Women's Pages in Australian Print Media from the 1850s

Abstract

For a roughly a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, most Australian newspapers ran a section directed towards a woman reader written from a woman's perspective and edited by a female journalist. The rise and fall of the women's editor's ‘empire within an empire’ provides insight into female journalists' industrial situation, as well as a window on to gender relations in colonial and post-Federation Australia. This history matches wider struggles over the notion of separate spheres and resulting claims for equality, as well as debates over mainstream news values. This article investigates the appearance and disappearance of women's sections from Australian newspapers, and argues that this story has greater impact on contemporary digital formats than we perhaps realise.

The ‘girls’: women press photographers and the representation of women in Australian newspapers

“…Women’s entry into press photography was influenced by their employment in the media more widely and through participation in the growing field of commercial photography. First, women had worked as journalists since the 19th century, although their output was generally constricted to writing from a ‘woman’s perspective’ on dedicated women’s pages (Baker, 2015b; Lloyd, 2014; Lemon, 2008a). Opportunities for women in general reporting slowly expanded, particularly during World War II (Baker, 2015a; Clarke, 2014: 496), but it was only in the 1960s that their numbers grew significantly and reporting became more diverse.…”

Gendered labour and media: histories and continuities

“…As one of us has argued previously in Media International Australia (Lloyd, 2014), the situation of women journalists in print can be traced through debates over the scope of the ‘women’s page’ in commercial daily newspapers. The rise and fall of the women’s page as a media ‘empire within an empire’ provides insight into female journalists’ industrial situation up to and including the second wave (Lloyd, 2014).…”

“…As one of us has argued previously in Media International Australia (Lloyd, 2014), the situation of women journalists in print can be traced through debates over the scope of the ‘women’s page’ in commercial daily newspapers. The rise and fall of the women’s page as a media ‘empire within an empire’ provides insight into female journalists’ industrial situation up to and including the second wave (Lloyd, 2014). Furthermore, US-based feminist media historians have explored the rich vein of gendered news agendas, by documenting the career histories of individual journalists (Yang, 1996) and the negotiations by media employees themselves of transitions away from a dedicated women’s page in newspapers (Harp, 2006).…”

“…Since the 1990s, government and industry reports have provided data on women’s participation in the Australian media industries, and pointed to their underrepresentation and their lower status and pay, yet scholars have only recently turned to interrogating women’s labour in the media from a historical perspective. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that for most of the 20th century, women working in the Australian media were confined to gendered work considered of lesser value, and given less opportunity for advancement to higher paid positions (Baker, 2015; Clarke, 2014; Lemon, 2008; Lloyd, 2014; North, 2014).…”

Women in journalism: Margaret Jones, gender discrimination and the Sydney Morning Herald, 1965–1985

“…This changed once women were identified as a separate readership. The Australian Women’s Weekly opened up a slightly wider range of employment for women journalists from its first publication in 1933 (Clarke, 2014: 496), but, for the large part, the ‘women’s pages’ dominated, taking the form of special interest sections outside the flow of news events and relegated to the back of the paper (Lloyd, 2014: 61). Although their establishment demonstrated that newspaper proprietors and editors were at least acknowledging their women readers, women journalists became confined to working on them, trapped in ‘a world of intimate, chatty escapism, varnished with a layer of social snobbery’ (Pearce, 1998: 144).…”