Tag Archives: #womeninjournalism

A Few Good Women

In Heath Lee’s guest post this week, she recalls a moment in 1969 when Washington journalist Vera Glaser confronted President Nixon at the second press conference of his administration. 

            “Mr. President, in staffing your administration, you have so far made about 200 high-level Cabinet and other policy position appointments, and only three have gone to women,” she said. “Can you tell us, sir, whether we can we expect more equitable recognition of women’s abilities, or are we going to remain a lost sex?”*

            Normally, in this setting at the time, journalists lobbed softball questions at a president. This question was a bomb! Yet, Nixon accepted the challenge, creating The President’s Task Force on Women’s Rights and Responsibilities, whose job was to ensure that women had opportunities to take leadership roles in government.

            In 1971, Nixon appointed Barbara Hackman Franklin, one of the first female graduates of Harvard Business School, as a staff assistant. She coordinated efforts to fulfill the task force’s recommendations, which were published as “A Matter of Simple Justice” in 1970.

Penn State, of course

            When I researched Barbara, I was thrilled to find that we share an alma mater — Penn State. We ARE!

            Penn State went on to fund an oral history project titled “A Few Good Women.”** One of the women interviewed was the journalist who started it all, Vera Glaser.

            Today, I want to excerpt one small part of the interview conducted by Jean Rainey, the project’s administrator. It’s a story of a light-bulb moment when someone realizes that something isn’t fair in the world. So, here is Vera to tell the tale. 

Are you telling me…

            “I wanted to report to you something that reflects on the situation early on when the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced. I was covering the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the ERA.

            One member was Judge Marlow Cooke of Kentucky. One of the first witnesses was a very attractive young woman who had a law degree from Harvard and had graduated very, very high in her class.

            She testified that her male colleagues got choice job offers after graduating from Harvard, and here she was — having  ranked second or third in her class — with no offers of a job as a lawyer.

            So Judge Marlow Cooke said, ‘Are you telling me that my four daughters, that the money, the thousands that I’m putting out on their education, isn’t going to buy them the same break in the job market as it buys for a man?’

            She said, ‘Yes, I’m telling you that.’

            Well, that caused a hullabaloo. But his question was marvelous because it drew some chuckles, and at the same time was very, very pointed and valid.”

Use your imagination

            “I think it takes a little bit, or in the beginning, certainly it took a little bit of imagination and open mindedness on the part of men to accept what was beginning to happen 25 or 30 years ago. It isn’t that these men were prejudiced. It’s just that it had always been that way.

            Women were accustomed to this kind of division in the power structure. But women increasingly pushed for a role in the nation’s leadership.

            I have felt that my participation in the women’s movement was a very pivotal point in my life. I am so happy that I did it. I had qualms in the beginning. I had qualms as a journalist about asking the president the kind of question that I did. And yet in simple justice, you had to ask it. If I hadn’t, I am sure eventually someone else would have. So, I’m happy that I was able to do what I did, and I wish that I had been able to do a great deal more.”

                                                __________________________

* At the time, Vera Glaser was the Washington bureau chief for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), a syndicate serving about ninety newspapers. She went on to work for Knight Ridder and the Washingtonian, among other press outlets. She died in 2009.

** “A Few Good Women” is part of the Penn State collection, “Advancing the Cause of Women in Government, 1969-74.” It accompanied a book by Lee Stout titled A Matter of Simple Justice: The Untold Story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and A Few Good Women (State College, PA: Penn State University Libraries, 2015).

Saved by the game

High school is a memorable time for many of us, but for Melissa Isaacson, it was more than nostalgia that made her write about the girls basketball team that won the 1979 Illinois state championship.

Melissa’s book, State: A Team, a Triumph, a Transformation, is about a team of girls who beat not only their opponent, but a society that only recently had let them be athletes.

“This story is about one group of girls sitting innocently at a monumental place in our nation’s history,” Melissa wrote. “It’s about the sheer joy of getting our first uniforms, packing the same school gym where we were once not allowed to practice, and gaining access to life lessons previously only available to boys.”*

The girls of the Niles West team of Skokie, Illinois, made their way onto the court in the early years of Title IX. They came from varied, and sometimes neglectful and even violent, families. They believe to this day that playing basketball not only changed them, but saved them.

They had strong backers and role models. Nicholas Mannos, the principal who fought for girls to have the same opportunities as boys. Their first coach, Arlene Mulder, who’d never coached basketball but who mastered the game and pushed the girls to be their best selves. Billy Schnurr, the boys basketball coach who secretly mentored Mulder and helped mold the girls into fierce competitors. Gene Earl, their second coach, who delighted in the girls’ spirit and took them to the championships.

Who’s that I see?

When the team arrived at the championship game in 1979, they found they’d be facing East St. Louis, a powerhouse of a team with a secret weapon — Jackie Joyner, the extraordinary athlete who went on to win six Olympic gold medals. That didn’t faze Melissa or her teammates.

“After 25 games, and for most of us, two or more years of running stairs and scrimmaging at five in the morning behind us, we could say with confidence that no team in Illinois was better conditioned or more in sync,” she said.**

It was a hard fought battle, but when the final buzzer sounded, they had won the game 63-47. Melissa, who had suffered an injury that year, only came in for the final minute. Holding the ball at the buzzer, she flung it skyward as the stands rocked to the chant, “We are! State champs!”

Years later, at a team reunion, Holly Andersen Blanchette shared what sports meant to her.

“People accuse me of being competitive sometimes,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean I’m a sore loser; it means that sports has empowered me. It gives you self-confidence and makes you more determined.”

A scandal spurs a career

Melissa played club basketball at the University of Iowa, where she earned her B.A. in journalism. Her interest in the profession arose from the seminal political event of the 1970s, the Watergate scandal.***

“Journalism was suddenly a glamorous profession. Reporters were celebrities,” she says. “And it was a natural interest for me, as I loved writing and lived in Chicago, a town that had three daily papers.”

For 30 years, Melissa was a sportswriter, working for the Chicago Tribune and USA Today among other newspapers. In the ‘90s, she covered the Michael-Jordan-led Chicago Bulls and the Chicago Bears, the first woman in those reporting roles. She worked for ESPN, covering everything up to and including the Olympics.

A woman sportswriter — in choosing her career path, Melissa opened up an avenue previously unavailable to women. Today she is a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.  

Melissa once had the opportunity to interview Birch Bayh, the Indiana senator who co-wrote Title IX with Reps. Edith Green and Patsy Mink. She ended the call on a personal note.

“Thank you,” I told him. “What you did changed our lives…. it gave me and my teammates an identity and self-esteem that girls just a few years older didn’t have the same chance of having.”

                                    _____________________________

* Quotes in the present tense (says) are from my telephone interview with Melissa Isaacson on April 19, 2022. Quotes in the past tense (said) are from her book, State: A Team, A Triumph, A Transformation (Chicago: Agate Midway, 2019). https://amzn.to/3yBR0cf

** When the team suffered a rare loss that season, Coach Earl comforted the girls with this memorable thought: “Trust me,” he said. “You are not going to remember this when you’re giving birth to your first child.”

*** So I wasn’t the only one! I went into journalism because of Watergate, too.