Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Media and Journalism offers an account of women’s leadership in journalism and media by looking at what has motivated and enabled women to navigate the intersecting impacts of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age to become leaders in media. The volume looks at executive leadership as well as moral leadership, and encompasses print, broadcast, PR, film, and digital media, as well as commercial, large-scale noncommercial, and small-scale alternative media. Women leaders profiled in this volume include Mary Ann Shadd Cary, publisher of The Provincial Freeman in Canada; Ida B. Wells, famous for her Memphis Free Speech; Mary Margaret McBride, who pioneered the unscripted, unrehearsed radio show; publisher Katharine Graham, who steered The Washington Post through a contentious strike; Joan Ganz Cooney, who led the early educational television show Sesame Street; public relations executive Ann Barkelew; syndicated talk-show host Oprah Winfrey; Frances Stevens, founder of a much-beloved lesbian magazine; Lisa Williams, the first Black woman to head the Associated Press Sports Editors; S. Mitra Kalita, a senior executive at both major commercial and smaller digital organizations; and Iman Zawahry, a Muslim hijabi filmmaker.

Linda Steiner is a professor in the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. She is an author and editor of several books, most recently Front Pages: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage (co-edited with B. Kroeger, University of Illinois Press, 2020) and Journalism, Gender, and Power (co-edited with S. Allan, Routledge, 2019).