The Women's Pages.

 The Women's Pages was a Late Nineteenth-Century publisher's dream. It was a cheap, innovative way of hiring female writers, gaining advertisements, appealing to a wider audience, all while bringing in copious amounts of money. Nicknamed "Mrs. Consumers", it was clear by the 1930s that this was the key to success in the American economy. 

The content of this page, was in its essence sexist. It only talked about topics / stories pertaining to beauty, housekeeping, parental advice, and serial fiction. It worked to reinforce gender norms, feeding directly into female audiences, portraying the myth of the "Ideal American Woman" as a financially comfortable, white woman rooted in her housework. These newspapers explicitly expressed values of white supremacy, but also served as a platform for women to speak to each other on topics of substance under the nose of doubting men. It was a paradox, both limiting and liberating, because it created a separate sphere in the paper. It started off small, with new features, different genres, visual motifs, and topics, with the addition of interactive columns where women shared recipes, advice, etc. The Women's Pages were also the influence for stunt reporting and celebrity gossip as new genres in papers we still see today. 

There were also different versions of the Women's Pages across different newspapers, some of which helped cultivate bonds of affinity between women. One example is from a Yiddish Women's Pages, where they wrote about their own ideological agendas, where they figured out how to "fuse normal women's content with either socialism or religious orthodoxy." It was all done sneakily, as male editors saw these columns as trivial, so women used their ignorance to covertly talk about their own politics, such as suffrage, workplace harassment, etc. 

An interesting example of women run, written, and released Women's Pages is one called the Chicago Defender. It was written by African American women, with a strictly feminist, pro-women approach to content. One of the writers for the paper was Vauleda Hill Strodder, who wrote under the pen name of Princess Mysteria. Her column was named "Advice to the Wise and Otherwise", where she discussed current events, societal expectations, and was a true inspiration to other women. She covered a lot on the roles of wives and mothers, along with a high dosage of high society news. But, the real intrigue to Princess Mysteria was her interaction with fan letters about their own life, she would write back sometimes publishing her response. A quote from one of these occurrences is "This guy is not worth your time. He has an unfixable flaw." 

Another newspaper of importance was the Pensacola Journal, running from January 1905 - December 1914. It had a society page geared towards offering insight into national cultural concerns for women, a page dedicated to "People and Events" highlighting social events with paragraph long descriptions. One of the writers for the paper, Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson who's articles in "Heart and Home Problems" provided practical advice to fans writing to her, on topics ranging from hygiene, to courtship, to achieving a better education. Women's Pages as a whole also tackled the topics related to the body - inside and out; with fashion and beauty addressed in the form of editorials, news reports, and advertisements. Some of the advertisements included products related to problems typically experienced by women, such as how to take care of the sick, or new advancements in the cooking world; but beyond that these ads also made false promises in curing "womanly troubles" through random, unrelated products. In "The Journal's Daily Fashion Feature" authors included drawings and descriptions of the up and coming clothing styles emerging from and around the United States and European countries. 

Overall, the Women's Pages were pivotal in providing a place for women in journalism. Whether they were writing about beauty and home, or suffrage and abortions, it was and still is an extremely important moment in journalism history.