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As of 1926, the Associated Press had not hired women to work as reporters. With the appointment of Kent Cooper as general manager, the first woman reporter was hired in that year, followed by the hiring of seven more women who worked at either the AP's New York or Washington, D.C., bureaus between 1928 and 1931. These women reporters provided American readers with numerous stories of women's activities, their style of dress, and other social news. They covered women athletes, women active in politics, and wives of officials, but they did not cover the most important assignments because that territory was claimed by their male counterparts. For the first time, AP assigned women to cover the wives of the presidential candidates, women at the political conventions, and women in the presidential inaugurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

This article examines the Penney-Missouri Awards competition, which was meant to raise the standards of women's pages by recognizing the sections that went beyond traditional content. Using interviews to look at the competition's history as well as framing analysis to examine the content of winning submissions, the study's findings over the period from 1960 to 1971 support a revision in the history of women 's pages. While traditional women's pages filled with society, home, and wedding news appeared in many newspapers, some sections were progressive in their content and their writing style. Recognizing the differences among women's page editors at various newspapers helps to strip away the invisibility of women in journalism history and stresses the important role played by them in pressing for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, through a series of interviews conducted with women war correspondents in Great Britain, cautions against undue optimism since sexism in the field, both within the military and among journalists, continues to prevail. The authors of the essay do not subscribe to a feminization of war news theory but instead suggest that a "journalism of attachment," which favors more human stories of civilian victims is creating a productive arena for women reporters. It is suggested that the presence of women in the frontline may also be indicative of a change in war storylines. A female perspective is allowing for greater engagement with the lives of the victims of war rather than its technical and strategic aspects.

The article argues that audience perceptions about women have not kept pace with institutional changes in the field of journalism. Thus, the spaces available for women as agents in war journalism continue to be attenuated. Given that most news about Iraq was coming from the wire services or international media agencies, the South African Broadcasting Corp. adopted a different approach in an attempt to offer an alternative view of events in Iraq. For the first time, a decision was taken to send South African reporters and cameramen, as "unilaterals," to a combat zone. One of the reporters, who arrived in Baghdad the first day the U.S. invasion began and remained throughout the bombardment of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, was a young woman named, Renee Horne. South African audiences continued to feminize Horne, demanding that she look glamorous.