Chairlane McCray’s City
It would have been a coup for any young woman to score a job at Redbook, where McCray started working in 1977. It was the intellectual women’s magazine, having published fiction by Mary Gordon and Jane Smiley and articles by Betty Friedan, and staffed by pathbreaking women who understood keenly the art of the political gesture. In 1970, a band of Redbook editors took a stand by wearing pants to work, and Sey Chassler, the magazine’s editor, was convinced by a scholar to use she instead of he in print as the generic pronoun. A couple of years later, he persuaded dozens of magazines to simultaneously publish articles on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. McCray was young but made her home there—though what co-workers remember, mostly, is how soft-spoken she was. Frances Ruffin remembers lots of editorial assistants working at Redbook at the time. “They were all very smart. Chirlane was the quietest.”
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