I really enjoyed this article about Mary Ann Grossman who has spent 50 years at St. Paul Pioneer Press – many of those years as the women’s page editor.

This was my favorite part:
“Years later, Grossmann found herself defending the Women’s Department and the society it covered.

“In the 1960s and ’70s, the next generation of women didn’t want anything to do with the women’s section. They all wanted to work for the city desk,” she said. “I always told them that we climbed on the shoulders of our sisters who came before us; don’t ever sneer at those women. And those women, through their charity balls and fundraisers, built hospitals and funded art projects. They helped make St. Paul the town it is today.”

Grossmann became editor of the Women’s Department just as women’s roles in society were changing.

“I interviewed Betty Friedan (author of “The Feminine Mystique”) before her book hit the shelves,” she said. “She’s the mother of us all. She empowered women to look at their lives and know that they should be able to do what they wanted to do. It sparked the national women’s movement.”

Trying to cover the changing times was tricky.

“I have to compliment the men running the paper at the time; this was a confusing time. They wanted to get the paper into contemporary times, but they didn’t want to lose readers, and we had a lot of very conservative readers,” Grossmann said. “Covering things like abortion — which we did, from both sides — was a big departure from what we used to write about.”

Please follow and like us:

I really enjoyed this article about Mary Ann Grossman who has spent 50 years at St. Paul Pioneer Press – many of those years as the women’s page editor.

This was my favorite part:
“Years later, Grossmann found herself defending the Women’s Department and the society it covered.

“In the 1960s and ’70s, the next generation of women didn’t want anything to do with the women’s section. They all wanted to work for the city desk,” she said. “I always told them that we climbed on the shoulders of our sisters who came before us; don’t ever sneer at those women. And those women, through their charity balls and fundraisers, built hospitals and funded art projects. They helped make St. Paul the town it is today.”

Grossmann became editor of the Women’s Department just as women’s roles in society were changing.

“I interviewed Betty Friedan (author of “The Feminine Mystique”) before her book hit the shelves,” she said. “She’s the mother of us all. She empowered women to look at their lives and know that they should be able to do what they wanted to do. It sparked the national women’s movement.”

Trying to cover the changing times was tricky.

“I have to compliment the men running the paper at the time; this was a confusing time. They wanted to get the paper into contemporary times, but they didn’t want to lose readers, and we had a lot of very conservative readers,” Grossmann said. “Covering things like abortion — which we did, from both sides — was a big departure from what we used to write about.”

Please follow and like us: