Lindsy Van Gelder's "The Trials of Lois Lane: Women in Journalism" appears in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women's Liberation Movement, first published in 1970. The essay is one of five personal testimonies from professional women that discuss working in journalism, television, the military, publishing and medicine.
It's a Boys' Club...
"The Trials of Lois Lane: Women in Journalism" recalls the old-fashioned image of a newspaperman who dashes around in a fedora, thrusting his microphone in cops' faces, helping to catch criminals, politicians and other bad guys. "Newspapers have changed a great deal" since those days, Lindsy Van Gelder writes, and yet women in the 1960s were still trying to get work at newspapers and finding job titles like newsman, rewriteman and copy boy.
In the essay, Lindsy Van Gelder recounts her struggle to work for various newspapers during the 1960s:
- The New York World-Telegram & Sun was afraid she would get married. She prepared a chart showing that more men had left the paper for different or higher-paying jobs than women had left the paper in recent years, but the editor told her women were a distraction in the newsroom. "Other men apparently can make it through the day without raping their secretaries, but the virility of newspapermen is such that temptation has to be out of reach," she writes.
- A Wall Street Journal summer program director told her she didn't look like a newspaperman.
- A New York Daily News editor was "beaming" over her resume, until he saw that she was married. She assured him that she was on the Pill and that she and her husband believed she would work if she did become a mother. She reports that the editor said, "Honey, that's no way to talk. A pretty little thing like you ought to be home having a baby every year!" She lost her case when she protested this at the State Human Rights Commission.
...But Women Belong
The second half of the essay reflects on the fact that despite these road blocks, women who actually get reporter jobs do very well. Perhaps, Lindsy Van Gelder suggests, it's those "stereotyped female traits" that help reporters get a story, traits such as compassion or getting people to talk to you. By the 1960s, the cops, politicians and celebrities had publicists and spokesmen -- or spokeswomen. Reporters needed to talk to newsmakers who were workers, students, demonstrators, soldiers, teachers, parents and welfare recipients -- and they wouldn't have to talk to the press unless they felt like it, she obverves.
"The Trials of Lois Lane" describes a demonstration by the National Organization for Women. A television newsman turned his microphone to a fellow journalist, asking a female reporter what she thought "about all this." Lindsy Van Gelder comments, "I would very much like to have seen him try the same routine on a black reporter at a Black Panther rally."
Trivialization of women's issues and condescending behavior were deeply ingrained in the world of journalism, just as in much of the world at large. Often, feminists in the women's liberation movement adopted the tactic of refusing to speak to male reporters at their protests and other events. Forcing the newspapers and networks to send female reporters served a dual purpose, of fighting that condescending attitude and giving more women the work. "Come the women's revolution," Lindsy Van Gelder concludes her essay, "an awful lot of talented women are going to be hauled away from their steno pads, research jobs and fashion columns - to explain it in print."
Sea Change
"The Trials of Lois Lane: Women in Journalism" is an eye-opening read that offers a women's liberation perspective and a better understanding of how women were shut out of certain professional work by sexist attitudes. However, the world of journalism and conditions in newsrooms greatly evolved over subsequent decades. In 2011, Lindsy Van Gelder said there had been "a feminist tsunami in journalism" since she wrote her essay. Among other indicators, in 2011 The New York Times, often considered the most influential newspaper in the U.S., finally appointed a woman as executive editor.