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30 THREE THE WomEn CHARLOTTE MOULTON WAS 65 years of age in 1978, the oldest woman in our survey. She grew up in Dorchester, a Boston suburb, graduated from the School of Secretarial Studies at Simmons College, and came to Washington in 1940 to work as a secretary at the War Department earning $1,400 a year. A year later she arranged a transfer to another secretarial job in the public relations office. Soon, she said, “I was editing a news summary for the top people in the War Department . . . . [Then] I went to United Press in 1942 to work the morgue. Do you know what a morgue is? It’s a file room where they keep their newspaper clippings. [She also ran the telephone switchboard on Saturdays .] I moved up by making a pest of myself and telling the bureau manager that I wanted to be a reporter. [She started reporting on April 3, 1944.] I got the beat that was the lowest on the totem pole, a combination of Interstate Commerce Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the Post Office Department. I didn’t know anything about reporting. I’d never written a news story. I just had to learn it. And the only reason I was able to do that was because men were being called to military service, and they absolutely had to have women. They didn’t want them, you know, but they had to have them.” In September 1949, moulton was named the wire service’s Supreme Court reporter, ultimately becoming a legend in what was to be a long line of women who would make their mark on this beat. “It was not a particularly popular beat—I mean you had to spend a great deal of your time reading Supreme Court cases, briefs that came in. That was the way you prepared for the time when you were going to file your stories. You The Women 31 had to read all this stuff, and I think it’s probably fair to say that most of the young men who were starting in the business then, you know, they liked to run around Capitol Hill and talk to congressmen and interview people and all that, and they weren’t particularly interested in sitting at a desk and reading a great deal of the time. It was confining.” She retired in 1978, after covering the Supreme Court for nearly 30 years. “I was 65. And I was ready to retire. . . . I got darn sick of working .” Charlotte moulton died 26 years later, at 91 years of age.1 The single biggest creator of jobs for women journalists in the nation’s capital—besides World War II—was Eleanor Roosevelt. The president’s wife decreed that only women could cover her news conferences.2 The New York Times at first resisted assigning a woman to its Washington bureau and instead sent a reporter from new York each time she held a press conference.3 Leo Rosten’s 1935 study of the Washington press corps lists only three women, one of whom was the correspondent for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker.4 At the end of the war the boys came home, and their employers were required by law to give them their jobs back. The United Press retained only three women: moulton, Eileen Shanahan, and Helen Thomas. According to Shanahan, “Charlotte was kept on for the right reasons. She was covering the Supreme Court . . . and reporting rings around a whole series of Associated Press reporters. . . . They were afraid to fire her. As for Helen and me, one might think, given our successful subsequent careers, that we too were kept on because of our perceived excellence . Not so. Nobody else wanted those lousy jobs rewriting the news from the local papers for the radio wire, with a choice of working either 5:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. or 3:00 p.m. to midnight.”5 WOMEN TRYING TO break into mainstream journalism in the 1960s experienced variations of the same story. Deborah Howell, a 1962 graduate of the University of Texas: “I had a job on the AP, which was canceled before I got there because they decided, and I have a little letter that says, ‘We’re not going to hire any more women in the Texas AP.’ And there were no laws, so I couldn’t do anything about it except try to find a job off the women’s pages...

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