How Great Writing Helped Charlotte Curtis Blaze Trails in Journalism
The first woman on the New York Times masthead had wit, courage, and political savvy
As a student at Vassar, Charlotte Curtis hoped to land a summer job as a news reporter at her hometown newspaper, the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen. But when she applied, she was told that the paper “already had a woman” in that position.
The Citizen instead gave her a $40-a-week job on the women’s and society pages and hired her back in a similar role after her graduation in 1950. In the pre-feminist era, that beat tended to be a pink ghetto for female reporters.
Lindsy Van Gelder, a former New York Post reporter, wrote in Ms. Magazine that she hated women’s page assignments in the late 1960s:
“The women’s page was for frivolous, boring, puffy, irrelevant, 86-ways-to-make-tuna-casserole-news.”
The first woman to edit the Times’ op-ed page
Curtis proved that tuna casseroles didn’t have to prevail. After leaving the Citizen for the New York Times, she helped to transform how newspapers covered women. Along the way, she became the most powerful female editor in the history of the Times: the first woman to edit its op-ed page, the first to…
