Dorothy Jurney
- Dorothy Jurney, Eleni Epstein, Gloria Biggs, Marjorie Paxson, National Women and Media Collection, Roberta Applegate
Happy Archive Month!
October is National Archive Month. I love archives – which we visit as often as we can. Our favorite is the National Women & Media Collection in Missouri. I am writing an article about my discoveries there for the 25th anniversary of the Collection. The NWMC was started by women’s page editor turned publisher Marjorie Paxson. Other women’s page journalists whose papers are at the NWMC include Marie Anderson, Roberta Applegate, Gloria Biggs, Eleni Epstein and Dorothy Jurney. And, most helpful of all are the papers of the Penney-Missouri Awards – the top recognition for women’s pages in the 1960s.
- Dorothy Jurney, Florida Women's Pages, Jeanne Voltz, jounalism history, Marie Anderson, Marjorie Paxson, Miami Herald, Roberta Applegate
Saving the Miami Herald Building
Yesterday, the Miami Herald featured this story about a preservation group’s fight to save the Miami Herald Building. Marie Anderson was the women’s page editor of the Herald when the building opened in 1963. The Miami Herald had one of the top women’s page sections in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. Journalists who wrote for the section at the time included: Roberta Applegate, Dorothy Jurney, Marjorie Paxson and Jeanne Voltz.
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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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St. Pete Beach & Dorothy Jurney’s brother
We are back from our Poynter trip and our stay on St. Pete Beach. Legendary women’s page editor Dorothy Jurney’s brother, Dick Misener, was the mayor of St. Pete Beach in the 1970s. We also drove over the bridge named in his honor. While at Poynter, I read portions of a book about newspaper editor Eugene Patterson. Above is a letter from Patterson to Jurney. It can be found in her papers in the National Women and Media Collection. My article about her was published last summer in Journalism History.
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Soft news? Hard news? Or, quilted news.
Most of journalism history considers the content of women’s pages to be soft news. Yet, a closer examination of the women’s sections in the 1950s and 1960s shows more complex content. There was soft news – personality profiles, fashion stories and features. Yet, there were also stories about politics, education news and family violence. The women’s page editors created a new kind of news within the social fabric of their communities – a kind of quilted news. Quilts have become recognized as art – largely women’s art – in recent decades. Some credit the counterculture’s arts-and-crafts movement in the 1960s for the renewed attention to the craft. Others view the…
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Soft news? Hard news? Or, quilted news.
Most of journalism history considers the content of women’s pages to be soft news. Yet, a closer examination of the women’s sections in the 1950s and 1960s shows more complex content. There was soft news – personality profiles, fashion stories and features. Yet, there were also stories about politics, education news and family violence. The women’s page editors created a new kind of news within the social fabric of their communities – a kind of quilted news. Quilts have become recognized as art – largely women’s art – in recent decades. Some credit the counterculture’s arts-and-crafts movement in the 1960s for the renewed attention to the craft. Others view the…
