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When The Times Kept Female Reporters Upstairs

Times journalists at work in 1958, including Patricia Peterson, a fashion editor, behind the telephone; and Carrie Donovan, at right, a fashion reporter.Credit...The New York Times Company Archives

Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.

Hanging near the offices of the top editors of The New York Times is a photo from 1958 featuring several women arranged around a desk. The women are sitting in an office of the ninth floor, away from the main newsroom, where they all worked for “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings” — the women’s news section in those days.

“We were in some dark little corner of the Times,” said Phyllis Levin, now 97, who said she started working at the paper in the mid-1950s, first writing for fashion, alongside those in the picture, and later writing about parenting. Later she became a biographer of the first ladies Abigail Adams and Edith Wilson. “We respected one another,” she said. “I just admired them all, and they were wonderful women who could’ve been anywhere on the paper, and eventually were.”

“Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings” ran from 1955 to around 1971 as a one-page section in the paper on varying days of the week. Historically, women who came to The Times were immediately placed in the women’s pages, informally known as the “four Fs.” Nan Robertson, who worked in the four Fs for five years, wrote in her 1992 book, “The Girls in the Balcony,” that the section’s coverage “provided the sop to the people who bought space in a newspaper that elsewhere in its columns gave the news ‘impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect or interest involved.’ ” It was hardly the first women’s section; a housekeeper’s column ran as early as the 1870s. Domesticity, however, was an abiding theme. There was even a kitchen at the far end of the floor.

Four F writers said they were overlooked by the rest of the paper. (Ms. Levin said the men from downstairs visited infrequently: “It was as if we kept the measles up on the ninth floor.”) But it fostered lifelong friendships among the women, many of whom later organized around the 1974 class-action sex discrimination suit against the paper led by Betsy Wade, The Times’s first female copy editor — who had been placed in the four Fs when hired. That suit ultimately changed women’s roles in the newsroom.

“Those years would prove to be among my happiest on the Times,” Ms. Robertson wrote. “We were all young and gifted and full of the devil.”

The four Fs staff of around 30 was mostly female, and, as with the rest of The Times in those days, mostly white. Elizabeth Penrose Howkins, who served as the section’s editor in chief from 1955 to 1965, sat in a glass cage in the middle of the desks, overseeing stories ranging from culinary interests (“News of Food: Subtleties of Veal”) to peculiarities in fashion (“Air Squeak in Shoe Is Hard to Remove”). In her office, she posted the page next to its greatest rival — the hybrid society and fashion section from The New York Herald Tribune, run by Eugenia Sheppard.

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A “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings” page from 1955.Credit...The New York Times

Other times, coverage revolved around subversive people in culture and society, including Richard Avedon, as in the April 1957 article “Fantasy Marks the Work of Fashion Photographer”; and Diana Vreeland, as in the 1962 article “Diana Vreeland, Dynamic Fashion Figure, Joins Vogue.”

Editors would hang ideas on hooks, and if a story with a news peg came up, they would add it to the board.

“You covered the cut of the dress,” Ms. Levin said. “But what made it possible, really, and most interesting, was the biography of the past, the color of these people’s lives.”

Because it was so often ignored by the rest of the newsroom, the four Fs became a space for writers to experiment and push past what was conventionally considered “women’s news.”

“Howkins and her staff strayed from the tight ‘paper-of-record’ style, for which the Times was known, a rigid style that stressed objective chronicling of events and fact-filled profiles and feature stories,” Marilyn Greenwald wrote in her 1999 book, “A Woman of the Times.”

Ms. Levin, for example, wrote an article published in 1960 on the phenomenon of restless women who had become housewives after college, titled “Road From Sophocles to Spock Is Often a Bumpy One.” She said this was her Betty Friedan moment, referring to one of the leading figures in the women’s movement. (It hung on the hooks for a few weeks before it was finally published.)

Eventually, the section outgrew its original purpose — what qualified as women’s news had expanded, according to Ms. Greenwald’s book — and around 1971, the header was changed to “Family/Style.”

Then came the class-action suit in 1974, which represented 600 women against the paper. The suit was settled in 1978, accompanied by an affirmative action plan requiring the hiring of a certain number of women in entry-level positions. In April 1978, Nancy Newhouse, who had previously worked for New York magazine, said she was hired “to update and freshen up the paper’s coverage” as head of the paper’s new “Living Style” department, which included the daily and Sunday family/style pages, the newly minted Living section and the Home section. The department of just over 40 people was made up mostly of women and housed within the newsroom.

“I was very focused on women’s issues obviously, especially in the 1980s, when there were so many stories about the changing role of women,” Ms. Newhouse said. “I called it the kind of story, ‘first woman who. …’”

Several of the women of the four Fs, including Ms. Levin, have remained friends over the years. Much has changed at The Times in the meantime, and women now make up nearly half the staff. That includes Penelope Green, Patricia Green’s daughter, who has sometimes joined the group for lunch. Ms. Green writes for the Styles section.

“I think there was a lot of hard work that went into getting where you all have gotten,” Ms. Levin said, “and it has paid off immeasurably.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Female Reporters Upstairs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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