Clift, Crittenden reflect on breaking into the boys' club of hard news reporting

Louise D. Walsh

June 07, 2023

Women broke into the men-only preserve of hard news reporting through legal fights and sheer determination, groundbreaking journalists Eleanor Clift and Ann Crittenden told a National Press Club audience at the History and Heritage team's "Tales for the Fight for Equal Rights for Women Journalists” on Monday.

“It was very obvious what the system was,” Crittenden explained. “Women were researchers and men were reporters.”

Magazine publisher Henry Luce called them his “vestal virgins,” she said to audience gasps. “We were second class.”

Groundbreaking journalist Ann Crittenden reflects on early hurdles for women in journalism. Photos by Nancy Shia.

She cited several examples of exclusion, including learning that although she was a key member of a story team, she would not be included at an offsite story conference because women weren’t allowed in. In another incident, at a luncheon meeting with a financier and another reporter at an all-male athletic club near Wall Street, the party was rushed into a back elevator. The staff brought a screen to block their table.

“It really hits you in the gut,” she said, noting none of her colleagues objected. “They didn’t bat an eye. That’s the way it was back then.”

As a Fortune magazine researcher, she repeatedly saw her interviews with major news figures published under a man’s byline. When they published what she wrote from Central America and elsewhere, she applied for a writer position. “Too good a researcher” to get a writing job, she was told. That’s when she went to Time magazine, one floor below Fortune, met with women seeking stories for their lawsuit, and became a lead plaintiff in discrimination suits against Time, Newsweek, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. Settlements with Time and Fortune yielded immediate, positive results for women, she said.

Eleanor Clift describes how she got hooked on journalism. Photos by Nancy Shia.

“Well, ‘That’s the way it was!’ is the key phrase!” underscored Clift, who now writes a Daily Beast column. Newsweek hired her as a secretary, a ‘Gal Friday.’

“I came into this [job] without any expectations," married with her first child and grateful for work, she said.

On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated, the magazine has closed its edition for the week. Clift's boss left for Dallas and told the rest of the staff to go home to grieve, and return tomorrow. He left her to manage the newsroom. “There I was, the right hand of the man [in charge], assembling stringers, people in Texas, who was doing what… It was the most exciting experience I had in my life until then! It hooked me on journalism.”

The women in journalism today benefitted from the work Clift, Crittenden and other women did to break through the newsroom barriers to women, said panel moderator and Club Vice President Emily Wilkins, who this week joined CNBC as a congressional correspondent. The Club did not admit women until 1971. Today they occupy the majority of the Club's leadership positions, and eight of the past 15 Club presidents are women, she noted.

“We’re here because it’s important that we not forget what happened,” Wilkins said.