Skirted

For most of the 400 reporters accredited to cover Franklin Roosevelt, the big event of the year is the night when he covers them. That is at the White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner. It is the only wartime dinner the President attends outside the White House. Some of the correspondents' editors show up to pat their backs, the drinks flow swiftly, the Fourth Estate has itself a time. Last week it all happened again. But 37 White House reporters stayed away. The reason: they wear skirts.

On file with the Association was a formal protest against the exclusion of women from the party. Its author was Mrs. Elizabeth May Craig, correspondent for four Maine papers, pert president of the Women's National Press Club (TIME, June 14).

Distaffers. None could dispute that Washington's editors need women reporters and writers. At the bottom of the manpower barrel, they are recruiting more & more women. The United Press bureau, which had only one woman reporter before the war, now has eleven on beats and eight others in its office. The Senate and House Galleries, which had some 30 women six years ago, now lists 98.

The newshens cover almost everything. A few have been on the police beat. They help on every major Government bureau beat and on two --OPA and Agriculture--women alone represent one major press association. The editors' consensus is that they do remarkably well. A girl reporter at the Interior Department was first to dig out the "Big Inch" faulty-pipe story. The Associated Press's young Flora Lewis was 24 hours ahead on the State Department's embargo of oil shipments to Spain. The girls contend that the traditional greeting of officials at press conferences --"Good morning, gentlemen"--is no longer fit for so many feminine ears.

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