Herald Tribune's Lady

(See front cover*)

Trailing a thousand different perfumes, an endless procession of women surged through the lobbies of Manhattan's swank Waldorf-Astoria last week. They were large and small, handsome and unlovely, most of them middleaged, many of them buxom, and not a few with funny hats. They pushed into the elevators, chattering, fluttering programs, snatching quick glances at themselves in mirrors. The elevator operators knew better than to stop at the mezzanine, where the Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association was in convention. Unmistakably these passengers were headed for the third-floor ballroom and the Conference on Current Problems.

The Conference is called every year by the New York Herald Tribune. It began in 1930 when Mrs. William Brown Meloney, able editor of the Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine, observed that the work of various women's clubs might well be correlated. In cooperation with the club women the Herald Tribune secured potent speakers to give them food for their forums. The first meeting, scheduled for the Herald Tribune's auditorium, overflowed to the Hotel Astor. The next, held at the Waldorf, was an even greater success. This year no less than 38,000 women applied to the Herald Tribune for tickets, and 25,000 actually registered for the five sessions. The ballroom had seats for only 2,500. A thousand others packed the adjoining halls to hear the program from loudspeakers.

Hostess. There was nothing about the program, opened by the President's wife and closed by the President, to remind the audience of the Herald Tribune's arch-Republicanism. Gracious hostess of the Conference was Helen Rogers Reid, vice president of the Herald Tribune, who said to her guests: "We have chosen for the topic of this conference 'Changing Standards.' . . ."

Thereupon some 50 distinguished men and women began taking turns at the speaker's rostrum where alert, bird-like Mrs. Meloney presided, or before microphones in faraway places. Busy Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt dashed down from Hyde Park to give the Conference one of her neat little speeches which sound so much more important than they look in print. Said she: "The higher standards which women now set themselves, for whatever work they engage in, will raise the standard of men's work. . . . The biggest change in standards must come [in] the field of business and of labor...."

Attorney General Cummings whose men caught John Dillinger and Indiana's Governor McNutt, whose men let him escape, talked about crime. Madam Secretary Perkins urged unemployment insurance; and President Stanley King of Amherst College warned against rushing headlong into it. When Mrs. Meloney pushed a card at Theodore Roosevelt reading "You have one more minute," that speaker swept it aside and talked for three more about "worthwhile work." There was a session on "Changing Standards in the Arts," with contributions from Will Irwin, Hugh Walpole, Pearl Buck, Lawrence Tibbett, Harvey Wiley Corbett, a session on Youth, a session on "The Struggle for Security." But best of all, to many and many a woman in the audience, was a session on "The Changing Status of Women."

"Status of Women," Here was a subject near and dear to the heart of Helen Rogers Reid, and on which she could have given competent testimony. But she left the symposium to her peers, notably three women who spoke by radio from overseas. First of these was Margaret Haig Mackworth, Britain's Viscountess Rhondda.

Large, handsome, healthy and vigorous, Viscountess Rhondda at 51 is chairman of seven companies, director of 24 others dealing in iron, steel, coal, shipping, newspapers. As her chief occupation she regards the editorship of Time & Tide, which she founded as a feminist weekly and which still employs only women in the office. Only child of the late David Alfred Thomas, Welch "coal king," she inherited his vast business interests, his title, his amazing vitality. As Lady Mackworth (she is divorced from Sir Humphrey Mackworth) she went to jail and hunger-struck in the Pankhurst campaign for women's suffrage. She was aboard the Lusitania when it was torpedoed. She has fought for the right of peeresses to sit in the House of Lords. She scorns feminine frills, looks like Amy Lowell, regards idle home-women as a menace.

Transatlantic radio failed Lady Rhondda last week, and her voice was unintelligible to the Conference. An advance copy of her speech was read by Irita Van Doren, editor of the Herald Tribune's Books Supplement. Her text was the inscription at the base of the statue of Nurse Cavell who, before she was taken out to be shot as a spy, said: "Patriotism is not enough." Her theme: "The one thing that matters more than all the rest is international relations. . . ."

Also from London came the voice of Frau Mathilde Wurm, 13 years a Socialist member of the Reichstag, a Jewess, now living in Great Britain in virtual exile. Speaking in English, she told the Conference that Hitlerism, having wooed the support of German women with promises of liberation from underpaid drudgery, betrayed them by expelling women from civil and professional life, and by handing them over to farm and household labor without pay.

Third speaker from abroad was Mme Paul Dupuy of Paris, who was born Helen Browne of Manhattan. Out of a French finishing school, Miss Browne married Paul Dupuy, son of the publisher of Le Petit Parisien. Three weeks after M. Dupuy's death in 1927 his widow was installed in his office, learning to boss the largest group of publications in France. Since then, she has trained her two sons to succeed her. Mme Dupuy entertains lavishly at Versailles and at her apartment in Passy, sports the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Her message to the Conference:

". . . Without denying woman any of the rights and privileges she has . . . acquired, we must not lose sight of the fact that woman's primary role is ... the rearing of children. . . . No triumph in any other field of endeavor could excuse their neglecting it."

Mme Dupuy could hardly find cause for criticism of one other woman on the same program--Dr. Lillian Moller Gilbreth. While building up Gilbreth Inc., Manhattan consulting engineers, of which she is president, Dr. Gilbreth also found time to bring up eleven children. Her Conference topic: "The Home Becomes a Major Industry."

Big Jobs. With Lady Rhondda, Mme Dupuy and Dr. Gilbreth, Mrs. Reid has a close personal and professional kinship. They are all women who are holding down men's jobs in a man's world, with no concessions asked or given because of their sex. Women in politics may get the headlines and Sunday feature stories but it is women in Big Business that make Mrs. Reid and her friends feel that the world is moving forward. The list of lose who hold top-notch positions makes an impressive roster: Josephine Roche, who owns and runs her late father's Rocky mountain Fuel Co. (TIME, Sept. 7, 1931; Sept. 24); Mary Elizabeth Dillon, who rose from office-girl to president of the 12,000,000 Brooklyn Borough Gas Co.; Eleanor Medill Patterson, fiery editor of Hearst's Washington Herald; May Greer, cashier of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., reputedly highest salaried woman in the U. S.; Minnie Williams Miller, owner and operator of Thousand Springs stock farms in Idaho; Mrs. Charles B. Knox, president of Knox Gelatine Co., and many others.

And Little. But big women in big jobs, while they might be shining examples, are ot Mrs. Reid's sole interest. Keenly attentive was she to a Conference speaker who dealt with the whole army of U. S. women workers, which has mounted from 5,320,000 at the Century's turn to double hat size today. Equally significant was he swelling proportion of professionals in the ranks: 9% in 1910, 40% in 1930. But woman's place in business and industry is not helped by the fact that the number of women in jobs is today greater than the number of men out of jobs. Cropping up more & more throughout the U. S. is the old theory that men have first right to earn wages, that women ought to stay home. In defense, Secretary of Labor Perkins not long ago announced that 95% of married women in jobs were sole supporters of families.

Sixth Floor. Full of pride over the success of the Conference, and full of congratulations for "Missy" Meloney, to whom she gave all credit, Helen Rogers Reid lost no time getting back to the Herald Tribune Building a block from Times Square. Her office is in a corner of the sixth floor, one story above the city room. It is a man's room. Seated in a man's chair, at a man's desk, Mrs. Reid looks singularly small and frail. Tiny she is; frail she is not. Her grey hair is bobbed and waved, and her thin straight lips are carefully rouged, but the wife of the president of the Herald Tribune is anything but pliant. She moves slowly, speaks slowly in a voice which to a stranger sounds disinterested. But when she says in an offhand way "I think it would be nice if . . ." there is not an underling on her newspaper who mistakes it for anything but a command.

Such were the surface qualities, coating innate efficiency, ambition and commonsense, which Helen Rogers of Appleton, Wis. carried out of Barnard College 31 years ago. She wanted to teach, but Elisabeth Mills Reid, handsome, gracious wife of Editor Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune, wanted her as social secretary. Wisely she chose Miss Rogers. When President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 sent Whitelaw Reid to the Court of St. James's, Secretary Rogers went along. There she met the Reid's fun-loving Son Ogden, just out of Yale. Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, who had a deep affection for her pert, level headed secretary, smiled on the match. Helen and Ogden were married in 1911. Next year Whitelaw Reid died and the Tribune, which he had acquired in 1872 from Horace Greeley, passed to Son Ogden.

Home in the U. S., Helen Reid bore three children. One died of typhoid at the age of nine. Son Whitelaw is now at Yale, Son Ogden Jr., 9, in boarding school. Mrs. Reid slaved for women's suffrage until 1918 brought victory. Then her husband said to her: "You are freed from your suffrage work and responsibility. The Tribune needs you; come down to the office and work the paper's success out with me."

Mrs. Reid went out on the street and solicited advertising for two months be fore assuming an office in the Tribune. She then took charge as advertising director, knowing how to whip her staff into a lather of energy they never suspected in themselves. In 1924 the Tribune absorbed James Gordon Bennett's Herald, which the late unlamented Frank A. Munsey had run into the ground, and Mrs. Reid acquired new responsibilities. At 52 she is still advertising director, firing her sales force with 9 a. m. pep talks every Monday and keeping them stoked through Saturday noon. Though her husband owns nearly all of the newspaper's stock and has the title of editor, the Herald Tribune today as a business is largely Helen Rogers Reid.

Ninth Floor. Votes-for-women is no longer an issue, but the flame of feminism burns as high as ever in Helen Reid's compact breast. Proud is she that no other metropolitan newspaper employs as many female executives. There are Mrs. Helen W. Leavitt, assistant advertising manager; Elsa Lang, promotion director; Esther Kimmel in charge of the Home Economics Department; Books Editor Irita Van Doren; Mary Day Winn, assistant fiction editor; Book Critic Isabel Paterson. And most important, presiding on the ninth floor, Marie Mattingly Meloney.

Kentucky-born 50 years ago "Missy" Meloney at 15 worked on the Washington Post, at 16 helped cover a Republican National Convention for the New York World. Like many a crack newshawk she served her hitch on the rowdy Denver Post, and was the first woman reporter ever admitted to the U. S. Senate Press Gallery. She was editor of Delineator in 1926 when her good friends the Reids invited her to take charge of the Herald Tribune magazine. The magazine is said to be a money-loser at present, but beyond doubt it pulls substantial circulation. Like Helen Reid, "Missy" Meloney is small and indomitable. She is warm, friendly, with arge brown eyes and a hawk nose.

Fifth Floor. Around the Herald Tribune's editorial offices and in the city room a woman is seldom seen. With rare exceptions, City Editor Stanley Walker has small use for women reporters. Of various reasons and prejudices, perhaps the most tangible is his conviction that newswomen lack versatility and are practically useless on police stories. His only female reporter is Emma Bugbee, who is indispensable for keeping tabs on Mrs. Roosevelt in Washington and out. In the sport department Janet Owen was hired, at Mrs. Reid's insistence, to cover women's games. There are no others, and City Editor Walker is happy with a male staff which has made the Herald Tribune's metropolitan news the best written in New York City.

Yet a curious neurosis afflicts the fifth floor, a misogyny born of nightmarish fear that some noon the staff will arrive to find a woman as editor. It is not due to any persistent interference by Mrs. Reid, who rarely meddles visibly in news matters, but to the feeling that she could interfere if she would. All Herald Tribune editorial men are far more acutely conscious of Mrs. Reid, although they may not see her for a full month, than they are of bald, likable, easy-going Ogden Mills Reid whose office is on their own floor. A contributing factor is that Mrs. Reid is sternly Dry, which most Herald Tribune men, including her husband, are not. Even the rumor that white-crowned Jack Bleeck, who has run the Herald Tribune's next-door bar for years, considered opening his door to women, gave the whole staff a mild case of jitters. Bleeck's affords something of the oldtime barber-shop refuge from feminism, and there nearly every day the staff gathers--Stanley Walker, Grafton ("Wilkie") Wilcox, the able managing editor, wise Geoffrey Parsons, chief editorial writer, and "Oggie" Reid himself.

Every four years, the night of the presidential election, "Oggie" Reid delivers himself of an editorial. Now and then between times he becomes so steamed up over a situation that his friends persuade him to write another. He does so, and bristles with pride for days thereafter. Otherwise his duties include holding the strings of the editorial purse, keeping an eye on news policy. Handsomely, his wife has said of him: "Ogden Reid is the most independent-minded man I ever knew." But it is Mrs. Reid who often helps that independent mind make itself up.

*At a meeting of private school headmistresses, at Manhattan's Spence School. Standing: Mrs. Ordway Tead of Katharine Gibbs School; Miss Valentine Chandor of Spence. Seated: Dean Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve of Barnard College; Mrs. Roosevelt of Todhunter School: Mrs. Reid.

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