Beverley Morales Presentation

I will be presenting the paper “Pioneering Journalist Beverley Morales: Redefining Women’s Page Content in 1960s Florida,” at the Florida Conference of Historians next Spring in Lake City, Florida.

Beverley Brink Morales (pictured above) was a ground-breaking journalist who spent much of the 1960s in South Florida. It was a significant time for women’s page editors as women’s news was being redefined as a mix of traditional and progressive content. Florida was a significant place for women’s page journalists as they won a majority of Penney-Missouri Awards – the top recognition for women’s pages – throughout the 1960s. Morales won a prize in the first year of the Awards for the women’s section that she had helped create at the upstart Sun Sentinel newspaper. Her career also included becoming a successful grant writer in the years after the women’s pages disappeared. This paper is a description of Morales’ Florida career and how she re-invented herself after the end of the women’s pages in the early 1970s.

It is the story of a previously unknown Florida journalist who helped redefine the concept of women’s news in her state and the industry. It also addresses challenge that women’s page journalists faced as their sections were eliminated. The scholarship adds to the limited literature on women’s page journalists. Material for the paper comes from the papers of the Penney-Missouri Awards at the Missouri Historical Society and interviews with Morales’ sisters.

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