Marjorie Paxson

Marjorie Paxson
Paxson c. 1950s
Born	(1923-08-13)August 13, 1923 Houston, Texas, US
Died	June 17, 2017(2017-06-17) (aged 93)
Occupations	Publisher editor journalist
Years active	1944–1986

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. 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. 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.