Judith Helen Gingold

Judy Gingold, a pioneer in the first sex discrimination complaint filed in the news media, died in Los Angeles, March 2, 2024 after a long illness. Judy was a brilliant philosophy student: a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Smith College and a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University. When she returned to New York, she could find a job only as a researcher - not a reporter or writer - at Newsweek magazine, 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, the first such action by women in the media. After that, women at Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post and The New York Times all filed sex discrimination complaints, changing the face of journalism in the US. "That is one of the hardest things I've ever done but I felt I had to sue," Judy said at the time. She ended up as the editor of the My Turn column at Newsweek.
In 1982, Judy moved to Los Angeles with her husband, David Freeman, a writer, but never gave up her love for New York. In Los Angeles, Judy wrote book reviews for the Los Angeles Times as well as pieces for The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic magazine. She also was 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.
Judith Helen Gingold was born in The Bronx, September 25, 1941, the daughter of Jacob Gingold, an electrical parts distributor and Rose Mufson Gingold. She is survived by her husband, her brother Alfred Gingold, sister-in-law Helen Rogan and nephew Toby Gingold and her many friends in Los Angeles and New York.