20th-century American women writers

Doris Lilly (c.1922/26 December 1926 – 9 October 1991) was an American newspaper columnist and writer. Lilly wrote newspaper columns on high society for the New York Post between 1968 and 1978, and the New York Daily Mirror.

Marianne Means (née Hansen; June 13, 1934 – December 2, 2017) was an American journalist and syndicated political columnist based in Washington, D.C. who, for many years, was a White House correspondent. She started her career as a reporter and advanced to the role of a copy editor for a newspaper in Nebraska for a couple of years. She then relocated to Washington, D.C. where she took a position as the chief editor for a Virginia newspaper and supervised a staff of men for two years. She later transferred to Hearst Newspapers where she was a Washington bureau correspondent. She covered the reporting of John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign. Then she reported full-time at the White House and was the first female reporter to do this. There were rumors she was one of Kennedy's many lovers. She covered Kennedy's assassination and the transition to the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. As a political reporter for The New York Times she reported on every presidential campaign from Kennedy to Bill Clinton. She was an international commentator and television personality.

Rene Carpenter (April 12, 1928 – July 24, 2020) was an American newspaper columnist and host of two Washington, D.C., television shows.
As the wife of Scott Carpenter, one of the Mercury Seven astronauts, she was a pioneering member of NASA's early spaceflight families.

Janet Anne Haradon Dailey (May 21, 1944 – December 14, 2013) was an American author of numerous romance novels as Janet Dailey (her married name). Her novels have been translated into nineteen languages and have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. Dailey was both an author and entrepreneur.

Alma Vessells John (September 27, 1906 – April 8, 1986) was an American nurse, newsletter writer, radio and television personality, and civil rights activist. Born in Philadelphia in 1906, she moved to New York to take nursing classes after graduating from high school. She completed her nursing training at Harlem Hospital School of Nursing in 1929 and worked for two years as a nurse before being promoted to the director of the educational and recreational programs at Harlem Hospital. After being fired for trying to unionize nurses in 1938, she became the director of the Upper Manhattan YWCA School for Practical Nurses, the first African American to serve as director of a school of nursing in the state of New York. (Adah Belle Thoms had served as acting director of Lincoln School for Nurses between 1906 and 1923). In 1944, John became a lecturer and consultant with the National Nursing Council for War Service, serving until the war ended, and was the last director of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses from 1946 until it dissolved in 1951. Her position at both organizations was to expand nursing opportunities for black women and integrate black nurses throughout the nation into the health care system.
In 1949, John wrote a script titled Brown Women in White for production on WNBC, which led to a second career in radio and television. In 1952, she presented The Homemaker's Club on station WWRL in New York. The following year, she became the first black radio personality to be invited as a member of the New York chapter of the Association of Women in Radio and Television. She campaigned successfully for the organization meetings to be held in unsegregated facilities. In 1957, she received the McCall's Golden Mike Award for her show What's Right with Teenagers and in 1959 she became the director of women's programming at WWRL. Over her 25-year career at the radio station, she wrote and produced numerous programs giving household tips, health care advice, and providing community service information. In 1970, John began appearing on television shows at WPIX-TV. She interviewed prominent black figures on her shows Black Pride and Positively Black. John worked up to her death in 1986 and is remembered mainly for her pioneering role in radio.

April Bernard (born 1956) is an American poet. She was born and raised in New England, and graduated from Harvard University. She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. In the early 1990s, she taught at Amherst College. In Fall 2003, she was Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books.

Ah Jook Ku (April 24, 1910 – August 6, 2007) was an American journalist, writer, media advocate and public relations practitioner. She was the first Asian American reporter for the Associated Press, and the first Asian American female reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin newspaper. Her nickname was "Jookie."In the 1940s she covered life in China and the government of President Chiang Kai-Shek. But in later years she was regarded as the "guiding force" of the media council, said former Chairman Richard S. Miller. Ku was known as a feisty advocate for freedom of information and journalism standards.

Lucy Herndon Crockett (April 4, 1914 – July 30, 2002) was an American novelist and artist who illustrated her own books.

Helen Charis Wilson (; May 5, 1914 – November 20, 2009), was an American model and writer, most widely known as a subject of Edward Weston's photographs.

Joanna McClure (born November 10, 1930) is an American poet associated with the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation. According to author Brenda Knight, McClure wrote prolifically from the 1950s onward, filling dozens of artist's notebooks with poems and producing "as much writing as [Jack] Kerouac did, though she kept much of hers private."The child of Henry and Ramona Kinnison, McClure grew up on a ranch near Oracle, Arizona, north of Tucson. After the family lost the ranch during the Great Depression, McClure lived for a time in Tucson, then Hermosillo, Mexico, and Guatemala City, Guatemala, before returning to Tucson to study literature and history at the University of Arizona. She married Albert Hall, a chemist, in 1951, but the marriage ended in divorce. Still in Tucson, she met Michael McClure, a university student who later rose to prominence as a Beat poet. In 1954, she moved to San Francisco, involving herself in the Beat scene and befriending Miriam and Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Phillip Whalen, and other writers and artists. The McClures married in 1954, and their daughter, Jane, was born in 1956. The family moved briefly to New York City in the 1960s before returning to San Francisco, where Joanna pursued her interests in poetry and in early childhood education. The McClures later divorced but remain connected by poetry.