EOTO#3 Women Pages

 

Women’ pages

The first women’s page appeared in the New York World in the 1890s.

Women’s pages quickly became essential for newspapers that featured society coverage, food and fashion.

By the 1950s and 60s, a new breed of women’s page editors arrived on the scene. There were journalists such as Dorothy Journey, Vivian Castleberry and Marj Paxson. These women remade the women’s pages giving them a “political bite.”

“Fake news”

Molly Iving told Mills that Castleberry and her Dallas Times-Herald reporters “got away with murder because the male editors never bothered to read it.”

Woman’s pages were writing about birth control and abortion but it wasn’t considered ‘real news’.

 According to Kimberley Voss, an associated professor of journalism at the University of Central Florida, “Woman’s Pages were simply fluff”. However, Voss also points out that they were doing good journalism, they were just wearing hats and white gloves because that’s what society required of them. Voss believes that women pages were quite revolutionary because, “they found a way to  play by the rules and get things done”. Voss said. However, the  growing feminist movement felt that women’s issues were as important as the stories on newspapers’ front pages. One example of this is when  Gloria Steinem  complained when she was profiled by a women’s page editor though . Voss also  notes that two years after Steinem spoke out against the women’s page, she admitted that she had been wrong, that there was a place for women’s pages.

The Transitions

 The first paper to transition was the Washington Post, on January 6, 1969. Ben Bradlee, editor at the Post, told mills that the reason for the change was to “treat women as people and not as appendages to men,” as well as organize the paper between work and leisure, rather than men and women .

Jean Taylor who became the editor of the Los Angeles Times “view” section a year after its 1970 founding, complained to Mills that it was women who considered her section as unimportant. “We artificially had to put esteem into women's sections by bringing men in, by running stories all people would be interested in.'' This also included hiring male writers. Marj Paxson was laid off in 1970, after getting an award for her work at the St. Petersburg Times’s women’s section [now the Tampa Bay Times]. She was then hired as women’s editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin. However her job there  disappeared in favor of a “Focus” section with a male editor. She told Mills, “We were not considered capable of directing this new kind of feature section. That was man’s work.”

Feminist Movement

Feminist continue  to rightly complain of being pushed out of the more “serious” sections and worry about being discussed alongside the day’s fashions leads to more focus on their clothes and makeup, than their ideas, and stories on “woman's issues” that hit front pages are often still written by men. They provide space for women to talk to each other, since we’re still too often left out of the conversation in front of male audiences.