Pages for Women

Gone are the days of the old-fashioned "women's pages" -- those pallid compendiums of weddings, engagements and social comings and goings. Taking their place in U.S. newspapers are pages for women filled with news and feature stories about the facts of modern life.

Typical is a series that ran in the women's section of the Seattle Times. In full and numbing detail, Women's Editor Dorothy Brant Brazier described house wife alcoholics in Seattle: how they keep their window shades perpetually drawn, how they dare not show their swollen faces at P.T.A. meetings, how they neglect their children and outrage their husbands.

The Seattle Times is no more frank than dozens of latter-day women's pages, which deal with feminine vices and afflictions hitherto reported else where in the paper -- if at all. Reporting on the ways and means of Detroit's 6,000 prostitutes, the women's page of the Detroit Free Press ranked them from chippies who settle for a good meal and a night on the town, to street walkers working at the beck of pimps and call of drugs, to expensive suburban call girls who keep Fanny Hill-style notes on their clients' bedroom peculiar ities. Last month the Miami Herald's women's page reported that 40% of the nation's chronic gamblers are women.

Not only that, said the Herald, but women cheat more than men. The Charlotte Observer had scarcely finished discussing the social stigma of syphilis when it published a report on life inside a nearby women's prison. Along with elegantly displayed fashions, Long Island's Newsday furnished readers with a list of 13 ways to avoid a child molester -- just as past women's pages would have listed the ingredients of a recipe.

Tee & Sympathy. Once segregated from the rest of the paper and ignored by male journalists, today's women's page is often read by as many men as women. Under the spirited direction of Charlotte Curtis, the New York Times's page often focuses on men: their travail when they go shopping with their wives, their attempts to get closer to their kids by familiarizing them with office life. Women's golf, once confined to the sports page of the Houston Post, now appears on the women's page in a column titled "Tee and Sympathy."

Women's editors keep in step with medicine. They routinely discuss pregnancy, the pill, abortion, menopause. Mrs. Brazier not only reported the phenomenon of infant crib deaths in Seattle; she ran photos of babies who had died, including the children of socially prominent families. Observing that the use of oral contraceptives in some cases enlarged women's breasts, the Atlanta Journal's Edith Hills Coogler interviewed the local Lovable brassiere manufacturer, who lovably agreed that he had to do some tinkering with his production line.

In times past, the women's editor was often recruited from the ranks of high society and wrote puff pieces about her friends. More often than not, today's editor comes up from the city room. "We're expected to get scoops," says Washington Post Columnist Maxine Cheshire, who was once a police reporter, "and not be scooped." She seldom is. She guessed early that Jackie was pregnant with John Jr., was the first to pry confirmation from John Kennedy. She broke the story on President Johnson's rejection of the Peter Hurd portrait. Far from content with pool coverage, the Chicago Daily News's Colleen Dishon had an expert counterfeit an invitation to get her own reporter into the Jay Rockefeller-Sharon Percy wedding.

Flirtations & Affairs. Considering themselves journalists first, today's editors are not much impressed with the pretensions of high society. "We aren't pressagents grooming society's image," says Frances Moffat, women's editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. "We're reporting the scene." Concentrating on her city's long-revered upper crust, she shows much more enthusiasm for quips about their flirtations and affairs than for their marriages and charity balls. In one column she idly wondered how to send an invitation to a couple who are living together out of wedlock. "Should you accept the situation and send one invitation, or ignore it and send two?" The answer she left to the individual hostess' ingenuity.

More than ever, the women's pages concern themselves with ordinary women, and women whose skin happens not to be white. An article that appeared in the New York Times took umbrage at beauticians who lack the know-how to make up Negro women properly. The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune gives just as much space to Negro social functions as to white. "We don't make a crusade of this," says Executive Editor Paul Minolas. "But a major proportion of our community is Negro, and we consider it proper to include news about them."

The women editors have performed so handsomely that they may be working themselves out of a job. Not only is their section as newsworthy as the rest of the paper; in some cases it has been absorbed by it. It has disappeared, for instance, at the Los Angeles Times, which includes women's news along with culture and entertainment in one big section. "The women's page blends into so many areas," says Charlotte Curtis, "that one really doesn't know what to call it. Is it leisure, family, modern living?" Aware of the trend, women are looking ahead. Says Atlanta's Edith Coogler: "I wish we could do the whole paper."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.