How A Fed-Up Group Of “Good Girls” Beat The “Mad-Men” Era Sexists

In the late 1960s, the national researchers at Newsweek magazine were known as “the Dollies”. The Dollies were all women, and when they handed over the results of their work to their male bosses, they were apt to hear about their “perfectly pointed breasts.”

The Dollies were stuck in place, consigned by decades of tradition to a secondary role, with little hope of promotion. The boys did the writing and got the glory. The girls did the journalistic spadework and fetched the coffee. It felt like the natural order to many of the Dollies. They’d grown up in a world that accepted this kind of system, after the fashion of Mad Men, and even though lots of them had gone to elite schools and were crackling smart, they were constrained by the limits of what they could imagine for themselves. They were “polite, perfectionist, good girls who never showed our drive around men,” Lynn Povich, a former high-ranking Newsweek editor, writes in her book, The Good Girls Revolt, the inspiration for a fictionalised television series of the same name from Amazon Studios that began streaming on Friday.

Read more at Independent.co.uk.