Obituaries Class of 1963

 

Judy Gingold (9/25/1941 – 3/2/2024) was brilliant, sophisticated, witty, caring and a quintessential New Yorker, and was a pioneer in the first sex discrimination complaint filed in the news media.  She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, and was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. Upon her return to New York, she could find a job only as a researcher – not a reporter or writer – at Newsweek, a position for which only women were hired and rarely promoted.

Judy decided the women should take legal action. On March 16, 1970, she was one of 46 women staffers who filed a sex discrimination complaint against Newsweek. After that, women at several major magazines and newspapers all filed sex discrimination complaints, changing the face of journalism in the US. Judy became the editor of the My Turn column at Newsweek. 

In 1982, Judy and her husband David Freeman, a writer, moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote book reviews for the Los Angeles Times as well as pieces for The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic Magazine.  She was also a fellow at the Betty Friedan Think Tank at the Institute for the Study of Women and Men at USC and later at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA.

Judy is fondly remembered by her family, her Lamont housemates, and her many friends.