The Women’s Commission at Saint Louis University is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and during a luncheon Tuesday, they celebrated the advancement of women in the workplace by inviting the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ellen Soeteber, to speak about her experiences in the field of journalism. Gerald Fowler Ph. D., spoke as well, telling of his history with the University and the women’s commission.
Soeteber’s tales from the field highlighted the challenges she has faced as a woman working in a male-dominated profession. She talked about her fellow journalist and mentor, Clarissa Start, who retired this year from the Post-Dispatch at the age of 85. When Start worked at the paper during World War II, she was restricted to writing features. According to Soeteber, the Post editors considered it a triumph at the time that, unlike other newspapers during the war years, they were not forced to hire any women writers.
Throughout the ’60s, there were quotas on the number of women who could work in newsrooms. Soeteber graduated from Northwestern University in 1972, and as an undergrad first encountered the difficulties of being a woman in journalism. During a copy editing class her junior year, Soeteber said that her professor told the class that, “Women made lousy copy editors because they didn’t have a dirty enough mind.” Soeteber said she “took this as a real challenge.” She told her boyfriend at the time to “give me any word in the English language and I’ll make it dirty.”
That same professor helped Soeteber get her first job, working as a “copy boy” at the Chicago Daily News. “That was the actual title of the job,” she said, a job which entailed running around, sharpening pencils and getting coffee for the copy editors. “They would call me Ms. Boy.”
Upon graduating, Soeteber asked her boss at the Daily News if there were any open positions. She was offered a secretarial position and the position of assistant food editor. She told him, “I don’t know how to cook, and he said, ‘I’m sure it will come naturally to you.'”
Soeteber moved on to the Chicago Today, which was “going broke, so it couldn’t be picky about hiring women.” She said that even in the mid ’70s women reporters were still sheltered from working nights because it was “dangerous.” She compared journalism to the military, and said that she understands why women want equal opportunity to prove themselves by going into combat, because that is the way to learn and gain respect.
Soeteber went on to become the first woman to hold the position of night city editor at the Chicago Tribune. She worked various other positions at the Tribune and then moved to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, during the hectic years of the Elian Gonzales custody battle and the elections of 2000. Soeteber is now the first woman editor at the Post, but she notes that, “In the news business, I’m not rare anymore.”
Soeteber said that she is “a little worried” because two thirds of the students in journalism school now are women and that a new imbalance may occur soon. She said that there would be two major problems with women dominating journalism. First of all, it wouldn’t be representative of society; just as the boy’s club of old journalism wasn’t representative. Secondly, she said, if women dominate journalism, “the pay will stink.”
