Transforming the Women's Pages

Abstract

Like many elements of the American newspaper, women's sections were born in the late nineteenth century as one of the innovations propelled by Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World. Numerous scholars have documented that Pulitzer created reading material targeted specifically at women to wrap around the advertisements for department stores and various products used in the home.1 By 1900, many metropolitan newspapers were publishing women's pages filled with society news and advice on fashion, homemaking, manners, and romance.2 Such material continued to dominate women's pages for half a century. The male editors and publishers who controlled American journalism paid scant attention to the quality of the stories, fully satisfied to fill the space with flowery prose describing debutante balls, superficial advice to wives and mothers, and frivolous stories on the latest trends in fashion. This study focuses on three women who, beginning in the 1950s, were among those editors who rejected Pulitzer's stale definition of what editorial content was suitable for their readers. These women-Dorothy Jurney, Vivian Castleberry, and Marie Anderson-helped transform the women's pages of the American newspaper. Jurney, who worked for seven papers during a career that spanned forty-five years, recently recalled: Back in the '50s, male editors didn't give a whit what we 'girls' put in the women's section. Food, fashion, fluff-it was all filler to them. But some of us women editors thought differently; we wanted to start covering the substantive issues that women needed to know about.3 Various scholars of American journalism have studied the changes in women's pages, finding that during the late 1960s and early 1970s society and homemaking news shrank to make room for coverage of such hard-hitting topics as sex-based job discrimination and women's reproductive rights, as well as stories highlighting women who were expanding their lives beyond the four walls of the home.4 Those researchers have credited such major newspapers as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times for leading the shift.5 Although that body of scholarship has duly chronicled the sea change that swept across women's sections, it has not probed the depths of the topic. Scholars have concentrated on the types of changes that occurred rather than on exactly the editors succeeded in bringing about those changes. Considering the how question is significant because the women's editors were re-inventing a section of the American newspaper during an era when journalism was dominated by male decision makers who had little understanding of or interest in many of the topics that were important to American women.. In addition, understanding the changes came about may have implications for other changes-or potential changes-in the American news media. This article identifies and discusses some of the specific techniques and strategies that were employed by the editors who helped transform the women's pages of American newspapers. The basic question this study attempts to answer is: How did they do it? Related questions include: Did they work within the traditional system that had been developed (by men) to report and edit the news or did they defy that system? Where did these women editors find the strength to make their historic changes? How did they balance their professional and family responsibilities? What price did they pay to become agents of change? What were the limitations of their progress? Major sources for this study include transcripts of three interviews completed as part of the Women in Journalism Oral History Project of the Washington Press Club Foundation, additional interviews by the author with Jurney and Castleberry (Anderson died in 1996 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years), and articles that appeared in the sections that the three women edited between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. …