"Celia Brayfield was at her desk in the Femail section of the Daily Mail's Fleet Street office when an editor called her over. It was July and Wimbledon had started. He said: We want you to go down and get into the women's changing rooms and report on lesbian behaviour.' One didn't normally swear at that time but I declined. That was the attitude then, she told me."
"From the late 1960s until the early 70s, Brayfield was one of a small group of female journalists working on women's pages in newspapers. We were dealing with everyday sexism on an unbelievable scale, she said. You learned to wear trousers or take the lift because if you took the stairs someone would try to look up your skirt. But then you couldn't go to a lot of press conference venues in trousers. In the Savoy, for example, women in trousers weren't allowed."
"The Daily Mail was a very sexist organisation, she told me. I can't tell you how awful women's pages were, except for Mary Stott's at the Guardian. All the news of the women's movement in America was flooding across the Atlantic, but editors were profoundly uninterested. I always thought you couldn't mention anything to do with equality before the fifth paragraph."
Celia Brayfield was asked by a Daily Mail editor to enter women's changing rooms to 'report on lesbian behaviour' and refused. From the late 1960s until the early 1970s she was among a small group of women writing on newspapers' women's pages and faced everyday sexism, including attempts to look up skirts and bans on wearing trousers at venues like the Savoy. She began work at 19 assisting Shirley Conran and moved with Conran to the Daily Mail, where editors suppressed coverage of the women's liberation movement. Rejected interviews were published in underground outlets such as Frendz and she joined the Women in Media pressure group.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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