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Hanging near the offices of the top editors of The New York Times is a photo from 1958 featuring several women arranged around a desk. The women are sitting in an office of the ninth floor, away from the main newsroom, where they all worked for “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings” — the women’s news section in those days.

“We were in some dark little corner of the Times,” said Phyllis Levin, now 97, who said she started working at the paper in the mid-1950s, first writing for fashion, alongside those in the picture, and later writing about parenting. Later she became a biographer of the first ladies Abigail Adams and Edith Wilson. “We respected one another,” she said. “I just admired them all, and they were wonderful women who could’ve been anywhere on the paper, and eventually were.”

“Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings” ran from 1955 to around 1971 as a one-page section in the paper on varying days of the week. Historically, women who came to The Times were immediately placed in the women’s pages, informally known as the “four Fs.” Nan Robertson, who worked in the four Fs for five years, wrote in her 1992 book, “The Girls in the Balcony,” that the section’s coverage “provided the sop to the people who bought space in a newspaper that elsewhere in its columns gave the news ‘impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect or interest involved.’ ” It was hardly the first women’s section; a housekeeper’s column ran as early as the 1870s. Domesticity, however, was an abiding theme. There was even a kitchen at the far end of the floor.