Betsy Wade

Wade was born on July 18, 1929, to Sidney and Elizabeth Manning Wade in Manhattan.[1] She had one younger sister, Ellen.[3] Sidney Wade was an executive at Union Carbide and her mother had inherited family money.[1][3] Her mother struggled with mental illness throughout Wade's childhood.[3] The family moved to suburban Bronxville, New York, in 1934. At her junior high school and at Bronxville High School, she was a staffer at the student newspaper.[3] When she was fourteen her parents divorced.[3] She attended Carleton College in Minnesota, transferring to Barnard College in New York and earned her bachelor's degree in 1951. She earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1952 and was top of her class in copy editing.[1][3]

Wade's career began at the New York Herald Tribune in the women's section in 1952.[2] She was fired later that year when the paper learned she was pregnant.[3] Wade worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Association for the next two years.[3]

She joined The New York Times as a copy editor in 1956, becoming the first woman to edit news for the paper.[1][2] She was briefly assigned to edit the women's page, but by 1958 had returned to editing news.[1] She became the first woman editor on the foreign copy desk, and the first woman deputy chief of the foreign copy desk.[1] In 1972, when she became the first woman chief of the foreign copy desk, a position nicknamed "the slot", the Times announced it in their house organ under a headline of "Betsy’s in the slot: first dame to make it".[1]

Wade became active in the Newspaper Guild. She became a member of the union's International Executive Board, and in 1978 became the first woman president of the Guild's New York local.[1][4] She was also a founding member of the Times' Women's Caucus, formed in 1972.[1]

The Times' reporting on the Pentagon Papers, which Wade helped prepare for publishing, won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.[1]

Wade and six other plaintiffs filed a 1974 lawsuit against the Times for its treatment of female employees.[4] The suit demanded better pay and opportunities for female staffers, and was settled in the plaintiffs' favor.[5]

In 1979, she became the first woman president of the New York Newspaper Guild.[1] Wade told Nan Robertson in her 1992 book The Girls in the Balcony, "The copy desk did not put a screen around me. But they took the cuspidors out of the city room the first week. A copy boy got some deep ruffling and put it around my paste pot."[3]

Wade became a weekly columnist, taking over the Times' The Practical Traveler column in 1987.[1] A collection of her columns was published in book form as The New York Times Practical Traveler Handbook (1994).[1]

After 45 years at the Times, Wade retired in 2001.[4] After her retirement she taught classes in public policy and journalism at Hunter College.[1]

The Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers, which Wade helped prepare, won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service in journalism.[6][7]

Wade won the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Society of Silurians in 2016.[8]

Journalism & Women Symposium created a fellowship for women journalists of color honoring her, the Betsy Wade Fund Fellowship.[9]

She married James Boylan on December 27, 1952.[1][3] Boylan, who taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism from 1957 to 1979, founded the Columbia Journalism Review in 1961.[10][11] He later moved to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is professor emeritus of journalism and history.[12][1] She continued to write under the name Betsy Wade.

Wade and Boylan had two sons, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.[1]

Wade was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017 and died on December 3, 2020, at age 91 at her home in New York City.[1]