On ABC's The View this morning, co-host Elisabeth Filarski Hasselbeck announced that she was expecting her first child at the end of March or the beginning of April.

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Elisabeth, 27, first became widely-known shortly after graduating from Boston College, when she reached the "final four" on CBS's smash hit Survivor: The Australian Outback in the spring of 2001. She has been married to her college boyfriend, Washington Redskins backup quarterback Tim Hasselbeck, for just over two years.

In addition to her co-hosting duties on The View, Elisabeth -- a Rhode Island native who worked as a shoe designer in suburban Boston right after graduation -- has hosted The Look for Less on the Style Network.





To make the announcement, all four of Barbara Walters' co-hosts on The View -- Elisabeth, Meredith Vieira, Joy Behar and Star Jones -- came out wearing fake pregnancy bellies, and the audience was asked to guess which of the co-hosts was pregnant. After some wrong guesses (one audience member yelled out "Barbara"!), Elisabeth then revealed the truth. She said that she is at the end of the first trimester and is "nauseous, but I'm fine with that because it's all for a good cause."

Elisabeth also said that she and her husband had no interest in knowing the baby's gender before birth. No word yet on whether a boy would be named Rodger, but Elisabeth should have a much easier time with juggling her pregnancy and broadcast work than fellow co-host Meredith did back in 1991, when she was finishing her second year as a co-host of CBS's 60 Minutes.

When Meredith, who had joined 60 Minutes as the show's second woman reporter after a highly successful stint with Steve Kroft on the CBS news show West 57th, announced that she was pregnant with her second child, she asked the show's producers for a part-time schedule so that she could spend more time with her family. They wouldn't hear of it.

Meredith's subsequent acrimonious departure from 60 Minutes forced much of the TV news industry to re-evaluate its expectations and treatment of young female talent. Today, pregnancy announcement such as Lis' -- and even a possible request for some post-pregnancy time off or a part-time schedule -- would cause few problems for most news organizations.

Just another reminder of how much things have changed for women in the workplace in a relatively short time.

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