Making a Journalist’s Portrait: Flor Romero in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia

Abstract: This article explores key aspects of the history of Flor Romero, a leading figure of the women’s press in 1960s Colombia. Romero engaged in a quest to provide quality journalism to women readers and opportunities for women journalists, in which the writing itself constituted a means to further women and secure their visibility in the public forum. But while she fought against women’s exclusion in the press, Romero also adopted the language of her time and published stories that extolled being middle class. With this, she turned her gender crusade into a class narrative at a time when middle-class identity became crucial for and in circulating discourses of democracy. Not only is the study of Romero important to completing a chapter of Colombian and, for that matter, Latin American print culture and women’s history, it is also vital to illustrate the means historians have at hand to keep producing a history of journalism in its own right, based on a variety of source material.