Florida Women's Pages
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Miami News’ Billie (Womack) O’Day Images
In going through my files I came across these great images of Billie O’Day, women’s page editor of the Miami News in the 1960s. (Her real last name was Womack but she used the pen name Billie O’Day in both her byline and her professional life at this time.) In the top photo, Billie is in the coat on the far left as she won a Penney-Missouri Award for top women’s page in her circulation size. The second photo is from a Columbia, Missouri hotel room. Billie is giving a thumbs-up and that is Miami Herald women’s page editor Marie Anderson nearest the camera. I love the smoke and the…
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Beverley Morales Presentation
I will be presenting the paper “Pioneering Journalist Beverley Morales: Redefining Women’s Page Content in 1960s Florida,” at the Florida Conference of Historians next Spring in Lake City, Florida. Beverley Brink Morales (pictured above) was a ground-breaking journalist who spent much of the 1960s in South Florida. It was a significant time for women’s page editors as women’s news was being redefined as a mix of traditional and progressive content. Florida was a significant place for women’s page journalists as they won a majority of Penney-Missouri Awards – the top recognition for women’s pages – throughout the 1960s. Morales won a prize in the first year of the Awards for…
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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…
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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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Henrietta Poynter and the St. Petersburg Times/Poynter Institute
On Thursday, we are traveling to St. Petersburg for a three-day workshop at Poynter. It is named for St. Petersburg Times Publisher Nelson Poynter – although I always think that it should also be named for his second wife, Henrietta, who wrote editorials for the newspaper with her husband. Together, they created Congressional Quarterly. She had an impressive background with a 1922 journalism degree from Columbia University and then an editor for Vogue and Vanity Fair before marrying Nelson. She was the first woman to serve on the American Committee of the International Press Institute. A friend described her as “an earthy highbrow … the most unboring person I ever…
