work backwards, to overexplain, to go on for too long, to apologize.

Women traditionally also have suffered—and many still do—from an exaggerated desire to please, a syndrome so instilled in women of my generation that it inhibited my behavior for many years, and in ways still does. Although at the time I didn’t realize what was happening, I was unable to make a decision that might displease those around me. For years, whatever directive I may have issued ended with the phrase “if it’s all right with you.” If I thought I’d done anything to make someone unhappy, I’d agonize. The end result of all this was that many of us, by middle age, arrived at the state we were trying most to avoid: we bored our husbands, who had done their fair share in helping reduce us to this condition, and they wandered off to younger, greener pastures.

When I first went to work, I was still handicapped with the old assumptions and was operating as though they were written in stone. When I started my job, I was “inferior” to the men with whom I was working. I had no business experience, no management experience, and little knowledge of the governmental, economic, political, or other matters with which we dealt. I truly felt like Samuel Johnson’s description of a woman minister—“a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Since I regarded myself as inferior, I failed to distinguish between, on the one hand, male condescension because I was a woman and, on the other hand, a valid view that the only reason I had my job was the good luck of my birth and the bad luck of my husband’s death.

Being a woman in control of a company—even a small private company, as ours was then—was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique. Even at my own company, there were no women managers and few women professionals—and probably no women within four levels of me. The
Post
was not an anomaly; rather, this was typical of the times. The business world was essentially closed to women. At least through most of the 1960s, I basically lived in a man’s world, hardly speaking to a woman all day except to the secretaries.
But I was almost totally unaware of myself as an oddity and had no comprehension of the difficulties faced by working women in our organization and elsewhere. For far too many years I thought my handicaps were entirely due to my being new and untrained, and attributed none of my problems to being a woman.

Early in 1966, I was asked to speak at the Women’s City Club of Cleveland. Someone there had written me suggesting “The Status of Women” as a topic for my speech. My response to the president of the club reflects my views about operating in a man’s world at that time:

Even more revealing of my old-fashioned attitudes was an interview I did with
Women’s Wear Daily
as late as 1969. Overall, the piece reads perfectly sensibly, except on the topic of women in the workplace, about which I was grossly insensitive. The report portrays me with the editors in the unconsciously sexist way then taken for granted:

The day the
Women’s Wear
piece appeared, Elsie Carper, the longtime
Post
reporter and editor, and my friend, marched fiercely into my office and said—in response to the last line—“Do you really believe that? Because, if you do, I quit.” That shook me up. I saw her point, but for me, an understanding of the real heart of women’s issues surfaced only later, and far too gradually. Professionally, I remained very isolated as a woman and had no one in my work world to talk with about these things, certainly not in the upper reaches of the newspaper industry. The organization that I joined when I went to work, the trade association called the Bureau of Advertising, became the first of many over the years in which I was the only woman. Meetings were especially hard for me as a woman alone, because they took place over several days and often were held at resorts, creating problems of a social nature—whom to join at dinners, what to do if nothing was planned, what to do when the men paired off or went in groups.

One of the most awkward occasions for me was the bureau’s annual trip to Detroit for a meeting with officials from the automobile industry—needless to say, a totally male group at the time. For several years I stuck out like a sore thumb. There was always the most acute discomfort and self-consciousness about my presence in a room. One speaker after another used to start his presentation coyly by saying, “Lady and gentlemen,” or “Gentlemen and Mrs. Graham,” always with slight giggles or snickers. It made me extremely uncomfortable, and I longed to be omitted, or at least not singled out.

At one bureau meeting, a friend of mine was presiding over a discussion of an issue totally new to me. To my horror, he decided to go around the table asking each individual for his view. I was sitting on his right, and he started at his left, which gave me time to try to think what to say while listening to what everyone else had to say. When he got all the way around the table and we had heard from everyone but me, he just stopped and acted as if I wasn’t there. Maybe he thought he was being kind, believing I had nothing to add. There was a brief pause, and then we all laughed, I shakily said something, and the moment passed. At the time, I didn’t know whether I was more relieved at not having to make a comment or more upset at being ignored.

I often observed that at times women were invisible to men, who looked right through you as though you weren’t there. I once mentioned this syndrome to Peter Derow, one of
Newsweek
’s executives. Later I found he was hosting an event for chief executive officers who were or might become
Newsweek
advertisers, a typical promotion—to which I hadn’t been invited. I inquired politely why he hadn’t included me in this meeting, which was being held in Washington, especially since I was the CEO of his own company. “You remember telling me about the meetings where
men looked right through you?” Peter replied. “Well, that’s the reason.” Oddly, I was still insecure enough to let this pass.

Each time I was the only woman in a room full of men, I suffered lest I appear stupid or ignorant. And yet I have to admit that, as much as I may have been discomfited by being the only woman in most of the meetings I attended, as time went on there was part of me that quite liked it. I actually confessed to a friend at the time that “it’s spoiling—and fun—to be the first in the door.”

An extreme example of my acceptance of traditional notions of men’s and women’s roles and realms was a frivolous but basic one. In Washington and elsewhere where large, social dinners were given, men and women automatically separated after eating, the men usually remaining at the dining-room table discussing serious matters over brandy and cigars while the women retreated to the living room or the hostess’s bedroom to powder their noses and gossip, mostly about children and houses—“women’s” interests, as they were then considered. I remember hearing a story that once Cissy Patterson, on being herded off with the other women after dinner, said to her hostess, “Let’s hurry through this. I have no household problems and my daughter is grown.” But she, too, accepted this ancient custom, as did I. Long after I had gone to work and was engaged in discussing political, business, or world affairs with many of these same men by day, at night, after dinner, I would mindlessly take myself off with the rest of the women, even in my own house. Finally, one night at Joe Alsop’s, something snapped. I realized that I had worked all day, participated in an editorial-issue lunch, and was not only deeply involved in but was actually interested in what was going on in the world. Yet I was being asked to spend up to an hour waiting to rejoin the men. That night at Joe’s—he was especially guilty of keeping the men around his table—I told him I was sure he would understand if I quietly left when the women were dismissed. Far from understanding, Joe was upset. Defensively, he insisted that the separation didn’t last a full hour but only long enough for the men to go to the bathroom. I maintained that that was nonsense, that I liked early evenings, that I looked forward to my reading, and, further, that I wasn’t trying to tell him what to do but only stating what I wanted to do. Joe couldn’t accept the idea of my leaving and promised that if I stayed he would let everyone—men and women—remain at the table.

My action didn’t come as the result of some major philosophical stance; rather, it simply occurred to me that I could use that after-dinner hour better by going home and reading the early edition of the paper. But clearly my working experience had at last combined with the influence of the increasingly strong women’s movement.

I had had no intention of starting a revolution, but my action did indeed
trigger a minor social coup, as news of my innocent suggestion spread. Because I was regarded as a conservative on these social issues, my stance was particularly effective. The illogic of expecting women to leave while men held meaningful discussions became obvious, and the practice gradually broke up all over town.

T
HERE WAS NO
single dramatic moment that altered my views about women; rather, I just began to focus on the real issues surrounding the women’s movement. However slow I was to learn—no doubt much too slow to suit many women—I finally became increasingly aware and involved. Looking back, I can’t understand, except in the context of the times, why I wasn’t quicker to recognize the problems.

Thinking things through with Meg Greenfield helped a great deal. She and I came at women’s issues from different perspectives but with surprisingly similar attitudes. Meg had “made it” before women’s liberation—in her early days at the
Post
she had a sign on her office door that said, “If liberated, I will not serve”—but she faced many of the same prejudices in her office that I did in mine. We tried to articulate our ideas together. She once added a P.S. to a note about something else: “I have been trying to work out a position—any position—on women’s lib but I fear that even moving toward the spirit of [the] thing somewhat, I am irredeemably Uncle Tom. Do you suppose there’s a book one should read?” (We did indeed get a bunch of books, including
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir, and read them and improved our attitude.) She went on thinking about these matters and heartily agreed with what was probably the first
Post
editorial comment on women’s issues in this era. In August of 1969, under the title “Not Such a Long Way, Baby,” we wrote about a sportswriter, Elinor Kaine, who had been barred from the press box at some football stadium. Unable to cover the game, she had taken her case to court. The
Post
editorial read: “[D]espite Virginia Slims, few ‘babies,’ as the TV commercial would have you believe, have come a long way.” After discussing salary and other inequalities, the editorial noted, “The women’s liberation movement, which began a few years ago as a fragile feminine caucus, is spreading,” and said that “countless women who were previously resigned to their roles—in this case, often as slaves or salves to the male ego—now see that schools, businesses, churches and government all exploit or oppress women in some way.” The editorial—written by a liberated man—suggested legal and social remedies but concluded that “perhaps we can begin with the ultra-radical notion that a woman is a human being.”