Kimberly Wilmot Voss, Re-Evaluating Women’s Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era: Celebrating Soft News (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Women are most likely to be included in journalism history if they make it to the front pages of newspapers, cover sports or become wartime correspondents – when they dared to take on men’s turf.[i] Only during wartime did women leave the women’s section, other than a token few. They were rarely part of newsrooms at most metropolitan newspapers. Yet, in the years between World War II and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, many women’s page journalists were also redefining women’s roles.

For much of the scholarship on journalism history, the story of women’s pages has been consistently defined with a broad stroke, described as the four Fs of family, fashion, food and furnishings. The women’s pages were also the place to find high society news, advice columns, and wedding information. More often, the term fluff was applied to women’s page material. Yet, the sections were rarely examined to see if there was more to it. Recent scholarship has begun to shine a light on the women who covered soft news.[ii] The truth is more complicated as many women’s pages had long been refining roles for women as recent scholarship has shown.[iii]

Reporter Susan Paynter said her work in Seattle demonstrated how women’s page news was evolving by the 1960s. She said: “The women’s pages became, really, the center of social-issues reporting. The news side wasn’t doing it at all.” She said that by the time the news side realized that they had been scooped by the women’s pages: “It was too late, because the ball was in our court and we were running with it.”[iv] The Seattle newspaper was not alone in these changes. By the late 1960s, the women’s pages of the Charlotte Observer were covering the social stigma of syphilis and life inside a women’s prison. The Detroit Free Press covered prostitution in the city – including ranking those who just wanted a free meal to those who exchanged services for drugs. The New York newspaper Newsday women’s pages included 13 ways to avoid a child molester.[v]

It is easy to simplify the content of the women’s pages rather than examine the complexity of the material. In looking at the women’s sections, there was some fluff and undoubtedly some of the material reinforced women’s role in the private sphere. Yet, there were also stories of career women and community development by clubwomen It has been shown that there were progressive women’s sections throughout the 1960s, as various newspapers won Penney-Missouri Awards.

[i] Kathleen A Cairnes, Front Page Women Journalists, 1920-1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); War Torn: Stories of the Women Journalists Who Covered the Vietnam War (New York: Random House: 2002)

[ii] Eileen Wirth, From Society Page to Front Page (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013),

[iii] Kimberly Wilmot Voss, “Anne Rowe Goldman: Refashioning Women’s News in St. Petersburg, Florida,” FCH Annals: Journal of the Florida Conference of Historians, March 2011, 104-111. Kimberly Voss and Lance Speere,

[iv] Susan Paynter oral history with Maria McLeod, July 2008, 5.

[v] “Pages for Women,” Time, May 19, 1967

Kimberly Wilmot Voss is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Central Florida. Prior to this work, Voss authored The Food Section and co-authored Mad Men and Working Women. To purchase Re-Evaluating Women’s Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era: Celebrating Soft News, click here.