[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: Good morning.

Shanahan: Good morning.

Clark: We're talking about the women's movement.

Shanahan: Looking back on covering the women's movement, which I call the second—I often carefully call it the second women's movement or the second feminist movement because, of course, the first one was suffrage. I astounded my children—my older daughter wanted to know if I had been a suffragist. [Laughter.] I tell her that women did get to vote in this country four years before I was born.

But when I look back on it, there's a verse of poetry that comes to me—and you'll recognize it, Wordsworth. He was talking about the early days of the French Revolution, before it became a bloodbath. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven."

Well, I wasn't young. In 1971, I would have been forty-seven. And it was bliss for me, too. The young are hopeful, the young kick over the traces, the young see possibilities which people with more experience say, "Oh, well, you can't change it," or "Don't fight city hall, you can't win," and so forth. But to be forty-seven years old when I got into covering this, I had, of course, always been a feminist. I recognized that from early days.

But to see the possibility of change at that time. I guarantee you it was as blissful for me as for any twenty-year-old, maybe more so, because I knew what discriminations were out there, I knew things like what happened to my friend Isabelle Shelton at the Washington Star who'd been ghetto-ized into interviewing the wife of the newly appointed Cabinet member and all that, when Isabelle was one of these people who could have done anything in journalism, and subsequently proved it—I know she's being interviewed but she probably didn't toot her own horn. When they killed the old women's pages and shifted to the Metro staff, she covered the creation of the Metro subway system here in Washington, engineering and economic details and all.

And to see those possibilities and to be involved in covering it, in many respects it was the happiest experience I ever had as a reporter, not primarily—though partly—because I saw something happening that I believed was good—good for individuals and good for the nation and maybe even good for the world, if it spread that far. It was the people I was coming to know, only as a reporter knows—I always kept a certain distance, which you must do—but coming to know people like Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm, and the great leaders—Jill Ruckelshaus who was the great Republican in that group, and younger ones as well.

It was just such a pleasure. They were so smart and so full of vitality. But they were also for the most part very humane people, even Bella in her bulldozer way, who could get very angry at you for very little reason and yell at you and all that. I don't know. She was a wonderfully human—was, is, she's still alive—a humane person with great warmth. And if she took the time, which she didn't always, was someone who cared about the people around her.

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So it was just such a wonderful pleasure to explore their minds. And they were so far ahead of me intellectually in terms of seeing the society and what it had done to women and what it was still doing to women and what the potential was, if it would stop doing it, that I was learning. I don't know, when I started out, whether I thought I would learn. I think I did get much deeper insights into the society and not just the role of women, but into all sorts of things about how the society really works and how it functions to maintain a status quo.

Somebody, some famous person said, "Power never yields anything without a struggle." And I saw that and came to understand it at a level that I'm not sure I would have if I hadn't had the association I did with these incredible women who were thinking so hard and so successfully about the society. It was a great period of my life. It's a thrice-told tale but still worth telling how I got to cover it.

Clark: Yes.

Shanahan: I get a phone call one day from a woman lawyer in New York whom I never had met and have not met to this day and whose name I have unhappily forgotten, who said—she knew somebody I knew and that's why she called me—"Do you realize that a constitutional amendment is coming up on the floor of the House of Representatives next Tuesday"—this was a Thursday—"and the New York Times has carried one five-paragraph wire service story about it."

And I said, "Oh, surely you must be mistaken." And she said, "No, I'm not." Anyway, she explained to me what it was. It was, of course, the Equal Rights Amendment. And this would have been the first year, 1970, when it did not go through the Congress. So I went and looked and she was absolutely right. So I went up to the news editor and said, "Do you realize?"—et cetera. And he said, "You must be wrong." And I said, "Nope. I looked it up, she's right." I had not expected, did not intend to be assigned to the story. It was just a matter of you let the news editor know if there were stories coming up on somebody else's beat so they would know about it.

So Marjorie Hunter, who covered the House of Representatives, was assigned to the story. And the night before, on her way out, she just stopped by my desk to chat for a minute and said, "Ah, I've got to cover that Equal Rights Amendment tomorrow and they're pulling me off the education bill and I wish could keep on covering the education bill. That's a very interesting, important piece of legislation." And we talked for a minute. And I finally said to her, "Gosh, you know, I don't really have anything I have to do tomorrow. I'd love to cover it."

So arm-in-arm we marched up to the news desk and told the news editor—quite a great guy, actually, named Bob Phelps, subsequently executive editor of the Boston Globe—that she didn't want to do it, or she'd rather stay with the education bill and I didn't have anything I had to do and I'd love to cover it. And he said, "Oh, but you don't do women!" Anyway, the short of it is they said—no editor minds when somebody volunteers for work, so I got to cover it.

I knew it was important but I didn't know what a gateway it was going to be to a whole new era of my professional life. The world is full of happy accidents. Women are chastised—and rightly so, I think—for too often attributing their success to luck. And I do think that is often true and I've done it myself. This really was luck, though. I'm sure that as the feminist movement went on, I would have gained some of the insights just from reading what people were writing. [Tape interruption.]

Clark: Okay.

Shanahan: But not with the depth, perhaps, and certainly not with the great fun.

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One of the wonderful things about covering the feminist movement was the degree to which most of them understood my role and that I could not be an advocate, if it was explained to them. Over and over again through the years I would have various women—some I knew, some I didn't—call me up and say, "We're going to do such-and-such and it really would help us if you would write about it." And I would carefully explain to them that it wasn't my job to help them and that if I were perceived by my bosses to be writing stuff to help the movement rather than cover the news, I'd get taken off the beat. And it wouldn't be a net plus for women to have me no longer doing that. "O-oh!" they'd say, "okay," and never bother me again. I've never had a group of people understand that so well and so quickly and easily and without acrimony as the women in the women's movement did.

There were some exceptions. And there was one person whom I have some regard for, quite a lot, who did a lot of good things for federally employed women, who got very angry at me after the ratification period for the Equal Rights Amendment expired, the seven years allowed in the amendment, the original version. And then the women's movement, led by NOW, tried successfully to get an extension of that time. And that had never been done before. And I kept writing, every time I wrote about it, that the constitutionality of that kind of an extension remained to be tested. And she called me up several times and denounced me and said, "You're not a real feminist. Of course it's legal." And I'd say, "No. We don't know whether it's legal. It's never been before the Supreme Court." And there were a few others like that.

I also remember—I think it was New Year's Day in 1973, something like that, I wrote a story, right on page one, that said, "The ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment is no longer a sure thing," and was very clear that something like twenty-two out of the necessary thirty-eight states had ratified it and all the easy ones were done. It was a well-reported, well-researched story, including quoting some of the ardent feminists saying what I was saying, that the easy ones were done and it wasn't clear whether it would ever be ratified. Well, I did get some angry phone calls and letters from feminist activists on that story saying, "What was I doing? Was I trying to kill the Equal Rights Amendment and so on?"

But the people like that were very much in a minority. Most people were awfully glad that I was doing it. In fact, of all the professional compliments I've ever gotten in my life, the one I treasure the most came from a woman named Millie Jeffrey who is the union woman, UAW [United Auto Workers], who had spent decades on the production line at I think it was Ford and was very active in the Coalition of Labor Union Women and may have been a founder of the Women's Political Caucus as well. And one time she said to me, "You know, Eileen, there are times when the women's movement wouldn't have been sure it was still alive if you hadn't been writing about it for the New York Times."

Well, I think that's not quite accurate, it's an overstatement, but I do treasure it. I do feel that what I did in that period was important, just because it was the Times. And you look at some of the other papers, the Washington Post, a paper I certainly admire generally, never had anyone assigned to it full-time or consistently, one or two people did it for a while.

And the continuity of my coverage and the fact that I did do it straight through from '70 until I left the Times at the beginning of '77, I think has some merit. It does leave a record of the major political and public policy side, economic side of the women's movement—not so much the personal stuff. I mean, I may have done some stories that got into things like divorce law and child support law, a few stories, at least. But I never did the sociology, you might say, on how marriage was changing and that sort of thing. But the public policy side of it I consistently covered and I think I covered all the big stories. And the continuity of that record I think—I'm glad it's there and I'm glad the clips are going to be in this file.

Clark: Yes. It's good to say the clips will indeed be on record from I think 1970 to 1977, the coverage of the women's movement.

Shanahan: It wasn't always easy to do in terms of one's own colleagues and bosses.

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Clark: Yes. I'd like to hear about that.

Shanahan: Well, I don't like to stay angry forever about things but there are a few that I do and some of them are related to this. I remember the day in 1971 when the Equal Rights Amendment went through Congress, when the Senate passed it, the House having already passed it. The Senate passed it in identical form which meant it went straight to ratification then. And the morning of that day I had covered a very complex hearing on another part of my beat, an antitrust hearing, on the House side and came over to the Senate side as the debate was beginning on the Senate side. And we knew that the vote was scheduled for that day. It was the last day of the debate.

And I went to John Finney of the Times, who was the head of the Senate staff, and said to him, "I've got to get this antitrust story out of the way first for the financial page," which had an earlier deadline, "and can you find somebody to cover the first hour or two of the debate for me while I'm writing the story." This was a routine thing to be done, to have somebody cover for you when you were doing two stories and so on. There's nothing unusual about it at all. And Finney said to me, "Well, if you're going to be equal, you'd better learn to do your own work." I've never forgotten and I guess I've never forgiven. But it shows you how threatened that man was. He's a brilliant reporter. Nobody's ever covered the politics of science the way John Finney covered it—and many, many other things. But obviously, that's the way he was.

And I'm not saying women in the press gallery were necessarily behaving like detached reporters that day. I'm sure, like me, they were all doing it when they had their fingers on their keyboard. But when the vote went through, I mean, there was ever so much hugging going on in the press gallery and I'm sure that upset the men even more. But we were all professionals and you can have deep feelings and be really fair and balanced in what you write, if you're aware of it.

Clark: And politically at this time there would have been issues revolving around the so-called protective legislation.

Shanahan: More than that. An awful lot of the opposition dealt with things that Senator Sam Ervin, who was the leading opponent in the Senate, who said things like "If this amendment passes, it will relieve men of the obligation to support their families and God put that obligation on men." Well, I don't think anybody would stand up and say that today. But it was deeply believed, then, may still be, in some places.

Oh, some of the stuff that was said in those debates was amazing.

Clark: What were the key issues, as you said? I read through your clips. But at times it wasn't clear to me whether the most volatile issues were the ones that were actually being articulated in the debate. Was it really—I mean, a draft amendment was in the works, and I guess Ervin finally was defeated in trying to attach that as a provision when the amendment finally did go through.

Shanahan: I think that was real. I think concern that the Equal Rights Amendment would require the drafting of women if men were drafted was a real issue. And the women's movement basically—but there were very few women, especially in Congress, who supported the amendment who would stand up and say, "Yes, that's right." I believe it is right. I believe that if that amendment were on the books, women would be required to be drafted.

Now, you could set some physical standards, you know, the way fire departments and police departments do to this day, and some of them with discriminatory intent. I know someone who has trained women to scale twelve-foot walls to get them into the police department in San Francisco. But I think that issue was real in the minds of the opponents and I don't think that was a phony issue. My daughters were in college at that time. And of course, this was the Vietnam war where people were being drafted. And I remember my daughter Kate, talking to her about that, and she said yes, she would favor drafting women.

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She was not ducking that issue as the politicians were. She would favor the drafting of women if men were drafted. She had a deeply emotional reason for it. She said, "You know, there's a barrier between me and all those guys of my age. I can be sympathetic and understanding but I don't face having to decide whether to go into the military or to fake some illness or to go to Canada and maybe never see my family again. They face it. I don't. And it's a gulf that cannot be gotten across." I thought that was an interesting human insight.

So that was real. I think the unisex toilets issue never was real. I think the issue of protective legislation—there were women's laws on the books in many, many states that women couldn't lift more than a certain amount, sometimes a ridiculously small amount like fifteen pounds or less than the size of a typical six-month-old baby. They were put on with discriminatory intent.

That's a specific case, involving the United Steel Workers, which had a terrible record, unlike the United Auto Workers which had a good one. After World War II they wanted to get all the women out of the steel plants. And the United Steel Workers were the ones that got that law through the Pennsylvania legislature, to chase the women out of the plant. So some of that had real discriminatory intent, not protective intent. Some of it did have protective intent, I think. But time had gone past that idea. And most of the women, the labor union women and others, who were concerned about the laws against overtime for women, the laws against lifting, the laws against night hours and so on, because they were actually being used for their consequences. Sometimes it wasn't deliberate but the consequence was to keep women from getting up the ladder because if your employer is subject to a lawsuit if you work more than forty-four hours a week or something like that, no executive works a forty-hour or a forty-four-hour week.

So those were real. I think they were real. It's amazing to look back at some of the laws that were on the books at that time. I forget where it was—it might have been Maryland—where if a woman wanted to open a bar, she had to have the testimony of ten people to her good character whereas a man only had to have three. There were laws in a lot of places saying that a woman could work as a waitress but not a bartender—the high-paying job. One of those cases went to the Supreme Court. I remember Justice Frankfurter dissented, wanting to uphold this "protection." I can't remember the name of the case any more.

There were laws that said a woman couldn't work in a bar unless it was owned by her father or her brother or her husband. You wonder what they were so scared of. And one of the early legislative cases had to do with the requirement that a woman use her husband's name on her driver's license.

Clark: Oh, really.

Shanahan: I forget what state, one of the Southern states.

So most of those have now been repealed, despite the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to get ratified. And that came about, in part, because of the ratification effort and people began looking at the books.

It's interesting. You know, this was truly a movement, the women's movement, which I define as something that sprang up near-simultaneously in a whole bunch of different ways. Somehow the time was right. What triggered it? Was it the founding of NOW in, I believe, '68 or '69? [1966.] Was it simply the number of women who—why did women after World War II go back to the home, however reluctantly, and then at some later date women began the great movement into the workforce—married women, women with children, not just upper-class women who were doing it because they were bored but women whose families really needed their earnings?

I don't know. I don't think I understand myself the origin of movements, what creates something that is defined as a movement. But it's clear to me the women's movement was indeed a movement, with all sorts of things simultaneously happening. It's catching.

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Clark: As you were starting to really cover the women's movement, even in '71, just looking over the headlines and having read the clippings, it seems to me that you're looking for patterns of discrimination and you find a lot of them even in the federal government. And that's something that actually does seem to change a lot in the next two years. I mean, in 1971, on July 12, you've written an article saying, "Women's Job Rights Gain in Federal Court Rulings," in which there was a series of decisions to lift most restrictions in state laws keeping women out of certain jobs. I guess some of that involved the protective legislation that you were talking about.

Shanahan: Yes. A lot of—that's exactly what that story was about.

Clark: Where did that come from? I mean, what do you perceive? Did the women's movement in any way force the federal bureaucracy to look at these changes and why?

Shanahan: That wasn't the federal bureaucracy. That was federal courts.

Clark: Federal courts, excuse me.

Shanahan: I remember that story very well. I was very proud of that story. Nobody had found it. And I don't even know how I found it but obviously—

Clark: I was going to ask you how you found it.

Shanahan: Talking to women in the women's movement, somebody told me there were a whole bunch of cases. And I went over to the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. Richard Nixon in a fit of absent-mindedness, I think, had appointed a good guy, a black guy named Brown who was a Rockefeller Republican, had worked for Rockefeller in New York, and who believed in enforcing the law. And he subsequently got sacked but not before he did some good stuff. Anyway, somebody told me there were a bunch of cases and I found a guy over there who was tracking them, and got a lot of material and then called people up around the country and so on.

That story, yes, I was very proud of. And it's interesting. This is, I think, just affirms what I was saying about it's being a movement because as far as I know, I don't remember how many cases I detailed in that story—about eight or ten, I think. And I think they all sprang up simultaneously.

Clark: Yes. That's what I was curious about.

Shanahan: There was nothing coordinated about it, as far as I know. Things like the Women's Legal Defense Fund didn't exist at that time. That was a little later.

Clark: But what about some of the women in the Washington underground? I say, the Washington underground. Was there such a thing? Rosalind Rosenberg in a book, Divided Lives: A History of Women in the Twentieth Century, which is, you know, kind of a good, straight history of the women's movement, uses that term a lot, talks about the women in the Washington underground. We don't necessarily see a lot of books on this or anything. What was that?

Shanahan: I don't—I'm trying to cast my mind back to 1971-72, in there. Not a lot. We had about a dozen women in Congress. We had not very many women in the executive branch. I remember when I was in the Treasury Department a little earlier than that, in '61 and '62, that I was the highest ranking women in any of the economic policy agencies, four or five ranks below an assistant secretary—about four below that. I think there were a few women staffers in Congress. It wasn't large.

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I do remember, for example, some hearings with women staffers. It was later—not much later, it was '73 because I remember the hearings ran simultaneously with the Watergate hearings so my stories ran deep inside the paper.

Clark: Yes. That's right.

Shanahan: Martha Griffiths, who had devised the procedure for getting the Equal Rights Amendment out of the Judiciary Committee and onto the House floor, through a little-used procedure, was by then a member of the Joint Economic Committee as well as the Ways and Means Committee. And she was the first woman ever to be on the Ways and Means Committee—the tax committee, important, this important stuff's got to be men.

She had persuaded whoever she had to persuade on the Joint Economic Committee to let her set up a subcommittee on women and the economy, and held some marvelous hearings. I've still got those three volumes of it on the status of women in the economy; she hired I believe an all-woman staff. She hired a bunch of young women Ph.D's, one of whom was subsequently an assistant secretary of commerce and who kind of got their start with her, and the others had great subsequent careers, too.

So she did that. I was not aware of women staffers on the Hill, though, nor women—I remember the first woman I ever interviewed on the economics beat. It was Marina Whitman who was the first woman who was ever a member of the Council of Economic Advisors. That was the Nixon administration, right around that same time. Of course, we still, just now in 1993, have only our second woman ever to be on the council and now, of course, Clinton has appointed a woman as chair, Laura Tyson.

But I remember going to interview Marina Whitman. I mentioned earlier my first interview with Whitman—with any woman of that rank.

But what that underground may have been—there was actually no major—let me see if I'm right about this. I can't remember a major leader of the early days of the women's movement who was from Washington. Now, some other people very much got involved: Elizabeth Carpenter and Ellie Peterson, Democratic and Republican respectively who formed ERA America as a bipartisan thing to try and get it ratified. Liz, of course, had been a big wheel in the Johnson administration. And there were others: Mary Crisp who was head of the Republican National Committee and got fired for her feminist activities, really.

I don't know. I guess I wasn't aware of that much of a network. I knew who the press women were, of course, and we were certainly a network and had been for some time before this, fighting the National Press Club for access.

Clark: I think Rosenberg at one point was talking about Catherine East, maybe, and some of her activities.

Shanahan: Well, Catherine East, of course, was, yes, in the bureaucracy. And what she might have done that I don't know about would have been in the bureaucracy. She's the one who said I wasn't a real feminist [laughter], because I kept writing that we didn't know whether the extension on the ratification of the ERA was constitutional or not. She led a frustrating life and she got mad easily. And I have high regard for her.

I don't know. I don't have a sense of there being a women's underground. I could be wrong. I wasn't part of it, in any event. I was more dealing with the above-ground people who were making news.

Clark: Right.

Shanahan: I mean, there are things that you think back on with astonishment, though, and to go back and look through those old clips, I realize that inadequate as it has been, there really has been monumental change in twenty years. At the time the Equal Rights Amendment went through the House, there was no woman—

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Martha Griffiths was on the Ways and Means Committee but there was no woman on any of the other major committees of the House. Not on the Rules Committee which has tremendous power over what comes up for a vote. Nobody on Armed Services. Nobody on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Nobody on Judiciary. And of course, the Senate didn't have a woman member. Well, Margaret Chase Smith, I guess, was still in the Senate at that time.

There have been real changes. I was really quite thrilled this week watching Clinton give the economic message to the joint session of Congress. And when they panned around the House of Representatives, I realized that I didn't recognize half of the women, there are so many now. It's the first time that I didn't recognize by sight all the women members of Congress. That's quite wonderful.

I remember feeling the same way—I don't know whether this is on earlier interviews or not—I've also been involved in a lot of racial equality stuff, including teaching in a minority journalism program over the years. And when the National Association of Black Journalists [NABJ] was first formed, I went to several of their conventions. And about the third one was the one when I realized, why I knew hardly anybody! And that was an equal and you might say an identical thrill, to realize that it's just wonderful that there were so many that I don't know lots of them.

Clark: You really covered the formation of the National Women's Political Caucus.

Shanahan: Yes.

Clark: In your opinion, why did that spring up at the time that it did and could you talk a little bit about the founders and their goals?

Shanahan: Well, the Women's Political Caucus, of course, was something of a Washington and New York operation. I think Betty Friedan was the real brain behind that—maybe she and Bella [Abzug]—who recognized that whatever had been done to date, progress was not going to continue unless women got political, in the narrow sense of the word, not the generic; all gender stuff is political in a sense.

Clark: This is subsequent to her falling out with Nell?

Shanahan: I'm not clear on that point. I think not. I think before. I don't remember that. I really never did cover Nell a lot.

In any event, they summoned this meeting, a couple of a hundred people, the most visible leaders were Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm. And they sat in a row up front there. They stated their goal as half women in public office, elected and appointed, by—I'm not sure they gave a date but that that was the goal. And I covered it.

There was a famous story about that. It ran, I guess, on a Saturday and a Sunday, that meeting, maybe started Friday night with cocktails or something, I forget. But anyway, a couple of things there. I wrote the story for the Sunday paper saying two hundred women had assembled in Washington determined to start a movement that would find half of the public offices in the country filled by women.

And this is one of these "God, she is on our side" things, there wasn't another item of significant news in the world for that Sunday paper. It was just about the slowest news day anybody ever saw. And the consequence was that my story not only ran at the top of the front page, there was a four-column—I think four-column, maybe it was three—picture—that's in the old eight-column format, taking up close to half of the top part of the page—of those four I have just named. If there had been any other news to put on the front page, I might have gotten a lower left-hand corner, if that.

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That led to something that was widely reported when it happened. A conversation between Henry Kissinger who—I forget whether he was secretary of state or White House foreign policy coordinator at the time—but anyway, between Nixon and Kissinger that "Did you see that picture on the front page of the New York Times?" And somebody—I forget who said which—"Yeah, looked like a chorus line." And Nixon apparently asked Kissinger—you'll find this all in the papers, I don't remember it quite well, but it was reported at the time. And Nixon asked Kissinger, well, is she one of Henry Kissinger's old girl friends? At that time, Kissinger was between his first and second marriages and was squiring a lot of movie stars and so on around town.

Clark: Is he referring to Steinem?

Shanahan: And he was referring to Gloria Steinem, who promptly sent out a press release in language that echoed the old denial by people who were accused of being communists during the communist witchhunt days, "I am not now and never have been a girl friend of Henry Kissinger."

Clark: But that rumor still has never been completely trounced! [Laughter.]

Shanahan: It was just one of those petty—those minor outrages, not petty, that it looked like a chorus line—or burlesque line, they may even have said. Somebody ought to look it up. And that was the climate of the times and women were, in the phrase that came into use later, mad as hell and not going to take it any more. That kind of put-down which we used to kind of smile sweetly and not say anything, we were starting to say stuff when people said things like that.

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

Clark: Okay. We were talking about some of the more outstanding stories in 1971, including your article on women being bypassed for the Supreme Court. The day the article appeared in the paper was October 21. You have a story about that.

Shanahan: Is that correct or is that the dateline on the story? I think—is the paper the 22nd?

Clark: The paper's the 22nd. I'm sorry.

Shanahan: Yes. You have to watch that closely on dateline stories.

Yes, I was very proud of the piece I did on the status of women in the law, which was written to run on the day when Nixon either did or did not appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. There were two vacancies. And he did not. He appointed Powell, who was quite an honorable conservative, and Rehnquist, now the chief justice—more of a knee-jerk anti-progress type.

Nobody had ever looked at this. And my story did say that the pool that Nixon had to draw from was tiny at that time—something like three percent of lawyers in the country were women, though the number in the law schools was already beginning to rise very dramatically. One of them was about women in legal education, the discriminations in admissions and scholarships, the discrimination in the way they were treated: all of the stereotypes and the just absolutely false ideas that were keeping women who were in law firms ghetto-ized over into doing estates and wills and family law and things like that. Tremendous lot of research on it. I remember that I worked on it intermittently between spot stories on my regular economics beat, which I always had to do.

Over a period of probably two weeks, maybe longer, but not full-time because, as was true for me and I think for most—maybe all—of the women who were covering the women's movement for daily newspapers, they had other assignments, I'm unaware of anybody on a major paper whose full-time assignment was just to

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cover the women's beat at that time. And you had to do your "important" work first and then they didn't mind if you also went off and covered women's stuff. And that is the way this story was done.

What I remember about it, somewhat painfully: The story as it got in the paper was fine and I was proud of it and I think it was a contribution. I think it's a story that has historical value to this day. But Max Frankel, the Washington bureau chief, in whom there was then and is now much to admire, much, was so uptight about that story. He insisted on editing it personally, which was something he essentially never did. He'd look at a story occasionally, if there was some problem that either was a leak and was going to make some people mad or—there are various reasons why, as the bureau chief, he would look at copy. But to sit down and insist on what we call pencil-editing, line by line on a story was rare to unheard-of for him. And he did make a number of changes and in particular, cut it quite a lot, saying, "It's too long. It's much too long." It was emotional on his part, which, of course, then made me emotional in return.

I remember after he then subsequently years later got to be executive editor of the Times after I was long gone, when he did some really dumb things and said some really incredibly stupid things about women. And I was surprised because there is so much in Max to admire. I think he's one of the smartest people I've ever known, one of the most deeply and broadly informed. And I shouldn't have been surprised. I should have remembered that episode and how uptight he was that I was going to take a look at a whole major, important profession in this country and particularly important to people who were interested in public policy, which is still very much dominated by lawyers. And I should have known that despite the fact that he had brilliant wife at that time [Tobia Frankel], who has since died, and has married a second woman whom I don't know but apparently also brilliant [Joyce Purnick], that he was generically not at ease with the whole issue of discrimination and barriers to opportunity for women.

At the time I thought he had wrecked the story. I have re-read my original version and what ran and I think that was an over-reaction. There were some things—

Clark: Why did you feel that it wrecked it then?

Shanahan: I don't know. You write a story and any news story you ever do, almost, of any consequence, you leave out a lot of things that you wish you could put in because space is always finite. And I had made my decisions as to what had to go in and therefore any single thing he took out upset me greatly because I felt that what I had left in was what should go. My stories on the Times basically did not get cut.

Clark: Didn't get cut. Let's talk about some of the particular eliminations. [Tape interruption.]

In terms of some of the eliminations, I notice that a lot of the statistics were eliminated on the LSAT—the percentages were eliminated on the LSAT scores versus the admissions, for example. I don't want to be imprecise. I'm not going to say—but you gave very specific percentages, like thirteen percent scored this or scored higher on SATs.

Shanahan: Which demonstrated that admissions were discriminatory.

Clark: Yes. And those statistics were eliminated.

Shanahan: Yes.

Clark: And a general statement was made about how a smaller number got in than the number of people who actually applied with these high admissions scores or something. So that was sort of generalized.

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I was interested when you said eliminations because I guess more than the story was changed, I noticed the number of eliminations about particulars, you know, supported some of the general theses. And also elimination of the part of the story about Harvard's failure to provide adequate financial aid packages to women.

Shanahan: Oh, yes.

Clark: I thought that was very critical.

Shanahan: Yes. I thought it was, particularly since Harvard advertised at that time "Nobody who is admitted ever can't go because they don't have the money. If we admit them, we fund them," if they need it. And what I wrote, and Max cut out, showed that wasn't true, as to women.

Clark: And also along with that was the elimination of statistics on women who had families for whom they did not receive necessarily any financial aid because they weren't supported to go to law school, not as much as men, for example. Also, I think a paragraph was eliminated completely on the salary discrepancies and how they widened significantly.

Shanahan: Year by year.

Clark: Year by year.

Shanahan: Do you have some more? I hadn't done that side-by-side comparison since the day it happened.

Clark: It's very interesting. But I think maybe most critically, it was sort of how the article was wrapped, you know. And I thought it was so interesting because later—I mean, I'm speeding ahead in time—by having read the draft of your deposition, you know, a lot of things keep springing to mind about, you know, you were somehow criticized at some point for being considered an advocate or you felt that this was a criticism for you, whereas actually I thought that your story was incredibly well-balanced and you didn't find the need to sort of wrap it up in a way.

You actually started to end the story with a statement about how there's considerable dispute still over how the status of the problem of women being discriminated against will resolve itself. And instead, I guess Frankel took from a quote from Jean Reid of Duke who said, "The job picture is improving and the trend should continue," as the lead in to the end of the story. And then there was a final subhead called "Problem of familiarity" in which one of your interviews with a woman who said, "The legal world is still run by men who have no peer experience with women"—it was lifted out of the number of really substantive interviews and quotes you had had with women, talking about the real difficulties—towards the end of the article. In other words, there was no happy resolution towards the end of your first edit. But the problem of familiarity was picked up as the real problem, you know, rather than say "illegal practices of law firms" or "a bleak picture." It was interesting how that was sort of blacked out.

Shanahan: The subheads, of course, are written on the desk. That was an all-male desk at that time. Betsy Wade, I think, was at that time the only woman copy editor anywhere on the paper. The national desk that would have handled that in New York was all men. It's interesting that a lot of this was going on in the Nixon administration which was pure coincidence but there were a lot of things related to the Nixon administration.

And we went in to the times at that time. Nixon put in a complete price and wage control in the summer of '71, a very cynical act. It was done so he could pump up the economy for the election in '72,

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without creating inflation. Then he took it off, in January or February of '73 after he was safely reelected. The whole thing was quite outrageous.

But the thing I remember as a feminist: He appointed two outside advisory committees, twenty-two members, a pay board and a price commission, all very outstanding economists, and one woman, Marina Whitman who was subsequently the first woman member of the Council of Economic Advisors. And the Times ran—I wrote some of them and other people wrote some of them, mostly it was done in New York—they ran little thumbnail sketches, little one-inch pictures of each of the twenty-two and then maybe in kind of a narrow type, three inches or so of copy, just giving the highlights of their lives.

And they told you what Marina Whitman's husband does. He was a professor of English and especially Shakespeare at the University of Pittsburgh. Not a single mention of what the wife of any of the twenty-one men did. And it was just the most dazzling demonstration of how women have a secondary identification.

And I do remember calling up the national editor, Gene Roberts, a great newspaperman and a great guy in most respects—pretty terrible about women—and pointing this out to him. And I think it was one of the few times I ever really got through to Gene. It was so blatant. Twenty-one men's highlights of their lives, not a mention of their wives. One woman, what does her husband do. So, women get it both ways. If they're single, what's wrong with them. And if they're married, they're their husband's wife.

That came up in a whole lot of different ways. I remember so distinctly what I still think of as the Pocono conference. It was the first conference of women state legislators sponsored by the Center for the American Woman in Politics at Rutgers University, run then and now by a wonderful woman named Ruth Mandel, who had an idea of getting a bunch of women legislators together. There were fifty at the meeting, not chosen at random, by any means, or not to represent all states, but picked because they were considered to be outstanding. I think there were something like twenty-six states represented.

And it was the most wonderful example—and I was able to write this in the story—of how women have so suppressed their own knowledge of discrimination, because if you can't change it, you know. I think in some respects it can be a mentally healthy impulse not to recognize it because if you can't change it, why chew yourself to pieces over being conscious every waking moment of unfair things that are happening to you.

At this meeting, the first day, I was an official rapporteur. Ruth had asked four people, of whom I was one, all women journalists—because a lot of the working sessions were split into four smaller groups—to take notes and there was subsequently a book written about it by Jeane Kirkpatrick who was subsequently and still is a big foreign policy person. Or was she ambassador to the UN—I guess.

Anyway, when the women first assembled, then, in the early sessions or even just in the informal coffee conversations, most of them said, "Oh, no, I haven't been discriminated against." But as they, one by one, sort of told a little anecdote, they began to realize that there wasn't a single one of them who was on the appropriations committee or whatever the most important committees were in their legislatures. And that the men went off at night to their favorite bars and clubs and settled the affairs of the state, and came back the next day and presented those who were not included with a fait accompli.

It was fascinating to watch that happen in front of my very eyes. There were always a few who held back. I remember there was a beautiful, white-haired woman from Georgia—I've forgotten her name—who was saying, "Well, I don't understand all this stuff about how I have to be Mrs. Mary Jones. I am very happy to be Mrs. William Jones. Why wouldn't I want my husband's name?" Well, I don't know whatever happened to her. You like to hope that one day the light dawned. But she was a definite minority in that group.

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That was the occasion, too—this has been printed—when Millicent Fenwick, who was then a New Jersey state legislator, told the story that subsequently she told again in Washington at a Women's Press Club dinner. And it was in all of her obituaries when she died, but it's still a great story.

There was quite a discussion at that Poconos meeting of whether women had an obligation to carry the ball on women's issues: ERA ratification, equal pay, daycare, et cetera. And there was a heavy consensus that yes, they did have the obligation because who else would do it but also that it cost them in standing with their colleagues. And in the course of that discussion, Millicent Fenwick who, of course, was subsequently a member of the U.S. Congress, told this story. She was one of the ones who very strongly felt she had that obligation. And she had led the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment ratification in New Jersey. She told how the Speaker, a member of her party—she's a Republican—had stood up at one point and said, well, he wasn't sure about all this equality, that as far as he was concerned, he liked his women to be warm and kissable and to smell nice. To which Millicent Fenwick, with her Vassar accent, replied, "I don't believe I helped my cause much when I replied, 'That's exactly how I like my men and I do hope you haven't been disappointed as often as I have.'"

Clark: Fabulous. I can see it.

Shanahan: She didn't tell it as well at the Press Club. I'm sure I have the verbatim quote and the quote in all the obits is a little different from that, but anyway.

It was quite a remarkable experience. And there were women—a woman here from nearby Virginia whom I knew of named Dorothy Darmid who was a great leader of the anti-Byrd machine forces behind the scenes in Virginia, never up front, represented one of our liberal suburban communities here. The excitement to me as I listened to all of this and then was able to report it was quite wonderful.

Clark: On that level, I just wanted to comment that I noticed a really interesting—first subtle and then I went back and read it again and again, a real transition, a real shift to writing the story from the woman's perspective. I mean, the story began with literal women's voices. It was not what I was used to reading in a newspaper like the Times. Without even being conscious of it, the male voice reporting on a woman's activities or, you know, something in the third person, something more removed. It felt very—there was a transition to being—not being an advocate necessarily or in the movement necessarily but it was a transition to the woman's voice, uncensored, unfiltered through a kind of a male voice.

Shanahan: I remember that lead. I remember the lead on that story which was something like "Women state legislators believe that they work harder, are better informed, less corrupt, more pure sexually"—

Clark: Yes. "More pure" was in there several places.

Shanahan: And—

Clark: More conscientious.

Shanahan: More conscientious, and so on, than their male counterparts but they don't have the influence they should. I remember that, ticking off all those things—and I don't think I've included them all. You might want to put that date on the story in.

Clark: May 23, yes. May 23, 1972.

Shanahan: Yes. You have to be careful in all of these, that maybe the next day's paper, if you're looking at a dateline story.

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Clark: I'm actually saying the day appeared.

Shanahan: That's interesting. I hadn't quite thought about that. I guess I would have thought that I was telling things in women's own voices before. But maybe it was simply sort of the boldness of what they were saying which I merely recounted.

Clark: Yes, exactly.

Shanahan: We are. We work harder, we know more, we're less corrupt, less running around sleeping with everybody we can get our hands on, whatever.

Clark: Well, it just raised the question for me. Could a man have reported this story in the same way?

Shanahan: Oh, boy, that's a controversial question. I think some men, though no man ever reported it over as long a period of time as I did, nobody—well, that's not true. My friend Isabelle Shelton of the Star I think reported it as long as I did and was given good play, more often on the women's pages than on the front pages, I believe. But Isabelle should be asked that.

It's funny that you should ask, could a man have done it, because the question that was always asked—and an analogous question still particularly being asked of blacks today is: But can a woman report it fairly? Isn't she biased? Later I heard the right answer to that. There was a big controversy in recent years about a series on abortion that the L.A. Times wrote. And there was a sidebar by their writer who covers press issues as such, raising the question of whether women could really fairly report on abortion issues since they are the only ones involved. To which someone I know replied, "Nobody ever raised that question about whether men could report on the draft where they are the only ones involved."

Clark: That's what I was about to say.

Shanahan: And it was never, ever, ever, ever raised about that. My own sense of it is that one, I am a professional. Two, I understood the hazards to my own career and my own being permitted to continue with that assignment of being anything other than a fair and balanced reporter. I don't say "objective," because everybody knows there's no such thing.

Clark: Really?

Shanahan: People in journalism don't use the word "objective" any more. You bring your whole life to any story.

Clark: Do you really think that's a shared assumption, say at the higher levels of the New York Times?

Shanahan: I think if you look at what they say in their speeches to journalism meetings and so on, they talk about fairness and balance and so on, they don't really talk about objectivity, particularly since newspapers have become much more interpretive, not just saying the president said, blah, blah, but then putting in that six weeks ago he said something a little different and all that sort of thing which was just really beginning to happen—well, it had begun before I got into covering the women's movement.

I covered a lot of the national conventions, especially the Women's Political Caucus, and NOW a little less so. And I do so remember the Women's Political Caucus, their first meeting after—the founding meeting and then the first meeting in the national convention in Houston. All sorts of interesting things happened. Some of the more important ones not on the floor of the convention. There were some battles about this and that. Jill Ruckelshaus made a speech that had us all in tears. Do you know about this?

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Clark: No.

Shanahan: I've got a copy of it somewhere and I don't want to hash it up. I can get it for you for the files. Literally, that's the only time I ever cried covering a story, just quietly—dripping—as did others. She talked about the journey we had taken to get there, not just from Alaska, which was the home of the most distant delegates to the convention but the journey we had taken in our lives to get there. And she said, "And I want my daughters and my mother to take that journey," and talked about the cost, including being misunderstood by people you love very much. A wonderful speech. A wonderful speech. But someday we could look back and say, "I gave everything I had for freedom."

I'll get it for you. It's just one of the most moving speeches I ever heard.

To go back to your previous question, could a man do that? Could a man have done that reporting that well? I think some could have. It's like anything else. Some are better than others. A man wouldn't have cried at Jill Ruckelshaus' speech. But, I think, did not affect my reporting. I had some of it in the story, as I recall—not all of it. It never occurred to me to ask the New York Times to print the full text. [Laughter.] That just occurred to me this minute. Today something of that sort, that was so moving, I think, I might say, "Why don't you print the whole text?" Especially since it was short. And I've done that sometimes, when something just had a dramatic impact.

I think the women's movement made a big mistake at that convention. Bella Abzug was one of the prime movers who suggested that it was time for the founders to step down and have some other people take their places. Frances Fahrenholt of Texas, who was certainly a first-class person and no doubt about that—she'd run for governor and almost won and so on. She's still active in politics there.

The reason I think it was a mistake was in terms of publicity for the movement. The movement—Bella and Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan—Betty because of her book The Feminine Mystique more than activity. Bella, of course, was a member of Congress and an effective one by then. And Gloria, I guess, only because of the movement, they had really become recognizable names. And in journalism people who don't have recognizable names have a hard time getting quoted in the papers.

I've thought about it a lot. I think women's role, inherent or socialized—and I don't know which—as nurturers, bringing up the next generation, the motive was wonderful. "I'm not going to stand here and hold power just because I'm big and old and important and can do it," Bella was saying, in effect. "But we need some younger leaders." And the result was, the amount of publicity that the caucus was getting sharply diminished because Cissy Fahrenholt, for all of her intelligence, gifts, and continuing to do good things, just wasn't a name that commanded press attention. I very quickly came to the conclusion that had been a mistake but it was sort of too late to turn back.

Of course, lots of interesting things happened at that convention not on the convention floor. It was held at a hotel called the Rice Hotel in Houston where many of us were getting telephone calls from our offices, not just the press women but other women who had important jobs and people would call them when they were out of town. And the Rice Hotel would not page women, on the ground that no woman wants her name announced in a hotel lobby." [Laughter.] And when we found out that was happening, we went to them and said, "For this convention, you will page women in the lobby." And they quite reluctantly did so.

There was also the matter of the waitresses. They were vastly understaffed for a convention of—whatever size that was. The poor waitresses were run ragged and working overtime. And we found out. It just happened that one of the labor union women was at my table—I don't remember which one now. It might have been Millie Jeffrey—who found out that these women weren't getting time-and-a-half for overtime, just straight time. She called in some union organizer from the area. I don't know whether they ever actually

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organized or not but they scared the hell out of the management which in fact began paying them time-and-a-half. I think maybe they didn't actually organize. We also made sure we gave those waitresses big tips.

Clark: It's very interesting.

Shanahan: Of course, the Houston papers—which were rags, both of them, at that time. I know the Chronicle where I have a good friend, these days has improved a lot. And I haven't seen the Houston Post in years. They gave almost no coverage to this convention of hundreds and hundreds of women from all over the country, even when a hometown girl, Frances Fahrenholt, was elected president.

One of the papers—and I can't remember which one it was—the only time they put the story, any piece of it, on page one had to do with—there were all kinds of caucuses, ethnic caucuses, various other kinds of caucuses, professional, whatever. There was a lesbian caucus and they decreed that nobody who wasn't—that no man, I guess they didn't keep straight women out—but no man could come to the lesbian caucus. And that was the story that—I think it was the Houston Post—put on page one, the only one for this whole two-and-a-half day meeting. Oh, well.

I mentioned Bella. I wish to say a few words about Bella Abzug. I am horrified at the degree to which today younger women, feminist women, do not know what an effective member of the House of Representatives she was. The male view—not all males—that she just stood up and screamed and antagonized everybody and accomplished nothing is just absolutely false. She did stand up and yell a bit and she could in fact be harsh on her staff and had a lot of high staff turnover. Ed Koch, subsequently the mayor of New York, was in the House at the same time she was and had an equally high staff turnover and nobody ever wrote word one about it.

So, you ask me, could the men have covered some of this stuff as well? And my answer is that women are sensitive to that kind of thing and men weren't. They never wrote about how impossible Koch was to work for. Bella did have that defect. She did yell at people a lot. But she also was effective and, within the House leadership, known to be effective.

I remember a friend of mine telling me a story about—there's a long hallway that runs the whole very considerable length of the House of Representatives chamber, with access to the chamber from that long hallway. It's called the Speaker's lobby. And a friend of mine was walking along with the Speaker, then Tip O'Neill. And Bella was walking a few paces in front of them. And he said to my friend, "You know, I kind of like that woman." And she was at that time engaged in what was one of her top issues which was reducing the military budget.

I actually got called in at one point to cover a piece of that debate because the regular reporter was busy on something else and saw her make mincemeat out of the member of the appropriations committee—which she was not even a member of—on the military construction budget, who just didn't know what he was talking about. And she would say such-and-such is the case. And he'd say, "No, it isn't." And she'd say, "Well, right here on page 203 of your report, it says, quote, and won a vote to reduce that.

She got a lot of stuff through there. And of course, she was the one who got the Vietnam resolution through. She tried and tried and tried to get a resolution through—it took several years—saying we ought to get out of Vietnam—and she finally succeeded, by persistence, and also it had to be some behind-the-scenes stuff. And this was before the country at large really—I can't tell you the date but Vietnam was already tearing the country apart. But this was before the consensus against the war, before the consensus had turned. And she got it through.

One of the stories about Bella's accomplishments that always delighted me the most—and I knew a lot about it because I had a good source inside the Federal Reserve which regulates most of the larger banks,

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which means supervising their lending practices and so on. And it has to do with the issue of women not having equal access to credit, which was egregiously true. A woman alone, an unmarried woman, had a terrible time getting a mortgage and sometimes even consumer credit, never mind what her earnings were, it was just not there—denied credit, never told why. A wife often, if a couple wanted to buy a house or something, the wife's earnings were not counted because, oh, well, she's going to get pregnant and stop work. Never mind if she already had three kids and didn't intend to have any more or whatever. It was just an automatic assumption.

Anyway, Bella was one of the people behind the equality-in-credit legislation. But there was something more than legislation. There were things that she felt—believed and she was right—could be done by the Federal Reserve as a matter of bank regulation. They didn't really need a law to tell banks that they had to cut out this unequal treatment of women and just look at the economics of a given loan applicant, an economic decision.

Well, Bella called the chairman of the Federal Reserve at that time, Arthur Burns, a brilliant man, but one of the most high-handed arrogant people I've ever known, who would just brush aside anyone—pretty much regardless of gender, I guess—who disagreed with him on anything. Brilliant, no question about that, and effective at what he was doing. Anyway, she requested that he come up to meet with her and some other people on this issue of credit for women. And I will say I had a very good source inside the Fed at that time, a young woman economist who was telling me what was happening behind the scenes, which is how I know about this.

Burns went up there expecting to meet with Bella and "some screamers from NOW," was the way my source put it. Instead, she had—I forget how many women there were in the House at that time, let's say sixteen. If there were sixteen, she had fourteen of the sixteen women members of the House there. And he walks into this room saying, "I would like you to meet Congresswoman So-and-So and Congresswoman So-and-So," and took him around the room until he realized that she had virtually all of the women members of Congress there. I guess there weren't any in the Senate at that time. And they were all saying to him, "You get those regulations fixed." And it worked.

Clark: That's a great story about Bella.

Shanahan: Yes, it drives me crazy that young women who really are feminists do not know that she was an effective member of the House, because so much of that reporting was filtered through male eyes—male reporters, male editors. So she was this noisy broad that was easy to hate, and that's all there was to it, as far as they were concerned. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Clark: Okay. I want to find out about when you first heard about the lawsuit.

Shanahan: I'm not quite sure when I first heard that the women were organizing to make known their views that they were not being fairly treated. I think everyone hoped and believed that this great institution would see the error of their ways and do right.

The first time I remember was one day, perhaps without warning or maybe somebody telephoned me, I got in the mail a bunch of forms, one for every woman, every professional job I guess, in the Washington bureau to fill out, I think for the state equal employment agency, whatever its right name was, because under federal law, if there was a state agency, you had to go to that first before you went to the EEOC. And so I passed them out. And it asked for information about things that either—the way it was worded—happened to you or you know of your own knowledge happened to somebody else, was sort of the way it was written.

So I filled it out in terms of discrimination against me and others and so on. And at that time, the bureau chief emeritus, Reston's predecessor, Arthur Krock, who had stepped down as bureau chief but still

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wrote a column and still employed a woman—the Times employed her on his behalf—named Laura Walz, as his secretary, researcher, et cetera. And she came to me, having just heard women talking about it in the ladies' room or something, and asked if she might fill out such a form.

Well, I was a little surprised because Laura Walz was one of the most thoroughly courteous and proper people I've ever known. I never felt that I knew her very well. She didn't seem to seek friendship, not so much stand-offish as just sort of self-contained. She never sought me out; I never sought her out. And we had minor conversations, never of any duration.

So when she came and asked me for a form, I was a little puzzled but of course, I gave her one. I think I had to xerox it. And it came back with—I mean, she was so ladylike, so soft-spoken, always very professionally dressed and so on. It came back filled out in first-class, eloquent English about what kind of work she did and what her researcher duties were and how she was paid as a secretary and accorded no standing, no respect, and in particular, no money—none of which is the way she phrased it. But that's what the message was.

Well, shame on me for not having recognized that women like Laura Walz probably suffered more than the professional women did. And so I quite happily sent it back with the package of filled-out forms from the Washington bureau.

And of course, Louise Carini was an original plaintiff from the accounting department. The whole thing that I was aware of had started with some meetings—I guess probably before I got these forms—and that originally it was confined to the editorial floor and the professional women. And I think it was only later that I heard the story about how Louise Carini asked to become involved in much the same way that Laura Walz had. That was the first I knew about it.

That's all for now.

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