Women's Pages Research Articles

“Too Soon” to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia

While research has explored the extent of gender bias and the barriers to women's inclusion on English-language Wikipedia, very little research has focused on the problem of racial bias within the encyclopedia. Despite advocacy groups' efforts to incrementally improve representation on Wikipedia, much is unknown regarding how biographies are assessed after creation. Applying a combination of web-scraping, deep learning, natural language processing, and qualitative analysis to pages of academics nominated for deletion on Wikipedia, we demonstrate how Wikipedia's notability guidelines are unequally applied across race and gender. We find that online presence predicts whether a Wikipedia page is kept or deleted for white male academics but that this metric is idiosyncratically applied for female and BIPOC academics. Further, women's pages, regardless of race, were more likely to be deemed “too soon” for Wikipedia. A deeper analysis of the deletion archives reveals that when the tag is used on a woman's biography it is done so outside of the community guidelines, referring to one's career stage rather than media/online coverage. We argue that awareness of hidden biases on Wikipedia is critical to the objective and equitable application of the notability criteria across race and gender both on the encyclopedia and beyond.

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

Family Values in Advertising Discourse of Women’s Periodicals of the NEP Era

The aim of this research is to identify the values of a family and society, reflected in advertising discourse including bibliographic advertisement on the pages of women’s periodicals of the NEP era. New empirical material is introduced into scientific circulation: texts of traditional and editorial book advertisement of non-state periodicals for women (Magazine for housewives, 1922–1926, Women’s magazine, 1926–1930). The relevance of the research is due to the necessity of studying bibliographic advertisement in women’s specialized magazines, which has not been included previously in the orbit of scientific interest. The basic research methods are historical and typological, comparative historical, methods of linguistic and textual analysis, entire overview. The authors reveal the importance of bibliographic advertisement on the pages of “Magazine for housewives” and “Women’s magazine” in process of transformation of the value paradigm in post-revolutionary Russia, reconsideration of the old and consolidation of the new gender roles of a woman in Soviet society (the wife, the mother, the housewife, the worker, the social activist). Using syncretic of their genre nature texts on the pages of Magazine for housewives and Women’s magazine actualizes genres of bookselling advertisement (annotation, price list) as well as media genres (mini-review and review, recommendation, etc.). Comparisons, lexical repetitions, superlatives of adjectives, calls to action, etc. were used as means of language suggestion in book advertisement in specialized magazines. Indication of the uniqueness of a book novelty, promise of a gift or a benefit and personalization are becoming the universal methods of book advertisement. Since the strategies tested in bibliographic advertisement of the NEP era were actively developed in the subsequent period, our results can be used in future analysis of axiological context of the Soviet advertising discourse.

Christina Stead and the Matter of America by Fiona Morrison

Reviewed by: Christina Stead and the Matter of America by Fiona Morrison Michael Ackland CHRISTINA STEAD AND THE MATTER OF AMERICA, by Fiona Morrison. Sydney Studies in Australian Literature. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2019. 196 pp. $45.00 paperback. Christina Stead (1902–1983), although Australian born and much drawn to England and France, was well qualified to write about the United States. Her partner for four decades, William James Blake (né Wilhelm Blech), whom she met in London, was an American businessman, a Marxist theoretician, and a popular novelist, whose published non-fiction included Understanding the Americans (1954)—a subject on which he was regarded as an authority. Stead readily confessed to having profited greatly from Blake's learning and opinions, and he undoubtedly did the most to shape her views of America before they arrived there from Paris in July 1935. After less than a year they returned to the Continent, then mid-way through 1937 moved to Manhattan in time to watch the American economy slide into recession. They stayed in the United States, living on both the east and west coasts, until December 1946. Stead observed firsthand the New Deal, America's version of the Second World War, and the opening moves of what would become the Cold War. This was a crucial decade in American history and in Stead's life. Understandably, [End Page 174] then, Fiona Morrison's Christina Stead and the Matter of America is hailed on the back cover as "the first critical study of Stead's time in America" and foregrounded for its exploration of "Stead's profound engagement with American politics and culture," "gender," and "modernity" that mark her as "the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century." Inevitably Stead drew on her knowledge and experience of the United States in her writing. American settings and citizens feature prominently in five of her novels (one of them incomplete), which are the main focus of Morrison's study. Stead also wrote short stories, articles, and numerous letters about the United States and left manuscripts that dealt with diverse aspects of her experience there. Given her subject, Morrison's omission of much of this material is hard to justify and can lead to dubious claims. In addition, the critic's historical grasp of the period seems, at best, general and on crucial issues far from reliable, as when the America examined here is described stunningly as being in "transition from a buoyant and financially viable 1930s into a world of ever-increasing political and commercial difficulty" (p. 136). A deeper knowledge of the 1930s and 1940s would, in turn, have helped considerably to illuminate "Stead's profound engagement[s]" during these decades. What is at stake here can be well illustrated by one of Stead's essays on the United States that is discussed frequently and at length: "It Is All a Scramble for Boodle: Christina Stead Sums Up America." Published posthumously in the Australian Book Review in 1992, it is a fairly predictable account of the American obsession with wealth above all else: "Here, where the love of money is brutally outspoken and crassly advertised, no illusions are offered to the workers … it is all a scramble for boodle and nothing else" (p. 16). Stead is taken aback by the pervasiveness of money: "Everything is expressed in terms of money; [I am] shocked by women's pages where the money value of divorce … where the money value of children is discussed" (p. 85). These conditions, of course, are dramatized in Stead's novels such as Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) and A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948) and duly elaborated on by Morrison. However, what is passed over in silence is that this essay exists in two versions, the second being longer, thematically more diverse, and held among the Stead papers at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Especially striking in this manuscript version is Stead's response to broader social problems than the national obsession with "boodle." One of her major themes is an America of glaring social disparities, including destitute African Americans "buying tainted meat secretly at dusk from unpainted wagon" and images of human misery...

The Potential of Facebook Utilization in Women’s Undergarments Luxury Fashion Brand

. The dynamic of global economy drives luxury fashion businesses to change. The primary channel of retailing for luxury fashion brand undergarment is offline stores because Luxury brands are expected to evoke uniqueness and exclusivity through high quality, premium pricing, and controlled distribution. With the exponential growth of various social media, however, luxury brands face challenges in how to maintain brand integrity while keep up with the social media trend. Facebook pages have emerged as a commonly used marketing communication tools and marketing channel, because visiting luxury fashion brand Facebook may stimulate consumers' interest in using Facebook for shopping. The purpose of this paper is to examine how women's undergarments luxury fashion brand using Facebook as a marketing tool and how consumers are interacting with the brand by measuring the number of fans, comments, and accuracy of information provided. This paper is based upon a content analysis, inquiring into 30 women's undergarment luxury fashion brand Facebook pages. Data analysis revealed many undergarment luxury fashion brands appear to have in promoting their products and engaging customers through Facebook. One major problem was the absence of an updated Facebook page. The findings of this study can enable luxury brands to forecast the future purchasing behavior of their customers and provide a guide to managing their marketing activities as well.

The meat and veg complex: food and national progress in Australian print media, 1930–1965

Plain, British-derived cookery appeared increasingly old hat in 1950s and 1960s Australia. In contrast to the culinary novelties introduced by European migration and an expanding consumer economy, ‘meat and three veg’-style cooking symbolised the staid prewar past. However, the gastronomic ‘coming of age’ celebrated by post-war journalists, and its associated narrative of national cultural progress, had been rehearsed by prewar advocates of culinary reform. Columnists in 1930s, particularly in the newspaper ‘women's pages’, urged Australian culinary progress within broader debates on nutrition, population health, cultural development and national identity. This rhetoric of progress and maturation continues to influence perceptions of mid-twentieth century Australian food history.This article has been peer reviewed.

Multiracial Women and the African Press in Post-World War II Lourenço Marques, Mozambique

Based on original research of the biweekly publication of the women's pages in Lourenço Marques' only ‘African’ newspaper, O Brado Africano, this paper addresses racial and class dimensions of urban ideals of feminine modernity in the colonial capital of Mozambique. Between 1948 and 1958 the Pagina para a mulher produced rich and at times radical content. During this period, an urban multiracial middle class of Christian, educated women used the Pagina para a mulher to transmit, discuss, and debate ideas of what it meant to be a modern woman, mother, wife, daughter, and contributing member of society. The article looks specifically at feminine ideals of modernity that gave meaning to colonial categories of ‘civilised’ and ‘non-civilised’ Africans within an assimilationist legal framework of ‘native’ African subject and ‘non-native’ African citizen, and the racial tensions produced by a colonial ideology of European racial and cultural superiority. I argue that the content of the women's pages of O Brado Africano merits scholarly attention as a site of female social and political discourse and aspiration in a post-WWII era of possibility.

More Than “Rations, Passions, and Fashions”: Re-Examining the Women's Pages in the Milwaukee Journal

The Milwaukee Journal is an example of a Midwestern metropolitan newspaper that featured an unnoticed but progressive women's section in the 1950s and 1960s produced by a group of women who were doing more than giving superficial treatment to food, family, fashion, and furnishings, derisively known as the Four F's. They were focused on a fifth F—feminism—quietly laying the foundation for the women's liberation movement years before marches and demonstrations drew widespread media attention to the cause. A reexamination of the soft news of the women's pages reveals a process of social change and demonstrates how the women of these sections were finding their own ways of redefining women's roles.

A Woman's Place Is in the News

Through a comparative content analysis, this article examines coverage of women's labor—domestic, volunteer and wage—in commercial and alternative newspapers in Canada during the Second World War. While scholars have written on media representations of women during the war, the lack of a systematic, longitudinal analysis of Canadian newspapers creates methodological and knowledge gaps. Using a feminist media studies framework, this article offers empirical evidence to demonstrate that despite the magnitude and significance of women's wartime labor, the subject received limited news coverage and, moreover, coverage reinforced gendered ideals within and across commercial and labor newspapers. This challenges the idea that either the women's pages or the alternative labor press offered a “space” for more progressive coverage than the gendered representations traditionally found in the mainstream news and, in the process, this article offers ways of thinking about women's labor inclusively, but beyond the historical gendered division of labor.

Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings

Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings

Something More Than a Seduction Story

In 1935, actress Shiga Akiko was arrested for an offense under the Criminal Abortion Law. From 1936 to 1937, her case generated substantial media coverage and public debate. Liberal intellectuals generally viewed Shiga as a victim of the pronatal state; her scandal provided feminists with an opportunity to analyze the relationships among working women, their work environment, and the politics of reproduction. On the pages of women's magazines, readers avidly followed Shiga's case because she was caught up in contradictory forces, as most of them were: pride in work, love for movies, fascination with celebrity culture, and normative femininity. This essay contextualizes discursive and filmic responses to the Shiga scandal within historical processes in the late 1930s Japan. The state attempted to fully incorporate women into the nation-state as subjects for the imminent war. In order to mobilize half the population—indispensable for reproduction—without granting them full rights, various forms of negotiations, persuasions, and seductions took place. The Home Ministry increased control over the film industry by tightening censorship, particularly on representations of women. This essay demonstrates the film industry's response to the scandal, which initially took shape as Shiga's unsuccessful comeback projects, resulted in the emergence of a cycle of new seduction stories in which a heroine bears an illegitimate child and yet regains personal integrity and economic independence. This example of a compromise among commercial cinema, active women, and the state's pressure offers a new perspective on wartime Japanese film culture as a field of negotiations.

Feminism and social change: women's place in Taiwanese newspapers and public opinion

This study used a content analysis of editorial articles to explore the portrayal of gender in women's pages of Taiwanese newspapers between 1975 and 2009. In addition to topical themes and editorial format, we focused on how women's pages present political messages in terms of the topics addressed, style of argumentation, methods of challenging traditional gender roles, and the promotion of provocative actions. We compared the content analysis data with social development indicators and public opinion polls in the contexts of the evolution of the market and the women's movement in Taiwan. We found that in the early stages of the women's movement, the women's pages mainly played the role of shaping a collective identity among the female public. During the postfeminist period, the women's pages mainly address social problems rooted in the domestic realm and provide self-development advice.

Women's Pages in Australian Print Media from the 1850s

For a roughly a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, most Australian newspapers ran a section directed towards a woman reader written from a woman's perspective and edited by a female journalist. The rise and fall of the women's editor's ‘empire within an empire’ provides insight into female journalists' industrial situation, as well as a window on to gender relations in colonial and post-Federation Australia. This history matches wider struggles over the notion of separate spheres and resulting claims for equality, as well as debates over mainstream news values. This article investigates the appearance and disappearance of women's sections from Australian newspapers, and argues that this story has greater impact on contemporary digital formats than we perhaps realise.

Anglicyzmy w artykułach dziennikarzy modowych a kryteria poprawności językowej

The article deals with the subject of expansive borrowings from English, encountered in the texts of fashion journalists published in the pages of women’s magazines. The Anglicisms in question have been characterized in confrontation with the criteria of evaluation of linguistic innovation used today by normativists, namely: the criterion of self-sufficiency, language economy and also the functional, visual and aesthetic criteria. The analysis of this lexis renders possible its evaluation with regard to usefulness in the Polish language, but also makes it possible to formulate conclusions whether we can talk today about the process of creation of a professional jargon of fashion journalists.

Book Review: The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey that Inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club, by Linda Kay

The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey that Inspired the Canadian Women's Press Club. Linda Kay. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012. 228 pp. $34.95 hbk.In June 1904, sixteen Canadian journalists boarded a luxurious train car bound for the St. Louis World's Fair. It was a newsworthy trip for more than one reason: they were female and about to report on a global exposition, undoubtedly the biggest story of the year. At the turn of the century, the few dozen women who worked as journalists in Canada typically penned articles on etiquette and social events for women's pages, and they rarely traveled for assignments. That was about to change.In this enjoyable road-trip narrative, Linda Kay, associate professor and chair of Concordia University's Department of Journalism, describes a journey that helped Canada's female journalists achieve professional legitimacy and led to the formation of the Canadian Women's Press Club (CWPC). As the first women's press club in the world to claim a national membership, the CWPC would endure 100 years.But the sixteen women traveling in the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) car could not know any of this. Dressed in the day's fashion of floor-length tweed skirts, shirt- waists, and large-brimmed hats, the women were excited and a little nervous. For some, the assignment marked their first reporting venture. The novices also were awe- struck by the few stars among them, such as Kathleen Blake Coleman of the Mail and Empire, one of Canada's largest newspapers. Known by her readers as Kit Coleman, she had become famous for covering the 1898 Spanish American War from Cuba.CPR sponsored the journalists' ten-day trip. The railway wanted to entice immi- grants to western Canada and thus ensure the transcontinental line it had completed in 1885 would enjoy brisk traffic. Its publicity-savvy officials knew a group of women traveling alone to the World's Fair would garner a great deal of press coverage about Canada and their company, and they were right. The railway's public relations appara- tus, although not a focus of this book, is an interesting side note.The author deftly places the women's stories within the political and social context of Canada at the start of the twentieth century. In 1904, women in Canada did not have the right to vote or hold public office. Married women found it difficult to continue professional careers. Kay shows that the cultural differences of the country's dual language citizenry are reflected in this group of journalists, which was evenly split between English- and French-speakers. …

'What we think is needed is a union of domestics such as the miners have': The Domestic Workers' Union of Great Britain and Ireland 1908-14

This article provides the first in-depth account of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–10). In a period of intensifying labour unrest, young female servants working in private homes attempted to organize their own trade unions. Short-lived and disrupted by the First World War, their efforts left little formal documentation and have never before been the subject of historical study. Their activities can, however, be traced in the pages of women’s movement periodicals and the correspondence columns of local and radical newspapers. The idea of organizing domestic servants as workers was an anathema to many in both the labour and the women’s movements. Nevertheless, the Domestic Workers’ Union provides a fascinating case study of how, in this moment of exceptional social unrest, elements of trade unionism and feminism converged to challenge entrenched gendered divisions between the public and the private, the workplace and the home.

On the Front Page in the "Jazz Age": Journalist Ione Quinby, Chicago’s Ageless "Girl Reporter"

discovery has been made as why I wear a confessed lone Quinby readers of the Chicago Evening Post, where her male colleagues the newsroom had quite figured the foibles of the first newswoman their midst the 1920s. Famed as the Posfs reporter, although she was her thirties, Quinby wrote that the men never sure about my They also were baffled by her habit of never removing her hat, whether at her desk the newsroom or out assignment the city's streets. As her unmarcelled bob customarily was crowned with a $5 turban, she wrote, the men didn't know whether my bangs were sewed my hat or annexed my scalp. Quinb/s behaviors so bemused her editor that he sent her out a stunt for free psychoanalysis offered by faculty alienists at nearby Northwestern University. Typically, Quinby took the assignment good humor, turning a light-hearted, self-deprecating story that won her one of more than a thousand bylines earned by a phenomenon of the era: a woman journalist the front page the Jazz Age Chicago.1Typically, too, Quinby had persevered when the psychology professor initially had rejected her request. He looked at me kindly but said they were only taking subjects who had something wrong with them, she wrote, such as children who misbehave school or persons sent by the police department for disorderly conduct. The Post photographer helpfully protested the professor behalf of men the newsroom, stating that you'd better take her, as 'there's something radically wrong with her.' The readily agreed, offering that two trappings of her job-her trademark hats and her desk's placement the newsroom-had become totems. got a lot more nerve when I've got a hat on encounters with people I interview...from those who treat me sodas those who try throw me out the door. I always have a she wrote. And upsets me terribly have my desk moved, she admitted, as its place the newsroom was where she had made her most important decisions amid constant deadlines competition among the city's press for headlines and for front-page bylines.2The professor, apparently intrigued by a reporter well-known for covering the girl-crime beat of murders and other mayhem Chicago the 1920s, agreed give a glimpse into her psyche. She he regaled her readers with his assessment of her attachment her ever-present headwear, writing that subconsciously, I have made myself believe that a hat also helped her reach big decisions, especially in desperate situations. Indeed, compared physical risks of stunts and stories that sent women reporters into the worst of city streets, an assignment that took her a campus and risked only a look into her mind may have been a relief. She shared her wariness, however, that her sources and others now would be mean enough take advantage of this discovery. The newsroom also now would know of the significance that she placed upon the placement of her desk. 'You don't like have your desk moved, the alienist advised, as it satisfies your ego as the only little girl reporter among men the news side, not with distaff staff off the side with women's pages. Owing her unusual place the press, the professor recommended participation his study to promote social adjustment. The reporter retreated, however, upon realizing that participation required filling out a form that would reveal her age. Only after her retirement, six decades later-in her mid-nineties-and her death at the age of a hundred years, would her co-workers discover that she had been a decade older than she had claimed.3By then, despite her fame the 1920s, Quinby's remarkable career was long forgotten. She rarely receives mention scholarship the history of the Chicago press, and only mischaracterize her as solely a sob sister, a reporter the girl-crime beat covering sordid lives of other women also better forgotten the city's crime-ridden streets and Cook County jail cells. …

Class and Social Status in the Lydia Pinkham Illustrated Ads: 1890–1900

The illustrated advertisements produced by the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company during the 1890s were unique among newspaper advertisements of the period. They created rich images portraying women in a variety of social settings and were very close in format to the articles being published on the popular women's and society pages. Though the company's target audience was lower- and working-class women, the majority of the illustrated advertisements portrayed middle- and upper-class women, pioneering what became the advertising strategy of appealing to the public's desire for upward mobility.

Domesticating the Airwaves: Broadcasting, Domesticity and Femininity. By Maggie Andrews

In this ambitious and stimulating book, Maggie Andrews explores the complex relationship between broadcasting and domesticity from the foundation of the BBC in 1922 to the present day. Broadcasting, the author argues, has always been ‘preoccupied’ with the home. A considerable amount of programming has been devoted to advice about domestic skills and home improvement, while many of the staples of radio and television drama—especially ‘soap operas’—represent and revolve around family life. At the same time, radio and television dramatically altered men and women's experiences of domesticity, providing a new focus for individual and family leisure and changing the ‘soundscape’ of the home. The lonely housewife, in particular, was offered a new way of connecting to the wider world. This is certainly a rich avenue to pursue: much of the historical work on broadcasting has focused on institutions, especially the BBC, or on news and current affairs output, leaving other strands of programming relatively neglected. And while gender historians have explored the construction of domesticity in some detail through the pages of women's magazines and popular newspapers, less attention has been paid to similar material transmitted via the airwaves. As an experienced social and cultural historian who has previously written on the Women's Institutes and consumption practices, Andrews has the ability to situate broadcasting in the rhythms and realities of everyday life. She draws on an impressive range of sources, moving beyond the BBC Written Archive and the texts and images of the programmes themselves to evidence about reception found in Mass-Observation surveys, oral histories and diaries. The result is a rich study full of interesting detail and perceptive insights.

Out on assignment: newspaper women and the making of modern public space

Out on Assignment illuminates the lives and writings of a lost world of women who wrote for major metropolitan newspapers at the start of the twentieth century. Using extraordinary archival research, Alice Fahs unearths a richly networked community of female journalists drawn by the hundreds to major cities--especially New York--from all parts of the United States. Newspaper women were part of a wave of women seeking new, independent, urban lives, but they struggled to obtain the newspaper work of their dreams. Although some female journalists embraced more adventurous reporting, including stunt work and undercover assignments, many were relegated to the women's page. However, these intrepid female journalists made the women's page their own. Fahs reveals how their writings--including celebrity interviews, witty sketches of urban life, celebrations of being bachelor girls, advice columns, and a campaign in support of suffrage--had far-reaching implications for the creation of new, modern public spaces for American women at the turn of the century. As observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work, Fahs argues, to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively. | Out on Assignment illuminates the lives and writings of a lost world of women who wrote for major metropolitan newspapers at the start of the twentieth century. Fahs argues that, as observers and actors in a new drama of independent urban life, newspaper women used the simultaneously liberating and exploitative nature of their work to demonstrate the power of a public voice, both individually and collectively.