How To Be A ‘Gutsy Girl’ Redbook Editor’s New Book Tells How She Stopped Being A Pushover

If Kate White, the self-assured editor-in-chief of Redbook, appeared on the cover of a woman’s magazine, she’d wear a solid-colored, elegant suit, perhaps a butter yellow with big buttons and soft lines, because “gutsy” girls do.

She’d add a strand of understated pearls accented by antique earrings. She’d flash a cover-girl face dabbed with makeup, a cover-girl smile painted watermelon red, and covergirl eyes full of fire and a glint of mischief, because “gutsy” girls do.

The magazine headline would scream, CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER GOOD GIRL: Kate White Talks About How She Went to Bed a Pushover and Woke Up a Gutsy Girl. And on the shiny pages inside, she’d tell you exactly what she wants from work and life, and how she gets it, because, yes, “gutsy” girls always do.

This is the mantra, according to White. She tells all in her new, 278-page book of career strategies called “Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead … But Gutsy Girls Do” (Warner Books, $21.95). White, 44, knew in her gut that the title was a winner - like an Armani suit for a job interview - before she ever wrote a word.

The book’s meat - nine secrets every career woman should know - is really the same old T-bone, a list of do’s and don’ts covered by other business tomes or any number of women’s magazines. A gutsy girl breaks the rules. A gutsy girl takes smart risks. But it’s still a fun read.

White reveals how to find a subordinate’s G-spot - professional G-spot, that is. She drops names (Ivana Trump, Nancy Glass) and details about her own juicy, behind-the-scene victories.

Once, she demanded a gutsy, $50,000 bonus, and her boss said OK. Strategy 6: A Gutsy Girl Asks for What She Wants.

“Career success isn’t about learning the textbook answers to questions and repeating them back on a test,” she writes by way of defining “gutsy.”

“It’s about generating fresh, creative ideas that make people go ‘Wow.’ It’s not about waiting to be called on. It’s about asking for what you want. It’s not about making everyone like you. It’s about getting things done effectively even if you have to ruffle some feathers - or kick some butt.”

It is also about using connections: Glamour, where she began her career as a 22-year-old editorial assistant, ran a four-page spread excerpting the book. Working Mother, whose editor in chief is one of her oldest friends, called it a “must-read book for steps on how to leave your inner ‘good girl’ in the dust.”

“She understands what you need to do to sell yourself and package what you do,” said Ellen Kunes, executive editor at Redbook and a longtime sidekick.

On a recent workday in midtown Manhattan, she laughed boisterously while telling one of the many anecdotes that lace her conversation and her book, her blue-gray eyes - steely when she’s displeased - animated with delight. In a word, she has spunk, fueled, in part, by a steady drip of she-woman coffee.

“People love her,” Kunes said. “People see her as this little bundle of energy.”

White, who also has held the top spot at Child, Working Woman and McCall’s, does most of this between the hours of 9 to 5. A gutsy girl, it seems, is not a workaholic.

Although White takes work home, she has a life, which includes children, Hayley, 5, and Hunter, 7-1/2, and husband, Brad Holbrook, a TV anchor for a tennis program. Most nights, she makes a sit-down dinner.

She spends weekends with her family at their country house. She watches “ER,” and truth be known, she thinks George Clooney is a hunk.

Her life comes from her office-hours efficiency, which can, at times, make her seem brusque. At one point in her workday, White bluntly assessed a bad idea, leaving a subordinate stammering. (That’s the gutsy girl style.)

According to White, this business of gutsiness isn’t easy for women, especially for those (most of us) stuck in a quagmire of unwritten rules, issued since girlhood by parents, schoolteachers and society, that insist that little girls “Be nice” or “Be good.”

That’s why she wrote the book. (She also had the time because her husband, who was then hosting an early morning show, went to bed at 7:30 p.m. while she, the night owl, couldn’t sleep before 1 a.m.) She wanted to explain why gutsiness takes so much guts.

“I’ve read books that say it’s important to ask for what you want,” White said. “But I’ve never understood why that was hard for me to do. So I spent my life rationalizing why I didn’t ask for it.

“The ‘good girl’ helps you understand the behavior,” she said, “and to challenge yourself not to do that.”

But at one of her early jobs, she was the perfect good girl. While vying for a top position at Family Weekly, she worked hard, doing everything asked of her, meeting deadlines, making sure her staff liked her. But the plum spot went to someone else.

“I’d retreated into the woodwork,” she writes. “I’d never taken any steps to demonstrate to top management that I had a burning passion for the position.”

Several years later, she said she made her gutsiest move. She interviewed for the job of editor in chief of Working Woman while 7-1/2 months pregnant. She was offered the job, she took it, and she was a grand success.

In her book, gutsiness sometimes can come off as cold and calculating. Consider page 199: “Every single person who crosses your path is a potential saboteur. You must be ever vigilant - and when you spot trouble, you must confront it.” Or page 223: “A good girl trusts people. A gutsy girl knows that you can never, ever completely trust anyone.”

The gutsy boss is never overly nice, sometimes arbitrary and picks favorites.

But White isn’t all guts; she can show shades of a good girl. She can be very nice with a disposition to match her sunny, sixth-floor corner office with its ginger walls and carpet.

And she can nurture, considering a staffer’s pitch for a story on Marie Osmond, even though her gut tells her BORING, or showing mercy to a staffer caught in a bind of her own making.

“I’ve had bosses who are tougher than me,” said White, slipping her feet out of her 2-1/2-inch black heels. “I don’t think it’s in my nature to be that tough.

“Even in gutsy women, myself included, there is that good girl gland. It’s like hemorrhoids. You can shrink it, but it never totally goes away.”

She threw her head back and dissolved into gutsy girl guffaws.