The very next year, McCormick won the Pulitzer Prize, the first woman writing for a major newspaper to do so. The story is told in Cokie Roberts' We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, a book that is part memoir, part women's history. Flash forward three decades. Roberts, a Wellesley College graduate, is herself looking for journalism work. For women in journalism, the progress has been slow but steady, reflecting advances women have made in many spheres of public and private life.
Critics note the gaps in opportunity, especially at the top, but strides have been made.
Roberts, for example, is a celebrated ABC and National Public Radio broadcaster, a star in the firmament of network broadcasting. Some break through and succeed beyond anyone's expectations, including their own. In the '70s, it was a woman who stood her ground and bucked a powerful president. Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, may have inherited her job through family and marriage. But in the early days of the Watergate story, when the paper was largely alone in reporting the Nixon administration's wrongdoing, it was Graham who set the tone and stood fast as the paper's chief executive.