When the Washington Post decided, in January of 2013, to run a story about feminists’ disputes over Michelle Obama’s time as first lady, it ran in that magazine’s Style section.
In The New York Times in March 2012, Sarah Hepola’s profile of Gloria Steinem—complete with discussion of where the next feminist icon like her might be—ran in “Fashion & Style.”
And when the young (male) publisher of Jacobin magazine was profiled in the Times’s Books section in January, women editors and publishers at The New Inquiry protested—when their similarly intellectual publication was featured in the Times the previous fall, they had been in “Fashion & Style.” (Disclosure: I am an occasional contributor at Jacobin.)
Katie Baker at Jezebel called out the Times for the disparity in coverage of the two publications.
This is not to say that fashion is less important than literature. But The New Inquiry and The American Reader [another pub founded by a young woman] are not fashion magazines … Why did editors decide that only the female-founded magazines had more in common with Fashion Week than critical thinking?
The question comes up again and again, as women’s projects and concerns that have little to do with fashion nevertheless turn up in the Style pages. To answer it, we have to go back in time a bit and follow the history of the Style section—back to its origins in the “Women’s Page.”
According to Carolyn Kitch, professor of journalism at Temple University, the first regular woman’s page in a major newspaper appeared in the 1890s, in the New York World. Women’s pages quickly became staples of the newspapers, featuring society coverage, food and fashion, coverage of the burgeoning women’s clubs and more. Women reporters could get work there that they weren’t given otherwise. Kay Mills, in her book A Place in the News: From the Women’s Page to the Front Page, points out that having women covering the police and being out at night put off male editors, but having women out at night chatting up powerful sources at society balls never seemed to.
But at the same time, while reserving a separate space for “women’s issues” meant that things like parenting, fashion, and the beginnings of the feminist movement got column inches, the separation also demarcated the women’s page as the site of less newsy content, a “pink ghetto” that still persists.
By the 1950s and ’60s, a new breed of women’s page editors arrived on the scene. Mills describes journalists such as Dorothy Jurney, Vivian Castleberry, and Marj Paxson as remaking the pages, giving them “political bite.” Famed Texas political reporter Molly Ivins told Mills that Castleberry and her Dallas Times-Herald reporters “got away with murder because the … male editors never bothered to read it. They were writing about birth control. Abortion. But it wasn’t considered ‘real news.’ Even today it isn’t.”
“They were women talking to women, making issues relevant so that women were encouraged to speak out about them,” says Kimberly Voss, associate professor of journalism at the University of Central Florida. Voss maintains a blog devoted to Women’s Page history, which she describes as a “public history” project, a way to correct the idea that women’s pages were simply fluff.
“They were doing good journalism, they were just wearing hats and white gloves because that’s what society required of them,” Voss continues. “It was really quite revolutionary. They found a way to play by the rules and get things done.”
Yet the growing feminist movement felt that women’s issues were as important as the stories on newspapers’ front pages. Gloria Steinem famously complained when she was profiled by a women’s page editor—though Voss notes that two years after Steinem spoke out against the women’s page, she admitted that she had been wrong, that there was a place for women’s pages.
This is a great piece, and true of the UK too - I remember first reading about The Vagenda blog when the founders were profiled in the Style section of the Sunday Times...
#1 Posted by Debbi Evans, CJR on Wed 20 Feb 2013 at 10:26 AM
Why is this article broken up into three separate screens? In a print newspaper or journal itr would be together as one.
Women helped to build their print journalism ghetto by cooperating with the powers that be.
#2 Posted by Lewis B. Sckolnick, CJR on Fri 22 Feb 2013 at 12:00 PM
This doesn't go nearly far enough towards answering the questions raised by the first three paragraphs. It really doesn't answer them at all. The implication here is that "style" sections are more or less "women's pages," albeit without the feminist-y consciousness-raising stuff that marked some of the more interesting ones in the 60s and 70s. But the author is speaking about them as if they're a thing of the recent past. Those two NYT profiles that received such incongruous treatment -- and I do think it was incongruous rather than disparate -- were last year. I don't see how anyone can explain why they ran in the sections they did without talking to the editors who put them there. They're contemporary figures, how about asking them? I also think it's misguided to say that "women-only sections are all too often the only places . . . where women don’t run into the same sexist coverage." As a woman who generally does not read the "style" section (which is far too short on actual style and far too much about very middle class trends) and who does not read blogs like Jezebel or the Hairpin (which likewise seem fixated on things stereotypically of interest to extremely conventional, middle class women), I think it's laughable to suggest that a heap of articles about what women politicians are wearing, what beauty products sent out press releases this week, and what the latest breeder trend is (a new kind of baby shower? ooh, do tell!) are somehow not sexist. Even when they cover things that aren't inherently sexist, e.g., the editor of a new literary journal, who happens to be a young woman, the pieces very often take a sexist angle (oh look, she dresses well, it's adorable!). How can we address any of these questions without looking at the values of the people who are actually writing and editing the stuff right now? This little history lesson was interesting in its own way but it certainly does not explain the present.
#3 Posted by Anonnie Muss, CJR on Tue 26 Feb 2013 at 01:03 PM
How funny. I was just telling someone yesterday that when I was growing up in DC, what we now know as the Style section was known as For and About Women. I guess nothing has changed except the name.
#4 Posted by Jane, CJR on Fri 1 Mar 2013 at 07:05 PM