![]() And that’s our next objective, is to take those positions for women themselves. Yet to this day where we have 80 % of the industry made up by women, m ost of the leaders at the very very top are men. But in the 90s, a lot of women became vice presidents, senior vice presidents and moved on up. There were women in the 80s who fought like the devil to break ahead. SHELLEY: W e ha d lots and lots of obstacles that women like Muriel and Barbara and I nez pushed through. A s we wrap this up, w hat’s your advice to women who aspire to leadership? Are t here maybe lessons learned that they should really take to heart to improve their chances of greater success in our industry ? And obviously, women face many challenges today, not just in communications, but in many fields. But Inez was the first black woman to start her own PR agency.ĭOUG: I t’s really amazing history. ![]() And so effective was she and such a great role model that she was invited to the Reagan White House to participate in the SBA program and encourage more minorities and women to start their own businesses. A nd what she did that was so special was she marketed consumer products, whether it’s Sears or 7 Up, lots of other consumer brands, Lever Brothers, and her specialty was marketing to what they called the Negro audience back then. ![]() So, just imagine what life was like for her back then. I mean, they did not in Kansas City ever re nt an office to a black person, much less a black woman. She’s a black woman from Kansas City who opened up her PR firm in 1957, a nd if you know your history, that’s the beginning of the Jim Crow era, the height of civil rights. There’s another woman that unfortunately was left out of the history books, as many women are, b ut she’s an incredible person. And then eventually, and I think a great lesson from Barbara, i s that when she was 65 years old, when most people would go and retire, she decided to open up her own agency again with Hunter PR, which is still going on thriving today. So, they were the first women to buy an agency. SHELLEY: Ok, I think that Barbara Hunter, just by her very example, she and her sister were in public relations in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and were working for a firm called Dudley – Anderson – Y utz, D-A-Y, a nd one day they decided to buy the firm. Why don’t you share some other examples of women who’ve made a huge difference? So even though she started as a professional in 1949, she’s still going strong. She’s going to be appearing at your upcoming event, for those who get to see this in time, about PR women who changed history on March 11th. And the importance of NOW cannot be understated.ĭOUG: I mean, it’s really incredible what she accomplished. And then a few years later, she met Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and the three of them together created NOW, the National Organization of Women. And eventually she was able to get a job at the radio TV department a t Byoir and thrive there, e ventually became the head of that department, eventually became the first woman VP ad buyer and probably of any PR agency. She saw an ad in The New York Times classifieds, and it said “ writer needed ,” a nd she went to the office there and they said, oh, you’re a woman, w e only hire women as secretaries here. SHELLEY: Right, so, Muriel Fox, she was a graduate of Barnard College and then she went for her first job at Carl Byoir. But she did not push herself into those client meetings, which I think she should have done.ĭOUG: Now, Muriel Fox is another woman who had amazing achievements in communications that aren’t necessarily known. ![]() So, there’s a lot of similarities with that today. Yet she continued to work and then had to go home and arrange dinner parties, at the same time raise to the kids. She was the one who did a lot of the writing, a lot of the idea creation, b ut yet she was not allowed, because of the culture of that age, to go into client meetings. So, let’s start with Doris Fleischman, 1919, working with her husband Ed Bernays. SHELLEY : So, I’d like to talk about three or four women of PR history that are just amazing and offer to us all a lot of good life lessons. Shelley, w hat can we learn from the history of PR that’s really relevant today to some of the challenges women face and are overcoming to be leaders in communications? DOUG: So, let’s talk about PR women who ’ve changed history and what those im plications are for women practicing in PR today, either as leaders or those who aspire to be.
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