Yet few readers today will place Ross’s name, let alone those of the “front-page girls” she celebrated. Papers with strapped budgets took on more women, a trajectory that mirrors the history of professions like teaching and nursing. Still, as late as the 1950s, Kroeger writes, “women journalists inched across a swinging rope bridge toward fuller acceptance but still in single file.” Their pluck went only so far. Between 1970 and 1983, anti-discrimination suits roiled The Times, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post and The Associated Press, among other outlets. Before those proceedings, women had tended to cluster “on the bottom rungs of a company ladder with broken steps,” Kroeger writes.

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