Pioneering Journalist Betsy Wade Remembered as ‘a No-Nonsense Heroine’

The Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS), the networking and professional organization for women journalists, was on the eve of its first virtual national conference in early December when news broke of the death of Betsy Wade.

JAWS leaders went into action. Chicago-based writer and editor Suzy Schultz began scouring print and broadcast interviews with and about Betsy. JAWS President Mira Lowe urged former JAWS presidents and board members to send in videos of their own memories. Dozens did.

By the second day, an appreciation of Betsy went live for the more than 200 journalists attending the JAWS camp, as the annual conference is known.

Betsy Wade was a pioneer on many fronts: 45 years with the New York Times, breaking a 105-year history of men only as news desk editors. She was elected the first woman to head the New York Newspaper Guild, one of the toughest journalists’ unions in the country. And she was the lead plaintiff in the sex discrimination class action lawsuit against her employer: Boylan et al. v. The New York Times.

That 1974 lawsuit had national repercussions, including an impact on the half dozen other major media class action lawsuits then underway, including one I’d signed onto against The Associated Press.

But the JAWS women wanted to go beyond Betsy’s resume. They set out to show the intangible ways she mattered to generations of journalists. Those speaking included ex-presidents Betty Anne Williams, Julia Kagan, Pat Sullivan, Mary C. Curtis, and Jodi Enda.

Schultz also shaped what she called a “tone poem” to use Betsy’s own words to flesh out who she was, read by four board members: Lowe, Schultz, Georgia Dawkins, and Jane Isay.

“She was a no-nonsense heroine,” said Isay.

“She was an advocate and a fighter, and she was a coalition builder,” said Julia Kagan. She kept JAWS honest — “immensely supportive but always holding up for us what else we could do. She was always about access and making the road clearer.”

Sullivan said Betsy was a willing volunteer, running the fundraising auction, serving as treasurer, rewriting the charter. “But what she meant to JAWS was another thing entirely. Her professional stature was unmatched, and her words carried a lot of weight. She was a mentor before that word meant anything, by opening her mind, heart, and home to younger journalists who needed guidance — or a drinking buddy.”

When her Times friend and lawsuit colleague Joan Cook died, Betsy worked with Williams, the then-president of JAWS, to establish a fund in Joan’s name to underwrite scholarships for young women of color. This later became part of the Legacy Fund, and in 2020, the scholarships were renamed the "Alice" awards, in honor of Alice Dunnigan, the first African American woman to cover the White House.

Betsy was a high school rep for the Times, distributing the paper in school every morning. Later, she went to Barnard, where, according to Lowe, she took away valuable lessons in self-confidence: “They were saying you will do it … not just that you will marry someone who will do it.” She was one of 10 women out of 65 students in her class at Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism. She called it “a strange and alien world.”

Her first job, at the New York Herald Tribune in 1952, lasted only one year; they fired her when she got pregnant. After her son’s birth, she got a job at Scripps Howard but kept an eye out for a job at the Times. She was hired in 1952, the first woman on its news copy desk. According to Lowe, Betsy wasn’t sure what the men were going to do: “I didn’t know if they were going to put a screen around me, put me in a corner, or what.”

In its obit on Betsy, the Times said, “She was too good to be sidetracked. … She was soon recognized for her cool appraisals of articles and her deft pencil — invisible to readers, but all too apparent to colleagues — as her surgical excisions and repairs saved The Times from factual errors and its writers from clumsy sentences, phrases of dubious taste and embarrassing flaws in grammar, spelling and syntax.”

One of the women copy editors who followed her, Merrill Perlman, said the foreign desk was and is the premier news desk at the Times. “And Betsy was the first woman to be the foreign desk slot.” The Times’ in-house newsletter took note: “Betsy’s in the slot. First dame to make it.”

She was part of the team that edited the Pentagon Papers. That was huge. She might have expected to get a career boost. But the lawsuit changed that. Dawkins quoted Betsy as saying “it was like a divorce being carried out in public … really loathsome.” But, Dawkins said, Betsy said the women in the lawsuit “knew that nothing was coming from this for us. That’s not what you do when you sue them. They don’t reward you.”

At one point, according to Isay, a male colleague “asked her if she really wanted his job,” and Betsy replied, “No, I don’t want your job. I want an equal shot at the job beyond yours.” That shot at a more senior position never happened, Isay noted, but Betsy took heart in the changes that occurred as the lawsuit progressed.

She also wasn’t going to let the bastards get her down.

When she was abruptly moved from her prestigious copy desk slot immediately after the lawsuit was settled, she found another niche she made her own: the Practical Traveler column, which she wrote for 14 years before retiring in 2001. She taught at Hunter College, worked on histories with her husband, Jim — and worked to get the Times to accept “Ms.” as an honorific for women (which it started to do in 1986).

And she put more time into nurturing JAWS.

When JAWS was founded 34 years ago, most of the class action lawsuits had been settled out of court. In the Boylan case, the Times admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay a cash settlement, raise women’s salaries, and give women greater opportunities. But the JAWS founders saw that the glass ceilings remained firmly in place. Their idea was to provide an annual informal networking “camp” enabling women to get together to share contacts and job strategies, and, increasingly over the years, to provide skills-enhancing workshops and seminars.

The goal from the outset was to make JAWS a multiracial, intergenerational group of women journalists. The success of the vibrant virtual JAWS camp of 2020 showed that the group has gone a long way toward making that a reality.

JAWS also has existed to show a “softer” side of these professionals. Betsy had a part in that, too: In 2009, she presented JAWS with a quilt she had made from JAWS T-shirts. It’s been loaned each year to a JAWS member who needed the comfort of her colleagues all year long, not just at camp. Sometimes the member had lost a job or gotten bad health news. “The quilt is a way to emphasize that these powerful women in JAWS are there for each other,” said Schultz.

This year, the quilt went to Betsy’s family.