The Press: Flight from Fluff

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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 André 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.