Seeking Equity for Women in Journalism and Mass Communication Education

A 30-year Update

Ramona R. Rush, Carol E. Oukrop, Pamela J. Creedon, Ramona R. Rush, Carol E. Oukrop, Pamela J. Creedon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135623999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume concentrates on the study and efforts of women and minority men to gain respect and parity in journalism and mass communication, and focuses on trends over the past three decades. Contributions to the volume provide a history of the equity efforts and offer updates on equity in the academy and in the professions. Theoretical and international perspectives on equity are also included, as are the concerns about equity from the new generations now coming into the profession. This anthology serves as a benchmark of women's current status in journalism and mass communication and provides a call to action for the future. As such, it is required reading for all concerned with establishing equity throughout the discipline.

PART I

History and Context
of Educational Equity

1
“But Where
Are All the Women?”:
Our History

Susan Henry

When the University of Washington's journalism department was searching for a faculty member to teach advertising in 1916, Professor Frank Kane wrote to Walter Williams, the dean of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, asking him to recommend someone for the position. Williams replied: “The best man among our journalism graduates this year for the place you have in mind is a woman.” Her name was Merze Marvin, Williams said, but “I do not think you have the nerve to appoint her to the position—I am sure I would not. She is, however, especially well qualified.” Indeed, “Her sex is her only drawback.”¹

Kane wrote back that he “did not have the nerve to go any further in Miss Marvin's direction,” despite his personal willingness “to go to the front to battle against the weight of prejudice, inertia and other loads of senseless opposition that limit her cruelly and result in loss to the world.” The problem, he said, was that “a mountain of proportions is not removed in bulk in a short time.” But eventually “it can be picked to pieces and the pieces carted off. A strong army strongly entrenched cannot be dislodged easily; however, it can be ‘nibbled.'”² More nibbling—and more nerve—would be necessary, though, before his department would have a woman on its faculty.

If Merze Marvin had been hired by the University of Washington in 1916, she likely would have joined the four-year-old American Association of Teachers of Journalism (AATJ), (predecessor to today's Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication), where she would have found four other women members (out of a total of 107). Women were surprisingly visible in the organization early on. For example, the seven women faculty who attended the 1921 convention accounted for 12% of all members present. In 1924 M.Virginia Garner was elected AATJ vice president, and the next year Ethel Outland joined its executive committee. (Both women were full professors at women's colleges.) By 1927 the organization's 42 women faculty accounted for almost 10% of its total membership.³

Walter Williams even had the nerve to hire a woman—Sara Lockwood— as an assistant professor in 1921, and to marry her six years later, at which point she left the faculty (although she returned to teaching after his death).⁴ When she left, two other women were hired by the school, albeit as instructors. Like Lockwood, Frances Grinstead and Helen Jo Scott were Missouri graduates, as was Marian Jamie Babb, who had been an assistant in journalism (the step below instructor) during the 1923–1924 academic year.⁵ Clearly, all four women benefited not only from their journalism degrees but from their prior association with the school, where they presumably were well regarded. They would have known many of the male faculty, who likely would have been more comfortable with them as colleagues than they would have been with unfamiliar women.

However, Kansas State University has the longest continuous record of hiring women. Since 1915 (when it was Kansas State Agricultural College) it has always had at least one woman on its journalism faculty, although they were assistants in the early years.⁶ The best known was Helen Hostetter, who taught for 25 years. Hired as an instructor in 1926, she was promoted to assistant professor the next year, left in 1928 to teach in China, then returned in 1931 and advanced to associate professor. After leaving for five years to edit a prestigious professional journal, she returned in 1946 and was promoted to full professor, probably the first woman to hold that rank in a major university's journalism program.⁷

Women also taught at the University of Wisconsin for many years. Genevieve Jackson Broughner was hired as an instructor in 1920 and, when she left the next year, was replaced by Ruby Black. When Black left in 1923 (going on to a very successful journalism career), she was replaced by Helen Patterson, who stayed for 34 years.⁸ Marguerite McLaughlin stayed at least as long at the University of Kentucky, where she began as an instructor in 1914 and was still teaching (as an assistant professor) at least as late as 1947. She very likely was the first woman faculty member of the AATJ.⁹ Frances Grinstead taught even longer—36 years—including 18 years at the University of Kansas, where she went in 1948 after leaving Missouri (thinking she would write full time, but finding she was soon drawn back into teaching).¹⁰ Probably the most visible of the next generation of women journalism professors began teaching the same year Grinstead went to Kansas. She was Gretchen Kemp, who taught at Indiana University for the next 26 years and was a nationally recognized leader in the education of secondary school journalism teachers.¹¹

“FEMALE UNDEREMPLOYMENT, SURE ENOUGH”

What was academic life like for these women?

A substantial number of women faculty at schools with full-fledged journalism programs taught courses for female students in writing for newspapers' women's pages or for women's magazines. Genevieve Jackson Broughner believed she taught the first of these courses—titled Features of Interest to Women in Magazines and Newspapers—when she was an instructor at the University of Wisconsin in 1920–1921.¹² Ruby Black evidently taught the same class the next year).¹³ Helen Patterson, who followed Black in 1923, began a course called Writing for Homemakers, despite admitting, “I have little interest in cooking and such.” But, she said, “I recognize the enormous market for articles on the home and think it offers a wide opportunity for women writers.”¹⁴

Intended to prepare female students for traditional “women's work” in journalism, these courses sometimes were criticized for limiting young women's career aspirations and perpetuating sex segregation in the field. Yet their number increased during the Depression as the job market tightened and women's opportunities were further restricted.¹⁵ At Kansas State, Helen Hostetter began teaching Journalism for Women in 1931 and soon afterwards offered another course called The Home Page.¹⁶ When she returned to teaching in 1937, Sara Lockwood Williams taught Opportunities in Journalism for Women at Washington University.¹⁷ One study of the course offerings at 67 schools and departments of journalism during the 1939–1940 academic year identified 12 additional courses especially for women at institutions ranging from Columbia University to Texas Technological College. These courses also created a few additional job openings for women faculty.¹⁸

Still, between 1927 and 1938 the number of women AATJ members dropped from 42 to 28, although their percentage of the total AATJ membership actually rose—from slightly less than 10% in 1927 to 10.6% (28 out of 264 members) in 1938.¹⁹ That percentage would not be reached again for more than 30 years. However, women seem to have had little visibility at AATJ conventions in the 1930s and 1940s. Hostetter and Patterson said they frequently were the only women faculty present, so they stuck together for moral support).²⁰ It is not clear that Patterson was entirely welcome. Many of her male colleagues evidently objected to both her feminism and her general manner, which they considered overly abrasive. During the late 1940s, “Don't hire a woman, she might be like Patty,” was said to be a widespread comment.²¹

On their own campuses, a large majority of these women were the only women in their departments. Looking back on her career after her 1967 retirement, Frances Grinstead lamented the lack of female colleagues at the University of Missouri and the University of Kansas, noting, “One woman to a faculty total of 15 or 20 men is female underemployment, sure enough!” And these lone women seldom attained the rank of full professor. The “grudgingly small percentage of qualified women” who did reach this rank, Grinstead observed, usually did so “near the very end of their careers.”²²

She herself had earned an MA degree from the University of Missouri, was a very productive freelance magazine writer, and had published a novel and won national acclaim as a teacher of feature and magazine writing. Yet when she left Missouri after 18 years she still had not risen above assistant professor. She was promoted to associate professor after teaching for three years at the University of Kansas, but she stayed at that rank for 16 years, until she retired.²³ “In all modesty,” she remarked, “I cannot accept this fact as a fair assessment of performance.”²⁴

Despite even more accomplishments, Helen Patterson did no better. Before earning her master's degree from the University of Wisconsin, she had been a daily newspaper reporter and city editor as well as the first woman in Kansas to work as a wire editor, the first woman copy editor and the first woman critic. She taught at Wisconsin for 34 years, also lecturing at many other universities. Considered the leading magazine-writing teacher of her era, she was so effective that one year her students sold $3,800 worth of articles. Her textbook on feature writing went into three editions and was a non-fiction bestseller. When she retired in 1957 though, she, too, was an associate professor.²⁵

Women faculty also typically were paid less than their male colleagues. Grinstead explained that at the University of Missouri during the Depression all faculty took pay cuts, “but when the Depression clouds cleared it was men (under pleas of families to rear, under threats of leaving for better posts) who jockeyed for position and took the lead” in pay increases. Nationwide, she pointed out, even when women were lucky enough to receive percentage pay increases equal to those of their male colleagues, most women's base pay had been “held down for so long” that the total dollar amount was only a “pittance in improvement.”²⁶ Indeed, in 1946 when Kansas State's Helen Hostetter became a full professor, she was paid less than the three men in her department who held that rank. In 1962 when she retired from full-time teaching, her salary was $8,640; the male department head was paid $11,820 and the male adviser to the student newspaper was paid $10,200. The man in the lowest journalism faculty position earned $7,740.²⁷

Nor could the women who retired in the 1950s and 1960s have felt very hopeful that their successors would avoid most of the problems they had encountered. In 1950 the name of the journalism professors' organization changed, as the AATJ became the Assoc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• LEA’s Communication Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: History and Context of Educational Equity
• Part II: The Update: 30 Years of Equity Struggles
• Part III: Update on the Equity in the Professions
• Part IV: Theoretical and International Perspectives on Equity
• Part V: Listening to Concerns About Equity
• Epilogue
• Tributes to Donna Allen: A Life Dedicated to Achieving Equity
• A Memorial Tribute to Marion Carpenter, White House News Photographer
• Appendix: Original 1972 Research Report: (More Than You Ever Wanted to Know) About Women in Journalism Education
• Author Biographies
• Author Index
• Subject Index