Virginia Pitt Sherlock: Interview #4

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Brunet: Ginny, do you know when you first decided that you wanted to become a journalist?

Pitt: I really don't. I can't pinpoint it. I can't give you a specific time or date; I don't think anybody can. My guess is that it goes back to when I was a teenager, or even younger than that, maybe. My father was a journalist in the days when journalism was very exciting, in the twenties, in the thirties, in the days of "The Front Page."* He had wonderful stories about being a journalist in New York in those days. My mother was a journalist much later in the forties and fifties. So I grew up in a family of journalists and journalism. My father was a professor of journalism. We always had newspapers all over the house, very many newspapers. I grew up reading newspapers as a child, not just reading the comics, but actually reading the papers, and I guess listening to my father's stories預nd my father was a wonderful storyteller. Drop a pencil, and my dad would tell a story.

I guess listening to those stories and wanting the excitement that I heard in them made me want to go into that field. He sometimes would take me with him on trips when he would go. He was still writing even when he was a professor. He was writing magazine articles. He wrote for Look, and he would write for Reader's Digest. My mother did, too. So I got to meet a lot of people who were in the industry and very high up in the industry. It sort of rubbed off.

Brunet: You had sent me a picture of yourself and four women, that was taken in New York in '65. Was that one of those trips?

Pitt: Yes. My dad was working on an article, and I really don't remember what the article was, but he was working on an article for one of the magazines that he would freelance for, and we went to New York. He had known Kay Lawrence, who was with United Press, before it became UPI [United Press International], and I guess they were contemporaries. My father used to string for United Press and some of the other agencies. So Kay was a friend of Fanny Hurst, and there was a group of women, actually, I guess, who were, again, contemporaries, and we were invited over to Fanny Hurst's apartment to meet Kay and Fanny Hurst and Ishbel Ross, who was an early female reporter in New York, and Ethel Smith was there. I think she's in the picture. She's a musician, a very fine organist. It was '65. What would that make me庸ifteen, sixteen, something like that. So we went over to Fanny Hurst's apartment, and it was very elegant. At least I remember it that way. A big, big wonderful place. She had a little pet monkey, I think it was, and her calla lilies and her grand piano. Ethel Smith played for us on the piano, and Ishbel Ross and Kay Lawrence sat around and talked about women in journalism and laughed, and it was wonderful.

______________________ * Ben Hecht's play about newspapers in the 1920s.

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met through my father over the years, it was very exciting. There were a lot of characters in journalism. They were just characters, people who would come into the office, into the newsroom, in top hat and tails, having just been to the theater, but passed a murder on the way home or something. It was very kind of wild. That was not the journalism I met when I started in the late sixties. Journalism at that time was more悠'm not sure "staid" is the right word, but I think journalists began to think of themselves as professionals, and once they began to think of themselves not as tradespeople or craftspeople, but as professionals, they got a little stuffier. Characters were few and far between. I worked with a few over the years, but nothing like what my folks had worked with or what people in "The Front Page" had worked with. There just weren't any more Hildy Johnsons. I don't know what happened to them, and I don't know why. I have a feeling it has to do with the sense of, "Now we're professionals. We're just like doctors or lawyers or architects. We're professionals." And that was a big thing in the seventies in journalism, to make us not be tradespeople, but professionals. Little stuffier.

Brunet: Was there a time when journalism became exciting for you again?

Pitt: I think it had its share of excitement. It was a different kind of excitement. There was competition in Cincinnati, when I worked in the Cincinnati papers. There were two papers, and they were in direct head-to-head competition, which I think is just unheard of anymore, other than in New York, where you still have some competition, and even that's fading. It was a good-natured competition. It wasn't the cutthroat competition that you had in the twenties and thirties. We had a good-natured competition between the Post and the Enquirer, which were the two papers that were in direct competition for circulation in a fairly good-sized market. The reporters from both of the papers knew each other, and, of course, you'd run into each other covering the same stories. You had little good-natured bets going on who could get the interview and who could get the information that the other couldn't get. One paper was a morning and one paper was an afternoon, so there wasn't really a time competition as to who got it first. Who got it first depended on what time of day it broke. But there was enough competition, and I think that's probably what makes journalism exciting, is the competition, the need to get it first or to get it most or to shut the other people out. That existed to a certain extent in Cincinnati. I worked with a good group of people in Cincinnati that were fun to be around.

And the excitement was still there at the AP [Associated Press], which, because of what it was, the AP, the cream of the crop, top of the line, just being at the AP was exciting, just getting started at the AP in Boston, which is a good news town. A lot of good stuff comes out of Boston and New England, in general, and at that time the Boston bureau that I worked in was responsible for all of New England, except for Connecticut. So there was an excitement about just being at that level in journalism. The work itself wasn't that exciting, but it's kind of nice to pick up the phone and call a news source and say, "This is Ginny Pitt from the AP," and have them snap to attention. When you call and say, "This is Ginny Pitt from the Cincinnati Enquirer," they say, "Who?" or, "What?" But when you say, "From the AP," they snap to, and that was exciting. I was very young, and it was very exciting to be at that level of the industry. When I went to New York, of course, that was an even higher step up. So there was excitement; it was just of a different kind, a different type of excitement. Certainly there's nothing more exciting than working at the Associated Press on election night, national elections, things buzzing around. There's excitement.

Brunet: We were talking a few moments ago about having to be one of the boys and to talk rough and drink hard, especially in the seventies. Was there a time when that began to change and that was no longer necessary for you and other women journalists?

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position. I seem to think it was Jack Mayne, but I could be wrong. Somebody told me. It was definitely confirmed. It wasn't my suspicion or my hunch or my supposition; I was told, "You were being tested, and you passed." I was told long after the fact.

Brunet: How did you feel about being told that?

Pitt: I think that I was a little angry. I think that I thought that that was a kind of rotten thing to do. Really, I was there to be a reporter, an editor, and I'm very good at that, and I was then, and that was just kind of a dumb thing to do. What was the point? I think that was my reaction. I don't remember what I said to Jack, if it was Jack, or whoever said it to me. I don't remember what I said to them. I don't think I probably exhibited any kind of anger at the time, but I think later I probably felt it was just rotten, a rotten thing to do.

Brunet: I don't think we've talked about your mother's stories of being a journalist. She was a journalist for a while in the forties, is that right?

Pitt: Yes, forties, fifties.

Brunet: Did she tell any stories about what it was like to be a journalist in that time?

Pitt: She really didn't. It's funny, because her career took a different turn. She really went into public relations and advertising, which is really where her love was, rather than journalism. It was ironic that she had worked her first job in journalism was at the Cincinnati Post, and mine was at the Cincinnati Enquirer, and we compared salaries. I remember talking about that. She was paid $17 a week, and I was paid $120 a week as our beginning first things, and we talked about that. But I don't think her real love was in hard news, it really wasn't, so I don't recall stories from her about being a journalist and, therefore, being a woman journalist. She was not really my role model in that, because she was really more into advertising and public relations, and that's the direction she took.

Brunet: Who were your role models in journalism?

Pitt: Other than the women I had met in New York really many years before預nd they did remain role models, they really did葉here weren't a lot. There were a couple, believe it or not, of TV people, like Pauline Fredricks, people who you saw on TV. You didn't see the print people. I think I had fewer role models than mentors. I had a lot of mentors. I had a lot of women who were in the industry who did take me under their wing and pull me along and push me when I needed to be pushed, and this started in Cincinnati. They were really all in Cincinnati葉he Cincinnati group. And oddly enough, virtually all of them were working on the women's pages, you know; they weren't the hard-news people. But they were pushing me in that direction and helping me in maintaining contacts and throwing out my name wherever it would be helpful. Some of them were really fairly high up in the organization, even though they were women's editor. They still got to sit around the big table with the boys and plan conferences, and they would throw my name out when it would be helpful, and things like that. So there was a lot of support from the women in Cincinnati.

Brunet: Would you name them?

Pitt: Of course. Jo-Ann Albers is top of the list. Jo-Ann I've talked to you about before. I call her the mother of female networking in journalism. She's a champion at that. She knows everybody anywhere in the industry, or knows of them, or they know of her. She attends every

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In New York, really the same thing on the general desk. I'm trying to remember how many women there were. Earlean Tatro was there, and Louise Cook had been there for a long time, but there weren't a lot of women in that position either. So, again, you don't really have role models because you don't have people who have been doing that for a long time that you can say, "Gee, I'd like to be like that." They weren't there. There was nobody to look to.

Again, I looked to the networks and some of the ladies who had been around a long time, like Gay Pauley at UPI, who had certainly been around a long time, who actually had been a friend of my mother's years and years earlier. Those, I guess, were the role models, the Pauline Fredricks and the Gay Pauleys and the Ishbel Rosses and people who had been around for quite a long time. I guess just the idea that they stuck it out. Helen Thomas, certainly. That's about it.

Brunet: Once you went with the AP, of course, you moved to Boston in '72. When did you begin to notice the sex discrimination?

Pitt: Well, probably right away. [Laughter.] I mean, probably immediately. First of all, it's very obvious to you that there aren't other women around, that you're working in a bureau and you're almost always the only woman, because although there were two of us, it's a twenty-four-hour operation seven days a week. You get spread pretty thin. Mary Thornton, who was the other woman, and I did not work together most of the time. It was very rare to have both of us on, and I think that was by design. I'm almost sure it was by design. For what purpose, I'm not sure, but I think it was by design. So you're aware of the fact that you're the only woman in the room most of the time, and when you go to press conferences to cover things, you're aware that you're either the only or one of only two or three women in a large room full of lots of reporters from lots of media outlets. So I certainly was aware almost from the outset that there was a dearth of women.

As far as when I realized that there was actual discrimination, are you talking about at the AP or in journalism? Because I can go way back and tell you my trying to get a job, when I was told, "Do you need a girl reporter?" as opposed to "a reporter."

Brunet: Let's talk about AP, because I want to talk about the suit.

Pitt: I guess it was more of a gradual thing, realizing that there aren't many of us. I would have fairly rare occasion, but some occasion, to call other bureaus. When you got a female voice on the other end of the phone, when you were calling another bureau, it was a shock. You would try to stay on the phone a little longer, and you did develop some kind of悠 hate to say "bonding," it's just a yechhy word, but you did develop some sort of a bonding with these women that you were talking to in the other bureaus. At that time, again, there weren't very many, but there was Phyllis Austin up in Maine and Patti Lee in Montpelier. I'm sure that there must have been others, but in the beginning, that's what I remember. There was a woman in the Springfield, Massachusetts, bureau, as well. But we sort of kept in touch and kept together.

When you talk about discrimination in the AP, the things you think about are, first of all, pay. Am I making as much as the men? And that's something you don't know, and you have no way of knowing for a long time. You think there's no discrimination, because you have a union contract, and the union contract sets forth how much you're going to get paid. And until you reach the top level in that union contract, which is six years of experience, you're just getting paid what's in the contract, and you think everybody else is getting that, too, and it doesn't occur to you that there can be wage discrimination. What you don't realize is that there are merit pay raises that are handed out by bureau chiefs, and nobody knows who gets them. After you get to

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know that there were some problems that the women were facing out in the bureaus. I was in New York, the [Newspaper] Guild office was in New York, the guild's attorney was in New York. It just seemed that I was the one who could just walk a few blocks down the street and say, "What's up?" So I did.

Sid Reitman was the guild attorney at the time and was a wonderful, terrific labor attorney. He represented the union, but the union was the one that was really organizing and pushing this matter. I had some discussions with Sid. Pat Sherlock, I guess, at that time had become the president of the union. Pat is now my husband. He was not at that time, but he was a friend. I had known him for a few years. He had worked in the Portland and Augusta, Maine, bureaus when I had worked in the Boston bureau, so I had gone a ways back with Pat. But we began to sit down and look at the documents and look at what had been done and tried to revive the case. We had to try to locate the named people. It turned out that some of them had settled individually and moved away.

The bottom line is we really had to start all over again. Shirley Christian was the only person of those original complainants who was still with the AP and still interested in pursuing the matter. So we started with Shirley, and we said, "All right, we're going to revive this thing." I don't want to go into a long, boring story about what we did, but we made a trip to Washington, we went to see Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was the head of the EEOC at the time. We complained that we weren't getting any action. This complaint, which was still alive because Shirley was still around, was sitting on somebody's desk or the bottom of somebody's pile of papers, and nothing was happening. We didn't have a real satisfactory meeting. I think we got pats on the head and all that. Sid Reitman made it very clear that there would be legal steps taken to get a writ of Mandamus to force the agency to do its job. That's what a writ of Mandamus does.

Shortly after that visit, we did finally begin to get some action. The EEOC did finally begin to do its investigation and eventually issued what they needed to issue, a letter of determination, so that we could proceed with litigation.

We began rounding up more plaintiffs, new plaintiffs, hired a lawyer who was a Title VII expert, Jan Goodman, who had handled the NBC litigation. Sid Reitman was pushing to get somebody who was a Title VII expert, because he was a labor lawyer, and he knew that he was a labor lawyer and he was not a Title VII lawyer, and we needed a Title VII lawyer. So Jan Goodman came on the scene, and I met with her and with Sid and Pat Sherlock and Shirley, I believe. Those were [at] the initial meeting. We retained her, and that's when we started to get some action from the EEOC.

We moved into the conciliation process and tried to do some negotiating with the AP. It was not successful. The AP was not at all responsive, not at all receptive to any suggestions for change and improvement, and eventually it did turn into a federal lawsuit.

Brunet: For our audience that may not understand all of the steps involved in this kind of a case, why was it so necessary for the EEOC to make a determination of probable cause for complaint and give the guild and you the right to sue?

Pitt: I'm not sure I understand the technicalities, but Title VII, which is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, as amended, sets out the procedure for pressing a discrimination claim, and also the cause of action is set out in Title VII. So you have to follow those procedures. I believe that one of the things you have to do before you can just slap a federal lawsuit on

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We were seeking massive, massive numbers of documents, and you have to pay for that. You can't just have AP produce 1,000 pages. They're going to charge you for their photocopy expenses. At a dollar a page or whatever, it's very expensive. So when EEOC became an intervenor, they would pick up the disbursements, and it became very important to us to have them for that financial support, as well as, of course, the moral support of having a federal agency agree with you and be on your side.

Brunet: The unions were not always involved in the Title VII suits.

Pitt: It's very uncommon, very uncommon.

Brunet: Other than the financial aspects that you've just mentioned, why was the union involvement so important as the case progressed?

Pitt: For one thing, the union represented all of your co-workers, although neither AP nor UPI were union shops. You didn't have to belong to the union. Most everybody did. The union was all of your colleagues. Although there were certainly people in the union who did not support the lawsuit, the issues were put to a vote in the union repeatedly, and always the vote came out in our favor. So the majority of the union leadership, the majority of the union membership, supported what we were doing, and that was very important, because that was the majority of our colleagues. You really are sort of alone out there when your name's on the lawsuit and you're the one who's going to the meetings and getting called off the desk from time to time. You feel a little bit alone out there. But when you know that everybody else wants you to do it and is supporting you and is behind you, it makes it a lot easier. So the union represented that. The union represented a tremendous amount of support of numbers of people, and not just within the AP, but also the UPI, because that was also the same union, both AP and UPI, and UPI was watching this very closely, as were a number of other news organizations and outlets that would also have the same union representing their employees. The Newspaper Guild is a very large union. The Wire Service Guild is a chapter of it.

Brunet: From your point of view, of course, why did the mediation and conciliation process fail?

Pitt: From my point of view, because the AP never really believed that it would have to change. I don't know whether it was arrogance or just indignation that said, "You people are not going to tell us how to run this organization, and the federal government is not going to tell us how to run this organization." And they wouldn't budge from that. They wouldn't even consider the possibility that the organization wasn't being run not only not properly and not legally, but not being run in a way that would maximize the talents of all of their employees. They wouldn't accept that. They wouldn't acknowledge that, and they were very stubborn. It was a very almost blind refusal to even consider making any changes in the way hiring was done, promotions were done, pay was handed out. They just weren't even going to consider it, and they certainly weren't going to consider suggestions from outsiders, and that meant the federal government and the federal courts.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Brunet: What happened to move you from actively supporting the suit to becoming a named plaintiff?

Pitt: I went to see Jan Goodman with Sid and Shirley and Pat Sherlock, and we discussed the complaints, in general, and I felt that I was sort of a repository of complaints from women all over

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New York City one year, and, of course, all the Washington bureau people, the political reporters, were coming. Peggy was told she couldn't cover the national convention. She would be the only Washington reporter regularly assigned to the political beat who couldn't come to the convention, and the reason for that was they were getting hotel rooms for everybody, and because she was the only woman, they would have to get her a room all by herself. Everybody else was doubling up, and it was going to cost too much, because they'd have to get Peggy a room all by herself. She couldn't double up with anybody. I mean, if that's not sex discrimination, I don't know what is. Peggy came and stayed at my apartment and covered the convention. It didn't cost the AP anything. But those were the kinds of things that would just drive you crazy, and AP didn't see anything wrong with that. They saw that as an economic decision. "It's just an economic decision, that's all. It has nothing to do with sex; it's just an economic decision." But Peggy, I did work on her a little bit to join us. She was also a very visible woman, as was Fran Lewine, people who had bylines that you would recognize, and that was important. I wanted to get people whose bylines would be recognized.

Brunet: I've seen a reference to maybe a famous meeting between you, Peggy Simpson, and Shirley Christian, in New York.

Pitt: We had a lot of them.

Brunet: Was there a meeting in which she finally decided that she would become a named plaintiff?

Pitt: When Peg came to New York, it was not unusual for Peg and Shirley and I to sit around and talk. I don't recall the precise time that Peg decided. I seem to think she told me on the phone. I seem to think that she called me on the phone and said, "All right, I'll do it." I can't relate it to any incident. But it was not uncommon for Shirley and Peg and I to get together, both before and after, or in Boston for Shelley Cohen and Peggy and Maureen Connolly and I to get together. We would get together when we could, because we were geographically split.

Brunet: When you were talking with women around the country about their situations, were you gathering information, or did they have to submit affidavits regarding discrimination?

Pitt: I don't remember people submitting affidavits. I was gathering information on an informal basis. A lot of it began, again, as my own curiosity about was this really occurring. I had subscribed for quite a while to a publication that Donna Allen did, out of Washington, about women in journalism, and Donna used to run verbatim transcripts of depositions, and she would run verbatim complaints. So I was very familiar with a lot of the lawsuits that were going on at the time, the NBC suit being one of the biggies, and the Reader's Digest suit being another of the real big ones. I read those things. I read Donna's newsletters cover to cover, and I was fascinated by some of the stories that were told in these depositions and complaints. I guess I just wanted to see whether similar occurrences were happening in the AP, and they were. They were, all over, in every bureau. It wasn't a particular bureau chief who was discriminating; it was all over. It was clear that it was a pattern. It was clear that it was a practice.

I was not then, and I am not today, convinced that it was a deliberate attempt to discriminate, but it was clearly a deliberate attempt to keep women from doing certain things, and whether through some misguided desire to protect women, like when they'd tell Shirley Christian, "You can't go to Central America because they'll eat women up down there," that's an attempt, I suppose, to protect us, or whether it's an attempt to protect their own interests. When you have a bureau chief telling a woman, "You can't be a bureau chief because you have to take editors out to

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Pitt: The suit, I guess, wasn't really filed until toward the end of my AP career, and it may not have been actually filed until after I left the AP. Certainly they knew I was going to be a named plaintiff long before that. My visible participation in this whole affair started considerably before the lawsuit was actually filed, and really before Jan Goodman was even hired and we were really talking serious Title VII litigation; it really started when, as a representative of the Guild, I was attempting, along with Sid Reitman and Pat Sherlock, to negotiate a settlement of the claims of the individual complainants prior to it entering the litigation stage. At that time I clearly was a visible party, because I was face to face with the AP executives in various negotiating sessions, and there were times that my schedule had to be changed to let me off duty on the general desk so I could go to a meeting or have a conciliation conference.

At that time, I don't think I ever felt that I was going to be fired. I never felt that my job was in jeopardy. I never felt that. What I did feel was that I was being punished, and I was being punished. I was being put on the overnight shift, I was being put in lesser tricks that ordinarily a new person on the desk might work, the less desirable tricks where people with a lot less experience could boss you around, you know, and you don't like to be in that position. So I felt that I was certainly punished. I felt that they were trying to make me a little invisible. They didn't want to see me. They put me on the overnight shift so that the managers didn't have to look at me when they came in for their nine-to-five jobs. But I never felt that I was going to be fired. I never felt that I was going to lose my job. I never felt that. I don't know why.

For a time I thought, "Maybe this will actually help. Maybe they'll see that I'm tough and I'm good, and they'll make me a bureau chief just to get rid of me or something." That didn't last very long. It did become apparent to me fairly quickly that things were not going to get better for me at the AP, that I could be there forever if I wanted to be, but that was as good as it was going to get, and I might look forward to twenty years of the overnight shift. I did have one male colleague tell me that, that the fellows on the seventh floor, which is where the executives were, didn't like that I was rocking the boat.

Brunet: I want to be sure that I'm clear on the timing of when you agreed to be a plaintiff. Were you already being punished? Had you already seen that you were not going to continue to move up?

Pitt: Yes. Oh, yes.

Brunet: What role did that play in your deciding to be a plaintiff?

Pitt: Not much, because that's really a retaliation claim, which really did become part of my claim, part of the litigation, that there was retaliation. But I don't think that really played the major role. I hate to sound like a broken record, but the major role is when you find out that over a four- or six- or eight-year period, you got about $30,000 less than the man sitting next to you. That really hits you very hard. I really don't think the retaliation pushed me over the edge; I think the facts pushed me over the edge, when I realized the disparity in pay and certainly in assignments. That's what did it.

Brunet: What was the timing of these decisions in relation to your decision to leave the AP?

Pitt: The decisions�

Brunet: The decisions to go ahead and be a plaintiff, and that you were not going to move forward. Were they simultaneous?

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Brunet: Would you tell that again, because we were not on tape at the time?

Pitt: That's a very tense kind of situation. You read the transcript. You could see the lawyers going at each other pretty hot and heavy. It's very uncomfortable, you're very tense. I was at it for two full days, terrified that I was going to slip up and say something wrong and blow the whole case. Jan had made it clear I was the key witness, and I was the one with the information. I was the one who had talked to everybody. So if I messed it up, it was messed up for everybody. It wasn't just my case; it was everybody's case. So I felt an awful lot of pressure to do it right, and I didn't know what "right" was.

The lawyers were nasty, and it was very unpleasant. I can remember at one point being so terrified, that I just stood up and said, "I have to take a break," and I went out into the hallway. This was at the Rogers & Wells office, a very large law firm. I believe it's in the Pan Am building in New York. I went out into the hallway, and I think I was looking for a glass of water, and I got lost and I couldn't find my way, and I didn't know where it was, and I just burst into tears. I just began to cry uncontrollably. The pressure had built up, and I just couldn't take it anymore. All I could say is, "I want to talk to Pat. I want to talk to Pat." I really wanted to call my husband. "I want to talk to Pat." Because I knew he would make it okay. He would tell me what to do and how to get through it, and I did finally stumble in to some secretary, who very kindly pointed me back to my lawyer, who was appalled to see her key witness there, crumbling in front of her very eyes, tears running down, just repeating over and over, "I want to talk to Pat. I want to talk to Pat." [Laughter.]

So they put me in a little conference room, shut the door, and gave me the phone. I called Pat, and fortunately he was home, and fortunately he talked to me for a little while. It's funny, I asked him about this the other day, and he has no recollection of this at all. He has no memory of it. But he talked to me for a while, and then I got off the phone, I was calm, and I went back in and proceeded to finish the deposition. Pat tells me that when he picked me up at the train station悠 had taken the train back to Boston, and he picked me up at the train station, and he said that I got off the train and I looked around, and when I saw him, I burst into tears. So he remembers that. I don't remember that; he remembers that. But he was my strength. He was my support for years and still is.

My family was mildly supportive. My father didn't approve of the lawsuit, because that's not the way you solve problems with employers. My mother, I don't think approved of it, but didn't disapprove quite as much, but neither my mother nor my father attempted to discourage me or ridiculed or criticized me for it. They didn't think it was quite the way to go, but if I felt that I had to do it, then by all means I should do it, and they were not unsupportive. I had friends in the industry who were not in the AP, who were extremely supportive, both male and female.

Brunet: The fact that you burst into tears seems so much unlike you. Am I correct in that?

Pitt: Oh, sure. Sure.

Brunet: It suggests that this was incredibly stressful and became increasingly so.

Pitt: It was. It was. I think it was just a lot of pressure and build-up for a lot of years and months. No, that's not like me. I'm not one to puddle up.

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times to mediate when we couldn't quite agree, and we took votes, we yelled and screamed and did all the things that people do when they hammer out a negotiated settlement, and we finally came up with a formula that we all agreed to. We split it up based upon length of service and based upon the level of activity in the lawsuit, which put me higher up because I had less service, certainly. I was probably maybe third in terms of length of service, but higher up in terms of activity in the suit. Shirley, of course, had been there from the very beginning, so she was higher up, too.

Brunet: How would you summarize the effect of the AP suit on the role of women in journalism?

Pitt: I'd like to think that it had an effect in opening doors for women in the higher echelons of journalism. I mean, really the Associated Press is one of the pinnacles, and I'd like to think that the lawsuit made it possible for women to not only be street reporters and society writers, but also to be managers, to make decisions about how the news is delivered. I'd like to think that what we did was improve the AP by letting it use all the talents of all its employees, whether they were male or female. I'd like to think that we did something that was not only helpful to women in journalism, but helpful to journalism, because we can use women to their full potential if we don't close doors in their faces.

Brunet: Thank you very much.