New Exhibition Reveals the Feminist Journey of “Washington Post” Publisher Katharine Graham

As president, publisher, and CEO of The Washington Post, Katharine Graham helped shape American history, publishing the Pentagon Papers, which helped end the war in Vietnam, and supporting the Post’s investigation of the Watergate scandal, eventually leading to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

But when she first took over the Post less than a decade before those events, she was far from confident in her abilities to lead the national newspaper: “I seemed to be carrying inadequacy as baggage,” Graham wrote of that time in a 1997 Post column. “What most got in the way of my doing the kind of job I wanted to do was my insecurity.”

For Graham, part of that insecurity emanated from a childhood full of her mother’s exacting demands, as she wrote in her Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography, Personal History. But her lack of confidence also derived from internalized sexism that came with growing up as a woman in 20th-century America. In 1969, she told an interviewer: “I think a man would be better at this job I’m in than a woman.”

A new exhibit on Graham’s life argues that it was the women reporters of The Washington Post— along with feminist author and activist Gloria Steinem (a co-founder of Women’s Media Center) — who helped the publisher realize both her own abilities and the systemic nature of sexism. “Cover Story: Katharine Graham, CEO,” an exhibition including more than 200 photographs and objects, on view at the New-York Historical Society through October, charts Graham’s lifelong trajectory to self-actualization — which included becoming a “staunch, if discreet, feminist,” according to curator Jeanne Gardner Gutierrez — with the aim of spotlighting the woman behind the journalistic icon.

“She’s such a key figure in 20th-century history — not only women’s history, but also journalism and business and political history,” Gutierrez said. “We’re fully aware that she had an extraordinary amount of privilege, but the contours of her trajectory, I think, would be familiar to a lot of other women who came up around that time.”

Graham’s privilege was, indeed, the foundation of her positions at the Post: her father, Eugene Meyer, an investor and government advisor — already a multimillionaire by the time Graham was born in 1917 — bought the newspaper for $825,000 at public auction in 1933. Phil Graham, Katharine’s husband, took over from 1948 until his 1963 death by suicide, prompting Katharine to step into the role to keep the paper in the family.

After more than two decades as a stay-at-home wife and mother of four — roles that she said made her feel like “a kind of second-class citizen” — stepping in to lead the Post marked a return to the industry Graham had hoped to enter before marriage and motherhood. Her first job, at the age of 17, was as a “copy boy” and messenger in the Post’s women’s department; after college at Vassar and the University of Chicago, where her interest in journalism grew, she briefly worked as a labor reporter at a San Francisco newspaper and then on the editorial pages of the Post. Her return to the workplace later in life marked the beginning of the era when she came into her own, Gutierrez said.

“She learned over the course of her professional life to be more assertive, to stand up for herself, to make common cause with other women,” she said.

A key event that fostered her early confidence in the new role — and a central focus of the exhibit — was a 1966 masquerade party the novelist Truman Capote threw in Graham’s honor at New York City’s Plaza Hotel, featuring more than 500 guests. For Graham — who discusses the ball at length in her memoir, an important source that informed the exhibit — the party was pivotal.

“She was at the center of all of these networks, all of a sudden,” Gutierrez said.

But as the exhibit shows, Graham’s support of feminist causes came more gradually, and didn’t solidify until the years following a 1970 Newsweek cover story on the women’s liberation movement, according to Gutierrez. (Newsweek was owned by The Washington Post from 1961 until 2010.) The same day the story was published, nearly 50 women employees of the newsmagazine filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging discrimination in hiring, promotions, and salaries — proven in part, they argued, by the fact that a freelancer wrote the cover story about the women’s movement because no women on staff were considered senior enough to do so.

When Newsweek editor Osborn Elliott informed Graham of the news, the exhibit notes, she replied: “Which side am I supposed to be on?”

In the years that followed, Graham came down on the side of the women. In 1972, she joined an American Society of Newspaper Editors committee tasked with investigating allegations of gender-based discrimination in journalism, which later reported that women editors faced pay discrimination, among other challenges.

That same year, a group of Black Washington Post Metro reporters filed an EEOC complaint alleging discrimination, inspiring the women of the paper to file a similar complaint. (Two Black women, Penny Mickelbury and LaBarbara Bowman, were part of both groups who filed complaints, according to Gutierrez.) Graham began meeting with women reporters at the Post to learn more about the challenges they faced in areas like salary inequity and childcare. Those meetings proved a major part of Graham’s own feminist education, Gutierrez added.

“It was after she started talking to those women that she started to realize that it’s not just a question of individual merit, but there’s actually structural things happening that prevent women from getting ahead,” she said.

Graham also went on to support her women colleagues’ ambitions, insisting that their news coverage — including of the 1972 presidential election and of a 1988 speech First Lady Nancy Regan gave to the United Nations on drug policy — be published as news, rather than being relegated to the Style section simply because they were women. “Should we change this ancient attitude?” Graham asked of the practice, in a memo to executive editor Ben Bradlee and managing editor Len Downie.

In response to the EEOC complaints, the Post management appointed Elsie Carper as the first woman to be assistant managing editor, and tasked her with increasing opportunities for women and Black reporters. Management also created a six-person Equal Employment Opportunity Committee for the newsroom, which provided monthly status reports on the hiring and promotion of women and Black employees and interns, according to internal memos, Gutierrez said.

But Graham later acknowledged that the paper failed to treat those employees “with much sensitivity, understanding, or skill.” And disparities remain: A 2019 study by the paper’s union, the Washington Post Newspaper Guild, found that women as a group are paid less than men, and employees of color are collectively paid less than white men — even when controlling for age and job description — with disparities particularly pronounced for women of color.

“She didn’t solve all the problems … we’re not necessarily trying to replace the ‘great man’ history with ‘great women’ history,’” Gutierrez said.

In addition to the women of the Post, Graham also credited Steinem with shaping her understanding that it was crucial for women to realize they had a purpose “other than that we were put on earth to catch a man, hold him, and please him.” Steinem later wrote a eulogy for Graham — titled “A Great Woman Who Was Everywoman” — after her 2001 death. That text — which notes that many women can relate to “both her painful lack of confidence and her determination to overcome it” — played a significant role in framing the exhibit as a look at how parts of Graham’s trajectory mirrored those of other American women trying to pave their own paths, Gutierrez said.

“It took her a while … but she got there, and started to live more for herself.”

(Julianne McShane is a regular contributor to The Washington Post.)