Considered by some as the most important woman in Dallas in the latter half of the 20th century, Vivian Castleberry was a force for women, nationally and internationally. In shining a light on her career, more becomes known about her fights and her victories. Through this book, historians can better understand that the relationship of the women’s pages to the women’s movement between the 1950s and '70s was more complex than previously explored. Known as the “godmother” of the Dallas women’s movement, Vivian was a trailblazer. Yet, she was also a mother of five daughters at a time when working outside the home was still being challenged, and that was an experience many middle-class women struggled with. Her role in the public sphere meant she often told the stories of others. This book is her story.
For those of us who lived through the Cold War years in Dallas, this book is a sometimes-painful journey through a past we would most like to forget. For younger people, it fills in gaps in our local history that had national and international dimensions. At the same time, it is a reminder of the integrity, tenacity, and courage of the few brave souls who kept faith in the sure knowledge that right will win out and whose leadership has led us to a new day in our citywarts and all! This is the story of the Dallas Chapter United Nations Association, long overdue. Norma and Bill Matthews, both of whom are past presidents of DUNA, have done a masterful job of probing the past, ferreting out nuggets of history tucked into boxes and stashed away in family attics, backroom nooks, and office storerooms. For much of the time since its founding in 1953, DUNA has had no permanent home or office, and its records have been at the mercy of whoever was its leader, always with the possibility that succeeding generations of its founders would not recognize the merits of those sealed boxes and would destroy them. Using endless newspaper files, mostly from the Dallas Morning News and some from the late Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Matthews writing team has been able to follow the founding, development, and leadership of DUNA, vastly enriched by personal stories of individuals who kept the flame alive in good times and bad. Norma and Bill Matthews teamed their professional degrees in education, communication, music, and theology to serve as volunteer activists for human rights and peace endeavors. Married 63 years, and retiring as teacher and minister, they committed themselves to research and preserve the history of advocacy for support of sustainable goals of individual and universal dignity and freedom.
Taking a thematic approach, this new companion provides an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and international study of American literary journalism. From the work of Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman to that of Joan Didion and Dorothy Parker, literary journalism is a genre that both reveals and shapes American history and identity. This volume not only calls attention to literary journalism as a distinctive genre but also provides a critical foundation for future scholarship. It brings together cutting-edge research from literary journalism scholars, examining historical perspectives; themes, venues, and genres across time; theoretical approaches and disciplinary intersections; and new directions for scholarly inquiry. Provoking reconsideration and inquiry, while providing new historical interpretations, this companion recognizes, interacts with, and honors the tradition and legacies of American literary journalism scholarship. Engaging the work of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, African American studies, gender studies, visual studies, media studies, and American studies, in addition to journalism and literary studies, this book is perfect for students and scholars of those disciplines.
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.
Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s-1980s documents the professional experiences and observations of more than a dozen journalists, all women, all covering Mississippi state politics over the course of a century—from the 1880s, right after the end of Reconstruction (when newspapers were the primary source of information) to the 1980s, a time period marked by steady declines in both news revenue and circulation, and the emergence of corporate journalism, led by media conglomerates like Gannett. Pete Smith argues that the experiences of the women journalists reflect broader social, political, legal, and cultural struggles and changes in both the South and the nation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evolution of the modern-day political journalist, particularly for southern women who aspired to such a position, can be seen in their struggles and accomplishments.
The six-volume Encyclopedia of Journalism covers all significant dimensions of journalism including: print, broadcast and Internet journalism; US and international perspectives; history; technology; legal issues and court cases; ownership; and economics.
Desperately Seeking Women Readers delves into the history of U.S. newspapers to examine the construction of female readership. Pages designed specifically for women transformed over time as the newspaper industry looked for ways to capture women readers. Harp investigates the creation and collapse of these pages before considering contemporary case studies to explore the recent revival of sex-specific pages. Interviews with professional journalists reveal the difficulties with defining news for women and the problems inherent in constructing newspapers in a sex-specific way. With a clear and descriptive style, Harp offers a fresh, original topic in communication scholarship. Desperately Seeking Women Readers is ideal for undergraduate and graduate coursework, as well as for curious readers of U.S. newspapers or historical and contemporary women's issues.
In this volume, Jan Whitt tells the stories of women who have been overlooked in journalism history, offering an important corrective to scholarship that narrowly focuses on the deeds of men like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. She shows how numerous women broadened the editorial scope of newspapers and journals, transformed women’s professional roles, used journalism as a training ground for major literary works, and led breakthroughs in lesbian and alternative presses. Whitt explores the lives of women reporters who achieved significant historical recognition, such as Ida Tarbell and Ida Wells-Barnett. Investigating the often blurry boundary between journalism and literature, she explains how this fluid distinction has actually limited how many scholars perceive the contributions of authors such as Joan Didion and Susan Orlean. Whitt also highlights the work of important novelists, including Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, to shed light on how their work as journalists informed their highly successful fiction. This study also offers a survey of contributions women have made to the alternative presses, including the environmental press and civil rights activism. Whitt examines important figures in the early feminist press such as Caroline Churchill, editor and reporter for Denver’s Queen Bee, and Betty Wilkins of Kansas City’s Call. Finally, through newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and journals, she traces the history of the lesbian press and points out the ways in which it indicates that the alternative press is thriving.
