Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones

As I page through colorful old copies of the magazines from my eight years at Mother Jones, memories start firing. I came on board as an editor in 1979, just as we were moving into the loft space Rolling Stone vacated when it fled to New York, supposedly because founder Jann Wenner’s then-spouse had a mortal fear of the Big One. Those were the days of being in an office all together, a small band of brothers and sisters, working long hours for slim pay, walking the copy from desk to desk as the magazine-making process played out in physical space. No texting or email, so we popped into offices for quick conversations and used the phone a lot, calling writers and sources all over the country.

We edited with mechanical pencils and colored pens, using precise copy editor’s marks that might cover a page edge to edge, spidery corrections, up carets, side arrows, and phrases in balloons. “Cut and paste” meant actual scissors and glue, and then those pages went off to the fact-checking department, then and now a severe taskmaster (the best libel defense being accuracy), and next to our visionary art director, Louise Kollenbaum. She wanted to give readers “access to the thinking,” she recalls, so she paired our long and so-serious articles with myriad color illustrations, photos, pull quotes, sidebars, and cartoons.

I sometimes hear people say that they remember Mother Jones from the ’60s, but chronologically and culturally, the magazine (founded in 1976) was a decidedly post-’60s phenomenon. As one of our founders, Adam Hochschild, would write a couple of years later, during the wildest days of the ’60s, many had believed the system was “so weak that a few shouts, kicks and a good hard shove would bring it all crashing down.” Instead, among the “silent majority,” resentment grew against the college-­based youth movement, hippies, and antiwar protests and against Black, Latino, and other uprisings. Revolutionary ideals and people were violently suppressed in crackdowns led by the FBI, CIA, and local police departments, while bomb-throwing militants also just burned out because of their own extremism and unpopularity. By 1969, Richard Nixon was swept into office by conservative resentment, a pattern we would see repeated: Nixon, Reagan, Trump.

RelatedExploding Cars, Office Monkeys, Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones

When Nixon was unseated in 1974, it was not Democrats or the left that turned the tide, but journalism. The Watergate revelations made national heroes of investigative reporters and proved that even the president could be ousted thanks to malfeasance exposed. But then, after four years of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan rode another swell of conservatism, just as I was named editor-in-chief in 1980, and so my tenure coincided with a decade of backlash, but also continuing social change, what some have called “the long ’60s,” or the persistence of resistance. The backlash never fully succeeded.

As we baby boomers emerged from our freewheeling 20s, many became progressive professionals: social entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, affordable housing developers, alternative energy pioneers. Scholars were reforming schools and universities with more inclusive curricula. Many of us anticipated the emergence of a new voting majority, a left-populist “rainbow coalition” in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 phrase (a forebear to the “purple America” that Barack Obama would proclaim in his 2008 campaign), incorporating all those too long excluded from the American Dream, women, racial and ethnic communities, the working class and the poor. It seemed so logical, so possible, so…likely. And I believe it is still within reach.

I asked some of my colleagues from those days which stories they remembered best after 50 years. Mark Dowie, our chief of investigative reporting, answered unequivocally: a special issue from 1979, with a cover that read “The Corporate Crime of the Century,” about the practice of exporting products banned in the United States to other countries. In partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting, we revealed what this meant on the ground: Hundreds of Iraqis had died from grain coated with a fungicide banned in the US. Pajamas treated with Tris, a carcinogenic fire retardant that had set off a panic among US parents, were shipped overseas; so were pacifiers and teething rings linked to choking deaths. Both Depo-Provera and the Dalkon Shield, dangerous contraceptives that could not be sold here, were being sent abroad in US-sponsored population programs.

The project won a National Magazine Award and led to a book called Circle of Poison by CIR reporters Mark Schapiro and David Weir. Carter signed an executive order banning the practice. Reagan would later rescind that order, but eventually, legislation was put in place to at least inform other countries whether products for export had been banned in the US.

For Hochschild, a landmark memory was an evening in Moscow in 1979, in the smoke- and vodka-infused apartment of Andrei Sakharov, perhaps the Soviet Union’s most distinguished scientist, whom he was interviewing for Mother Jones: “I felt immensely humbled to see this man…put his immense prestige in support of dissidents under threat from the Kremlin,” he told me. “I felt in the presence of people willing to sacrifice everything for their ideals.” Less than two years later, Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, would be sentenced to internal exile for opposing the USSR’s war in Afghanistan.

At the time, there was no other woman editing a national “thought leader” magazine, the term of art in our trade, and bylines for women were scarce. Men and women mostly read different magazines, and feminist writing was generally directed at women, as in Ms., founded just a few years before Mother Jones. This was a profound cleavage among progressives: Feminists were growing by leaps and bounds in their understanding of patriarchy and gender discrimination, but men were often barely aware. Bringing women’s voices into what had been male-dominated political conversations, and showing that feminism was good for men, too, was a big step.

I am proud of assigning stories by the late and much-missed Barbara Ehrenreich, along with Katha Pollitt, Doris Lessing, Vivian Gornick, and so many more. Kollenbaum brought in countless women as artists, cartoonists, and photographers, such as Sue Coe, Roz Chast, and Susan Meiselas, often spotlighting their work at the beginning of what would be significant careers.

Fiction was another way to bring fresh voices into our pages, as art is often a step ahead of politics. Alice Walker gave us a complex meditation on marriage and abortion, and an excerpt from The Color Purple, which, shockingly to some, centered Black feminist issues with the type of writing that would come to be called intersectional. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote “The Brother in Vietnam,” a story about Chinese American men who had been drafted into an anti-Asian war. Bharati Mukherjee’s “Angela” traced the journey of a girl adopted from Bangladesh; Grace Paley wrote on marriage and her neighborhood association; Rudolfo Anaya, a founder of Chicano literature, shared an excerpt from Bless Me, Ultima, which later won the Premio Quinto Sol award.

RelatedThe Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones

Kollenbaum, herself of Native American ancestry, put Russell Means, a leader in the American Indian Movement, on the cover of the issue featuring his essay on the ravages of “European mentality” on the Earth. Reggie Major and Cecil Brown and Manning Marable wrote on racial discrimination, Thulani Davis on Black mayors, Roger Wilkins on Jesse Jackson. Margaret Atwood wrote about anti-American feeling in Canada, Alan Bérubé explored the origins of gay liberation in WWII, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, in a piece about flight attendants, introduced the term “emotional labor” and drew attention to the habit of men telling women to smile more.

We editors all wrote for the magazine, too. Amanda Spake delved into a brutal attack on a young female hitchhiker and the “mythic rage” particular to men that led to the crime. Doug Foster, who would later become ­editor-in-chief, investigated the dumping of radioactive waste at sea. Jeffrey Klein, another future editor-in-chief, provided a ferocious interrogation of 60 Minutes legend Mike Wallace, who for months had turned down Klein’s requests for an interview. Finally, after learning that Wallace was to fly to New York from Los Angeles on a particular day, Klein booked the seat next to him and grilled him midair.

Art director Louise Kollenbaum (from left), Deirdre English, Philip Glass, Godfrey Reggio, and Tom Luddy in 1982

One time, our great copy editor, Rick Clogher, disappeared for a spell and came back with a fabulous story about having infiltrated the Bohemian Grove, a retreat for rich and powerful men that has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories since. Another editor, David Talbot, had a knack for the kind of headline we didn’t yet call viral (“My Mother’s Name is Afton Blake. My Father’s Number 28. Sperm-Banking in America”) and went on to found the first major digital magazine, Salon. We often looked beyond our borders: Orville Schell traveled to China, where he encountered a nascent underground punk culture. Bill Finnegan wrote about “unlearning apartheid” as a teacher in South Africa. We especially focused on Central America during those blood-soaked years when the US sponsored the region’s repressive armies. In a 1981 special package, “The White Hand of Terror in El Salvador,” we showed grisly photos, including of children murdered by US-trained forces, images the rest of the press shied away from. In 1985, I went to Nicaragua, interviewed President Daniel Ortega, and raised doubts about the sustainability of Sandinista ideals.

When I mentioned to a wise colleague that I was writing about my years at Mother Jones, she challenged me: What did we miss? Did the magazine overlook one of the biggest trends of the era, the shafting of the working class? When it comes to the content, the answer is decidedly no. We ran pieces by writers like Ron Chernow (who would go on to write the Alexander Hamilton biography on which Lin-­Manuel Miranda’s musical is based), extolling progressive unionism and investigating the “New Pinkertons.” Studs Terkel brought us the lament of a logger over his life and the life of the forest. Barbara Garson wrote about the fresh hell of data-entry jobs in “The Electronic Sweatshop” in 1981.

RelatedThe Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map

Our readers, though, were largely college educated and middle class, as they generally are for long-form magazines, even as right-wing radio and TV made inroads with working-class audiences. This is why I am so hopeful about today’s Mother Jones, which is reaching audiences not just in print, but on YouTube, social media, and podcast platforms, featuring personalities who can connect with a wide range of communities.

When I look back at the early years, I still mainly see my co-workers, so many more than I could mention. In hindsight, they are all good-looking, caring, witty, and whip smart. To them, my message is: Those were the days, my friends.

For today’s MoJo audience, my message is that our experience offers a hope now. In the Reagan era, the movements we championed, the accountability we demanded, were hit with a brutal backlash. But our journalism persevered in exposing and opposing, as it does so forcefully today. The audience for that work has only grown in size and in diversity. Now, MoJo stands on a firmer foundation than ever, and we know in our hearts that it’s exactly when accountability and justice are most under attack that independent, reader-supported journalism will rise to the challenge.

For more on our 50th anniversary, check out The Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones, The Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map, and Exploding Cars, Office Monkeys, Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.