The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times.

• Author: Williams, Marjorie

Nan Robertson's disappointed love for The New York Times (*) dates back to 1955, when she was hired to work for the "women's page" way up on the ninth floor--one of the few reporting jobs open to a young woman at the Times in 1955.

Those who passed through the ninth floor, including women who bore such later-famous bylines as Gloria Emerson and Charlotte Curtis, lived in a different ethical universe from the men who labored in the city room six floors below. "Fashion was New York City's most important advertising industry," Robertson writes. "We were never allowed to forget it." She and her colleagues were expected to produce burbling "news" stories about major retailers in precise proportion to each store's advertising outlay at the Times--a practice rigorously policed, down to the column inch, by the paper's advertising director.

It was, among other things, a perfect sign of the paper's contempt toward its women employees. Men took care of delivering the news without fear or favor, while women were delegated the dirty job of bringing in the cash.

Robertson eventually made her way down to the third floor and later to the Washington and Paris bureaus. But her work on the women's page was only one of many humiliating experiences in what she describes as an almost unrelieved history of piggery at America's most important newspaper.

Early and late, ambitious women have been shocked to learn that journalism harbors as much sexism as the next trade. Vested power is at stake; discrimination against latecomers is the rule. Even so, Robertson argues, the Times has a long history of unusual hostility to women: "Look back on the landscape of 19th and early 20th century journalism," she writes:

Nowhere is it emptier of women than on The New York Times. While Nellie Bly (the pen name for Elizabeth Cochrane) was whizzing around the planet in 72 days or locking herself into insane asylums to do front-page stories for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World; while Rheta Childe Dorr was going off to the Russian Revolution for The New York Mail; while William Randolph Hearst of the Hearst chain and Roy Howard of the Scripps-Howard chain and Joseph Patterson of The New York Daily News and Colonel Robert McCormick of The Chicago Tribune were pushing their women stars, The New York Times stood fast against what it was sure was the weaker sex.

Adolph Ochs, publisher from 1896 to 1935, was frankly opposed to hiring any women at all, and editorialized against female suffrage. Even during World War II, when the man shortage dramatically broadened women's opportunities at other newspapers--and when the more tolerant Arthur Hays Sulzberger had taken over--The New York Times stood fast against hiring women replacements when male reporters were called up.

It wasn't...