The shift from the old ‘Today Girl’ - to Barbara Walters

“The shift from the old ‘Today Girl’—who was usually a coffee server and amiable lightweight—to Barbara Walters—is the television industry’s change of attitude in microcosm,” Gloria Steinem, explained in “Nylons in the Newsroom” published in The New York Times on November 7, 1965. How prescient! A decade later, Barbara Walters was on the cover of Newsweek October 11, 1976. It is often said that without women in television news, the industry would look quite different. What the presence of Barbara Walters on television, on the front cover of Newsweek, and as moderator of one of the 1976 presidential debates did for me was challenge attitudes and beliefs about the women in communication.

About a decade ago, she related a story of the time when “Today” host Frank McGee demanded that she be limited to “girlie” interviews. Walters objected, and the network president came up with a compromise. She was not allowed to ask any questions during the interview she shared with McGee until he could ask the first three questions. Walters could ask the fourth. I used to think celebrating the lives of women was enough to inspire and change the world. What changed my mind? Barbara Walters. Her sharing of her tests and trials (like the one above) offers us a valuable piece to a larger puzzle—all of parts of the prejudices of letting women be intelligent. That trend takes me back to Gloria Steinem, who, at the 12th Annual Pennsylvania Conference for Women in Center City in 2015, explained to her Philadelphia audience why feminism had reached a critical point. It is time to pay attention to all the ways we dismiss our authority.

Talking like you don’t know what you are talking about (phrasing something in the form of a question instead of making a statement) is one way we make ourselves fourth, not first. Walters could not settle on having the fourth question when she could have the first question.

Fifty years after calling out the change of attitudes in the microcosm, Steinem addresses the change of attitudes in the macrocosm. “Behave as if everything you do matters because it might.”

Thank you, Barbara Walters, for revealing bits and pieces of the barriers influencing the present course of women’s professional advancement and equal opportunity.

Source for her story: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/10/answers-from-walters/