Nan Robertson, 83, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who chronicled her nearly fatal struggle with toxic shock syndrome and wrote a book about gender discrimination at the New York Times that has become a standard text in journalism, died Oct. 13 of heart disease at Collingswood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rockville. She lived in Bethesda. Ms. Robertson, a New York Times reporter, wrote in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine that just hours after a family Thanksgiving dinner in 1981, she lay near death in a hospital, her limbs paralyzed and her fingers and toes blackening with gangrene. The rare but potentially fatal disease had just been in the news because its occurrence had been linked to the use of super-absorbent tampons, although Ms. Robertson was one of the few who contracted the disease from an unrelated infection.
The book’s title referred to the perch above the auditorium at the National Press Club in Washington, which, until 1955, barred women from entering even on business, and barred them as members until 1971. The lawsuit, later expanded to include all 550 women at the Times, was settled for $350,000 and an agreement to equalize salaries and promotions. The court record was sealed at settlement. “Nan’s book, published 17 years after the suit was settled, provides the only record of what we considered an important step for women in the most visible part of journalism at the time,” said Betsy Wade, who under her married name, Boylan, was the lead plaintiff in the suit, Elizabeth Boylan et al. v. the New York Times. “But what other papers saw in this settlement was much more important: that if the Times can’t win [a sex discrimination lawsuit], we’d better clean up our act.”
Although she was not one of the seven women who put their reputations on the line for the groundbreaking lawsuit, Ms. Robertson was a bit of a rabble-rouser. She said in a PBS documentary in 1993 that her former editor, James Reston, the paper’s longtime Washington bureau chief, “believed that women belonged at home and that they should raise the children and be helpmates to their husbands, and he ran the Washington bureau like a men’s club.” She pushed her editors for years to allow the use of Ms. as a courtesy title, along with Mr., Mrs. and Miss. In 1986, the Times finally acknowledged that the honorific had become a standard part of the language and changed its style.
“Jubilant is the word for the way people feel around here,” she told The Washington Post about the style change. “Everybody feels it should have happened a long time ago, but that’s the Times. It has a sort of glacial way of moving. . . . It may have been late in coming, but it’s here.” A gifted writer, she once described an oversized gem worn by a socialite as “about the weight of a chocolate chip cookie,” said Wade, the former head copy editor of the Times’ foreign news desk.
Ms. Robertson was also a longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous. After achieving sobriety through a residential treatment for alcoholism and depression, Ms. Robertson wrote “Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous” (1988), called the first major book on the self-help organization.
She was born July 11, 1926, in Chicago. She graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 1948. She worked at Stars & Stripes, the Milwaukee Journal and as a special correspondent in Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt and London for the New York Herald Tribune European Edition.
Her first job at the New York Times was, as it was for many women in journalism, in the women’s department. By 1959, she joined the metropolitan news staff and, in 1963, moved to the Washington bureau. She worked in Paris and covered the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, then became a reporter in New York for the living and style sections and ultimately the culture news department before retiring in 1988.
After her recovery from toxic shock, she was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, an artists retreat in New Hampshire, and was a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow. She received the lifetime achievement award from the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Washington Press Foundation.
She taught at the University of Maryland as the first Eugene L. Roberts visiting professor of journalism from 1994 through 1999. She mentored a university’s worth of journalists, known and unknown, over the course of her career.
Her marriage to Allyn Baum ended in divorce. Her second husband, Stanley Levey, died in 1971. Her third husband, William W. Ross, died in 2006.
Survivors include five stepchildren, former Washington Post columnist Bob Levey of Washington, John Frank Levey of Burbank, Mary Houghton of Bethesda, Jim Houghton of Centreville and William P. Ross of Saranac Lake, N.Y.; a sister; and nine step-grandchildren.
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