Florida Women's Pages
- Bobbi McCallum, Florida Women's Pages, journalism history, Koky Dishon, Roberta Applegate, Ruth Ellen Church, women's history, women's page history
Working as a Public Historian
I have been asked why I spend so much time doing research when that work is not considered research by my university. My answer is that I believe in public history. I have written before about having to twice as hard to get tenure because I study regional rather than national figures in journalism history. While it does not feel fair, the women I write about were rarely treated fairly and faced much bigger hurdles than my own. I have the usual peer-review history journal articles that I publicize through social media, especially Academia.edu and Linkedin. My article about food editor Jeanne Voltz has more than 560 page views on…
You May Also Like
Fashion Writers Marian Christy & Bobbi McCallum
-
New Discovery: Ruth Gorrell is Ruth Gray
My thanks to Carol DeMasters for helping me to solve a food journalism mystery. As I had suspected, food editor Ruth Gorrell was also Ruth Gray. I could not find a wedding announcement and there was no reference to a maiden name in Ruth Gray’s obituary. Ruth Gorrell earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics from Kansas State University. She was the food editor at the Detroit Times in the early 1950s and later at the St. Petersburg Times. Her recipes are included in the 1952 Coast to Coast cookbook and she attended the annual food editors meetings. As Ruth Gray, she began reviewing restaurants in 1974. One restaurant that…
-
Quilted News: Mixing Hard and Soft News
Lance & I just got the acceptance email from the Florida Communication Association about our paper “Quilted News: Mixing Hard and Soft News to Create a New Definition for Women’s News.” We will be presenting at the conference in Orlando in October. The paper is an examination of the content of the winning women’s pages of the Penney-Missouri Awards in the 1960s – the first decade of the competition. There is an emphasis on Florida newspapers because in the 1960s Florida newspapers dominated the Penney-Missouri Awards. Overall, they won one-third of all awards during the decade. The content of the sections were examined using textual analysis. Further information was drawn…
You May Also Like
Writing Women into the Curriculum
-
Talking About Clubwomen to the Junior League of Daytona Beach
I am looking forward to my talk tomorrow evening to the Junior League of Daytona Beach: “Women’s Clubs: Well Behaved Women Who Helped Create Community.” In my presentation, I will discuss Marie Anderson’s contributions to Miami. Above is a photo of Marie Anderson, the longtime women’s page editor of the Miami Herald and the president of the Miami Junior League in 1945. (She is the one wearing glasses; she is sitting next to fellow journalist Dorothy Jurney.) In the mid-1960s, nearly 9,000 women showed up when Anderson ran a notice asking if female readers were interested in continuing their education. It led to the highly successful Council for the Continuing…
You May Also Like
Writing Women into the Curriculum
- Florida history, Florida Women's Pages, food editors, food journalism, Top Food Editors, Virginia Heffington
Top Food Editors: Day 30 & Virgnia Heffington
Day 30 of Top Food Editors features Virginia Heffington – a food editor in Florida and California. Recently, the Miami Herald cited a recipe from its 1960s food editor Virginia Heffington. Above is the book that Heffington wrote in 1968 when she was the Homemaking Editor of the Miami Herald. At that point she had been at the Herald for five years and had won a Vesta Award – the top recognition for food journalism. In the introduction to the book, she mentioned that she was a graduate of Iowa State in home economic journalism. I also found an archive in Canada that had ten of Virginia’s clips in its…
You May Also Like
Writing Women into the Curriculum
- Dorothy Chapman, Florida newspapers, Florida Women's Pages, food editors, food history, journalism history, Top Food Editors
Top Food Editors: Day 29 & Dorothy Chapman
Day 29 of Top Food Editors features Dorothy Chapman. She had been the women’s page editor at the Orlando Sentinel when Barr was the food editor. When Barr retired in 1969, Chapman became the food editor. In 1971, Chapman became the first restaurant editor at the newspaper. She wrote several cookbooks based on her column, “Thought You’d Never Ask.” According to her obituary: “As the Orlando Sentinel’s first restaurant critic, Chapman wielded her pen and fork with a civil tongue. “We [chefs] gave her a lot of respect because she gave us a lot of respect,” said longtime Orlando restaurateur Major Jarman. “She was fair. Everyone took her comments as…
