From Cheesecake to Chief: Newspaper Editors' Slow Acceptance of Women

Abstract

The struggle of women journalists to achieve equality in the newsroom begs the question of whether editors were reflecting social mores or practicing a more virulent form of male supremacy. The latter explanation is supported by a study of 680 editions of the newsletter of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Bulletin, from its inception in 1925 through the 1988 tenure of ASNE's first female president. Until the second wave of the women s rights movement took hold, editors saw women as sexual objects and housewives whose fragile and emotional natures left them congenitally unsuited for newsroom roles beyond the women's section. The unfiltered words of the editors betray a systemic gender bias that explains why newsroom discrimination was more entrenched than in society as a whole.