Flight from Fluff

The women's page of the Kansas City Times on one recent morning gave its readers a package consisting of Ann Landers' advice, a syndicated exercise column, a syndicated dress pattern, a large picture of three women with a cookbook and another picture of a model being ogled by the co-chairmen of a benefit fashion show. On the same day, the much larger "Style" section of the Washington Post offered, among other things, profiles of Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung excerpted from Andre Malraux's Anti-Memoirs, a crisp review of a television appearance by five wives of Cabinet members in which the reviewer called for "liberation" of these women, and a review of Haim Ginott's book, Teacher and Child.

This sharp contrast underscores the large and growing division between two kinds of women's page. The traditional variety perceives its readers as housewives and club members with limited concerns. Says Colleen Dishon, a former women's editor in Chicago and now in charge of a women's news service: "Women's pages for the most part have always embraced the all-American dream and added a cardboard dog to complete the family." The newer type assumes reader interests far beyond brides, diapers and charity luncheons, and strives for male readers as well.

At the Los Angeles Times, the women's section logotype has metamorphosed from "Women" to "Family" to "Part IV" to its present "View." The Washington Post kicked around 34 heads including "Private Lives," "Living," "Special Section," "Trends," "Critique," "Spectrum" and "You" before finally settling on "Style." The Chicago Tribune obviously has two concepts of women's pages: one with its brightly packaged Sunday "Lifestyle" and the other with its flashy Monday fashion section, "Feminique."

Several major dailies have done away with women's pages as such and incorporated some of their better ingredients into general feature sections. The Minneapolis Star's former Women's News editor, Sue Hovik, agitated for months to have her section, and thus her job, abolished: "By defining a section as 'Women's News,' the newspaper creates an invisible barrier that tends to fence readers either in or out of that section." In November 1970, Hovik won her battle; the Star junked its women's section and created "Variety." "Newsworthy activities by women," said Hovik, "should be of interest to both men and women." This thinking is obviously carried through in the Louisville Courier-Journal's upbeat "Today's Living" section. Women's Editor Carol Sutton finds room in her section for stories by cityside reporters; her staffers, in return, sometimes see their articles published in the general news pages. Instead of being a news ghetto, the section blends easily into the rest of the Courier-Journal.

L.A. Times Women's Editor Jean Taylor is determined "to develop coverage that will reflect the contemporary California lifestyle, which is different from any other." She usually succeeds; social trends often start in the West, and "View" has tried to keep pace with coverage of swinging singles, unwed mothers, communes, the counterculture's ebb and flow. Though talking more about subjects like abortion, "View" still leans heavily on fashion and society news. What has declined in the section is the number of marriage announcements.

Connubial Copy. Many women's editors across the country would like to copy the L.A. Times and a few other big-city dailies that now use wedding announcements as fillers, if at all. It becomes almost an ideological issue, because these announcements, except in small communities, can only cover the children of the affluent. The usual yardstick at the L.A. Times, says one staffer, is "Yes to the daughter of the owner of the International House of Pancakes chain; No to the daughter of the owner of a single House of Pancakes franchise." But L.A. Times Associate Editor James Bellows is realistic about why his paper can move away from marriage items, while smaller papers cannot: "If you live in a town like Charleston, S.C., where everybody has lived for 100 years, you could not pull out the brides because everybody wants to read about each other."

Even the New York Times still runs yards of connubial copy, mostly on Sunday, when the brides break up acres of retail advertising. Nevertheless, since "Family/Style" Editor Charlotte Curtis took over in 1965, the tone of her 4-F page--"family, food, fashions, furnishings"--has changed drastically. She is bored with social chitchat but fascinated with sociology. Says Curtis: "To look at current phenomena--the geodesic dome, plastic furniture and the family--that's where the big revolution is happening. The basic overturning of the family is just as important as the overturning of Lyndon Johnson."

The Times is not always as avant in print as Curtis' remark indicates.

There is still an occasional feature about that busy housewife who does it all, or a piece about the famous man's little woman who, it turns out, chooses his neckties. But the page is well worth reading--for men as well as women--because of articles about the changing status of Arab women in Israel; where to eat in Tancanh, South Viet Nam; the retired madam who knows she "saved a bunch of marriages from collapse"; and the outdated moral standards used by a New York family court judge in a child custody case.

Omission. While the Times usually sticks to one page for special features, Long Island's Newsday and the Washington Post have moved toward full feature sections covering the arts, the media, lifestyles, personalities of both sexes--all under one umbrella. These papers run paragons of what women's sections can become. Newsday's "Part II," with an assist from its tabloid format, reads much like a newsmagazine. Stories dealing with medicine, behavior, entertainment are separated into subsections. Not one is devoted exclusively to women, and the omission is not an oversight. Explains Newsday Executive Editor David Laventhol: "I feel that women's pages should be a thing of the past. They were frivolous, nonsubstantial and insulting to women."

Though big papers on both coasts and in the Midwest have been moving at varying speeds toward innovation, the flight from the frivolous or the merely dull has hardly begun on other papers. Press critics argue that many papers still regard women's coverage primarily as a lure for food and fashion advertising. As Charlotte Curtis points out: "Most pages developed because they were good for advertisers, not for readers."

Simple inertia is another problem, and not only on small papers in the hinterland. The New York Daily News, with the largest seven-day circulation in the country, still offers generally unimaginative fare, as does the New York Post. The Philadelphia Bulletin has not exactly lost its breath chasing changing times either. Marjorie Paxson, the Bulletin's women's editor, defends her paper's approach: "I think people here are very interested in society. Not all of the city is ghettos by any means. It is up to me to strike a balance." When the paper is serving a heavy diet of what she calls "problem stories" on drug abuse and prostitution, says Paxson, she likes to offset that by sending a reporter to cover an event like the midwinter ball in St. Petersburg, Fla. Paxson speaks for many editors, male and female. Ranking men executives, in fact, are often the strongest advocates of leaving women's pages in their old mode. Frequently changes occur only after restless women subordinates agitate for it.

Reader resistance is also a factor.

A few years ago the Arizona Republic gave its women's staff a free hand to change content, and the page began doing more serious articles. Among them were series on migrant farm workers and rest homes for the aged, and a moving story on efforts to help a catatonic child. According to Jeanne Tro Williams, who became women's editor last July, the experiment aroused too much opposition. Though the Republic still competently covers Indian life and culture, "We have started to come back from deep-think," says Williams now. "As a relief from hard news we are trying to return to a more circusy atmosphere. We want to do happy stories about women who have done something special." The Republic also features 75 brides a week--with their bridegrooms.

Despite retreats like the Republic's, the trend seems clearly in the other direction. As Washington Post Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman sees it: "The women's section is the part of the paper that isn't tied to inherited ideas of what an event is"; it is attracting a number of good new journalists, both men and women. Von Hoffman himself specially requested that his own freewheeling column run in the "Style" section of the Post, as did Humorist Art Buchwald. Said Von Hoffman: "People read the women's page far oftener than the editorial page, where our big hitters hold forth."

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