ABSTRACT
No woman who was a reporter in Washington during the 1950s and 1960s could forget the balcony at the National Press Club. I remember it well. To this day, Marjorie Hunter and Eileen Shanahan and I, colleagues during those years in The New York Times ’s Washington bureau, look up and think of that vanished balcony every time we enter the new ballroom of the refurbished press club, which fi nally allowed women as members in 1971. The men had fought fi ercely over the female invasion in vote after vote at the club; fi nally, the pro-women forces within the membership triumphed. Until then, a time still close to our own, the balcony was one of the ugliest symbols of discrimination against women to be found in the world of journalism. It was a metaphor for what working women everywhere faced.
