BY WENDY MIGDAL
FOR THE FREE LANCEâSTAR
A long-forgotten feature of newspapers past is The Womenâs Page, which ran in The Free LanceâStar from 1926â53. Most newspapers had one, and some started years earlier and ended years later. Perusing the pages provides interesting details about midcentury life, and raises even more questions: Why were the pages started and ended when they were? What caused certain standard features to be added and dropped? And what was the deal with all the gelatin-based food, anyway?
Beginning only on Saturdays, it expanded to a daily feature by the 1930s. One mainstay of the page was the society newsâwho was entertaining out-of-town guests, whose child was home from college, who just returned from visiting family in Port Royal, who was in the hospital. Interestingly, these items had always appeared in the paper, in the past with the title âNewsy Nuggets,â subtitle âMany Minor Matters Merely Mentioned,â sub-subtitle âLive Little Locals.â The society news continued after the womenâs page disappeared, as did several other features.