For twenty-five years, Charlotte Curtis was a society women's reporter and editor and an op-ed editor at the New York Times. As the first woman associate editor at the Times, Curtis was a pioneering journalist and one of the first nationwide to change the nature and content of the women's pages from fluffy wedding announcements and recipes to the more newsy, issue-oriented stories that characterize them today.

As Greenwald's narrative reveals, Curtis's successes were hard won. And in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, pivotal decades in American journalism, she covered some of the key stories of the era - the Robert F. Kennedy funeral train, the early days of the women's movement, and the tumultuous 1968 political conventions.