Shana Alexander

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since October 2006.

Shana Alexander (October 6, 1925 – June 23, 2005) was an American journalist. Although she became the first woman staff writer and columnist for Life magazine, she was best known for her participation in the "Point-Counterpoint" debate segments of 60 Minutes with conservative James J. Kilpatrick. She was the daughter of Tin Pan Alley composer Milton Ager and columnist Cecilia Ager.

Alexander graduated from Vassar College in 1945, majoring in anthropology. She fell into writing when she took a summer job as a copy clerk at the New York newspaper PM, where her mother worked. She worked as a freelance writer for Junior Bazaar and Mademoiselle magazines before becoming a researcher at Life for $65 a week in 1951. During the 1960s she wrote "The Feminine Eye" column for Life.

In 1969 she became the first female editor at McCall's, but quit in 1971, complaining that it was a token job in a sexist environment.

She was writing a column for Newsweek in 1975 when she replaced Nicholas von Hoffman on 60 Minutes, and debated Kilpatrick for the next four years. She played down this part of her career, commenting in 1979 that prior to that she "had been a writer, a columnist for Life magazine and for Newsweek -- that was about as high as you could get in column writing. I care about my writing. I'm not a quack-quack TV journalist." Still, the debates Alexander had with Kilpatrick were so prominent in American culture that they were famously satirized on Saturday Night Live, with Jane Curtin taking the Shana Alexander role on "Weekend Update".

She died of cancer in Hermosa Beach, California, at the age of 79 on June 23, 2005. [1]

She had been married and divorced twice. Her only daughter, Kathy, committed suicide in 1987.

She was rumored to have had a longtime affair with the late Eugene McCarthy, but this was disputed by McCarthy's biographer, Dominic Sandbrook in his 2005 book Eugene McCarthy and The Rise and Fall of American Liberalism.