Good Girls Revolt — When Men Were “Mad” and Women Were Researchers

Good-Girls-Revolt-Amazon-Pilot
Three “good girls” at Newsweek talking with brief hire Nora Ephron, who left her researcher role for “someplace I can write.”

It’s hard to believe, watching now.  Even more than Mad Men, Amazon’s Good Girls’ Revolt is all too familiar.  The story of the women of Newsweek and their battle for equality in the newsroom, it’s a heartbreaker, and it’s not because of the huge moments of oppression or betrayal, although they are present. (Through some creative reporting, a young researcher discovers what really happened at the 1969 Altamont Festival that “killed the 60’s.”   But the rewrite assignment – and the credit – goes to a guy who never left the building. “That’s how we do things here. We have a process.  Men are the reporters – you girls are the researchers.”)  The researcher on this story  loves the thrill of reporting so much she surrenders everything she’s learned, even though she’ll never get credit for it in the office, much less in print.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.  

Implicit, explicit and intractable power all in male hands, all the time, permeates every moment of Good Girls Revolt’s pilot episode.  We know where their pending revolution is coming from.

Even more frequent than the “big stuff” were the small assumptions, dismissals, insults and slights that eat away, day by day, at confidence and ambition and hope.

  • Four women in a hallway conversation greeted by the boss: “Hello, my little coven.”
  • The Managing Editor sending his best researcher, who keeps her reporter partner (and lover) safe and “his” stories on the cover, for coffee.  “Black, two sugars, right?”
  • “Sweetie,” “honey,” “cutie.”
  • A husband who “gives his wife a year” to write a novel before moving her to Connecticut to raise babies, but then puts a hole in her diaphragm so she’ll be pregnant before that year ends.
  • Three guys hungrily ogling a smart, but lovely women as she tries unsuccessfully to make it through the newsroom without incident.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.

For me it was a very sweet 60 Minutes producer sitting next to a very pregnant me in the newsroom and urging me not to come back to work – to stay home like his wife did.  Or the executive who called with sympathy for my miscarriage and told me that, pregnant woman that I’d been, I shouldn’t have been working so hard – as if I was my fault.  (His assistant asked me if I’d even wanted the baby at all.)

In addition to newsroom battles, this introductory episode takes us to a “consciousness raising” meeting, led by a pregnant “Eleanor Holmes Norton” and featuring, like a 12-step program, the telling of individual stories of humiliation, discrimination and sexual harassment.

Sadly, many of us remember; it happened to us.

In my own community, oppressive sexual relationships between researcher and producer weren’t frequent, but they weren’t rare, either.  They almost never ended well.  One correspondent told me at a bureau Christmas party “I’d really love to sleep with you.  Really.  But I never dip my pen in the company inkwell.”  He thought I’d be impressed.

We need this show – and so do our daughters and nieces and sons and nephews and husbands and young friends.  Here’s how Buzzfeed’s Ann Helen Peterson  ends her piece on the show:

Good Girls Revolt may be about a bunch of accidental revolutionaries. Its politics may be embroidered with melodrama, and romance, and fixation on clothes. But, then again, so is life. And that doesn’t make the show, or the work of the women behind the scenes, any less feminist — or necessary.

As [production designer Jeannine] Oppewall says, “Sometimes I look at my nieces, who don’t quite yet see the amount of work it took for us to pull this off, and I’m like, ‘You better have a look at the past, because if you’re not vigilant, the past can always be your future.’ You gotta babysit it and talk about it and push it and make it seem like this is absolutely the way it should be.”

 

Ripple, The Grateful Dead and Don Draper

Once upon a time, things were hopeful.  We were too.  Not because there was peace and love and bounty in the world but because, if we all tried, maybe there could be,

blissed out don draper Coke commercialThat’s what was so perfect about the Mad Men finale: the ironies of hindsight.  There was the desperate Don Draper, moving toward bliss and emerging from both the 60’s and his misery to create the perfect, pseudo-idealistic yet consummately cynical commercial: a UN of young people on a hilltop, singing about Coke.

This video is what that video should have been.  Musicians from 12 cities on 5 continents, brought together by Playing for Change,  join to pay tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of The Grateful Dead and to remind us of what had all hoped, and maybe still hoped, could be.

I was a little teary.  The friend who sent me the link said he’d been “crying like a girlymon the whole weekend…”

This isn’t the first “Playing for Change” video; take a look at what is a wonderful body of work created not only to move sentimental people like me but also to raise money for music schools and other services in areas of great need.

And while you’re at it – here are Robert Hunter’s lyrics for this beloved Dead classic.

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine

And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung,
Would you hear my voice come thru the music,
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken,
Perhaps they’re better left unsung.
I don’t know, don’t really care
Let there be songs to fill the air.

Ripple in still water,
When there is no pebble tossed,
Nor wind to blow.

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty,
If your cup is full may it be again,
Let it be known there is a fountain,
That was not made by the hands of men.

There is a road, no simple highway,
Between the dawn and the dark of night,
And if you go no one may follow,
That path is for your steps alone.

Ripple in still water,
When there is no pebble tossed,
Nor wind to blow.

You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall you fall alone,
If you should stand then who’s to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home.

Don Draper, Dick Whitman, Peggy, Sally, Joan, Coke, Mad Men and Us

Don on pay phone2The farewell to Mad Men, at least on Monday’s morning news programs, was all about “the Coke commercial” (indeed a brilliant, brilliant presence in the episode) the 60’s, advertising, capitalism and a Don Draper not at all like the man he described to Peggy in this phone call:

“I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am…. I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name. and made nothing of it.”

or his physical transformation – messy hair, plaid shirt and jeans – that returned him, at least briefly, to the “Dick Whitman” he once was.  Even his expressions were those of a country boy with a squint.

Joan faye peggy2
Joan, Peggy and Faye in the elevator in especially poignant episode about the women of Mad Men

Preoccupation  with “the commercial” overrode discussion of how important Mad Men has been to women: not only those who were teenagers as Don ascended and for whom so many scenes brought back memories of the scandalous neighborhood “divorcee,” of the Women’s Clubs and Garden Clubs and all the other “activities” suburban mothers created —  but also for those who came after, for whom some of what they saw of women’s lives was just a relic but way too much was way too familiar.

Don Draper’s journey, from brothel to executive suite to Esalen, is very much that of America through the 60’s and beyond.   It was a traumatic, scary, strange and exhilarating time, and whether you were there or you arrived later, it’s clear that Don’s misery and confusion mirrored what many of us, and, even more so, our parents felt every day.

Oh, and that Coke commercial? It was so perfect I laughed out loud as it appeared: all that we had hoped for and dreamed of, laid out in an air-brushed, multicultural, Benetton panorama.  I don’t think we knew then how far we would be today – maybe forever – from that dream, but watching it now, it seems quaint how sentimental we were, even in our days of rage.  Just like Don.

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck and Roman Holiday: a Political Lesson? No, Really.

Romanholiday2

It was a fairy tale about a princess on a journey. Doing her duty, kind of like Diana (but, since she was played by Audrey Hepburn, even classier,) she came to Rome, after Athens, London and Paris, to conclude her mission.

But she was young and beautiful and sick of receptions and parades. And so, in the middle of the night, she snuck out the embassy window and ventured across the Piazza di Spagna and into the Roman night.

If you know this movie at all, you remember with sweet nostalgia the way you felt the first time you saw it.  The princess asleep near the Trevi Fountain on the Roman equivalent of a park bench is awakened, like Sleeping Beauty, by reporter Joe Bradley, played by Gregory Peck. ( If the film has a flaw, it’s that we know some of what will happen once we see him there.  He’s a good guy and that’s who he plays.  He is Atticus Finch, after all.)
The film was released in 1953, right in the middle of the 1950’s.  Written by Dalton Trumbo, “Roman Holiday” was credited to a “front” named Ian McLellan Hunter, because Trumbo, blacklisted as a member of the Hollywood Ten, wasn’t permitted to write for movies any longer.  It’s one of the darkest chapters in Hollywood history, very much a part of the image of the decade and a sad facet of a beloved film that won three Oscars and introduced the world to Audrey Hepburn.
There’s something else though.  The people in this film behave well.  There are things that they want, desperately, but there are principals at stake, and they honor them.  When Peck meets Hepburn, he doesn’t recognize her but lets her crash at his apartment.  Once he figures out who she is, he knows this “runaway”  could be the story of his life.  Even so, after a brief, idyllic tour of the city, (SPOILER ALERT) she honors her responsibilities and returns to her royal duties, and of course, he never writes the story.  It was very much an artifact of the
“Greatest Generation” ideals, manifested with such courage during
WWII and very much the flip side of the jaundiced (and just as accurate) Mad Men view of the 50’s.  Duty and honor trump romance and ambition. 

Once again, I’m struck with admiration for the people of these times.  Yes the 50’s did terrible damage and made it difficult to be eccentric or rebellious or even creative.  But films like this one, or Now Voyager and similar films of the 40’s, sentimental as they may be, remind us of what else these people were.  They’d lived through the Depression and the war and they had an elevated sense of responsibility.  As we watch much of our government (and some of the rest of us) disintegrate into partisanship and self-interest, it makes a lot more sense than it did when we rose up against it all in the 1960’s.  Doesn’t it?