Women’s History Month: Edee Greene, Part II
I was more than a little disappointed to read this sexist headline and lead in the Orlando Sentinel yesterday:
“Mom wrestles alligator away from school as last bell rings”
“When a pushy 7-foot alligator tried to break through a chain-link fence onto the Clermont Middle School campus on Thursday, Lake County mom Jessica McGregor took charge.
McGregor, who’s also a Lake County deputy, didn’t want to wait nearly two hours for a distant trapper to show up and cart the offending party off to his destiny as an expensive purse. Especially when the final bell of the school day was ringing and parents were picking up students.”
There was no need to even mention she was a mother – she was on the job. And as for headline space – “cop” and “mom” are even.
It reminded me of the even more insulting lead from the week before on Channel 13:
“The youngest of seven children, Val Demings was raised to believe she could achieve anything if she put her mind to it.
That determination has served her well. Her titles include wife, mom, grandmother and former police chief.
It’s all a balancing act for the woman who said she was raised to serve.”
My bet is that the late Fort Lauderdale women’s page editor Edee Greene would be irritated, too.
In 1966, in hopes of educating editors on the topic, Marjorie Paxson and Greene gave a presentation to a Florida state meeting of managing editors called “What’s Wrong with Women’s Pages.” This was not their self-chosen title. Greene said: “I cried for a week when (her managing editor) Milt Kelly asked me to explain ‘what’s wrong with women’s pages.’ After ALL I had done. All the sacrifices I had made …” Their talk outlined numerous areas where they felt women’s pages and the coverage of women could be improved. The first issue they focused on was the newspapers’ emphasis on women’s roles as wives and mothers:
“We thought they made a mistake when they allowed reporters to write something to the effect that ‘although Edee Greene is a champion stock car driver, president of the Florida women’s press club and women’s editor of the Ft. Lauderdale News, she still finds time to be a wife and mother.”
They turned the story around, asking whether male journalists would write a story explaining that Milt Kelly (Greene’s supervisor) was a professional marksman, a flycaster, and a managing editor and yet still found time to be a husband and father. More than 20 years later, Paxson observed that style of writing is “still being done and I still cringe. We may have come a long way but we have a long way to go.”
