Kimberly Wilmot Voss

Food blogs are everywhere today but for generations, information and opinions about food were found in the food sections of newspapers in communities large and small. Until the early 1970s, these sections were housed in the women’s pages of newspapers—where women could hold an authoritative voice. The food editors—often a mix of trained journalist and home economist—reported on everything from nutrition news to features on the new chef in town. They wrote recipes and solicited ideas from readers. The sections reflected the trends of the time and the cooks of the community. The editors were local celebrities, judging cooking contests and getting calls at home about how to prepare a Thanksgiving turkey. They were consumer advocates and reporters for food safety and nutrition. They helped make James Beard and Julia Child household names as the editors wrote about their television appearances and reviewed their cookbooks. These food editors laid the foundation for the food community that Nora Ephron described in her classic 1968 essay, “The Food Establishment,” and eventually led to the food communities of today. Included in the chapters are profiles of such food editors as Jane Nickerson, Jeanne Voltz, and Ruth Ellen Church, who were unheralded pioneers in the field, as well as Cecily Brownstone, Poppy Cannon, and Clementine Paddleford, who are well known today; an analysis of their work demonstrates changes in the country’s culinary history. The book concludes with a look at how the women’s pages folded at the same time that home economics saw its field transformed and with thoughts about the foundation that these women laid for the food journalism of today.

Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community

The Food Section

Re-Evaluating Women’s Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era tells the stories of significant women’s page journalists who contributed to the women’s liberation movement and the journalism community. Previous versions of journalism history had reduced the role these women played at their newspapers and in their communities—if they were mentioned at all. For decades, the only place for women in newspapers was the women’s pages. While often dismissed as fluff by management, these sections in fact documented social changes in communities. These women were smart, feisty and ahead of their times. They left a great legacy for today’s women journalists. This book brings these individual women together and allows for a broader understanding of women’s page journalism in the 1950s and 1960s. It details the significant roles they played in the post-World War II years, laying the foundation for a changing role for women.

Celebrating Soft News

Re-Evaluating Women's Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era

Tracy Lucht

Erika Engstrom

Jane Marcellus

Now available in paperback, and with a revised conclusion to reflect the end of the program, this book offers interpretive and contextual tools to read the AMC television series "Mad Men," providing a much-needed historical explanation and exposition regarding the status of women in an era that has been painted as pre- or non-feminist. In chapters aimed at helping readers understand women's lives in the 1960s, "Mad Men" is used as a springboard to explore and discover alternative ways of seeing women. Offering more than a discussion of the show itself, the book offers historical insight for thinking about serious issues that modern working women continue to face today: balancing their work and personal lives, competing with other women, and controlling their own bodies and reproductive choices. Rather than critiquing the show for portraying women as victims, the book shows subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways that feminism functioned in an era when women were supposedly caught between the waves of the women's movement but when, the authors argue, they functioned nonetheless as empowered individuals. By doing so, it provides historical context and analysis that complicates traditional interpretations by (1) exploring historical constructions of women's work; (2) unpacking feminist and non-feminist discourses surrounding that work; (3) identifying modes of resistance; and (4) revisiting forgotten work coded as feminine.

Kimberly Wilmot Voss

Books

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