As someone whose first reporting job in journalism was as a writer for the women’s pages at The San Juan Star, I was immediately drawn to Dr. Kimberly Voss’ recent talk at the Matheson History Museum on ‘Florida Women, Advice and Social Change’.

There are no longer women’s pages, or even women’s sections, in the media today, but they used to be a fixture in newspapers. They faded away in the 1970s to become Lifestyle sections, but how much did they matter in their day?

Quite a bit, according to Voss, a journalism professor at the University of Central Florida. Voss recently reviewed these vestiges of the mass media’s past in her presentation at the Matheson, part of the Florida Talks program sponsored by Florida Humanities.

Voss, who has been studying the women’s pages for decades, considers them “an unexplored part of American journalism history.

“When I started …research about women in journalism was typically about the rare examples about women who wrote for the front page of newspapers,” she said. “The women’s pages were often described as ‘fluff,’ but no one actually examined these sections. When I went through the sections, the content was much more significant.”

It was ‘softer news’ that got explored – family, fashion, food and furnishings, plus wedding announcements and advice columns, but it was the kind of information that people wanted, Voss said.

“The women’s pages were the only place women could work at most newspapers for decades,” Voss said. “Their stories and the articles they wrote deserve documentation. In addition, these sections were incredibly important to readers and were a part of what made newspapers so successful.”

Advice columns first made their way into the newspapers as a way of showing that newspapers had a heart.  Nationally syndicated advice columns by Ann Landers and her twin sister, Abigail Van Buren, appeared regularly in newspapers across the country, including those close to home in Gainesville, Jacksonville and Ocala.

In Florida, Voss said there were many standout women’s page reporters and editors. They included Dorothy Ricker, who wrote a syndicated weekly advice column out of Tampa, and Dorothy Chapman, who wrote a weekly restaurant recipe column at The Orlando Sentinel before moving on to become the newspaper’s first restaurant critic.

Eleanor Ratelle, who wrote under the name Eleanor Hart, wrote an advice column at The Miami Herald, taking a lead in addressing issues of gender and race in the 1960s.

“These women journalists had great stories but had largely been overlooked historically. It has been a great experience to add them to the historical record, “ Voss said.

Voss has spent three decades studying the women’s pages and has written books about food journalism, fashion journalism and politics in the women’s pages. She is currently working on a book about wine journalism, based on materials that were in the women’s pages and written by women’s page editors.