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Penney-Missouri Awards at 12 Years
I recently came across this article from the 1972 Penney-Missouri Award Program. (This was the top honor for women’s pages. It was sponsored by the J.C. Penney Company and overseen by the Missouri School of Journalism.) In it, Paul Myhre who oversaw the program wrote about the first dozen years of the program. The program notes that Paul had passed away the previous September. “So women remain women: Talented, arbitrary, competent, charming, capricious creatures. They are the liberationists; the serious career types; and those who guide and rear the family first and still. Others are finding their first voices, for better or worse. Many millions more are working out of…
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Raising the Curtain on Paul Myhre, the Man Behind the Penney-Missouri Awards and the Network of Women It Fostered
Today I was working on my AEJMC paper, “The Wizard of the Women’s Pages: Raising the Curtain on Paul Myhre, the Man Behind the Penney-Missouri Awards and the Network of Women It Fostered.” In writing the panel presentation, I came across the letter and speech below between Miami Herald women’s page editor Marie Anderson and Penney-Missouri Award Director Paul Myhre. The exchange indicates the special friendship that Paul had with the women’s page editors during the 1960s.
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Raising the Curtain on Paul Myhre, the Man Behind the Penney-Missouri Awards and the Network of Women It Fostered
Today I was working on my AEJMC paper, “The Wizard of the Women’s Pages: Raising the Curtain on Paul Myhre, the Man Behind the Penney-Missouri Awards and the Network of Women It Fostered.” In writing the panel presentation, I came across the letter and speech below between Miami Herald women’s page editor Marie Anderson and Penney-Missouri Award Director Paul Myhre. The exchange indicates the special friendship that Paul had with the women’s page editors during the 1960s.
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Huffington Post Introduces a Women’s Page
It was announced yesterday that the Huffington Post will now have a women’s section. According to the blog: “HuffPost Women is a site for women looking to redefine success and what it means to live a healthy, happy, well-rounded life. It will highlight an approach to living that centers on the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good; that draws attention to the importance of “unplugging and recharging”; that cheers on the continued shattering of glass ceilings; and that embraces a fearless attitude about work, love, money, beauty, relationships, and friendships — with the understanding that fearlessness is not the absence of fear, it’s the mastery of fear.…
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Women’s Pages, Women’s Clubs and Wearing White Gloves
I am finishing up a paper for the upcoming AEJMC Convention in St. Louis. It is part of the Research Panel Session: Mad Men, Working Women, and History. My paper is called “Mad Men and Reasonable Women: Selling Bras Rather Than Burning Them.” I am going to focus on how women were making some inroads in 1960s adverting in products aimed at women, arguing that the selling of lipstick or bras should not be looked at as “lesser than” the selling of other products especially at a time when there were limited areas for women to claim authority. For a framework, I am making a comparison of Mad Men’s Peggy…
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Great News About Billie Womack O’Day
I just got off the phone with the nephew of Miami women’s page editor Billie Womack. (Her radio and pen name was Billie O’Day.) She is alive and alert in a Miami nursing home. We plan to make a trip down to meet her. Her nephew also mentioned that she had kept her papers which should be a gold mine for historians. Billie’s career is truly amazing. She had an impressive musical career – including conducting a symphony in the evenings after her work at the newspaper. I learned about Billie because of her winning several Penney-Missouri Awards – the top honors for women’s pages. I am working on an…
A website devoted to the history of newspaper women's pages
