STRIVING

My name is Jo Thomas. I’m a pioneering woman journalist with 36 years at three major metropolitan newspapers, most notably The New York Times

I’m excited to announce that my memoir Striving; Adventures of a Female Journalist in a Man’s World, A True Story, is now for sale on Amazon in e-book, hardback, and paperback editions. It chronicles my journey as a housewife who became an investigative reporter for The New York Times. It’s published by the 99 Cups of Coffee Publishing Company, Chicago.

I want to share my journey with you because my experiences mirror those of my generation and the ongoing fight for gender equality. Many women in the workplace still experience some of these barriers, big and little, today.

Keep scrolling for my story, samples of my work, and links to order the book.

From a Shy Bookworm to 'One of the Greats' at The New York Times

I was a senior investigative reporter at The New York Times who grew up in the 1950s as a shy bookworm who dreamed of being a housewife. I went to graduate school but quit when my husband took a management job out of state. Life as a corporate spouse was not the “happily ever after” I imagined. So I looked for a job as a writer. I had no professional experience, and in 1966, newsrooms excluded women.

In an incredible stroke of luck, I landed a job at the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star, which had hired no new woman in the newsroom for twenty years. That day, however, the city editor was desperate for help. The Cincinnati strangler had just killed his latest victim, and the paper was short-staffed. When I passed a writing test, the job was mine.

“No one who is any good just walks in off the street,” the editor told me later. When I asked why I got the job, he said, “You can write, and you have great legs.”

I went on to have a 36-year career in journalism at three metropolitan newspapers, mostly at The New York Times, where I was a national and foreign correspondent, as well as an assistant national editor. On one occasion, Gene Roberts, the newspaper’s managing editor, called me one of the greats, but I was never accepted as “one of the boys."

On a feature story at the Cincinnati Post and Times-Star

Still, the anonymity of print journalism and the invisibility of being a woman worked for me as a reporter. I could go places that shunned journalists. I exposed official mismanagement and private corruption in Cincinnati neighborhoods ruined by greed and racism. I uncovered the Mafia taking over the trucking business off the docks in Detroit. I found the Contras training in the Florida Everglades. I investigated death squads on the back roads of Northern Ireland. I was the only American reporter in Havana in the days before the Mariel boat lift. I took huge risks, and I was afraid. But I looked harmless, and I was lucky.

Working for the Detroit Free Press, awaiting the outcome of an all night standoff with police after auto workers took over Chrysler’s Mack Avenue Stamping Plant. August 15th , 1973.

My early marriage ended quickly, and I stayed single for sixteen years, redefining myself as a woman and a journalist. I became a single mother at the age of 38. While posted in London, I met an American anthropologist working in Northern Ireland. We married and had another child.

I have written hundreds of newspaper stories and dozens of magazine articles, but Striving is my first book, an adventure story, and a memoir. Other women, old and young, will recognize their own experiences in mine.