Newsweek in the Mad Men Era

'They'd say, "If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else. Women don't write at Newsweek" '

In The Good Girls Revolt, Lynn Povich tells the story of how she and 45 of her female colleagues in 1970 sued Newsweek in what would be the first gender discrimination lawsuit. At the time, women in journalism were relegated to fact-checking and research, with little hope of rising in the mostly male editorial ranks. Now, Newsweek has its first female editor in chief, Tina Brown. Povich (who eventually became Newsweek’s first female senior editor and, in 1991, editor in chief of Working Woman) talks about whether life really has improved for women in media.

Adweek: Why did you decide to tell this story now?
Povich: I started looking at the Newsweek legal papers about five years ago, thinking I’d send them to Radcliffe College’s Women’s Archives.

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