For All Us Girls, Darlings!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

               
                                              I mean, honeys, who doesn't have workplace issues????????????

                                              But Lynn Povich's (yes, she is the sister of Maury Povich) thin but historically encompassing volume, "The Good Girls Revolt", recreates a chapter of feminist and workplace history that may have otherwise fallen through the cracks.

                                               When the women of Newsweek Magazine sued their bosses for better pay, treatment, and job consideration, it was 1970, and I was trying to make my way through that adolescent horror called high school!!!!!!!!  I did not even know that, until 1963, sexual discrimination towards women was legal!!!!!!!!!!!  Can you imagine?????????????

                                                Even editor Osborn Elliot (who, with is wife, Inger, would figure in the later day scandal that John Guare turned into his play, "Six Degrees Of Separation; a fact, which, by the way, I wish Miss Povich had mentioned!!!!!!!!!!) sort of straddled the fence; on one level sympathizing with the women, on another saying they were bucking fifty years of tradition.  And the rivalry between Newsweek and the more conservative Time (which, of course, MY family got!!!!!!) which centered from story coverage, to the fact that Time employees got white table clothed sit down dinners, while Newsweek journalists had to scarf down take-out while putting an issue to bed, was fascinating.  Hey, I think I would have worked at Time, just for those elegant, sit down dinners!!!!!!!   Yet, after my then literary nemesis, Joyce Maynard, published "My Turn--Searching For Sages" in Newsweek during the early Seventies,  I knew I had to write the same, only better (of course, darlings!!!!!!!) for Newsweek!!!!   And who can forget that Newsweek--and both things were in 1975, darlings; what a year!!!--put on their front covers, Ronee Blakley and Robert Altman, regarding his trailblazing film, "Nashville", and Donna McKechnie, concerning that then musical trailblazer, "A Chorus Line."   I think the shark in "Jaws" made Time's cover, but next to "Nashville" and "A Chorus Line," who cares?????????????

                                              But anyone, darlings, who has felt put upon in any way at where they work, or have worked, will find Lynn Povich's book inspirational.  But it is also interesting that, as the phrase goes, "le plus ca chance, le plus meme chose."  Because Povich chronicles the plight of three young present day career gals, who had only the most minimal knowledge  of the earlier lawsuit, who, today, find themselves still experiencing similar job dissatisfaction  at Newsweek.

                                               The general point of Povich's well documented book is that if you want change, you have to take action, even if that means taking risks.  Which is a hard thing, by human nature, for many people to do.  In an epilogue, she chronicles the outcomes of some of the women involved; saddest is a talented woman named Liz Peer, whose older brother,when he was 17, was found dead in a New York City rooming house, an apparent suicide; seventeen years to that day, their own father killed himself, and, saddest of all, at the age of 45, the talented Peer succumbed to whatever clearly familial mental illness plagued her too, and ended her life.

                                              Yet the book remains an eye opener for everyone who reads it.  Beleaguered workers should keep a copy on their desk shelves, both to draw inspiration from it, and to serve as a subtle threat to whomever at work is plaguing them.

                                                You better believe I have mine right out in the open, dolls!!!!!!!!!