FIRST WOMAN TO EDIT NEWS AT NEW YORK TIMES; LED SUIT AGAINST PAPER

Betsy Wade, the f irst woman to edit news copy for The New York Times and the lead plaintiff in a landmark sex discrimination lawsuit against the newspaper on behalf of its female employees, died Dec. 3 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 91.

Her death was confirmed by her husband, James Boylan, who said she had learned in 2017 that she had colon cancer.

In a 45-year Times career, Wade also became the first woman to lead The Newspaper Guild of New York, the largest local in the national journalism union (now known as the NewsGuild).

She was revered among peers for her role in the 1974 class-action suit against The Times, one of the industry’s earliest fights over women’s rights to equal treatment in hiring, promotion, pay and workplace protections under federal anti-discrimination laws.

Four years after being fired as a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune for being pregnant, Wade landed at The Times on Oct. 1, 1956, and instantly broke a 105-year-old practice of male copy editing in the news department, where women were rare, relatively underpaid and relegated largely to reporting on fashions, cooking and other “women’s news,” or to clerical or secretarial jobs.

Wade, still a trainee, enjoyed only a month on The Times’ city news copy desk before she, too, was assigned to edit women’s news. She was too good to be sidetracked, however, and by 1958 she was back in general news.

She later moved up to jobs with more responsibility, and to other firsts by a woman at The Times.

She joined a women’s caucus in 1972 to study gender issues at The Times. It found that weekly salaries for women were $59 less than those of men with comparable jobs; that there were no women in top corporate or masthead ranks, on the editorial board or among 22 national correspondents; and that the staffs of 33 foreign correspondents and 35 Washington bureau members included only three women each.

In 1978, after a four-year court fight, The Times and representatives of 560 women on its 6,000-member staff settled a class-action suit — titled Elizabeth Boylan, et al, v. The New York Times, using Wade’s married name (she went by Betsy Wade professionally) — on terms approved by Judge Henry Werker. Both sides claimed victory.

Elizabeth Wade was born in Manhattan on July 18, 1929.