Still a student at Wellesley College, Geneva Overholser (GJ71) took her high school newspaper clips to an editor at the Boston Globe.

“Listen here, girlie,” he told her. “You better carry coffee to the editor of a New England weekly for a couple of years or go to a damn fine journalism school.”

That’s when she chose to attend the Medill School of Journalism, but the resistance didn’t end there. Overholser’s first reporting job was at the Colorado Springs Sun, a “feisty little underdog paper,” where she covered police.

“My first day over at the cop shop, the lieutenant wouldn’t let me see the pink slips, the crime reports. He said, ‘There’s rapes in there.’ I said, ‘Well, there are women in those rapes.’ But I had to get my city editor to call him.”

By 1988, however, everything had changed. Overholser, now Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting in the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s Washington bureau, became the first female editor at the Des Moines Register, a job she held until 1995.

Overholser was 40 and had never contemplated leading a newsroom. “You would have had to be a megalomaniac to have that dream. I didn’t know any women editors when I was coming up. There almost weren’t any.”

She worried about the reception she would receive at the Register, where she had worked as deputy editorial page editor before joining the editorial board of the New York Times. “I was afraid that a lot of folks at the Register would not be excited about having a woman editor,” she says.

But Gannett Co. had recently bought the paper, and staffers were relieved to see one of their own get the job. “They had a much greater fear of a corporate type than of a woman.”

Even so, “There’s no question my being a woman brought tension to the paper. There was a piece in Newsweek, and the guy who wrote it called the Register the most feminist paper in America. It was obviously because I was a woman. It was kind of funny.”

Overholser broke new ground at the paper, putting her unique stamp on the editorial content. She wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, which also ran in the Register, questioning whether newspapers contributed to the stigmatization of rape victims by declining to publish their names. The paper later won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1991 for a series of articles about the rape of an Iowa woman that used her name and photograph with her permission.

The woman profiled in the series called Overholser after reading the op-ed. “She has said she would not have called if I had been a man.”

Overholser had to reproach some of her male editors for toning down the content of the article. “They changed ‘When he had ejaculated’ to ‘When he had finished,’” which, in Overholser’s opinion, might as well have been a reference to someone having lunch.

All the attention Overholser got on the job raised the paper’s profile and landed her some key appointments to places such as the Pulitzer Prize Board. “The fact that I was a woman no doubt made a difference,” she acknowledges.

Her gender also meant a different management style. “It’s always dangerous to generalize, but I think I was more consensus oriented. I was careful to gather opinions, but I was fairly definitive when I made a decision.”

Also, “I certainly showed emotion more. When I was under duress, and it was usually about budgets, people who reported to me definitely had an opportunity to see me weep. I became OK with that.”

Some of her male employees were less OK with her displays of emotion. “Sometimes people were unsettled. They didn’t know what to do. I was the boss,” she says. “But even with the people who are uncomfortable with the idea of a woman, if you’ve got the job, you are their leader. It’s an amazing privilege. You’re not going to screw it up by crying.”

One thing she found unsettling at first was that some of the men at the paper who were 20 years older would call her “chief.” At first she told them to call her Geneva, but “after awhile, I let them call me chief.”

Overholser says it’s important for women to push past any fear of being in charge. She counsels them to picture themselves in certain jobs so they know how to react when offers are made, but she points to herself as an example not to emulate: “I could hardly believe when I got the job I’d be up to it.”

Her publisher, Charles Edwards, a colleague from her previous stint at the paper, talked Overholser into taking the position after she’d initially turned it down. “That partnership is so key,” she says. Many publishers are “risk averse” and reluctant to hire women, but Edwards liked and recruited her. “He pledged to make sure I had re- sources, and he gave me free rein.”

Despite her initial reluctance to take the helm of the Register, “I absolutely loved it right away,” Overholser says. “I have never loved a job so much. I’ve also never been so miserable. After two or three years, I felt like I was presiding over the demise of a great paper.”

The “profit pressure” and “squeezing” in “difficult economic times” necessitated tough choices. “You can only protect the newsroom so much. It was impossible. It’s a damn shame.”

The pressures have only increased since then.

“I think it’s worse today. It’s not that all family-owned papers are good, and all corporate-owned papers are bad. But the increasing public ownership has made a difference. The acceptance of the idea that papers must make 21/2 times more net income before taxes than the average industry in America is a negative. It’s like eating your seed corn. It absolutely guarantees you’re not investing in journalism. The relentless drive for profit has really reduced the journalism.”

Overholser found herself fighting Gannett on cost-cutting decisions like delivering the paper at the end of the driveways instead of doorsteps, which angered readers in the winter. “There were endless ways we thumbed our noses because we were trying to make more money,” she says. “You can’t straddle the gap between journalism and business. I was falling into the chasm, and I had an epiphany: I don’t have to do this.”

She left the job in 1995 for those and personal reasons. “My life changed dramatically. My marriage was breaking up, and I later married the man who had been the managing editor at the Register.”

Overholser has two daughters from her first marriage and a stepson. Her first husband, a teacher, carried a lot of the responsibility for child rearing. “Attempting to edit a paper and raise kids is very difficult,” she says. “I passionately wanted to do both, and my husband was really engaged in the kids’ lives. I was a much better editor because I had kids. Having children makes you part of the community, and it keeps you grounded. You can’t get too big a head when you come home to the honest critique of a 12-year-old.”

However, “I spent the entire six years without any balance in my life. Being editor did contribute to the breakdown of my marriage. I had to travel a lot, and my kids vehemently and vocally disliked that. It was a way of life to feel completely torn.”

While her first husband made sacrifices when her career took off, she had put her own career on hold early in their marriage to follow him to Europe and Africa, where he was a teacher. Overholser freelanced there and worked as a librarian in his school. When they returned, she had a hard time getting another job because she hadn’t taken a traditional path.

“Editors are so narrow-minded, and it affects women. Women typically do not have a straight trajectory,” Overholser says. “People asked, ‘Why did you leave a perfectly good newspaper job to go to Africa?’”

She moved to Des Moines because that was the only place she could find work. “People were astonished my husband came to Des Moines with me. But I followed his job literally to the end of the earth.”

She doesn’t regret her experience overseas. “It made me a better journalist and a better editor. It stimulated my curiosity and made me open to change.”

Overholser believes there aren’t more women editors today because publishers hire people like themselves and often “women don’t see themselves in those jobs.”

She wants women to know they can do it, and she encourages those who want to move up to promote themselves and make their wishes known. “Don’t think editors are going to think of you if you don’t suggest yourself. Don’t sell yourself short and assume people know what you want.”

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