No Longer in the Balcony?

A WRITER’S WIT
We are stimulated to emotional response not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by the works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Born June 16, 1938

My Book World

Robertson, Nan. The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times. Lincoln NE: iUniverse, 1992, 2000.

Much of my nonfiction reading is informed by C-SPAN’s weekend Book TV, and most of what catches my eye are recent releases. However, on May 24 I watched an early 1990s interview with the late Nan Robertson, New York Times reporter and author of The Girls in the Balcony. I was so taken with her wit, her analysis of what had happened to her and other female reporters during her long tenure at the newspaper that it spurred me to buy a copy of her book—which is now published as a reprint by the Author’s Guild. It chronicles the turbulent history that women reporters had with the Times, and she begins with the setting for the title.

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“The Board Room at the pinnacle of the New York Times Building is calculated to awe. It is a huge room, with a baronial fireplace sheathed in green marble at the far end. Set against carved mahogany paneling that reaches from floor to ceiling” (3).

Robertson goes on for a page and a half, describing the “baronial” room and the fact that until mid-twentieth-century, female employees cannot enter it except by way of the balcony, where, in reality, they are relegated to a near-elevator-sized space with no chairs. Unless situated correctly, the women cannot hear the proceedings, cannot participate in making the decisions about what is to be published and what isn’t. This situation is merely a symbol for their total inequality, which includes their salaries. Their research shows that the average woman is underpaid by at least $3,000 a year. Finally, in 1972, six women put their careers on the line and write a letter to the publisher concerning this issue, and fifty women sign it. Two months later, the publisher meets with the six women. One of them, Betsy Wade, chief copy editor of the foreign desk, speaks on their behalf:

“It’s all there,” Betsy said. “All of us are afraid in our pocketbooks. It hurts you over your lifetime earnings, it hurts you in your pension, it hurts every way. And of course, the individual woman can do little to remedy this. She goes to her boss or to her manager and she says, ‘Look, I’m turning the same turret lathe as the guy sitting here and I’m making less.’ And he says, ‘Well you just don’t turn the turret lathe quite so well’” (13).

The publisher must realize that if he is to rectify these discrepancies across the board it will cost the Times about $2 million dollars a year, and from his inaction, it is clear he doesn’t plan to help out. The women then go to court in 1974. In the long run, the women and the newspaper decide to settle, because to carry forward with a suit would ruin the paper (and the women’s careers). But what money the women receive is only a fraction of what they've earned. What is most notable about Robertson’s book—aside from her fine prose style, her impeccable choice of detail—is that she carefully delineates the battle these brave women fight on behalf of women reporters everywhere, including those who presently work for the Times. So often, the young (of any generation) take for granted their freedoms, as if they’ve always been present . . . and always will be. We must be reminded that women still make seventy-seven cents for every dollar a man makes, and what better way to remind us than Robertson's book.

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