journalism history
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The Significance of Jane Nickerson
In journalism history, there is always the question of whether a topic or subject is significant. This is my rationale for why Jane Nickerson is important to study. First, her role as first food editor at the NY Times, the nation’s newspaper of record is clearly significant. Unfortunately, her successor Craig Claiborne has widely overshadowed Jane’s role. (To his credit, he does note her accomplishments in his memoir.) Second, examining her overall career gives journalism history a richer understanding of women’s roles in the industry. If we are to believe the current story of Jane’s career, she left the NY Times to raise her children – it is almost as…
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Penney-Missouri Awards at 12 Years
I recently came across this article from the 1972 Penney-Missouri Award Program. (This was the top honor for women’s pages. It was sponsored by the J.C. Penney Company and overseen by the Missouri School of Journalism.) In it, Paul Myhre who oversaw the program wrote about the first dozen years of the program. The program notes that Paul had passed away the previous September. “So women remain women: Talented, arbitrary, competent, charming, capricious creatures. They are the liberationists; the serious career types; and those who guide and rear the family first and still. Others are finding their first voices, for better or worse. Many millions more are working out of…
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Huffington Post Introduces a Women’s Page
It was announced yesterday that the Huffington Post will now have a women’s section. According to the blog: “HuffPost Women is a site for women looking to redefine success and what it means to live a healthy, happy, well-rounded life. It will highlight an approach to living that centers on the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good; that draws attention to the importance of “unplugging and recharging”; that cheers on the continued shattering of glass ceilings; and that embraces a fearless attitude about work, love, money, beauty, relationships, and friendships — with the understanding that fearlessness is not the absence of fear, it’s the mastery of fear.…
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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.
