Forgotten feminist: women's page editor Maggie Savoy and the growth of women's liberation awareness in Los Angeles.

The year was 1963, and the publisher of The Arizonian, a weekly newspaper in Scottsdale, wrote a column about his friend Maggie Savoy, the women's page editor for the neighboring Arizona Republic in Phoenix. The publisher, Dickson Hartwell, was taking up Savoy's cause after listening to a self-important newcomer to the Phoenix area lament about his early encounter with the woman who would prove to be bigger than the legacy that has been afforded her.

"A newcomer had recently arrived in the Valley. He was a significant person who had been everywhere and knew everybody," Hartwell wrote. "He had spent only a few hours in his new community before he became aware of a subtle force which seemed to pervade the lives of people hereabouts. 'Wherever I went,' he recalled the other day, 'all I heard was "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie." It was damned annoying; all this Maggie business. When she finally called me for an interview I already detested her and I told her so. She came anyhow. Now, like everybody else, I love her dearly.'" (1)

Savoy was no annoyance to Hartwell, nor to many others. For nearly two decades prior, she had been making her mark in the Phoenix area. "They sense in her," Hartwell continued, "a strange and mighty influence. They feel that behind her shiny bright and beauteous face, her glowing smile, among all women in the Valley she is not just a figure. She is the key figure." (2) Savoy wielded significant influence, raising awareness of and fighting for issues central to the women's liberation movement and community development.

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A pioneering woman journalist, Savoy left a deep impact on her communities and the newspaper industry of the 1950s and 1960s. As her third husband, James Bellows, said in an interview, she did not see the limitations of traditional women's pages, she saw opportunities. (3) Her story also characterizes the growth of the women's liberation movement in the Southwest and, most significantly, in Los Angeles. An outspoken feminist who sought to explain women's issues in a media environment that was often hostile to the message, her method of defining a woman's right for equality was a complex one, varying according to audience.

While several journalism historians have examined women's page editors' lack of authority during the 1950s and 1960s, (4) they typically defined power as the ability to hire and fire or to make budget decisions. Savoy's example inspires us to redefine the word for women's page journalists during these decades and illuminates how women's page content was changing along with the times.

Though Savoy would live only seven more years after Hartwell's column was published, her impact on society, the communities and cities in which she traveled, the women's pages for which she gladly toiled, her fellow female journalists, and the men she worked alongside, fought with, and loved dearly was larger than her lifespan and recognized as such by those lucky enough to know her.