Margaret Jones, gender discrimination and the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, 1965-1985.

What is it about?

This article describes the career of Australian journalist Margaret Jones, at a time when women were mostly relegated to the women's pages. She had a stellar career in Australian news journalism despite systemic prejudice against women in journalism, and in particular, at her employer the Sydney Morning Herald. From the 1960s through to the mid-1980s, she served as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper in the United States, China and Europe, also later becoming the paper’s foreign and literary editors. Her career spanned more than thirty years, during which time she earned a reputation for being an exceptional print journalist. Jones’s first overseas posting for the Sydney Morning Herald was to New York in 1965, then to Washington where she established a bureau for the paper the following year. When she took up her post in Beijing in 1973, she was one of three Australian correspondents officially accredited to the People’s Republic of China after the recognition of China by the Whitlam government. They were the first journalists allowed in to report from that country after the Second World War. Later, after a long stint in Sydney as literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Jones returned to London in 1980 to take up a position as European correspondent. Besides her extensive journalism, Margaret Jones wrote three books: Thatcher’s Kingdom: A View of Britain in the Eighties (1984), as well as two novels: The Confucius Enigma (1979), a thriller based on her experiences in China, and The Smiling Buddha (1985), set in Cambodia.

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Why is it important?

This article recognises the career of a groundbreaking but little-known Australian woman journalist. At the same time, it traces the prejudice faced by women at the leading newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, as well as the way prejudicial attitudes began to change in the context of the international second wave of feminism, from the 1960s-1980s.