Marjorie Paxson

Marjorie Paxson (August 13, 1923 – June 17, 2017) was an American newspaper journalist, editor, and publisher during an era in American history when the women's liberation movement was setting milestones by tackling the barriers of discrimination in the media workplace.

Marjorie Bowers Paxson was born August 13, 1923, in Houston, Texas, to Roland B. and Marie Margaret (Bowers) Paxson, who had moved to Houston from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where both had grown up.

She had one younger brother, John.

Her father was a petroleum geologist and her mother had attended a secretarial school but discontinued working after she married.

According to Paxson, as children she and her brother visited the derrick floors on the oil fields her father worked, but when she got to high school age she was no longer allowed on the derrick floors because while children were welcome, women were not.

Paxson attended Lamar High School in Houston's Upper Kirby district.

She was uninterested in nursing or teaching, then the most common professions open to women, and became involved in journalism while taking a class in high school and writing for her school's newspaper.

Her journalism teacher had graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and Paxson decided she wanted to go to the school he had attended.

Paxson's parents aspired to a college education for both their children.

In accordance with her parents' wishes that she attend her first two years of college close to home, she applied to Rice University, which was only a mile away.

She was concerned about whether she would get into Rice, which at the time limited its freshman class to ten percent women.

She was admitted and under an endowment attended tuition-free; she recalled her family paying $200 per year for her to attend Rice.

While at Rice she worked on the student newspaper, The Thresher.

In 1942 Paxson transferred to the University of Missouri for her junior year; within a few weeks, most of her male classmates were drafted for World War II.

During her time at the university, the dean of the school of journalism was Frank Luther Mott, whom she admired but thought of as "sort of a stuffy character" until on New Year's Day during class he staged an attempted murder of himself, giving the class the assignment to write about the incident.

Paxson graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1944, and began her newspaper career in Nebraska during World War II, covering hard news for wire services.

She worked for the university's student newspaper, Columbia Missourian, and graduated from its journalism school in 1944.

After graduating from college Paxson considered joining the military but ultimately decided to look for a job in journalism.

She credited her work at the Columbia Missourian with helping her get her first job at United Press International (UPI) wire service.

Like many women in the United States, during World War II Paxson was considered for jobs previously limited to men.

Starting in 1944 she covered hard news for the wire services, first for UPI in the two-person Lincoln, Nebraska, bureau for $25 a week.

This represented equal pay because it was covered by the American Newspaper Guild contract.

With the men away fighting, one in five of UPI's employees was a woman.

Paxson and the Lincoln bureau manager, Marguerite Davis, reported all state news with the exception of football games, as women were excluded from Nebraska Stadium's press box, and executions, which the state bureau chief, Gaylord Godwin, considered inappropriate for coverage by women.

While covering the Nebraska Supreme Court, Paxson experienced sexual harassment by the court clerk.

In the 1960s, Paxson worked as assistant editor under Marie Anderson for the women's page of the Miami Herald which, in the 1950s, was considered one of the top women's sections in the United States.

From 1963 to 1967, she was president of Theta Sigma Phi, a sorority that evolved into the Association for Women in Communications (AWC).

She won the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into its hall of fame.

In 1969, she earned a Penney-Missouri award for her work as editor of the women's page in the St. Petersburg Times.

Throughout her career, Paxson advocated for working women and for women in journalism.

She worked at several different newspapers for different reasons that ranged from being replaced by men returning from the war, to seizing opportunities that afforded her the ability to make positive hard news changes to the women's section.

She experienced two demotions as newspapers changed their women's sections into features sections and replaced female editors with male editors.

She expressed bitterness over her demotions and attributed them partially to the women's movement.

She believed feminist activists unfairly denigrated women's pages and their editors, who she believed had been supporters of the movement.

Paxson worked as editor of women's pages in Houston, Miami, Philadelphia; and in Boise, Idaho, as an assistant managing editor.

While working as women's page editor for the Philadelphia Bulletin, she took a five-week leave of absence to edit Xilonen, the daily newspaper of the 1975 United Nations World Conference for International Women's Year in Mexico City.

She considered her time there to be the most important work of her career.

As a result of that work, she was honored with the AWC's Headliner Award.

She helped create the National Women and Media Collection, which documents media coverage of and by women in the United States.

She was one of four women's page journalists selected to participate in the Washington Press Foundation's Women in Journalism Oral History Project. After more than four decades of working to reshape the definition of women's news, Paxson finished her career as a newspaper publisher in Oklahoma.