Career: Lynn Sherr, Broadcast Journalist and Author

2015 National Women’s History Month Honorees

Meet Broadcast Journalist and Author Lynn Sherr

 March is National Women’s History Month.  2015 is the National Women’s History Project’s  35th Anniversary.  In celebration of this landmark anniversary, we have chosen 9 women as 2015 Honorees who have contributed in very special ways to our work of “writing women back into history.”  

Today we feature honoree Lynn Sherr, broadcast (TV) journalist and author, whose articles on historic trailblazing women chronicle those brave women who broke ground for today's women.

Lynn Sherr (1943- Present) 
Broadcast Journalist and Author

The modern women’s rights movement has brought about the greatest
social change in our lifetime.  It woke me up, gave me purpose focused my
energy…I joined a growing number of twentieth-century feminist determined
 to set the record straight and prove definitively that the same bold women
who had blazed the trails deserved our unmitigated thanks.  Lynn Sherr

Lynn Sherr, an American  broadcast journalist and author, began her career at Conde Nast, when she won the Mademoiselle Magazine Guest Editor Competition in college.  She soon moved on to the Associated Press, then WCBS-TV,  PBS, and ultimately ABC, where she covered politics, space and social change for more than 30 years.  As a correspondent for the ABC news magazine 20/20, she received many honors, including the George Foster Peabody Award in 1994 for “The Hunger Inside,” about anorexia. 

For over a decade,  Sherr along with Jurate  Kazickas created The Women’s Appointment Calendar, a day-by-day recollection of women’s historic events. The calendars are fun-filled, primary source documents of women’s history before and during the second wave of the 20th century women’s movement.

Sherr is an unabashed feminist who has twice been the recipient of the Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, honoring journalists for “exceptional coverage of reproductive rights and health care issues.”  She has rejected calls for a “new feminism,” remarking, “What’s wrong with the old feminism?”

In Susan B. Anthony Slept Here (1976), Sherr recognized the importance of reclaiming and visiting women’s historic landmarks.  Her latest best-selling book, Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space (2014), is the only adult biography of that pathbreaking woman.  Sherr’s career on and off TV is courageously chronicled in Outside the Box: A Memoir (2006).

This article is courtesy of the National Women's History Project