Women on the Paper; the Late Sixties Pinko-Rag

extend yourself and to challenge all around you somehow keep it up for the next ten, twenty, thirty years. Thank you very much, (standing ovation).

Robert Decherd: Thank you. Now moving into the sixties for better or worse, our next speaker, Linda Greenhouse, was The Crimson's Feature Editor in 1967-1968 and I feel certain that she can provide one perspective to the program tonight which no other speaker could, and that is what it's like to be first a woman at Radcliffe or Harvard, whatever name we're going by this year, and an editor of The Crimson at the same time. She can likewise tell us what it's like, something that would probably intrigue me and I would like to hear what it's like to be a woman reporter for The New York Times, which is what she does now. So without much more ado, Linda Greenhouse. (applause).

Linda Greenhouse: I never heard anything about that headline from Pearl Harbor Day but it reminds me of an apocryphal Boston Globe headline which was created by Paul Corkery who inexplicably isn't here about an event which would take place in the 1970's.

Two Hub Men Die in New York Nuclear Holocaust." (laughter). That's apropos of nothing we've been through a lot of decades tonight and I have the rather thankless task of talking about the decade that everybody here knows best, so I'm going to try to make this short and selective. There are a lot of things that can be said about The Crimson in the sixties and there are a lot of people in this room who are perfectly well equipped to say them so it anybody has any challenges I'm open to this. It seems to me that one thing that absolutely has to be said first is that this was an extraordinary decade when students at this college and other colleges saw themselves perceived as enemies by a large portion of this country outside the campus, and at times saw themselves. I believe, perceived as enemies by some people within the University community. And in a situation like this the standards of objective, impersonal impartial journalism, that The Crimson trained its members in for so many decades, these premises just had to become exceedingly shaky. You simply couldn't cover the war and everything it meant in the second half of the 1960s the way a few years earlier we had covered the Doty Committee or the Inner Belt or the Cambridge City Council. It simply couldn't be done. There was no way and perhaps ultimately no justification for standing above that very personal kind of anguish that marked the experience on the campuses in the last half of the 1960s. As a result, of course. The Crimson went through some very profound changes but I'll leave some of this serious stuff for Jim Fallows who follows me because by the time this really started to happen my class had graduated.

Women

I want to talk about change but a different kind of change. As Robert Decherd indicated I have one kind of perspective on the paper. When he tried to talk me into doing this he mentioned that I would be the only female voice heard at anytime during this weekend of festivities, and that it might be appropriate to say something about women on The Crimson. I tried to protest first that perhaps nobody wanted to hear this, and second that perhaps I wasn't the most appropriate person to take this kind of assignment. As he said I was Features Editor, which is a very traditional female role on the paper. I was not much of an activist and I never did anything very much to change the status quo, but once his persuasive southern charms (laughter) had talked me into getting up here because I should say that unlike Dave Halberstam who confided to me that he makes about a third of his living by giving speeches, (laughter) that was before his book sold 100,000 copies, but this is the first speech I've made since the night of my high school graduation (laughter). So I ask your indulgence. Anyway once I got talking into this, it occurred to me that maybe my perspective was as valid as anyone else's because women on The Crimson in the 1960s were really an astonishing docile lot of people.

First to get the terminology straight, we weren't women of course, we were girls on The Crimson, and to anybody who is attuned in the slightest to the rhetoric of the women's movement you'll know exactly what that distinction means. It seems to me that the 1960s represented an awkward and fascinating decade of transition for us 'girls' on The Crimson. There were enough of us, I believe women became members of The Crimson in the 1950s, so that by my time there were enough of us so that we weren't tokens, we weren't freaks, we weren't oppressed or anything like that, but no matter what was going on inside The Crimson the community outside The Crimson made it clear over and over again, every day in fact every meal hour that women were not obviously equal to men in this community. Contrary to the fears of some of my friends who knew what I was going to be talking about I'm not here to castigate male chauvinism in 14 Plympton Street or anything of the kind, this is a celebration not a recrimination so my purpose is really historical to refresh memories and perhaps to indicate a few things that some of the older people here might not even have been aware of. For instance, the Signet, which virtually every serious male Crimson editor joined was something we saw only at faculty or alumni dinners. Now my friends on The Crimson who consistently refused to put my name up for nomination tried to ease the blow by telling me that I was overglamorizing the Signet and that really it wasn't anything very special, but none the less Adams House where everybody repaired to supper before settling down to work allowed girls to eat there a couple of days a week, allowed Crimson women as a special favor to eat there a couple of other days a week, but still there were always a few days a week when our supper consisted of walking a few dozen yards further down Plympton Street to have a hamburger at Tommy's Lunch. I lost 10 pounds my freshman year at Radcliffe and my mother always attributed this to the virtues of exercise, walking from Radcliffe to Harvard, but it was simply because every night of my comp I had a 50 cent hamburger at the Waldorf, not having the time or energy to go back to Radcliffe and come back in time to report for duty. The Sheldons, the Shaws and all those fellowships that I have never been able to keep straight that were more or less the birthright claimed every spring by every male Crimson editor were of course something not open to us.

This was the time when The Crimson could appoint its first female Managing Editor in a perfectly matter of fact, normal fashion because she was the best person for the job, only to find that the national press was incredibly titillated by this bit of news, treated it as a kind of cute aberration with the assumption that once it was past The Crimson would return to its male clubbiness, which the world outside assumed was its natural order of business. All these things bothered us of course, but they didn't really bother us very much. When I was a freshman in 1964, Lamont Library was closed to women students, as of course it had been closed since the day it opened. When I was a sophomore, women could use Lamont, the building, but not the books (laughter), if they had section meetings there but only if they went in the back door and walked up the back stairs and weren't seen in the front of the building. Okay, where was The Crimson when this was going on? But more to my point, where were women on The Crimson? In 1965 during Linda McVeigh Matthew's exec. comp. the Harvard football team held its annual dinner here in this very building. That was during the week she was trial sports editor and she showed up to cover it, and of course they didn't let her in. Did we raise a fuss and threaten to boycott all future coverage of the Harvard football team? As I might add The New York Times Washington Bureau this year found it necessary to boycott the private background briefing sessions that go on in Washington which do not in this year 1973 admit women reporters. We did not. The Sports Editor came down and covered for Linda and it was business as usual.

How do we explain such docility in the face of this situation? Docility from a group that thought of itself as among the creative, active, aware people in this community. I explain it this way--I think girls on The Crimson considered The Crimson a very special place and we considered ourselves pretty special having the foresight and the fortitude to make ourselves a part of it. Radcliffe, which might naturally have been our special constituency as reporters and editors simply didn't interest us very much if at all. We were above all that, we were above all those girls who sang for the Radcliffe Choral Society, who frittered away their time studying or whatever they did. We didn't identify with them. When Harvard men voiced that age old complaint that conversation at the Radcliffe dining tables was vapid or boring we didn't rise to the defense of Radcliffe conversation, nor I might add, did we ever attempt to lend our own scintillating conversational gifts to Radcliffe dining halls. We were always the first people within earshot to agree. And so it was natural that The Crimson didn't cover Radcliffe and thus didn't cover-women very much at a time when some very interesting and very important things were going on there. When Mrs. Bunting was trying to drag us much against our will, kicking and screaming into some awareness of what an adult remale role was going to be for us in this society. Radcliffe stories when they were written at all were left to candidates or if we weren't lucky enough to have a comp going on, to baby editors.

As a result, women on The Crimson simply never made that intellectual leap that's necessary for any kind of political action or reform. By that I mean the leap toward thinking of one's self as part of a class. If I couldn't get into Adams House to have supper on a Thursday night, it was me, Linda Greenhouse an editor of The Harvard Crimson who was somehow stupidly being kept out of that building. Not one Radcliffe woman as an example of a class of Radcliffe women who were not being allowed to eat at Adams House. The world wasn't looking at things that way and we were too pleased with ourselves and busy to be the first ones to take that approach. Right after my class graduated in 1968 things started happening very fast. The wave of the women's movement washed over Harvard and left; and in its wake, as I understand it, none of the situations that I just talked about exist any longer. Things changed at Harvard of course as they changed everywhere else but they changed here I believe because they changed in other places not because we had anything to do really with changing them. So, I've gone on long enough but there are two observations I'd like to make. One is that a generation in college or on The Crimson is an incredibly short time, I'm talking about things that happened four-and-a-half years ago and I feel like an old lady, old woman I should say.

Second, for all that we assumed that we were in the very forefront of thought, of action at the cutting edge of things going on in this University, I think the evidence of the 60s might indicate that perhaps the very opposite was the case. But in case this is being recorded or anything, I don't want to finish on such a negative note, and I'll just say as a personal note that despite all this, on The Crimson for me as I guess for all of us, means more as an institution than anything I expect to encounter and the people on The Crimson I think mean more to me than anybody I've encountered since or expect to (standing ovation).

Business

Robert Decherd: Thank ya Lynda. The last speaker tonight I think might be able to tell us a little bit about things that did change very rapidly, to which Linda alluded. Jim Fallows was president of The Crimson in 1969-70. When I was comping fall of freshman year I remember being in awe of him at the time, (laughter). I still have a little bit, you may understand why when I tell you a little about him. The story goes, I'm not sure whether it's true or not, that when Jim came to The Crimson for the first comp meeting the building was very crowded and, I hope this is true, he was backed up to about the front door, he couldn't get up the front steps of the building, and the business board was having a tough time recruiting that night and so he innocently asked "Where do you go for the comp meeting?" Oh, right in here. Jim who had no intention of comping to the Business Board, walked in and thought well this is the way on to The Crimson, joined the Business Board, stayed on for as long as he absolutely had to and then moved to the editorial side of the paper and became president, which is quite a transition and I don't think too many people can claim that. He was president in 1969-70 but we hedged a little bit and made him the representative of the seventies. He was president of The Crimson in the spring of 1969 and we printed a piece that he wrote the following fall in our Centennial Issue, and many editors, I think, had questions about those years. I too have had questions but mostly they've been with regard to why graduate editors were so worried about The Crimson. It seems to have endured pretty well. Nonetheless, Jim spent two years in England as a Rhodes Scholar before returning to the United States this year to go to work for The Washington Monthly and perhaps now he can provide a few reflections on the days immediately after Linda Greenhouse's. Jim, (applause).

James Fallows: I have a feeling that reminiscences or memoirs are interesting or endurable in reverse proportion to their currency, so I'll try to make my one point briefly. When each of you was at The Crimson I'm sure that there was a theme that you talked about when you were sitting about in the offices, the Ku Klux Klan, or the wars, or the Ibis. For us it was the end of the world, (laughter). One illustration we always took to prove this general theory was the tremendous telescoping of time, how our brothers and sisters who were in high school we could hardly recognize; when they came to college, they were going to take the whole place over. And I think that the telescoping is shown not only in the awkwardness I am feeling right now, two-and-a-half years out of college never having earned a regular income, becoming a part of history standing up in this with elders of other decades. But also in the fact that only two years after Linda Greenhouse there was a different paper and in a sense a different decade of The Crimson to represent as I am sure any of you who has read The New York Daily News or Evans and Novak or Newsweek knows by now that era of The Crimson in which a good third of us here tonight was involved was that of the pinko-rag.