WOMEN'S WORK

Breaking barriers, one byline at a time

- BY DEIRDRE ENGLISH

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.