Last Monday Assistant Publisher Lane Fortinberry, White House Correspondent Dean Fischer and I had the pleasure of presenting a special leather-bound copy of our Bicentennial issue to our highest ranking reader, Gerald Ford. Our appointment was delayed by a strategy session of the National Security Council. That meeting, we later discovered, had focused on ways to respond to the Cambodian seizure of the merchant ship Mayaguez (see cover story). Unruffled by the developing crisis, the President greeted us warmly and leafed through the special edition. He paused at the People section, laughing over colonial Dr. Benjamin Rush's prognosis of ten extra years of life for anyone taking up a newly imported game called golf.

sb

Three years ago, TIME devoted a special issue (March 20, 1972) to the sometimes painful emergence of "The New American Woman." This week we follow up with a report on women's advances in politics, business, sport and the professions (see THE SEXES). Planned by Senior Editor Ruth Brine, the story draws on research done mainly by TIME'S women staffers. Reporter-Researchers Susan Altchek Aroldi and Linda Young drew statistics on employment and advancement from census reports and government publications. Correspondents Marguerite Michaels and Mary Cronin talked with women leaders as well as with the mostly male bureaucrats of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Writer Andrea Chambers summarized their findings: women, still sharply discriminated against, are making strong gains in fields once dominated by men. Since its inception in early 1973, The Sexes has reported the changes that women's liberation has worked in American lives and attitudes. But some male-chauvinistic attitudes die hard. When Chambers telephoned a Manhattan restaurant to make reservations for two in order to have a lunchtime interview with a women's leader, the maitre d' asked, "What are the gentlemen's names?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.