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Throughout her career, Jane Cunningham Croly (1829-1901), better known as "Jennie June," wrote extensively about women's rights in mainstream newspapers and magazines. This article revalues her work, considering the complexity of her journalistic stances on women's rights. Avoiding modern value statements that place cultural texts in hierarchal binaries of "liberal" or "conservative," it considers the motivation behind Croly's deployment of essentialist sex/gender logics. This study involved the historical analysis of more than sixty articles written by Croly about women's rights from 1855 until 1898, as well as additional primary sources that provided insight into her personal and professional lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown (1922-2012) assumed the top editing job at Cosmopolitan and transformed it from a failing title into one of magazine publishing's greatest successes. During an era of increasing publication specialization, Cosmopolitan was one of the few magazines to target and celebrate women's growing economic and social independence. Much of the scholarship on and critical appraisals of Brown and Cosmopolitan have focused on sexual politics and issues of taste. This paper takes an institutional approach by examining Brown's professional practices and how they contributed to Cosmopolitan's growth, profitability, and popularity: know your reader and always keep her in mind, prioritize good writing, and accommodate corporate and advertiser interests. In addition, it acknowledges Brown's role as a visionary editor and businesswoman, as well as Cosmopolitan's importance in magazine history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]