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Page 2 of 3
However, that also entailed the squandering of energy that could have been so much more usefully expended.
Says Yates: "It was such a waste of effort and resource to have to spend half your time proving your right to exist."
And it is disturbing to consider how many other women, not so
determined or so tough, must have just given up and never reached their
full potential.
The testosterone-charged advertising sales business was "a fairly wild and woolly industry," Yates says.
"There were no laws really to protect women and… a lot of things went
on that would never be allowed to happen today. Thank God."
The first time Yates landed a booking, instead of congratulating her,
one of the male sales reps accused her of having slept with someone to
get it.
"They were just awful," she says. "And they didn't mean it, they would
just push you and push you and push you to see if you were tough
enough. I think if I'd have cried, they would have thought that they
had won, then. I got very angry and shouted a lot. But I didn't cry."
Sometimes she must have felt like it. But far from friends and family,
in a strange city, with two kids completely dependent on her, she had
to make a go of it.
"It didn't matter how rotten it was, I just had to make it work," she
says. ``Poverty's an awful bloody thing, it really does limit your
options, and it's so boring. And I just wanted to get out of that as
fast as I conceivably could."
Yates's son and daughter still won't eat casseroles "because they
equate it with poor food." "But we survived and in the overall scheme
of things we certainly weren't desperately poor. We had to be very
careful, but it was a great motivator."
It was chauvinism again which launched Yates on another unexpected
career swerve when, after two years, her boss told her she would never
be promoted, no matter how long she stayed or how good she was.
So she quit and joined Family Circle magazine as its first female
advertising rep. She was quickly promoted to national sales manager and
then headhunted by Fairfax as advertising manager of The Sun newspaper.
Among all this. by the way, she reviewed her decision to swear off men.
"Michael and I met in April (1980) and we were married in November. It
really was across a crowded room sort of stuff," she says.
"We've been married 18 years and I'm blissfully happy. So I did finally
get it right. There's a lot to be said for keeping practising."
Yates worked at Fairfax for eight years and was eventually promoted to
deputy chief executive of Fairfax magazines. And that led to her most
unimaginable adventure of all: New York City and was brought undone by
the woman from Wabash.
The woman from Wabash (pronounced war-bash), Indiana, made an unlikely
nemesis and at first Yates did not see her as a serious threat. That
was a mistake.
Maybe Yates was simply too busy having what she now describes as
"probably the best time of my life" to believe anyone could wish to do
her so much damage.
She certainly vastly underestimated the muscle of America's religious
right— which the woman from Wabash represented—and its ferocious
determination to impose its will.
But after all, this was the 1980s and Yates was in the self-styled
capital of the civilised world, New York, where she and her good friend
Anne Summers had just fulfilled a dream by starting their own
publishing business, Matilda Publications.
Under Warwick Fairfax, Fairfax was offloading its overseas assets, and
Yates and Summers acquired two magazines: feminist bible Ms., which
Summers went on to edit for some years, and a new title called Sassy.
"It was a terrific time, so exciting, so fast-moving," Yates says. "We
had about six weeks and we raised $US20 million on Wall Street. It was
only the second woman-led MBO in US corporate history, so we're quite
proud of that."
Modelled on Australia's successful Dolly magazine, Sassy was Yates's baby, and she was confident of its success.
"Sassy did incredibly well in the beginning because it was so different and we attracted a lot of attention," she says.
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