I just finished reading Stephanie Coontz’s book A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. It is basically a biography of Betty Friedan’s book and the impact it had. Here is a Q-and-A with the author. I liked the re-examination of the book – she provides a nice historical context of marriage and women’s roles. Her use of interviews with those who read the book during the early 1960s. What was missing was the role that newspaper’s women’s pages played. Coontz cites women’s magazines and their reviews. According to memos and letters from Friedan’s papers, she requested that her book be reviewed in…

In my research on Milwaukee Journal women’s page journalists, I came across a new name yesterday: Constance Daniell. I love the lead in her obituary. It sums up the career of so many of the women I have studied: “Constance Daniell’s career in journalism evolved just like the women’s sections for which she wrote. She began with society reporting. Her work grew to include the full range of feature assignments.” She, like some many women in the 1960s, were both serious journalists and interesting characters. I liked this image of her:”I can still see her traipsing around the newsroom in a ball gown, filing a live report on debutante balls…