The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich Page A

embarrassed when a China scholar she had cultivated was asked to Newsweek one day and she hadn’t been invited. The next time someone asked her to call the man for a quote, she was overheard saying, “Call him up your bloody self—you just had him to lunch!” Fay felt strongly that we should first air our grievances with the editors. She wanted to make sure we had given them a fair chance. The more she thought about the lack of respect given the researchers and their work, however, the more upset she got. She decided to join our band of sisters.
    Meanwhile, we had been shopping for a lawyer of the female persuasion. The first attorney we approached was Harriet Pilpel, a senior partner in the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, which specialized in First Amendment issues. With no experience in the new field of employment rights law, she declined to represent us. Even so, recalled Margaret, “she was thrilled we weren’t lesbians. I don’t know if she used those words, but she was delighted that we were nice, soft-spoken, decently dressed young women and not part of the lunatic fringe.” We then approached the lunatic fringe—Florynce Kennedy, the flamboyant black civil rights lawyer and fiery feminist who had defended Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. Greeting us in her apartment in the East Forties wearing her signature cowboy hat, Flo had lots of ideas of what we could do, including sit-ins and guerrilla theater, but most of them were too outrageous for us. She also discussed how much money she would need, which made us realize we should think about a pro bono lawyer.
    That led us to the American Civil Liberties Union, where we met with the assistant legal director, Eleanor Holmes Norton. Five feet, seven inches and five months pregnant, Eleanor was an impressive figure with an Afro to match. As we sat in her office explaining our case, she grabbed a copy of Newsweek and opened it to the masthead. She looked at it—then looked at us—and said, “The fact that there are all men from the top category to the second from the bottom and virtually all women in the last category proves prima facie that there’s a pattern of discrimination at Newsweek. I’ll take your case.” (There was one male researcher on the masthead, a political refugee from Greece whom the editors had hired as a favor.)
    Eleanor was perfect for us. A veteran civil rights activist and self-avowed feminist, she was smart, shrewd, and sharp-tongued—“indignant” was her middle name. The great-granddaughter of a slave who walked off a Virginia plantation, Eleanor was from an aspiring and ambitious family. Her grandfather Richard Holmes was one of Washington, D.C.’s few black firefighters and successfully petitioned the department to create the first all-black company in 1921. Her father, Coleman Holmes, a charming and dapper man, went to Syracuse University on a scholarship. In Syracuse, he met Vela Lynch, a shy woman who had grown up on a farm in North Carolina but was sent north after her mother died. They married in 1935 and came back to Washington, where Coleman worked as a public health inspector and Vela took a job in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. More industrious—and more practical—than her husband, Vela went back to school to earn a teaching degree. In the late 1940s, she also joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and paid $1 annual dues toward its “Struggle for Full Emancipation for the American Negro.”
    As the oldest of three girls, Eleanor easily assumed the role of the first-born, scoring top grades and leading school organizations from elementary through high school. Washington was still a Southern, segregated city, where white-owned stores in black neighborhoods wouldn’t even hire “colored people” to work for them. In 1951, at age twelve, Eleanor had what she describes as her first consciousness-raising moment. The educator Mary Church Terrell threw up