By Mary Beth Schneider TheStatehouseFile.com INDIANAPOLIS—Recently a Republican candidate for governor of Mississippi refused to let a female reporter accompany him on campaign trips unless she had a chaperone. This week a second GOP gubernatorial candidate in that state said he had the same rule. I had to look at the calendar. Yes, 2019. I […]
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INDIANAPOLIS — Recently a Republican candidate for governor of Mississippi refused to let a female reporter accompany him on campaign trips unless she had a chaperone. This week, a second GOP gubernatorial candidate in that state said he had the same rule.
I had to look at the calendar. Yes, 2019.
I had hoped the question of whether there were different rules for women journalists than for men was settled back in the 1970s. That’s the era when I began as a reporter. Women in the newsroom were seen generally as feature writers. I had to slog my way through writing “girl stories” such as “Mary Beth rides an elephant!” and “Mary Beth drives a Jeep blindfolded!” until I could convince editors that I was even better at “Mary Beth covers an election!”
But that’s also the era when women won legal fights. One was for bastions of journalism including The New York Times to hire more than a handful of women for the byline jobs, and not just as researchers and librarians. The late Nan Robertson wrote about that lawsuit in her stellar book, “The Girls in the Balcony.” The title was taken from the National Press Club policy that until the 1970s barred women as members, only allowing them to stand, separate and unequal, in the balcony to cover newsmakers.
Another victory was for women sportswriters to join their male colleagues in locker rooms after sports events. It isn’t that they wanted to be in locker rooms; it’s that they needed to be where the post-game interviews were taking place.
One of the women at the front lines of that fight was Stephanie Salter, the Terre Haute native who worked for Sports Illustrated. In 1973, she was ejected from the Baseball Writers Association of America annual meeting because, she was told, “it was strictly a stag affair.”
Salter went on to a career covering baseball, including eventually becoming a member of that association; covering fraud and sexual abuse at the San Francisco Archdiocese as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner; and, most recently, was a columnist for the Terre Haute Tribune-Star when she returned to Indiana to care for her parents.
Like me, she’s frustrated that women still have to fight for the right to do their jobs.
When I heard that a second Mississippi candidate barred female reporters without a chaperone, I wrote on Twitter that that attitude showed either an admission that that candidate couldn’t be trusted to behave decently or that he believed most if not all women lie about sexual assaults. Several men responded that women have only themselves to blame because of the #MeToo movement.
“Oh, horse…,” Salter said, using what guys would call “locker room language.” “Of course we’re to blame. If we don’t blame ourselves, they will… I bet you anything Adam ate the apple and blamed it on Eve. Only God would know different.”
(You can see why she made such a great columnist, right?)
“This is pathetic,” Salter said. “You’d think that someone like (Vice President Mike) Pence and this yahoo in Mississippi would be embarrassed. What does this say about your own ability to deal with half of the human race?”
Pence reportedly has a rule of not dining alone with women, raising the question of what he’d do if the president was, say, Nikki Haley or if his own vice president was a woman. Would he refuse to be in the Oval Office with the speaker of the House or the head of the CIA, both of whom are currently women?
I never dined with Pence. I have spoken alone to many politicians. That’s always preferable for a frank discussion and illuminating interview. In most cases, though, that’s not possible. If I’m traveling with them, they have a driver or pilot. If they are governor, a state trooper is nearby. Often a press aide is hovering ready to cut off the interview. But the rules of an interview should never be set by gender.
It was the 1970s when a federal judge ruled that the 14th Amendment afforded women sportswriters equal protection to do their jobs — one winning battle in the world’s longest war.
“Women can never completely relax. We will never completely win this one, I don’t think, at least not for a long time,” Salter said. “Be prepared, girls! Roll up your sleeves and know that this is a lifetime deal.”
Mary Beth Schneider is an editor with TheStatehouseFile.com, a news site powered by Franklin College student journalists. She covered politics and the Statehouse for The Indianapolis Star for 20 years. Send comments to dr- [email protected].
