The Women's Pages: Women, Journalism, and Mid-20th-Century Mainstream Newspapers

Chambers, D

doi:10.1002/9781119429128

The Women's Pages: Women, Journalism, and Mid-20th-Century Mainstream Newspapers

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Deborah Chambers ORCiD

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Abstract

Since the postwar period, the "women's pages" of mass circulation newspapers have been celebarted and scorned. Featuring fashion, recipes, household tips, celebrity gossip, and advice columns, these women's sections are dismissed as superficial and conservative, promoting gendered stereotyping that dominates much of popular culture, Yet the women's pages of mainstream daily newspapers provided an entrance into journalism for women during the mid 20th-century after the decline of the suffrage press. Against all probabilility, by the 1970s women's sections were regularly tackling serious feminist themes, from domestic violence to equal pay. With a focus on the British mainstream press, this entry traces some of the historical roots of the women's pages. it consider the part they played in feminizing mainstream news between the 1950s and 1970s.