THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Lindsy Van Gelder

“Discrimination against women was the air that we breathed….I came very much to feminism through my being a reporter.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, October 2025

LVG:  My name is Lindsay Evans Van Gelder. I was born September 19, 1944, in New Jersey.

JW:  Tell us about your childhood. What do you think led you to become the person that you became?

LVG:  I was the oldest of three girls. Not atypically of people at that time, my parents did not really think that girls needed to go to college. I think that they realized that I would be hopeless as a secretary or much less a waitress, God forbid. I did get a scholarship, but I remember being very bitter about that, that I was not considered worthy even though I got good grades, and I really wanted to be a journalist and go to college. Growing up in mid-century, there were so many things to piss you off, but there really wasn’t a hook to hang it on. I went through childhood being angry about a lot of things that I wasn’t supposed to do or was supposed to do or wear or think or become. But feminism was not a concept in my head.

JW:  When did it become a concept?

LVG:  My moment of click was in 1968. Actually, something happened earlier. When I got out of college, I wanted to become a journalist. The first place I applied was the New York Daily News, where, many years later, I went to work as a reporter. In 1967, I had an interview with this guy, very nice Southern gentleman, and he grilled me mercilessly during this interview. I was married. I got married when I was still in college, and he grilled me mercilessly about my birth control and my procreation plans. I had no intention of having a baby right away. I was certainly going to wait, and I did wait at least five years.

I very earnestly tried to persuade him of my vigilance about taking the pill. People are now shocked because this would be an HR disaster. But at the time, this was standard crap. Finally, after I had just soldiered on trying to persuade him of my commitment, he said, “You know, honey, a pretty little thing like you ought to be home having a baby every year. So I couldn’t possibly hire you.”  I was furious.

JW:  What did you do?

LVG:  In the recent past, Congress had made sex discrimination illegal. It was a joke at the time, but it became a law. I knew that there was this thing in New York called the Human Rights Commission, and that sex discrimination was illegal. I went down and filed a complaint. My then-husband was a journalist, and he and all his friends told me this was a terrible thing to do, that I would never get a job. My feeling was, “I know, I’m never going to get a job anyway because I’m a girl. So, I thought, what the heck? Yeah. Nothing to lose here.” Meanwhile, I did get a job at United Press International as a starting reporter.

The guy who hired me had a wife who was a journalist. I don’t think that was incidental. But by the time this complaint went through the bureaucracy and came out, it was quite satisfying. I did not want the job that they had to offer me by then. But during this investigation, the city had found out that they discriminated not just against women, but against black people and various other groups. So, they were put on a plan to get it right.

JW:  Do you remember what year that decision came down?

LVG:  No. I worked at UPI from ’67 to ’68, so it would have been one of those.

JW:  That was quite an accomplishment. Did it get into the news?

LVG:  No. Discrimination against women was the air that we breathed. It was not news. But at that point for me, there was not this thing called feminism. I was just pissed off, and it was unfair. And somehow there was this law that somehow was going to help me. But the real moment of radicalization came in the summer of 1968.

I went from UPI to the New York Post, which at that time was not a Fox News-type rag. It was the most liberal newspaper in New York. It had a woman publisher, and they had the best maternity leave in town. I was on a tryout there, and I really wanted to be hired. This press release came across the desk from Robin Morgan, then with WITCH, the “Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.” They were going to picket Miss America. The city desk turned to me, a girl sitting there, and they thought, “She’s proved that she can write funny stories… Let’s send her out.”  I got sent out to interview Robin Morgan. As she talked and as she conceptualized all the reasons that Miss America was problematic, my brain was pinging. It was so unprofessional. I said, “Where can I join?”

JW:  Did you go to Atlantic City?

LVG:  The Post was very cheap. I wrote a story on Thursday that got published on Friday. The demonstration was on Saturday. My article was about their plans to have a freedom trash can, where they were going to have a bonfire on the boardwalk, and they were going to throw in all these articles that oppressed women, issues of Playboy Magazine, girdles, bras, et cetera. At the time, my dilemma was that I wanted to be hired by the New York Post. I did not want to write a funny story.

I wanted to be serious about feminism. And at the time, boys my age were burning their draft cards as a protest against the Vietnam War, and they were having this bonfire in a trash can. I wrote an article about men burning their draft cards and women now are going to be burning their bras. It was alliterative. It was cute. And that phrase is going to haunt me forever because, in fact, their plans to burn their bras did not come off. The fire captain of Atlantic City said, “You’re not having a fire on my boardwalk, kiddos.”

JW:  What was the reaction at your newspaper?

LVG:  They thought it was a great story. It got a lot of play. Apparently, Robin had sent a press release all over town and everybody had spiked it, thinking it was some stupid hippie girl stuff. But once my story ran, the switchboard at the Post went bananas all the next day with people calling me to find out how to get hold of Robin Morgan because now they wanted to cover the story.

JW:  Did you stay at the paper for a while?

LVG:  I did stay at the paper for a while with a couple of those great long maternity leaves that the woman publisher allowed.

JW:  How many children do you have?

LVG:  Two children, three biological grandchildren, two step-grandchildren. I’m a matriarch now, officially.

JW:  Tell us how you continued your feminist activities.

LVG:  At that time, there was the rule of thumb at my newspaper, in most newspapers, that you could not cover anything that you were involved in. It was hypocritical because it only applied to my age group. You couldn’t cover anti-war demonstrations if you were part of them, feminism, et cetera. But if you were a grown-up whose wife was a teacher, you could write about the teacher’s strike because that somehow was hard news. But anybody who was young and at all lefty was suspect.

The following year, I went to Atlantic City as a demonstrator. I was perfectly okay with that because they were not really covering feminism at that point. That had been a flash in the pan. But I got involved with a consciousness-raising group. Particularly, I had been in a media group of reporters who were against the war. It was the usual situation back in those days where the guy who was running the meeting asked one of the women to take notes or get the coffee. There was a spin-off from the media antiwar group of a media feminist group with a lot of my feminist female colleagues. I came very much to feminism through my being a reporter.

JW:  Did you join any groups?

LVG:  Yes. There was this group, Media Women, that a couple of my friends and I started. We were affiliated with groups like Red Stockings and so forth, who were around at the time. We would have our own little cells, but then we would get together for big demos or big conferences. That went on for quite a few years. That started in 1968. I had my first child early in 1971, and that put a crimp on my activism up to a point.

JW:  Were you still a reporter then?

LVG:  Yes, I was a reporter at the Post until 1977. But they were hypocritical, as I said, about grownups. They were also hypocritical about the younger people. I remember going in 1970 to the big march on Fifth Avenue, and the Post wasn’t planning to cover it. But once we took over all of Fifth Avenue, and it was evident that it was a huge crowd, they began to rethink that. They would sometimes ask me to call my sources about something. I really wanted it in one way or another. At that point, I wanted to be a feminist. I didn’t want to cover it. But sometimes I would get snookered into something because I wanted somebody in the movement to get some publicity, but it was an uncomfortable position to be in.

JW:  So, did you cover the march?

LVG:  No. We didn’t have cell phones in those days. And by the time they realized how big it was, it was too late. My colleague and I were already there. I also participated as a demonstrator at a sit-in at McCalls that they wanted me to write about later.

At the time, Ms. Magazine did not exist yet, and women’s magazines were horrible. They didn’t cover anything that feminists cared about. It was all this kitchen, kinder — that’s the German phrase – fashion, recipes, can this marriage be saved? My group stayed together for quite some time.

JW:  What did you do after you left the Post?

LVG:  When Rupert Murdoch came in, he liked me, but I did not like him. And it was clear to me that it was not a place I could really work. I had been freelancing for Ms. Magazine. They gave me a part-time job as a writer. I was doing some commentary, often on feminist topics, for a local TV station, and I got a gig teaching journalism at the NYU Graduate School.

I did all those things until 1980, when I eventually went to the Daily News, which had turned me down.

JW:  How did you get to become part of Ms. Magazine?

LVG:  I remember that I knew people there through the movement, and I was asked to come to the initial organization meeting where people were planning what they were going to do. It was a week before my kid was due, and I had to go buy a crib that day, so I was not at that meeting. But I began freelancing for them early on, and it was great to just have as a given that women were equal people. Because that was not the given anywhere else that I could have worked in news.

JW:  Do you remember any of your articles?

LVG:  I think the first one was about airline flight attendants who nobody knew had to take rigorous training to save your life. That was why they were really there. But all the ads and promotions painted them as sex objects. They were there for the businessman’s pleasure, coffee, tea, or me. It was gross. I interviewed a bunch of people from their union who really wanted to get the word out that they had serious jobs, although at the time, when you got hired as a flight attendant — stewardesses, they were called at the time — you had to be a certain height and weight and look a certain way and dress a certain way.

JW:  Be single, right?

LVG:  Yes. The veneer was not serious, even if the job was.

JW:  Tell us when you went back to your original newspaper, the Daily News.

LVG:  I remember Clay Felker was the editor of my section, and at some point, I got sent out to write a profile of the woman who was the Editor-in-Chief of the Ladies Home Journal. It was a very bizarre interview. I should back up and say that Clay Felker was one of these men, again, hardly alone at the time, who was pretty happy to work with women if he could mentor them and be the big daddy. He really did not like women with a point of view of their own.

When I went to this interview with this woman, the head of the Ladies Home Journal, there was something wrong with her ceiling in her apartment where the interview was taking place. I was asking her about the direction of the magazine, blah, blah, blah, blah. By then, the magazines had shaped up, at least a bit. Every time I would talk to her, she would say, “Do you see that crack in the ceiling? And there’s certainly a big problem with the crack in the ceiling. I don’t know. Do I need to bring a handyman? What do you think?” It was just bonkers. So of course, when I came back, I wrote an article about the editor with the crack in her ceilings.

It was very funny. And Clay Felker really hated it. And he had to run it because at that point, that would have been some bad censorship. But he wanted to put as a tagline, Lindsay Van Gelder is a radical feminist, as if that would explain why I wrote this article about the crack in the ceiling. My female colleague said, “Why don’t you just say Lindsay Van Gelder is an ardent skier? It has nothing to do with this article.” The tagline did not go in as he wanted, but he hated me forever.

JW:  What did she think of it? Do you know?

LVG:  She never talked to me about it, but I gather she hated it. At her level, you should know that you don’t talk about cracks in the ceiling nonstop during an interview. I also had some of the opposite things. Sometimes at Ms. I would have to argue that we had to write the truth and not protect the women’s movement.

JW:  There definitely were controversies.

LVG:  Yes. I have to say Suzanne Levine, who was then the managing director, backed me up every time. She even at one point let me write an article, I think called the “Women’s Movement Protection Game.” Abortions never bother anybody. Daycare is always great for kids. All these things we really wanted to believe, but that weren’t always true. I mean, that was an issue on both sides.

JW:  And you got to write both sides?

LVG:  Yes.

JW:  So, you haven’t been involved with Ms. in a long time, I assume.

LVG:  No. In the ’80s, it was taken over by an Australian group. I had been writing a lot about technology, which I was obsessed with at the time, and I was also writing for a lot of computer magazines. The Australians thought this was going to bring in ads, but I was a part-time employee. They fired me. They were afraid they would get in trouble with the government if they had part-time employees who were getting benefits, which apparently was illegal at the time. That was when I started writing books and eventually went to Condé Nast.

JW:  Tell us about that. What was your work then?

LVG:  At Conde Nast, I wrote about lipstick and hair and makeup, of all things.  They let me be funny. That was actually a great job. I was there for 18 years until I was 65.

JW:  So, your feminist ideas and beliefs would seep into whatever you were writing.

LVG:  Yes, and I didn’t have to sneak. That was the package that I presented to editors. By then, my partner was female. I didn’t have to hide that. I didn’t have to hide my politics. Compared to the times we’re living in now, where if you think racism is bad, you’re suspect. During the period when I was a professional writer, I felt like the whole package worked for me, most of the time. Occasionally, there was something that came up.

JW:  Anything you can remember?

LVG:  I remember there was some editor at New York magazine who did not want to hire Jews or queers to write for him. I wasn’t Jewish yet, but I was definitely queer. There would be things where you’d face some kind of a prejudice, but the writing business was so healthy then. I could always find somebody who would hire me, which is no longer the case, now.

JW:  So, no discrimination when your partner was a woman?

LVG:  I had a fight with Ms. once. At the time, they had a teacher in space, and then they were going to have a journalist in space. Ms. thought it’d be great if I applied to be journalist in space. I had no desire to go into space. I don’t even like to fly in airplanes that are having turbulence. But I applied, and I was a semifinalist. One of the things I had mentioned in my application for the journalists in space was my female partner. NASA was fine with it. Ms. sent out a press release because they were very proud that one of theirs had been selected in this prestigious role – I mean, it was me and Walter Cronkite, and people like Walter Cronkite. Ms. was very happy to be included, but they neglected to mention my partner in this piece. I was furious. I thought, NASA is okay with it, but you’re not?

At the time, whenever Ms. used either the word lesbian or abortion in the magazine, some advertiser would freak out. I knew this, but I was still pissed off.

JW:  Are you currently involved in any writing or feminist activity?

LVG:  I’m still technically a writer, but at this point, I couldn’t live on it. I mostly live on Social Security, 401k, and pension. I got a total reverse shoulder replacement last month. The last couple of months have been all about physical therapy and doctor’s appointments.  I horrified the doctor because the way politics are going, it could be very convenient to raise my arm now to do a Heil Hitler. He didn’t think that was funny.

JW:  In summary, how did that early feminism affect your whole life?

LVG:  Without feminism, I doubt I would have been open to getting involved with a woman at the point that I did. I might have raised my daughters differently. They’re definitely feminists, so it goes with the territory. I hear that a lot of young women are not feminists, but most of the young women I know are. I would have been a cat lady no matter what.

JW:  I want to thank you for the bra burning, even though they never did burn any bras, as we know. Still, it has great meaning.

LVG:  That is going to be my epitaph. When I was at the Daily News, I also coined another phrase. When Billy Jean King’s girlfriend was suing her, that was on the one day that Clay Felker did like me. I suggested we use “gal-imony” in the headline.

A lot of what I like about journalism is its cheap, shallow aspects. It’s so much fun.