Joan Younger Dickinson: Never Underestimate How a Woman Journalist Reinvented Herself After World War II

Joan Younger Dickinson was never a household name.Yet, as a reporter, she reached hundreds of thousands of listeners and readers with her writing.She reported on tragedies and run-of-the-mill events.She covered celebrities and everyday people.Ultimately, as the years went on, she helped guide thousands of middle-class women as they adjusted to a new reality following World War II.Although she had large wire and magazine audiences in the 1940s through the 1960s, her story has been largely overlooked.While women journalists are typically restricted to the footnotes of history, 1 Younger Dickinson has even escaped that attention. 2any women who found a place in the public sphere during World War II took on new roles-often combining motherhood and paid employment. 3 Yet, these roles were again limited after wartime.These women returned to the home or took on traditional female occupations like teaching and nursing.Yet, for some women, there were new adventures.They took the skills they had acquired during the war and sought different paths.For journalist Joan Younger Dickinson, wartime meant a taste of hard news and deadline journalism-a unique role for many women reporters at the time. 4 Younger Dickinson broke barriers by becoming potentially the first female full-time reporter for the United Press during World War II.In this position, she covered hard news and soft news as well as Eleanor Roosevelt's women-only press conferences-an important role for women journalists. 5et, being a "first" was only a part of her journalism career.Her importance lies in the reach of her journalism and the transition between the public and the private spheres for women that she represented while at Ladies' Home Journal. 6 In peacetime, when wire and newspaper jobs for women were limited,