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Cape Canaveral
We had hoped to take Baby Curtis to see the shuttle launch this week but it was scrubbed again. In the early years on the Space Coast, there were many profiles of the astronauts and their crews. One series – featuring the women at Cape Canaveral – ran in the women’s pages of the Miami Herald. The five-part series, featured below, was written by the wonderful Roberta Applegate.
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Virginia Whitehill
Dallas civic leader and women’s rights advocate Virginia Whitehill often worked with Dallas women’s page editor Vivian Castleberry to create a better place for women. Beginning in the 1960s, the two women helped co-found the Dallas Women’s Coalition, Women’s Issues Network, Dallas Women’s Foundation, The Family Place shelter, and the Women’s Southwest Federal Credit Union. From a Dallas Morning News profile: “Each was intended to help with the issues confronting women, but that didn’t make Ms. Whitehill andother leaders popular in some circles.“When we went down to Austin to lobby state leaders, some called us ‘FLACs’ – ‘Fat Lesbian Atheist Communists,’ ” she said. “There was that kind of bad-mouthing.…
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Bonnie Cashin grant
I am applying for a UCLA Research Fellowship in order to go through the extensive papers of the designer Bonnie Cashin. She has often been referred to as one of the “Mothers of American Sportswear.” I would focus on the 1950s and 1960s, her post Broadway and Hollywood years as she designed for middle-class women. As New York Times fashion writer Bernadine Morris wrote in 1968: “Women buy Cashin clothes because they are cozy and comfortable, not because they bowl people over.” I hope to examine her interaction with fashion journalists at newspapers. I initially came across Cashin’s work with women’s page editor and fashion journalist Eleni Epstein, the longtime…
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Vivian Castleberry and JFK assassination
Today I am back to working on my manuscript on Dallas Times Herald women’s page editor Vivian Castleberry. I am writing about her coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy. She was waiting to watch the president at the Trade Mart. The above hate ad ran in Dallas Morning News on the morning of the assassination. In an oral history, Vivian recalled being relieved that her newspaper did not run the ad.
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Betty Ewing and society writing
Too often society columns found in women’s pages are reduced to being insignificant. After all, the women’s section where these columns typically ran was often referred to as the “step-child of the profession” in journalism histories. Yet, these columns chronicled the stories of the powerful – the movers and shakers of a community. And, these columns also highlighted the women married to those in power. In doing so, Ewing gave overlooked women a voice. Ewing highlighted the stories of the wives who worked quietly behind-the-scenes. The stories of these women deserve to be part of the historical record of the South. Ewing’s reporting and writing revealed the personalities of the…
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Vivian Castleberry’s Equality Stories
I am working on my book chapter about Dallas women’s page editor Vivian Castleberry and her role in the women’s liberation movement. This is the lead from the 1980 article she wrote, “Equality: How Far Do Men Want To Go?” “Many men say they desire relationships of equality with women. But the past often dies hard – for both men and women. For many men, equality stops with dirty dishes and the dirty diapers. For many women, it stops with when the car stalls on the freeway and when the kitchen sink stops up.”
A website devoted to the history of newspaper women's pages
