A long career in economic news began by accident for Eileen Shanahan, with a job covering the price and wage controls that had been imposed on business during the Korean War. "News organizations had to hire additional reporters to cover controls and it turned out to be a terrific way of learning about the economy," she says.
In a few years, she moved on, from the newsletter where she'd started, to the Journal of Commerce, and began covering virtually all the government's major economic policy agencies, plus the federal budget.
In 1961, she was hired by the New York Times, after several of the paper's reporters who'd competed against her finally succeeded in convincing Washington bureau chief, James (Scotty) Reston, that a woman really could do the job. She was the first female reporter in the Times Bureau who'd been hired for any assignment other than coverage of the First Ladies. And although no woman was permitted to become an editor there until years later, she was, in fact, the editor for those giant, eight-page federal budget sections the paper carried in the '60's and '70's.
She was also, for many years, the only woman, among a dozen or so reporters for other publications, whose full-time assignment was the national economic policy beat in Washington. From the start, she also covered the Securities and Exchange Commission for the Times during its most energetic period of increased regulation of the securities markets since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. And she covered the major tax legislation of the era.
In the early 70's, she added coverage of the economic aspects of the women's movement: job discrimination, primarily, and the struggle of union women for positions of leadership in unions. Before long, she was also covering the rocky journey of the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment and virtually every other Washington-based women's movement story.
She soon became a part of that story. She joined other New York Times women, as one of the seven "named plaintiffs," in a 1974 class action against the newspaper, seeking pay and assignments equal to those of men of similar experience and quality. Among the many startling disclosures forced by the lawsuit, which ended in an out-of-court settlement in 1977, was this one: of 31 reporters and editors in the Times' Washington bureau, veteran Ms. Shanahan was paid "less than any man, except one rookie," she says. The other four women were one-two-three-four from the bottom.
Convinced that the Times would punish her for her role in the lawsuit, assigning her to dreary agencies and stories (she had no fear of being fired; there were and are laws against that) Ms. Shanahan left the paper in 1977 to join the Carter Administration as the top public affairs officer for the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services).
One of her aims in taking that job was its potential for acquiring management experience. The gamble paid off. The Washington Star hired her in 1979 as an assistant managing editor with supervision over business coverage and special projects for all the paper's sections.
After Time Inc. folded the Star in 1981, Ms. Shanahan eventually wound up doing something entirely new: in 1987, she became the founding editor of Governing, the first national magazine devoted exclusively to coverage of state and local government.
Ms. Shanahan has won two national awards for her lifetime of achievement in journalism: the University of Missouri Medal and the Colby College Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award.
Her 50-year marriage to John V. Waits, Jr., a production executive at the Washington Daily News and Washington Post, ended with his death in 1995. They had two daughters, Mary Beth Waits, now a high school assistant principal in Maryland and Kathleen Waits, a law professor in Oklahoma. They have given her two grandsons and a granddaughter.
Ms. Shanahan, who is in her mid-'70s, still keeps professionally active as a regular contributor to Governing.