[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Brunet: Ginny, do you know when you first decided that you wanted to become a journalist?

Pitt: I really don't. I can't pinpoint it. I can't give you a specific time or date; I don't think anybody can. My guess is that it goes back to when I was a teenager, or even younger than that, maybe. My father was a journalist in the days when journalism was very exciting, in the twenties, in the thirties, in the days of "The Front Page."* He had wonderful stories about being a journalist in New York in those days. My mother was a journalist much later in the forties and fifties. So I grew up in a family of journalists and journalism. My father was a professor of journalism. We always had newspapers all over the house, very many newspapers. I grew up reading newspapers as a child, not just reading the comics, but actually reading the papers, and I guess listening to my father's stories—and my father was a wonderful storyteller. Drop a pencil, and my dad would tell a story.

I guess listening to those stories and wanting the excitement that I heard in them made me want to go into that field. He sometimes would take me with him on trips when he would go. He was still writing even when he was a professor. He was writing magazine articles. He wrote for Look, and he would write for Reader's Digest. My mother did, too. So I got to meet a lot of people who were in the industry and very high up in the industry. It sort of rubbed off.

Brunet: You had sent me a picture of yourself and four women, that was taken in New York in '65. Was that one of those trips?

Pitt: Yes. My dad was working on an article, and I really don't remember what the article was, but he was working on an article for one of the magazines that he would freelance for, and we went to New York. He had known Kay Lawrence, who was with United Press, before it became UPI [United Press International], and I guess they were contemporaries. My father used to string for United Press and some of the other agencies. So Kay was a friend of Fanny Hurst, and there was a group of women, actually, I guess, who were, again, contemporaries, and we were invited over to Fanny Hurst's apartment to meet Kay and Fanny Hurst and Ishbel Ross, who was an early female reporter in New York, and Ethel Smith was there. I think she's in the picture. She's a musician, a very fine organist. It was '65. What would that make me—fifteen, sixteen, something like that. So we went over to Fanny Hurst's apartment, and it was very elegant. At least I remember it that way. A big, big wonderful place. She had a little pet monkey, I think it was, and her calla lilies and her grand piano. Ethel Smith played for us on the piano, and Ishbel Ross and Kay Lawrence sat around and talked about women in journalism and laughed, and it was wonderful.

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* Ben Hecht's play about newspapers in the 1920s.

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There was no feeling sorry for themselves or, gee, how hard it was, or anything like that; it was very uplifting and exciting. I was just sort of awestruck by it all. I don't know that I ever even opened my mouth, but I just listened to them, and my father joined in and told stories and swapped stories. I'll always remember that. Fanny Hurst took us into her workroom, where she wrote. I'm trying to remember at that time whether I had—I'm sure I hadn't read her books, but I had certainly seen the movies, "Imitation of Life" and all those tear-jerker movies, the kind of stories that she told. She showed us how she wrote in her workroom and how she laid out her chapters as she was working, and she was very gracious.

I felt all of those women were really bending over backwards to talk to me. Maybe it's a child's egocentricity that remembers it that way, but I just felt that they were talking to me. They were bringing me along. They were welcoming me into their world, and I liked that. That was a very big influence on me.

Brunet: What did they tell you about being a woman journalist in the thirties and forties?

Pitt: This would have been the twenties, thirties. Ishbel Ross, I think, probably had the most interesting stories to tell, because she was the earliest. I can't remember specifics, other than I do remember getting a sense of having to be like one of the fellows, you know, almost a need to not be a woman, or to not appear to be a woman, to just sort of be able to drink like the fellows and go out and be rowdy and run around and do all the dirty tricks the fellows did, you know, cutting the opposition's phone wires when they're phoning in their big scoop. I seem to remember that that was the crux of it all, to be like one of the fellows, like one of the guys, and learn to sort of talk tough out of the side of your mouth and not be a girl or a girl reporter, which I think carried into several decades later. I think when I started it was important to be just like one of the guys, if you could. You tried to do that.

I don't recall hearing about women's stories or women's issues or women's assignments like they have today. Nobody was talking about writing for the women's pages. We're not talking about fashion coverage and recipe contests; we're talking about people who were reporters covering fires and murders and wars. There was a sense of being like one of the guys.

Brunet: Is this the kind of reporter you wanted to be already by that time?

Pitt: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Sure. The good stuff. I wanted to do the good stuff. And when I did start, I did start doing meatloaf recipes and family reunions and what were at that time women's stories. I didn't like that; I hated that. But that was all I could get to start with. But, yes, I definitely wanted to cover the good stuff, the gory stuff and the fun stuff. What made it fun, really, was the competition. Back in those days, there really was a lot of competition to see who could get the story fast, the fastest, who could get it first, who could get the most, who could get the interview that nobody else could get. Well, you know, there's no competition for family reunion stories. There's no competition for the traditional women's stories. So if you really wanted to be in the fast lane, you had to cover the good stuff, and that's what I wanted to do, sure.

Brunet: You had said earlier that when you actually started working as a journalist that journalism was not as exciting as you thought it would be, but that it was very businesslike in a lot of respects. What did you mean by that?

Pitt: I think that's true. I meant that when I was growing up and hearing these stories from my father and from people like the women in New York that I talked to, and other people that I'd

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met through my father over the years, it was very exciting. There were a lot of characters in journalism. They were just characters, people who would come into the office, into the newsroom, in top hat and tails, having just been to the theater, but passed a murder on the way home or something. It was very kind of wild. That was not the journalism I met when I started in the late sixties. Journalism at that time was more—I'm not sure "staid" is the right word, but I think journalists began to think of themselves as professionals, and once they began to think of themselves not as tradespeople or craftspeople, but as professionals, they got a little stuffier. Characters were few and far between. I worked with a few over the years, but nothing like what my folks had worked with or what people in "The Front Page" had worked with. There just weren't any more Hildy Johnsons. I don't know what happened to them, and I don't know why. I have a feeling it has to do with the sense of, "Now we're professionals. We're just like doctors or lawyers or architects. We're professionals." And that was a big thing in the seventies in journalism, to make us not be tradespeople, but professionals. Little stuffier.

Brunet: Was there a time when journalism became exciting for you again?

Pitt: I think it had its share of excitement. It was a different kind of excitement. There was competition in Cincinnati, when I worked in the Cincinnati papers. There were two papers, and they were in direct head-to-head competition, which I think is just unheard of anymore, other than in New York, where you still have some competition, and even that's fading. It was a good-natured competition. It wasn't the cutthroat competition that you had in the twenties and thirties. We had a good-natured competition between the Post and the Enquirer, which were the two papers that were in direct competition for circulation in a fairly good-sized market. The reporters from both of the papers knew each other, and, of course, you'd run into each other covering the same stories. You had little good-natured bets going on who could get the interview and who could get the information that the other couldn't get. One paper was a morning and one paper was an afternoon, so there wasn't really a time competition as to who got it first. Who got it first depended on what time of day it broke. But there was enough competition, and I think that's probably what makes journalism exciting, is the competition, the need to get it first or to get it most or to shut the other people out. That existed to a certain extent in Cincinnati. I worked with a good group of people in Cincinnati that were fun to be around.

And the excitement was still there at the AP [Associated Press], which, because of what it was, the AP, the cream of the crop, top of the line, just being at the AP was exciting, just getting started at the AP in Boston, which is a good news town. A lot of good stuff comes out of Boston and New England, in general, and at that time the Boston bureau that I worked in was responsible for all of New England, except for Connecticut. So there was an excitement about just being at that level in journalism. The work itself wasn't that exciting, but it's kind of nice to pick up the phone and call a news source and say, "This is Ginny Pitt from the AP," and have them snap to attention. When you call and say, "This is Ginny Pitt from the Cincinnati Enquirer," they say, "Who?" or, "What?" But when you say, "From the AP," they snap to, and that was exciting. I was very young, and it was very exciting to be at that level of the industry. When I went to New York, of course, that was an even higher step up. So there was excitement; it was just of a different kind, a different type of excitement. Certainly there's nothing more exciting than working at the Associated Press on election night, national elections, things buzzing around. There's excitement.

Brunet: We were talking a few moments ago about having to be one of the boys and to talk rough and drink hard, especially in the seventies. Was there a time when that began to change and that was no longer necessary for you and other women journalists?

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Pitt: Yes, sure it did. I'm not sure I can say when. I think there was always a certain amount of camaraderie that you have to maintain that is not really sexless. It probably is more male than female. There's still a certain amount of toughness that you have to have, I think, in the business, unless you want to be labeled a "women's page" reporter. But I think certainly the times are gone where you had to drink the men under the table and prove yourself. I think that's what's gone. I don't think we're at that stage now. I think we're beyond having to prove ourselves. I don't think women are being tested like they were.

I got tested by being told I had to go up in an airplane in a terrible storm in Boston. They were going to send me to Cape Cod or something. There was an awful storm going on, and I was going to be sent up in this little plane. I was terrified, but I couldn't show that, and I said, "Okay." Later I was told, "Okay, you passed the test. We were just testing you." I think that's gone. I don't think those things are done anymore. They wouldn't test a man like that, see. They were testing the girl. I think that doesn't exist anymore, but I think you still have to have a certain ability to get along with the guys. It still is a male-oriented society and a male-oriented industry, I think, despite the tremendous strides that women have made. I think women have made some wonderful changes, and I think men have changed in response to that, but I think there's still a certain amount of melding of getting along.

Brunet: I'm wondering whether having to drink hard and be one of the guys had detrimental effects on you and on other women journalists at that time.

Pitt: I don't know whether it did or not. Probably it must have, in terms of the lifestyle that you live. It's never a good idea to drink hard and smoke a lot. It's certainly not a healthy lifestyle, but it's not healthy for men, either. I think that that has also receded for men, as well. I don't know whether that's because there are more women in the industry; maybe it is. I never really thought about it. I suppose that's a possibility, that maybe it's not as important to finish a shift and then go to the bar and drink until you stumble home. I suppose drinking, in general, is not looked on with the same levity as it was years ago, before we had MADD [Mothers Against Drunk Driving] and other organizations that called our attention to the real tragedies.

But as far as being detrimental in any way other than healthwise, I don't know that it was. In a lot of respects, I think it taught me things. I'm not by nature—or I wasn't by nature a tough person or a tough-talking person. Maybe I am now and I don't realize it; it just evolved. I think it changed my personality. I'm sure it did. I think in high school and my younger days, I don't think I was as aggressive as I am now, and I'm sure that having to be like one of the guys I often did things I didn't want to do, like say, "All right, I'll go up in the airplane." Or they sent me around to the porno shops to do an article on something. There was some Supreme Court pronouncement on censorship, and I was immediately sent to the "combat zone" in Boston, to go to all the dirty bookstores and interview the owners, who, of course, don't want to talk to reporters at all. That was another test. I didn't want to do that. I didn't like doing that, but I had to do it because it was an assignment and there was a photographer with me, who was a man, and I couldn't very well say, "I don't want to do this, but let's do it." I had to just say, "All right, we're going to do it," and march right in there. Now I think I do those kinds of things without even thinking about it, so maybe it wasn't detrimental. Maybe it was good. I don't know.

Brunet: Do you remember who told you that you were being tested, that it was a test?

Pitt: My guess is, it was Jack Mayne, but I don't know that for a fact. For some reason I think it was Jack Mayne, who was the assistant bureau chief in Boston at the time, and was a very fine fellow. He left while I was still in the Boston bureau. He went to New York into another

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position. I seem to think it was Jack Mayne, but I could be wrong. Somebody told me. It was definitely confirmed. It wasn't my suspicion or my hunch or my supposition; I was told, "You were being tested, and you passed." I was told long after the fact.

Brunet: How did you feel about being told that?

Pitt: I think that I was a little angry. I think that I thought that that was a kind of rotten thing to do. Really, I was there to be a reporter, an editor, and I'm very good at that, and I was then, and that was just kind of a dumb thing to do. What was the point? I think that was my reaction. I don't remember what I said to Jack, if it was Jack, or whoever said it to me. I don't remember what I said to them. I don't think I probably exhibited any kind of anger at the time, but I think later I probably felt it was just rotten, a rotten thing to do.

Brunet: I don't think we've talked about your mother's stories of being a journalist. She was a journalist for a while in the forties, is that right?

Pitt: Yes, forties, fifties.

Brunet: Did she tell any stories about what it was like to be a journalist in that time?

Pitt: She really didn't. It's funny, because her career took a different turn. She really went into public relations and advertising, which is really where her love was, rather than journalism. It was ironic that she had worked her first job in journalism was at the Cincinnati Post, and mine was at the Cincinnati Enquirer, and we compared salaries. I remember talking about that. She was paid $17 a week, and I was paid $120 a week as our beginning first things, and we talked about that. But I don't think her real love was in hard news, it really wasn't, so I don't recall stories from her about being a journalist and, therefore, being a woman journalist. She was not really my role model in that, because she was really more into advertising and public relations, and that's the direction she took.

Brunet: Who were your role models in journalism?

Pitt: Other than the women I had met in New York really many years before—and they did remain role models, they really did—there weren't a lot. There were a couple, believe it or not, of TV people, like Pauline Fredricks, people who you saw on TV. You didn't see the print people. I think I had fewer role models than mentors. I had a lot of mentors. I had a lot of women who were in the industry who did take me under their wing and pull me along and push me when I needed to be pushed, and this started in Cincinnati. They were really all in Cincinnati—the Cincinnati group. And oddly enough, virtually all of them were working on the women's pages, you know; they weren't the hard-news people. But they were pushing me in that direction and helping me in maintaining contacts and throwing out my name wherever it would be helpful. Some of them were really fairly high up in the organization, even though they were women's editor. They still got to sit around the big table with the boys and plan conferences, and they would throw my name out when it would be helpful, and things like that. So there was a lot of support from the women in Cincinnati.

Brunet: Would you name them?

Pitt: Of course. Jo-Ann Albers is top of the list. Jo-Ann I've talked to you about before. I call her the mother of female networking in journalism. She's a champion at that. She knows everybody anywhere in the industry, or knows of them, or they know of her. She attends every

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meeting ever held anywhere that has to do with women journalists getting together. Jo-Ann was at that time one of the women's-page editors at the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Pat Williams was the food editor at the Enquirer. Pat Williams, a very sophisticated New Yorker, a wonderful woman, no nonsense, loved gourmet cooking, but she wasn't a little shrinking violet, little old lady. She was a journalist, she really was, and she pushed me in all sorts of directions.

Jan Schwein, who wrote under the name Jannelle, because she was the fashion editor, Jan was part of this group. When I later went to New York with the AP, Jan would always come for the fashion shows every year, and we would always get together and we would go to the Plaza and have our tea and cakes and go to the fashion shows and have a wonderful time. Then we'd go out and drink and talk tough and talk journalism. She was a very good influence on me.

Gloria Anderson, who was not in the women's department, but was one of the few women in the hard-news department, and later went to the Miami News and became an editor and a publisher in the Knight-Ridder chain, Gloria was very much a part of this group.

Sally Wright was a reporter. Later she was out in San Rafael, California, for a while, I think during the Angela Davis* blowups out there. But Sally was a reporter and a good friend, and another "no nonsense" kind of person who just didn't take any guff from anybody about writing for the women's pages, and she always tried to do things differently. Sally knew everybody. When Sally left Cincinnati, there was a big party in a hotel down in Cincinnati. We had to rent three or four rooms in a hotel. Sally was the kind of person—the people who came to her going-away party ranged from the mayor and the city manager to the shoe-shine boy at Vine Street outside the Enquirer, cab drivers. I mean, she would take a cab ride somewhere and get to know the cab driver so well, she'd be invited to his son's wedding, and she would go. That was the thing about Sally. She would go. She would take them up.

These were the kind of women that were my first real family in newspapers when I was really an intern with the Cincinnati Enquirer, and these women just really surrounded me and helped me. I still correspond with many of them.

Brunet: Did you have other women role models in New York and in Boston when you moved and went with the AP?

Pitt: There were not a lot of women around at that time, there really weren't. When I went to Boston, there was one woman in the bureau. I became the second woman in the bureau. It was a big bureau, a big hub bureau. I was the second woman there. The woman who was there as a contemporary of mine, maybe my age or maybe even younger, had really not as much experience as I had in journalism and couldn't really be a role model. I think I told you she had an initial feeling of resentment that I was somehow usurping her status as being the only woman in the bureau, but it didn't take very long—I'm really talking about just a matter of days—for us to become fast friends, and for her to realize that she liked having another woman in the bureau. But we were enough of an oddity, we were really enough of a rarity that it drew comments about, "Oh, a woman."

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* Angela Davis (b. 1944). U.S. black militant, communist activist. Acquitted on charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy in connection with the 1970 shootout at Marin County (Ca.) courthouse, 1972.

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In New York, really the same thing on the general desk. I'm trying to remember how many women there were. Earlean Tatro was there, and Louise Cook had been there for a long time, but there weren't a lot of women in that position either. So, again, you don't really have role models because you don't have people who have been doing that for a long time that you can say, "Gee, I'd like to be like that." They weren't there. There was nobody to look to.

Again, I looked to the networks and some of the ladies who had been around a long time, like Gay Pauley at UPI, who had certainly been around a long time, who actually had been a friend of my mother's years and years earlier. Those, I guess, were the role models, the Pauline Fredricks and the Gay Pauleys and the Ishbel Rosses and people who had been around for quite a long time. I guess just the idea that they stuck it out. Helen Thomas, certainly. That's about it.

Brunet: Once you went with the AP, of course, you moved to Boston in '72. When did you begin to notice the sex discrimination?

Pitt: Well, probably right away. [Laughter.] I mean, probably immediately. First of all, it's very obvious to you that there aren't other women around, that you're working in a bureau and you're almost always the only woman, because although there were two of us, it's a twenty-four-hour operation seven days a week. You get spread pretty thin. Mary Thornton, who was the other woman, and I did not work together most of the time. It was very rare to have both of us on, and I think that was by design. I'm almost sure it was by design. For what purpose, I'm not sure, but I think it was by design. So you're aware of the fact that you're the only woman in the room most of the time, and when you go to press conferences to cover things, you're aware that you're either the only or one of only two or three women in a large room full of lots of reporters from lots of media outlets. So I certainly was aware almost from the outset that there was a dearth of women.

As far as when I realized that there was actual discrimination, are you talking about at the AP or in journalism? Because I can go way back and tell you my trying to get a job, when I was told, "Do you need a girl reporter?" as opposed to "a reporter."

Brunet: Let's talk about AP, because I want to talk about the suit.

Pitt: I guess it was more of a gradual thing, realizing that there aren't many of us. I would have fairly rare occasion, but some occasion, to call other bureaus. When you got a female voice on the other end of the phone, when you were calling another bureau, it was a shock. You would try to stay on the phone a little longer, and you did develop some kind of—I hate to say "bonding," it's just a yechhy word, but you did develop some sort of a bonding with these women that you were talking to in the other bureaus. At that time, again, there weren't very many, but there was Phyllis Austin up in Maine and Patti Lee in Montpelier. I'm sure that there must have been others, but in the beginning, that's what I remember. There was a woman in the Springfield, Massachusetts, bureau, as well. But we sort of kept in touch and kept together.

When you talk about discrimination in the AP, the things you think about are, first of all, pay. Am I making as much as the men? And that's something you don't know, and you have no way of knowing for a long time. You think there's no discrimination, because you have a union contract, and the union contract sets forth how much you're going to get paid. And until you reach the top level in that union contract, which is six years of experience, you're just getting paid what's in the contract, and you think everybody else is getting that, too, and it doesn't occur to you that there can be wage discrimination. What you don't realize is that there are merit pay raises that are handed out by bureau chiefs, and nobody knows who gets them. After you get to

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know people that you work with and you start sharing salary information, that's when you learn about wage discrimination, and that I didn't learn about until I was in New York, probably four years after I started with the AP.

Then there's the discrimination in assignments. If the men are always going to cover the governors and the women are always going to cover the governors' wives, then you know that there's something wrong there. How come I get Mrs. Sununu, everybody else gets the governor? So you start to recognize that, but it doesn't hit you. It takes a while, and it's a pattern that develops. After five or six or eight or ten of these things, you start to say, "Wait a minute." I think that's what happened at the AP. I don't think it was any one thing. After I got to New York, it was more pronounced. In Boston, it was less pronounced.

Brunet: How did you become involved with the suit?

Pitt: I think by talking to other women. It's really what I was talking about earlier. You realize there aren't very many around, and you begin to wonder why. Then when you talk to other women, they're noticing the same thing. They have the same sense of isolation that you have when they're the only woman in a room full of men. You just sort of talk about it.

I was aware of the suit because the union was very supportive of it, and I think the union put out a newsletter once a month or something. I had read about it in the newsletter. I was curious. I saw that there had been some complaints filed, and at that point it was not a lawsuit, it was an EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] complaint filed by primarily black reporters, but there was at least one woman among them, and that was Shirley Christian, who was on the foreign desk of the AP in New York. I think I called somebody, and I don't know who I called. I don't know whether I called the union office or whether I may have called Shirley. I don't know who I called, but I called somebody in New York and said, "Gee, what's this all about?" I was just interested. I can't say that at that point I felt that I was a candidate; I was really very new to the AP. This would have been '72, '73. I was very new. I certainly wasn't an agitator or anything; I just was curious about what was it all about. I suppose the self-interest always pops out: "What does this mean for me? I'm a woman. We're filing complaints because of the treatment of women. What does this mean to me?" So I called somebody. Whoever I called filled me in a little about it and I think maybe sent me some information or something. I didn't really do anything except try, from time to time, see if anything was happening on it, and nothing really was.

I didn't do much follow-up till I got to New York. When I got to New York, Shirley was there. Shirley was working on the same floor, just in a different office, and I would talk to her about it from time to time, but really nothing was happening. It just got stalled. The complaints were filed with the EEOC and the various human rights commissions in the various states where the named people were stationed. I believe they sort of wind their way through the human rights commission process in the various states, but then it just came to a dead stop.

Brunet: And yet for a time you were involved with the negotiation and conciliation discussions. How did that come about?

Pitt: Again, my memory is not as clear on that as I'd like it to be. I was concerned that the thing just came to a dead stop, and I can't tell you why I felt it was any of my business or why I felt it necessary for me to determine why it was at a dead stop, but I did. Again, I suspect it's because at that time I was in New York, and I was routinely, on a daily basis, talking to people in ten or fifteen or twenty bureaus a day, and many of them were women, not many, but enough to

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know that there were some problems that the women were facing out in the bureaus. I was in New York, the [Newspaper] Guild office was in New York, the guild's attorney was in New York. It just seemed that I was the one who could just walk a few blocks down the street and say, "What's up?" So I did.

Sid Reitman was the guild attorney at the time and was a wonderful, terrific labor attorney. He represented the union, but the union was the one that was really organizing and pushing this matter. I had some discussions with Sid. Pat Sherlock, I guess, at that time had become the president of the union. Pat is now my husband. He was not at that time, but he was a friend. I had known him for a few years. He had worked in the Portland and Augusta, Maine, bureaus when I had worked in the Boston bureau, so I had gone a ways back with Pat. But we began to sit down and look at the documents and look at what had been done and tried to revive the case. We had to try to locate the named people. It turned out that some of them had settled individually and moved away.

The bottom line is we really had to start all over again. Shirley Christian was the only person of those original complainants who was still with the AP and still interested in pursuing the matter. So we started with Shirley, and we said, "All right, we're going to revive this thing." I don't want to go into a long, boring story about what we did, but we made a trip to Washington, we went to see Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was the head of the EEOC at the time. We complained that we weren't getting any action. This complaint, which was still alive because Shirley was still around, was sitting on somebody's desk or the bottom of somebody's pile of papers, and nothing was happening. We didn't have a real satisfactory meeting. I think we got pats on the head and all that. Sid Reitman made it very clear that there would be legal steps taken to get a writ of Mandamus to force the agency to do its job. That's what a writ of Mandamus does.

Shortly after that visit, we did finally begin to get some action. The EEOC did finally begin to do its investigation and eventually issued what they needed to issue, a letter of determination, so that we could proceed with litigation.

We began rounding up more plaintiffs, new plaintiffs, hired a lawyer who was a Title VII expert, Jan Goodman, who had handled the NBC litigation. Sid Reitman was pushing to get somebody who was a Title VII expert, because he was a labor lawyer, and he knew that he was a labor lawyer and he was not a Title VII lawyer, and we needed a Title VII lawyer. So Jan Goodman came on the scene, and I met with her and with Sid and Pat Sherlock and Shirley, I believe. Those were [at] the initial meeting. We retained her, and that's when we started to get some action from the EEOC.

We moved into the conciliation process and tried to do some negotiating with the AP. It was not successful. The AP was not at all responsive, not at all receptive to any suggestions for change and improvement, and eventually it did turn into a federal lawsuit.

Brunet: For our audience that may not understand all of the steps involved in this kind of a case, why was it so necessary for the EEOC to make a determination of probable cause for complaint and give the guild and you the right to sue?

Pitt: I'm not sure I understand the technicalities, but Title VII, which is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, as amended, sets out the procedure for pressing a discrimination claim, and also the cause of action is set out in Title VII. So you have to follow those procedures. I believe that one of the things you have to do before you can just slap a federal lawsuit on

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somebody is exhaust what remedies that you may have short of that, and that included going through the various human rights commissions, to let them investigate and determine whether—I think in some cases, the states may have some priority to prosecute these kinds of claims. Because the AP had bureaus in every state and, in fact, just about every nation, this clearly could not be handled by one state human rights commission, and it would be consolidated. All these individual complaints would be consolidated into the one federal complaint.

The EEOC was charged with making a preliminary investigation and determining whether there was probable cause to proceed, and it was my understanding that legally—and I could be wrong; I never really looked at the statute—you had to get this letter of determination from the EEOC in order for the federal court to hear your case. If you didn't have it, if you were just going into court, the court would likely just throw you out and say, "Go see the EEOC and come back later." I don't think the EEOC could prohibit you. I think if they determined there was no cause, I think you could probably still go to court, but they had to give you the letter that said they had looked into it. The idea, I think, was always that it was hoped you could resolve things outside of court, and if you went through this EEOC investigation and conciliation process, that was always designed to avert a lawsuit and to save the federal courts the time and the effort and the expense of resolving these problems if they could be resolved outside of the courtroom.

Brunet: I've come across some things that talk about the EEOC covering some of the costs of preparing for litigation.

Pitt: Disbursements.

Brunet: Do you recall that?

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: How important was that?

Pitt: It was very important, sure, because in order to prosecute a lawsuit, you have to have evidence. You have to have proof. You don't just go in and say, "He got paid more than I did." Because of Title VII's requirements, you also have to show that there's a pattern and practice of discrimination, not that just I was discriminated against. You have to show that there's a pattern, that not only I was discriminated against, but you were discriminated against, and this woman and this woman and this woman and this Hispanic and this Asian and this black. You have to show a pattern. One of the ways to do that at that time was through statistical analysis. You would take all of the pay records and feed them through a computer, and they would spit out tables that would show how much men were paid, how much women were paid, how much blacks were paid, and all this. That's very, very expensive. That doesn't come cheap. You get experts and statisticians and computer technicians, and they charge you a lot of money to do that.

The Wire Service Guild, having been a plaintiff in the suit, was financing a lot of this, but we're talking large sums of money. The individual plaintiffs certainly didn't have the money to spend $3,000 or $4,000 for some computer run and the analysis of it. So EEOC became very important to us, that EEOC was an intervenor in the lawsuit, which they became. EEOC did intervene and become a party in the lawsuit. They felt that it was a good enough case that the agency was willing to press the claims of the Hispanics and to intervene in the claims of the blacks and the women, to be supportive in a financial way, that they would pick up disbursements. Disbursements are these costs, not attorneys' fees, but costs if you have to pay for a computer run or computer time or other evidence-gathering. We were seeking it because it was a class action.

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We were seeking massive, massive numbers of documents, and you have to pay for that. You can't just have AP produce 1,000 pages. They're going to charge you for their photocopy expenses. At a dollar a page or whatever, it's very expensive. So when EEOC became an intervenor, they would pick up the disbursements, and it became very important to us to have them for that financial support, as well as, of course, the moral support of having a federal agency agree with you and be on your side.

Brunet: The unions were not always involved in the Title VII suits.

Pitt: It's very uncommon, very uncommon.

Brunet: Other than the financial aspects that you've just mentioned, why was the union involvement so important as the case progressed?

Pitt: For one thing, the union represented all of your co-workers, although neither AP nor UPI were union shops. You didn't have to belong to the union. Most everybody did. The union was all of your colleagues. Although there were certainly people in the union who did not support the lawsuit, the issues were put to a vote in the union repeatedly, and always the vote came out in our favor. So the majority of the union leadership, the majority of the union membership, supported what we were doing, and that was very important, because that was the majority of our colleagues. You really are sort of alone out there when your name's on the lawsuit and you're the one who's going to the meetings and getting called off the desk from time to time. You feel a little bit alone out there. But when you know that everybody else wants you to do it and is supporting you and is behind you, it makes it a lot easier. So the union represented that. The union represented a tremendous amount of support of numbers of people, and not just within the AP, but also the UPI, because that was also the same union, both AP and UPI, and UPI was watching this very closely, as were a number of other news organizations and outlets that would also have the same union representing their employees. The Newspaper Guild is a very large union. The Wire Service Guild is a chapter of it.

Brunet: From your point of view, of course, why did the mediation and conciliation process fail?

Pitt: From my point of view, because the AP never really believed that it would have to change. I don't know whether it was arrogance or just indignation that said, "You people are not going to tell us how to run this organization, and the federal government is not going to tell us how to run this organization." And they wouldn't budge from that. They wouldn't even consider the possibility that the organization wasn't being run not only not properly and not legally, but not being run in a way that would maximize the talents of all of their employees. They wouldn't accept that. They wouldn't acknowledge that, and they were very stubborn. It was a very almost blind refusal to even consider making any changes in the way hiring was done, promotions were done, pay was handed out. They just weren't even going to consider it, and they certainly weren't going to consider suggestions from outsiders, and that meant the federal government and the federal courts.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Brunet: What happened to move you from actively supporting the suit to becoming a named plaintiff?

Pitt: I went to see Jan Goodman with Sid and Shirley and Pat Sherlock, and we discussed the complaints, in general, and I felt that I was sort of a repository of complaints from women all over

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the country, which I was. I don't remember if I kept notes—I must have—or whether it was in my head, that I was able to rattle off all the things that I felt were important for Jan to know. Jan kept asking questions about me and my salary and my assignments, and I kept trying to steer her away. I finally said to her, "You know, this isn't about me. I don't have a complaint. I'm a general desk supervisor, I'm making good money. This isn't about me." And Jan said, "Well, yes, it is." And she began to ask more questions—did I know how much the men made that I worked with? I really didn't. I can't remember what the other questions were, but as she was asking them and as I was answering them, I could see that she did have a point, and that a lot of the things I thought didn't apply to me did apply to me.

I began to ask some questions of my colleagues after that conversation with Jan. There were a lot of men on the general desk who were from the very beginning to the very end totally supportive, good friends, good co-workers. They would tell me anything I wanted to know. I could go up and say, "How much do you make?" [Laughter.] And they would show me their pay stubs. I could see that I was making a lot less—I mean sixty bucks a week less—than some of the men who had been on the general desk less time than I had been. In some cases I was supervising these folks. It did appear to be a pattern. It wasn't just, well, one fellow who knew somebody who knew somebody; it appeared to be four or five or eight or whatever. Then I began to talk to these men about conversations maybe that they had had with various management people, and I could see that I was not being given the same opportunities and same treatment and the same consideration as the men were given. And what could it be? It had to be my sex; it couldn't be anything else. Everybody acknowledged that I was good at what I did. There couldn't be anything else.

So I became a named plaintiff because, number one, I had a complaint that was valid and legitimate, and, number two, I felt like it was time for me to put my money where my mouth was, and if I was going to talk to everybody and try to revive something, and they needed named plaintiffs to do it, well, I should be willing to put my name out and get out there and do it. I felt a little less vulnerable, I think, than a lot of women did, because I did have a good position in New York, and I was good at what I did. I had at that time a good relationship with management, for the most part, in terms of my professional relationship. So I felt a little less vulnerable than a lot of women who were not quite as secure in their jobs or in their careers or in their positions. I just thought that it would be hard for me to go around asking other people if they wanted to be plaintiffs if I wasn't willing to do it myself. So I did.

Brunet: Were you the second named plaintiff?

Pitt: Yes. Shirley [Christian] was the first, because she was the carryover from the original group of complainants, and then I was the second. I didn't solicit plaintiffs. I didn't go call people and say, "How would you like to be a plaintiff?" But when they called me, or when I had discussions and we discussed problems that they were having, I would tell them about the lawsuit and ask them if they would like to talk to Jan, because I felt Jan would be the one to determine whether somebody would be a viable plaintiff; I clearly couldn't do that. And I believe that's the way I worked it. I had them call Jan. Jan couldn't call them.

I think only one person did I actively work on and say, "You ought to be a plaintiff," and that was Peggy Simpson in Washington. Peggy today says I applied the Chinese water torture; I did not. I was very gracious with Peggy. Peggy was a Washington bureau staffer, an excellent reporter with excellent, excellent credentials, and Peggy got the kind of assignments where she couldn't—there was one thing I remember particularly. I was working on the general desk at the time we were making arrangements for covering the Democratic National Convention in

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New York City one year, and, of course, all the Washington bureau people, the political reporters, were coming. Peggy was told she couldn't cover the national convention. She would be the only Washington reporter regularly assigned to the political beat who couldn't come to the convention, and the reason for that was they were getting hotel rooms for everybody, and because she was the only woman, they would have to get her a room all by herself. Everybody else was doubling up, and it was going to cost too much, because they'd have to get Peggy a room all by herself. She couldn't double up with anybody. I mean, if that's not sex discrimination, I don't know what is. Peggy came and stayed at my apartment and covered the convention. It didn't cost the AP anything. But those were the kinds of things that would just drive you crazy, and AP didn't see anything wrong with that. They saw that as an economic decision. "It's just an economic decision, that's all. It has nothing to do with sex; it's just an economic decision." But Peggy, I did work on her a little bit to join us. She was also a very visible woman, as was Fran Lewine, people who had bylines that you would recognize, and that was important. I wanted to get people whose bylines would be recognized.

Brunet: I've seen a reference to maybe a famous meeting between you, Peggy Simpson, and Shirley Christian, in New York.

Pitt: We had a lot of them.

Brunet: Was there a meeting in which she finally decided that she would become a named plaintiff?

Pitt: When Peg came to New York, it was not unusual for Peg and Shirley and I to sit around and talk. I don't recall the precise time that Peg decided. I seem to think she told me on the phone. I seem to think that she called me on the phone and said, "All right, I'll do it." I can't relate it to any incident. But it was not uncommon for Shirley and Peg and I to get together, both before and after, or in Boston for Shelley Cohen and Peggy and Maureen Connolly and I to get together. We would get together when we could, because we were geographically split.

Brunet: When you were talking with women around the country about their situations, were you gathering information, or did they have to submit affidavits regarding discrimination?

Pitt: I don't remember people submitting affidavits. I was gathering information on an informal basis. A lot of it began, again, as my own curiosity about was this really occurring. I had subscribed for quite a while to a publication that Donna Allen did, out of Washington, about women in journalism, and Donna used to run verbatim transcripts of depositions, and she would run verbatim complaints. So I was very familiar with a lot of the lawsuits that were going on at the time, the NBC suit being one of the biggies, and the Reader's Digest suit being another of the real big ones. I read those things. I read Donna's newsletters cover to cover, and I was fascinated by some of the stories that were told in these depositions and complaints. I guess I just wanted to see whether similar occurrences were happening in the AP, and they were. They were, all over, in every bureau. It wasn't a particular bureau chief who was discriminating; it was all over. It was clear that it was a pattern. It was clear that it was a practice.

I was not then, and I am not today, convinced that it was a deliberate attempt to discriminate, but it was clearly a deliberate attempt to keep women from doing certain things, and whether through some misguided desire to protect women, like when they'd tell Shirley Christian, "You can't go to Central America because they'll eat women up down there," that's an attempt, I suppose, to protect us, or whether it's an attempt to protect their own interests. When you have a bureau chief telling a woman, "You can't be a bureau chief because you have to take editors out to

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lunch and wine and dine them to try to sell them on the service, and their wives won't like it if a woman is taking them out to dinner and picking up the check," those were all the kinds of reasons that were given.

And I'm not sure that I don't think that AP management really believed those ridiculous things at the time, but it was clear that it was a pattern. It was clear that it was practices. It was clear that their promotion practices systematically excluded women and made it virtually impossible for women to get promotions, because we didn't know where the openings were; it was the "good old boy" network that fed information to people to get promotions. So I talked to women everywhere, and I found that it was everywhere, and I was collecting that information really on an informal basis, and I became sort of the central clearinghouse for information and eventually for complaints. People would call me to complain about a specific incident.

Brunet: And then you would refer them to Jan?

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: Perhaps she was the one that asked for the affidavits from members of the class.

Pitt: That may be. I don't remember affidavits. I'm sure there were at some point. Probably to get class certification for the lawsuit.

Brunet: Do you think your protest activity in college prepared you for considering suing the AP?

Pitt: No, no.

Brunet: You don't think so?

Pitt: No, because what we did in college was almost a mass hysteria kind of thing. There was not a lot of logic to it. It was very emotional. The college protests against the Vietnam War or civil rights problems, those were very emotional kinds of things, and you were driven more by emotion and a sense of "This is wrong." The discrimination problems were more logical. The first thing is, you're not getting as much money as the men are, and that's not right. That was not an emotional thing; that wasn't something that you just had some sort of feeling that it wasn't right. That was black and white, dollars and cents wrong. I think it's a very different type of protest, if that's the word.

Brunet: I had just wondered whether, if you had not had that experience, would it have been more foreign to take a very visible stand and stand up for what you felt was right.

Pitt: I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. That's possible.

Brunet: Once you became a named plaintiff, did the future of the rest of your personal career become more obvious?

Pitt: I don't know what you mean.

Brunet: You had said that before you became a plaintiff, that you felt you were in a good spot. You weren't afraid of taking a stand. But did the attitude of AP and management change once you were named as a plaintiff?

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Pitt: The suit, I guess, wasn't really filed until toward the end of my AP career, and it may not have been actually filed until after I left the AP. Certainly they knew I was going to be a named plaintiff long before that. My visible participation in this whole affair started considerably before the lawsuit was actually filed, and really before Jan Goodman was even hired and we were really talking serious Title VII litigation; it really started when, as a representative of the Guild, I was attempting, along with Sid Reitman and Pat Sherlock, to negotiate a settlement of the claims of the individual complainants prior to it entering the litigation stage. At that time I clearly was a visible party, because I was face to face with the AP executives in various negotiating sessions, and there were times that my schedule had to be changed to let me off duty on the general desk so I could go to a meeting or have a conciliation conference.

At that time, I don't think I ever felt that I was going to be fired. I never felt that my job was in jeopardy. I never felt that. What I did feel was that I was being punished, and I was being punished. I was being put on the overnight shift, I was being put in lesser tricks that ordinarily a new person on the desk might work, the less desirable tricks where people with a lot less experience could boss you around, you know, and you don't like to be in that position. So I felt that I was certainly punished. I felt that they were trying to make me a little invisible. They didn't want to see me. They put me on the overnight shift so that the managers didn't have to look at me when they came in for their nine-to-five jobs. But I never felt that I was going to be fired. I never felt that I was going to lose my job. I never felt that. I don't know why.

For a time I thought, "Maybe this will actually help. Maybe they'll see that I'm tough and I'm good, and they'll make me a bureau chief just to get rid of me or something." That didn't last very long. It did become apparent to me fairly quickly that things were not going to get better for me at the AP, that I could be there forever if I wanted to be, but that was as good as it was going to get, and I might look forward to twenty years of the overnight shift. I did have one male colleague tell me that, that the fellows on the seventh floor, which is where the executives were, didn't like that I was rocking the boat.

Brunet: I want to be sure that I'm clear on the timing of when you agreed to be a plaintiff. Were you already being punished? Had you already seen that you were not going to continue to move up?

Pitt: Yes. Oh, yes.

Brunet: What role did that play in your deciding to be a plaintiff?

Pitt: Not much, because that's really a retaliation claim, which really did become part of my claim, part of the litigation, that there was retaliation. But I don't think that really played the major role. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the major role is when you find out that over a four- or six- or eight-year period, you got about $30,000 less than the man sitting next to you. That really hits you very hard. I really don't think the retaliation pushed me over the edge; I think the facts pushed me over the edge, when I realized the disparity in pay and certainly in assignments. That's what did it.

Brunet: What was the timing of these decisions in relation to your decision to leave the AP?

Pitt: The decisions—

Brunet: The decisions to go ahead and be a plaintiff, and that you were not going to move forward. Were they simultaneous?

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Pitt: I don't remember. I really don't remember. I don't believe, when I made the decision to be a named plaintiff, that I was thinking about leaving the AP. I don't believe I was at that time. I was still thinking at that time that I thought we might win, and by winning at that time I was thinking in terms of changing the AP to the point that it might open up for me. So when I made the decision to be a named plaintiff, I was not thinking about leaving the AP. That came considerably later.

Brunet: Was there a time when you realized that you would not be able to change the AP?

Pitt: There were many times. We're talking over a period of many years. There were many times that I got very discouraged. There were a lot of times that I thought, "I'm just getting out of this. I'm just going to call Jan." I think I may have even called her a couple of times and said, "I can't do this." [Tape interruption.]

Brunet: I was asking you about the depositions. Frequently you were asked questions about how much the litigation would cost and how much you were prepared to pay, and often those questions were cut off by Jan Goodman. Why do you think they were pressuring you in that way?

Pitt: I don't know. My guess is to frighten me and others. Others were asked the same questions, the idea being that, "If you lose, you're going to have to pay all of this money, and we think you're going to lose. Are you prepared to pay all this money?" Jan had told us from the outset that that's always a possibility. "I think you've got a good case and we can show all sorts of statistics, but you could lose. And if you lose, you could have individually a bill of $20,000 or $30,000 to pay. Are you prepared for the rest of your life to send me $100 a month or whatever it takes to pay the bill? You have to be aware of that." Jan had told us that. I don't think any of us thought that that would actually happen, but we knew it. I don't know whether the AP thought Jan had not told us, and it was their way—I look at it as a lawyer now and not as a journalist. I look at the transcript, and I see an awful lot of game-playing and posturing and psyching-out, I guess you'd call it. I see that as I read through it now. And it did frighten me, and it worked. It's a little intimidating to have someone say, "Do you know how much this is going to cost?"

I think there were also some technical legal reasons for some of those questions, and I don't know what they are. I didn't know then, and I don't know what they are now, because I don't do this kind of law. So I'm not familiar with it. But I think it was really more of an attempt to get Jan than anything else. I think that what they were trying to do is to somehow show that Jan had not properly advised her clients that it was going to be a potential financial burden on them. I think that it was more aimed at that.

Brunet: And therefore make you lose confidence in your own attorney?

Pitt: Yes.

Brunet: Other than what you have already talked about in terms of the support of the guild membership, did you have other support systems that enabled you to go through this whole process?

Pitt: The biggest one was my husband. He was just incredible throughout all of this. Being a white male, you don't think of that as being your strongest supporter, but he was. As I've said, there are times that you just get very, very low and very discouraged and very put upon and battered by it all, and Pat was my rock through the whole thing. I think I told you about the deposition itself.

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Brunet: Would you tell that again, because we were not on tape at the time?

Pitt: That's a very tense kind of situation. You read the transcript. You could see the lawyers going at each other pretty hot and heavy. It's very uncomfortable, you're very tense. I was at it for two full days, terrified that I was going to slip up and say something wrong and blow the whole case. Jan had made it clear I was the key witness, and I was the one with the information. I was the one who had talked to everybody. So if I messed it up, it was messed up for everybody. It wasn't just my case; it was everybody's case. So I felt an awful lot of pressure to do it right, and I didn't know what "right" was.

The lawyers were nasty, and it was very unpleasant. I can remember at one point being so terrified, that I just stood up and said, "I have to take a break," and I went out into the hallway. This was at the Rogers & Wells office, a very large law firm. I believe it's in the Pan Am building in New York. I went out into the hallway, and I think I was looking for a glass of water, and I got lost and I couldn't find my way, and I didn't know where it was, and I just burst into tears. I just began to cry uncontrollably. The pressure had built up, and I just couldn't take it anymore. All I could say is, "I want to talk to Pat. I want to talk to Pat." I really wanted to call my husband. "I want to talk to Pat." Because I knew he would make it okay. He would tell me what to do and how to get through it, and I did finally stumble in to some secretary, who very kindly pointed me back to my lawyer, who was appalled to see her key witness there, crumbling in front of her very eyes, tears running down, just repeating over and over, "I want to talk to Pat. I want to talk to Pat." [Laughter.]

So they put me in a little conference room, shut the door, and gave me the phone. I called Pat, and fortunately he was home, and fortunately he talked to me for a little while. It's funny, I asked him about this the other day, and he has no recollection of this at all. He has no memory of it. But he talked to me for a while, and then I got off the phone, I was calm, and I went back in and proceeded to finish the deposition. Pat tells me that when he picked me up at the train station—I had taken the train back to Boston, and he picked me up at the train station, and he said that I got off the train and I looked around, and when I saw him, I burst into tears. So he remembers that. I don't remember that; he remembers that. But he was my strength. He was my support for years and still is.

My family was mildly supportive. My father didn't approve of the lawsuit, because that's not the way you solve problems with employers. My mother, I don't think approved of it, but didn't disapprove quite as much, but neither my mother nor my father attempted to discourage me or ridiculed or criticized me for it. They didn't think it was quite the way to go, but if I felt that I had to do it, then by all means I should do it, and they were not unsupportive. I had friends in the industry who were not in the AP, who were extremely supportive, both male and female.

Brunet: The fact that you burst into tears seems so much unlike you. Am I correct in that?

Pitt: Oh, sure. Sure.

Brunet: It suggests that this was incredibly stressful and became increasingly so.

Pitt: It was. It was. I think it was just a lot of pressure and build-up for a lot of years and months. No, that's not like me. I'm not one to puddle up.

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Brunet: Kay Mills, author of A Place in the News, has said that women were clearly successful not so much for themselves as for the women who came after them. How accurate do you feel that statement is?

Pitt: I think that's very accurate. I think that's absolutely true. I've gotten calls from women that I've never met to thank me for what I did. I'm still not sure what I did, but I've gotten those kinds of calls and letters. There was a little girl who wasn't even in journalism, that I met when I was a law clerk, who was a receptionist, and she knew about the suit. I don't remember how. I guess one of the other attorneys had told her or something. One day she came up to me and said, "I can't tell you how much I admire you and women like you who have made it possible for women like me to do what we want to do." She was going into public relations, and she had just gotten a real nice job. It just came out of the blue, just came out of nowhere.

I think that Shirley and Peg and Maureen and Virginia [Tyson], I think all of us were aware that what we were doing was going to help those behind a lot more than it was going to help us. I started out thinking that maybe I would change the AP, and I knew at some point that it wasn't going to help me. I knew at some point that I was going to have to do something else, but I really believed—and I still believe—that the people that came after would reap some of the benefits of what we did. I have had confirmation of that, I think.

Brunet: Did you ever have any regrets about your involvement in the suit?

Pitt: Yes. Sure, you do. Sure, you do. Even today I sometimes wonder, if I hadn't done this, would I still be with the AP? What would I be doing with the AP? Would I still be in journalism instead of not in journalism? I miss journalism a lot, I really do. I do have regrets. I have regrets that are based mostly on not knowing what would have happened if I didn't, but those are counterbalanced, or even outweighed, by the sense of it was the right thing to do, and if I hadn't done it, would have anybody else have done it. I don't know. I don't know. That, I think, is the thing that tells me I don't have more regrets than non-regrets.

Brunet: In our last few minutes, how was the financial settlement worked out?

Pitt: We worked it out, really, I guess, ourselves. There was a lump sum offer made. To be honest with you, I don't remember the figure. That's probably written somewhere, but I don't know what it was. But there was a lump sum offer. There was an amount that was to go to the class, members of the class, and there was a formula devised as to how members of the class would be paid based on years of experience and whatever, and then there was another lump that would go to the attorneys, and another lump that would go to the named plaintiffs, and there was a pot that went to the named plaintiffs. I don't recall the figure. There were seven of us. I don't remember the figure.

But the question was how we were going to divide up that pot that was going to the named plaintiffs. Apparently in the negotiations that Jan and the AP attorneys, Rogers & Wells, worked out, that was not decided. We were to decide that ourselves. So we had a conference call of all of the named plaintiffs; we were all on the phone from our various locations. We hammered out how we were going to divide up that pot, and—it's been published before—it was acrimonious. It wasn't easy. After all, we all felt aggrieved, and each of us, I'm sure, felt more aggrieved than the others in many ways. But we tried to hammer out, among ourselves, a formula that would recognize the length of service of the various plaintiffs, the activeness in the suit of the various plaintiffs, and the damage that had been done, which really is tied to length of service, because the longer you were with the AP, presumably the more you lost. We had to call Jan a couple of

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times to mediate when we couldn't quite agree, and we took votes, we yelled and screamed and did all the things that people do when they hammer out a negotiated settlement, and we finally came up with a formula that we all agreed to. We split it up based upon length of service and based upon the level of activity in the lawsuit, which put me higher up because I had less service, certainly. I was probably maybe third in terms of length of service, but higher up in terms of activity in the suit. Shirley, of course, had been there from the very beginning, so she was higher up, too.

Brunet: How would you summarize the effect of the AP suit on the role of women in journalism?

Pitt: I'd like to think that it had an effect in opening doors for women in the higher echelons of journalism. I mean, really the Associated Press is one of the pinnacles, and I'd like to think that the lawsuit made it possible for women to not only be street reporters and society writers, but also to be managers, to make decisions about how the news is delivered. I'd like to think that what we did was improve the AP by letting it use all the talents of all its employees, whether they were male or female. I'd like to think that we did something that was not only helpful to women in journalism, but helpful to journalism, because we can use women to their full potential if we don't close doors in their faces.

Brunet: Thank you very much.

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