The recently completed Washington Press Club Foundation oral history project on women in the news business offers an unusual cache of journalism history. Transcripts of fifty-six interviews with journalists -- ranging from Jane Eads, who began her career as a proofreader in 1918, to CBS news anchor Connie Chung -- provide a rich vein of information about the professional and personal lives of the women who pioneered in America's newsrooms. Here is Beth Campbell Short, who in 1936 became the only female reporter in the fifty-six-person Washington bureau of The Associated Press, telling about her first day on the job, and Virginia Pitt Sherlock, who worked for the AP some forty years later, telling about the reasons for a major sex discrimination suit against the wire service. And here is Vivian Castleberry, women's editor at the Dallas Times Herald from 1956 to 1984, telling how, in order to convince her editors to let the section do substantive stories, she had to show them that other newspapers' women's stions were doing it. And how "as soon as that subject would become credible, city side would take it over."

Racial as well as gender bias figures in some interviews. Broadcaster Carole Simpson recalls reading an account of a late-1980s plane crash in Brazil. Simpson, noted for her crisp diction, rubbed a line, saying what sounded like "twenty nine were afeared dead." The next day she received a memo saying that "racial colloquialisms" were inappropriate for broadcasts. She describes her reaction on tape:

When I go on television I feel I'm representing every African-American. . . . I feel this pressure to be good, to be excellent, every time I appear, that people are not only measuring me but everybody, and if my stuff is good, then it makes it easier for other people. So if this guy doesn't know that I enunciate and pronounce things . . . .

Simpson went to see the memo writer, stood in his doorway and said: "Massa Armstrong, I's afeared I's done sompin" turrible wrong." . . . And I start shuffling into his office, scratching my head and saying, "I's afeared I's done sompin" turrible, and I's done embarrassed ABC."

Then she slammed the memo onto his desk: "How dare you? How dare you insult me by suggesting that I don" t know better than to say something like this . . ."

The main repository for the material is the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University's Butler Library. For a list of the fifteen other repositories around the country, call the foundation at (202) 393-0613.

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